The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (69 page)

"You did." My mother sighed, looking at me sadly. "You don't remember talking to me, do you?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"The doctors said you'd have a spotty memory thanks to the combination of the head injury and the medication." She put her hand over mine on the bed and I realized I had a cast on my arm up to my knuckles.

"Everything's all dream-like." The pain was getting more assertive. "Did he make it? Is he alive?"

Now she hesitated. "Your uncle Scott's been sitting with him. He hasn't left the hospital since—"

"Uncle Scott?" Pain definitely wanted more attention now; I tried to ignore it. "Why is Uncle Scott sitting with Phil Lattimore?"

"Phil who?" My mother looked as mystified as I felt. "He's with
Ambrose.
"

Uh-oh,
said a small voice in my mind, under the pain. It sounded exactly like Ambrose. "Phil Lattimore is the guy I was trying to save," I said. "I knew Ambrose would be all right."

"All right?" My mother looked mildly stunned now, as if she had bumped her head.

"Ambrose isn't going to die for f—for a very long time," I said. "I knew I didn't have to worry about him."

My mother took a deep breath and let it out. "Is that so?" She gazed at me for a long moment, her expression a mixture of hurt, frustration, pity, and something else I couldn't read. I started to say something else and she suddenly rushed out of the room.

Caught completely by surprise, I tried to call after her but the pain stole my voice. Before it got really bad, however, a nurse came in with some medication.

When I woke up again, there was a man sitting in the chair next to the bed. I had never seen him before but even without the strong family resemblance I'd have known who he was.

"Hello, Loomis," I croaked.

"Hello, yourself." He got up and gave me some ice water the way my mother had, holding the straw between my lips. I drank slowly, studying his face. He was a little taller than Ambrose, wiry and lean, as if he spent most of his waking hours running. His hair was curly but darker than Ambrose's and he had a full dark beard with a few white hairs here and there. I found it really interesting that although his eyes were same shape as Ambrose's, they weren't the same clear green color but dark muddy brown, like mine.

I finished the water and told him I'd had enough. He put the glass aside and continued to stand there looking me over.

"Guess you know," I said after a bit.

He didn't bother nodding. "You weren't surprised, were you. Knew it almost your whole life and never told anyone."

"That how it was for you?" I asked.

He pressed his lips together. "So, was this premeditated or spontaneous?

I frowned. "What?

Loomis took a breath and let it out; not quite a sigh. "Were you always planning to save someone's life or was it a spur-of-the-moment thing?"

I hesitated. "I was gonna say spur of the moment but now I'm not so sure. Maybe I was always gonna do something like this and never knew it."

Loomis's eyebrows went up. "Good answer. Insightful. More than I was at your age. Otherwise—" he shrugged.

"Otherwise what?"

"Otherwise you're just as much a dumb-ass as any of us."

I was offended and it must have showed. He laughed and patted my hand.

"Hackles down, kid. Till the body cast comes off, anyway." He looked me over again. "Damn. Even I never took a beat-down this bad."

"Was it for nothing?" I asked.

Now it was his turn to be confused. "Say again?"

"Phil Lattimore. Did I save him?"

Fuck, no. He grimaced and poured another glass of water. Before I could tell him I didn't want any more, he drank it himself. "There are two rules, cuz. Number one: Never tell anyone. And that's
anyone,
even family. Never. Tell. Anyone.
Never.
And rule number two:
Never
try to save them. You can't do it. All you can do is make things worse." He gestured along the length of my body. "Exhibit A."

Alarm bells went off in my mind; I shut them out, made myself ignore the cold lump of apprehension in the middle of my chest. I'd be getting more pain medication soon; that always made all the bad feelings go away, physical and emotional. "Yeah, but I knew I was gonna be all right."

Loomis stuck one fist on his hip; the move was pure Ambrose. "You call
this
'all right'? Hate to tell you, cuz, but after the casts come off, you've got a whole lot of physical therapy ahead of you and you'll probably lose a year of school. At
least
a year."

"You know what I mean," I said defensively. "I knew I wasn't gonna get killed. It was just Phil Lattimore. No one else."

"Yeah, that was all you needed to know, wasn't it? Only this Phil Lattimore would die so that meant everybody else would be
all right.
" He looked at me through half-closed eyes. "Like you and Ambrose."

The lump in my chest was suddenly so large it was hard to breathe around it and my heart seemed to be laboring. "Ambrose wasn't driving, we had a flat—"

"He ran into the road after the car you were in," Loomis said. "One of those things you do without thinking. The car that swerved to keep from hitting him hit another car, which in turn hit the car you were in. Which hit him before skidding into yet another car." I started to say something but he put up a hand. "There were two fatalities—this Phil Lattimore person who was apparently too cheap to install airbags in his old land yacht and got spindled on the steering column, and someone else who you apparently hadn't met."

"But Ambrose is ali—"

"Alive, yes, and will be for another fifty-odd years," Loomis said, talking over me. "Exactly how odd nobody really knows yet. The doctors told my parents it's a miracle he survived that kind of head injury. They won't know how extensive the impairment is until he wakes up. My mother believes he's going to wake up any minute because he's breathing on his own."

It was like I was back on the floor of the car with some thug kneeling on my ribs, but harder, as if he were trying to force all the air out of my lungs.

"Hey, stay with me." I felt Loomis tapping me lightly first on one cheek and then the other. "I wasn't trying to be cruel." He ran a small ice cube back and forth across my forehead. "But you had to be told."

I started to cry, my tears mixing with the cold water running down from my forehead.

"Shouldn't have happened," Loomis went on. "Wouldn't have, but they just won't talk about it in front of the kids. They tell you everything else—why we keep the traits secret, how to be careful around those poor souls who have the misfortune and/or bad judgment to marry one of us, how to cover if you say something you shouldn't to an outsider. But not how I 'accidentally' broke a kid's wrist playing football so he couldn't go to the municipal swimming pool afterwards like he planned and drown. And he didn't. He went straight home because he didn't know his wrist was broken and he drowned in the bathtub. His parents were investigated for child abuse and his sister spent eight months in foster care."

"Stop," I said. "Please."

"They were all so mad at me, the family was." Loomis shook his head at the memory. "They claimed they weren't, they told me it wasn't really my fault because I didn't know any better. Everyone kept telling me they weren't upset with me even after the authorities found out
I
had broken the kid's wrist and called me in for questioning. Along with Mom and Dad and Rita. Ambrose was a baby; they examined him for bruises."

"OK. Now stop," I pleaded. "I mean it."

Loomis was talking over me again. "It all came out all right, there was no reason to be upset with me. They said and they said and they said. But after my mother searched my room and found my journal with everybody's dates in it—
then
they got upset. Oh, they got
furious
with me. I said it was my mother's fault for snooping and then telling the rest of the family about it but they weren't having any of that. Writing down
those dates
—how could I have done such a thing? I stuck it out till I was sixteen and then I booked."

The silence hung in the air. I closed my eyes hoping that I'd pass out or something.

"When you're well enough to travel," he said after a while, "you'll come with me."

My eyes flew open.

"Death is the one thing you never, ever even
try
to mess with. Everything in the world—everything in the
universe
changes. But not that. Death
is.
If you went down to the deepest circle of hell and offered resurrection to everyone there, they'd all say no and mean it."

"That's not where you live, is it?" I asked.

Loomis chuckled. "Not even close."

"They won't beg me to stay, will they? They all hate me now."

"They don't hate you," Loomis said, patting my hand again. "They love you as much as they ever did. They just don't like you very much any more."

The nurse came in with my pain medication and I closed my eyes again. "Let me know when we leave."

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of venues, including
Tor.com
,
Subterranean Magazine
,
Weird Tales
, and
Fantasy Magazine
, and has been collected in several year's best. She lives in Bakersfield, California, with her husband and two cats, and is seriously considering whether or not to become a crazy cat lady by adopting all four stray kittens which were recently born in her yard.

Lucian packed his possessions before he left. He packed his antique silver serving spoons with the filigreed handles; the tea roses he'd nurtured in the garden window; his jade and garnet rings. He packed the hunk of gypsum-veined jasper that he'd found while strolling on the beach on the first night he'd come to Adriana, she leading him uncertainly across the wet sand, their bodies illuminated by the soft gold twinkling of the lights along the pier. That night, as they walked back to Adriana's house, Lucian had cradled the speckled stone in his cupped palms, squinting so that the gypsum threads sparkled through his lashes.

Lucian had always loved beauty—beautiful scents, beautiful tastes, beautiful melodies. He especially loved beautiful objects because he could hold them in his hands and transform the abstraction of beauty into something tangible.

The objects belonged to them both, but Adriana waved her hand bitterly when Lucian began packing. "Take whatever you want," she said, snapping her book shut. She waited by the door, watching Lucian with sad and angry eyes.

Their daughter, Rose, followed Lucian around the house. "Are you going to take that, Daddy? Do you want that?" Wordlessly, Lucian held her hand. He guided her up the stairs and across the uneven floorboards where she sometimes tripped. Rose stopped by the picture window in the master bedroom, staring past the palm fronds and swimming pools, out to the vivid cerulean swath of the ocean. Lucian relished the hot, tender feel of Rose's hand.
I love you
, he would have whispered, but he'd surrendered the ability to speak.

He led her downstairs again to the front door. Rose's lace-festooned pink satin dress crinkled as she leapt down the steps. Lucian had ordered her dozens of satin party dresses in pale, floral hues. Rose refused to wear anything else.

Rose looked between Lucian and Adriana. "Are you taking me, too?" she asked Lucian.

Adriana's mouth tightened. She looked at Lucian, daring him to say something, to take responsibility for what he was doing to their daughter. Lucian remained silent.

Adriana's chardonnay glowed the same shade of amber as Lucian's eyes. She clutched the glass's stem until she thought it might break. "No, honey," she said with artificial lightness. "You're staying with me."

Rose reached for Lucian. "Horsey?"

Lucian knelt down and pressed his forehead against Rose's. He hadn't spoken a word in the three days since he'd delivered his letter of farewell to Adriana, announcing his intention to leave as soon as she had enough time to make arrangements to care for Rose in his absence. When Lucian approached with the letter, Adriana had been sitting at the dining table, sipping orange juice from a wine glass and reading a first edition copy of Cheever's
Falconer
. Lucian felt a flash of guilt as she smiled up at him and accepted the missive. He knew that she'd been happier in the past few months than he'd ever seen her, possibly happier than she'd ever been. He knew the letter would shock and wound her. He knew she'd feel betrayed. Still, he delivered the letter anyway, and watched as comprehension ached through her body.

Rose had been told, gently, patiently, that Lucian was leaving. But she was four years old, and understood things only briefly and partially, and often according to her whims. She continued to believe her father's silence was a game.

Rose's hair brushed Lucian's cheek. He kissed her brow. Adriana couldn't hold her tongue any longer.

"What do you think you're going to find out there? There's no Shangri-La for rebel robots. You think you're making a play for independence? Independence to do what, Lu?"

Grief and anger filled Adriana's eyes with hot tears, as if she were a geyser filled with so much pressure that steam could not help but spring up. She examined Lucian's sculpted face: his skin inlaid with tiny lines that an artist had rendered to suggest the experiences of a childhood which had never been lived; his eyes calibrated with a hint of asymmetry to mimic the imperfection of human growth. His expression showed nothing—no doubt, or bitterness, or even relief. He revealed nothing at all.

It was all too much. Adriana moved between Lucian and Rose, as if she could use her own body to protect her daughter from the pain of being abandoned. Her eyes stared achingly over the rim of her wine glass. "Just go," she said.

He left.

Adriana bought Lucian the summer she turned thirty-five. Her father, long afflicted with an indecisive cancer that vacillated between aggression and remittance, had died suddenly in July. For years, the family had been squirreling away emotional reserves to cope with his prolonged illness. His death released a burst of excess.