Halifax (20 page)

The nurse just smiled. “Sure she is. She’s a very pretty girlfriend. Now, let’s get you to lunch. It’s Thursday. You know what that means. Tapioca pudding. Your favorite.”

Nora watched for a moment as Andre rolled away. It didn’t look like she wanted to follow him. He wasn’t headed in the same direction she was. She turned and walked towards the parking lot where the blue Citroen was parked and a younger man waited for her.

“What do his parents think happened to him?” Nora asked Farrell as she reached the car.

“Rom created medical files saying he had developed a new form of Progeria,” Farrell told her. “It’s an accelerated aging disorder.”

“I always wanted to date an older man,” Nora said as she looked back towards the retirement home. “But I was thinking more like a college guy.”

The white tops of the waves could be seen in the moonlight as they crashed on to the beach and then retreated back out into the Pacific Ocean, leaving a rim of foam in the sand in their wake, only to have another set of waves come and carve another design into the sand. Over and over it happened. The sound the waves made was repetitive and soothing.

The Citroen was parked at the edge of the beach. It was the only car in the lot on this night. Farrell and Nora sat back on the hood of the car. The entire ocean was at their feet and the entire starry universe was laid out in the sky above them.

“It’s weird to think that someone somewhere out there is thinking about me,” Nora said as she looked up at the bright stars. “I’m nobody. Who am I important to?”

As Nora looked at the stars, Farrell looked at Nora. She was important to him. He couldn’t say that, though, or wouldn’t say that. Maybe he wouldn’t even know how to say that.

A meteor shot across the sky, a tailed light stretching across the darkness in a flash, gone before Nora even had a chance to point it out. “Did you see that?” she said excitedly. “A shooting star!”

“That wasn’t a shooting star,” Farrell told her. “It was a prison barge. Right on time.”

Nora crossed her arms over her body, pulling her sweater in closely, trying to ward off the November chill. “Thank you for forever ruining the romanticism of shooting stars for me,” she chided Farrell.

“Believe me, there’s nothing romantic about what goes on out there.”

Now Nora looked at Farrell as he gazed into the night sky. “You know, Mrs. O’Brien, or that Cambian thing, it called you a Jant,” she said to him, studying him. “And Izzy said you’re not half something. What…are you?”

Farrell sat up. He looked out at the waves now and away from the sky. “Jant is my family name,” he said. “We’re kind of like a royal family. That’s why I was immunized against the Cambian virus. Believe it or not, I’m kind of special.” It was an understatement that Nora couldn’t have begun to understand. “And Izzy was right,” he continued. “I’m not
half
anything. I’m
all
human.”

Nora let out of little sigh and smiled an almost imperceptible smile. She was relieved.

“I’m a human like you,” Farrell said as another shooting star, or maybe a prison barge, streaked across the night sky. “
I’m just not from Earth
.”