The Wonders (13 page)

Kathryn shrugged. “I don't see my brother anymore. He was a friend of my husband.”

Silence. Another of the topics that would never bloom into conversation, at least while Kathryn was around. The crew had discussed the husband when Kathryn wasn't there. Rhona had dealings with him because he was trying to sue her for a percentage of Kathryn's income, which Kathryn didn't know and had no need to know. But the husband's actions before she escaped him had all been recorded online in media reports and interviews, and the words of friends who wrote about him.

Kathryn's husband took photos of her skin as the wool emerged. He posed her naked on the floor to document every new growth of wool with a cheap camera and a blinding flash. He filed a lawsuit against the hospital where she had her treatment. They settled out of court for a sum that was never published. Yet when Kathryn arrived at Overington she was penniless. He had taken all the money and lost it in bad investments and partnerships with con men who recognized him for the fool he was. After Kathryn had gone he sold the remaining photos and his story, complete with invented details of her raging sexual appetites and bizarre antics, which he claimed were brought on by the change.

“I didn't know whether we could rescue her from that humiliation,” Rhona told Leon and Christos and Yuri. The staff had gone to bed, and a soft powder of sadness had fallen in the room, sadness for their old lives and for their new ones. “Everyone had seen everything. Her body was public property. She
was shrunken and crushed and barely able to speak. It's an odd word to use, but she was dishonored. Others had dishonored her and she had no honor left for herself. She made me cry. I decided that even if she could not recover enough to perform, I would have her here with whatever she needed. It took months of quiet and rest, and she'd already worn out two shrinks at the sanatorium before she even got here.”

The Kathryn who shared their life was unrecognizable as that cowed woman in the obscene photos smeared across the media when her change first began. Her husband had snapped her stretched out, curled up, bent over in positions a porn star might use. In some he posed her like a fashion model, for reasons Leon couldn't fathom. Or perhaps those two extremes were the only images of women the husband understood. The early photos showed the wool as a shadow, a dirty smudge appearing on her legs and back. Later it covered most of her body, but angry pink bald patches still shone through on her belly and her shoulders. In the last photos, the wool had grown long and was matted, greasy and ropy. She wore no makeup or shoes. She could have been an escapee from an ancient alien swamp. Leon hated to think about her life with her husband, how it could have turned Kathryn, blindsided by the treatment that caused the wool to grow, into the cringing, dirty, ugly creature who had been exposed to the world in those parodies of glamour portraits.

“But she did recover,” Leon said. “She's incredible now, so gutsy and beautiful. And a bit scary when she starts with that smart mouth.” Two nights before, she had called him Tin Man and threatened to leave a magnet in his bed. On a bad day she could wither him with a glance.

Rhona patted Leon's arm, partly to reassure him, partly to
correct him. “Underneath, Leon, she is still as flimsy as tissue. Outside—spunky and tough. Inside—still terribly scarred.”

That night as he lay in bed he imagined, as he had in the first days of arriving at Overington, how it would feel to have wool under his fingers. To sense the swell of a breast under soft curly fleece. To reach between warm woolly thighs to find moisture. To rub his cheek along the shorn black ripples of wool and push his tongue into the hollow of her throat where the wool ended and silky skin emerged. But it was a fantasy, not something he wanted to become real. He could imagine her afterward in a rage, unsatisfied, battering him with words, her possibility for pleasure bound tight by the punishing past written into her body. His fantasies were for late at night, for a quick uncomplicated release before sleep.

In the six months he had known her, Kathryn had not been with a man or a woman, had not shown any interest in romance or sex. While Rhona and Christos teased Leon about getting a girlfriend, they never pressed Kathryn. Despite being named as the sexiest woman who had ever lived by a salacious men's magazine that couldn't let a week go by without a mention of her, it was as if she had turned her own sexuality off.

Only once did Christos bring up the idea of her meeting someone. “When are you going to find yourself a playboy?” he asked.

Kathryn smiled even as she kept her gaze focused on the book in her lap. “Didn't you guess? I'm waiting for Pan.”

T
ODAY MINH LAY
on a chaise longue in a finger of afternoon sun beside the elephant house, ankles crossed, face tipped back to catch the sun. She was talking on a phone, and from her lighthearted laugh, Leon guessed she was on the line with Kathryn, who was in Los Angeles talking to producers about a biopic.

The arrival of Minh at Overington had soothed its small fraught world. Leon found it difficult to define exactly what her presence had done, but for one thing he felt healthier, even though she had done nothing but represcribe his medications and run tests and assays. Even Kathryn had relaxed since Minh's appearance. She and Minh could often be found chatting with their heads bent together, Minh's black hair glossy and smooth beside Kathryn's tight woolen curls, or lying on opposite couches reading quietly, or teasing Christos while Yuri fussed around cleaning the wings or working on specifications for the design of Christos's next project.

Sometimes Leon caught sight of Minh sitting on her camp
stool in the grounds, concentrating on a sketch or staring dreamily at something in the distance. In the short time she had been here, her skin had become tawny and fresh as she rambled and sketched the artificial wildernesses of the Overington grounds. Much as Leon wished he could pass by and comment casually on her artwork or on the scenery or even the weather, he had never been comfortable about approaching women, even for an innocent chat. He was sure they would be polite while wishing he'd leave them alone, or talk with him out of pity, or worse, give him a brusque response that left no doubt about their wish to be rid of this annoying bug. “Sad Leon” he used to be called in high school. With his forlorn face, he looked older than his physical age. Sad old Leon. He was brimming with the same wishes and hopes as everyone else, but all that was hidden behind his mournful visage. The women who took the initiative with him were often disappointed too. They had made their move presuming that face reflected a melancholy soul, a tortured poet, but what they discovered was a man of longing, eager to please yet unable to find the right tone or note or pitch to satisfy their expectations.

So, at Overington, Leon skirted around the luminous presence of Minh. He would wave from a distance, bowing with a Prussian gentleman's dip of the head, then stroll off, hands clasped behind his back, a socially inept idiot.

Seeing Minh today, he performed his stupid nod and pivoted on his heel, ready to head off in the other direction and silently berate himself for his gracelessness, but she called to him.

“That was Kathryn on the phone. She says she's never going to be a star. They want her to play herself in the early scene of when the wool starts to grow. They can't understand why she won't do it.”

Leon stood stiffly to attention on the spot where he had
begun to turn away. Should he walk toward Minh? Should he reply and continue on his way? Should he be frank—say that Kathryn deserved more than a hammy biopic? He thrust his fists into his pockets and clenched them for courage before he spoke.

“I think she's doing the right thing. She shouldn't have to live through that again.”

“That's what I said, Leon. I don't know why she's even considering this Hollywood film. It must be Rhona's idea.”

“Or Kyle's.” Kyle had accompanied Kathryn to Los Angeles. Leon wondered if the whole thing was a ploy for Kyle to spend time alone with her.

Minh cleared her throat. “Would you like to sit down?”

He hadn't noticed the second chaise longue on the other side of Minh. Of course, she and Kathryn sometimes lay here in the early morning. Soaking up their weekly dose of vitamin D, they said. He walked around behind Minh and eased himself onto the low cedar chaise with its padded cushions. His thighs were tense, a sure sign he was feeling anxious.

He adjusted his buttocks further onto the cushion pad. “It's comfortable.”

“You sound surprised.” Minh picked up a pair of sunglasses from a basket beside her and handed them to Leon. “You could put these on and lie down. I promise you'll be relaxed in no time. It works for Kathryn and me. This sheer autumn sunshine—it's therapy without the talking.”

Thirty minutes later Leon woke with a start. The strip of sun had moved down his body and now lit a stripe across his calves. Minh was sitting up, sketching Maisie and Maximus grazing in a copse of trees to the south, her long legs braced either side of the chaise longue, the sketchbook balanced on the flat of the seat.

“Feel better?” she asked without shifting her gaze from the elephants. Her hand made rapid strokes on the paper as if it were working alone, without her conscious mind.

“Mm.”

“I watched your breathing while you were asleep. I could see you've lost some lung capacity.”

Leon yawned and stretched, feeling the shift of tendon and muscle along bone. He was looser than he had been in months.

“Leon, I know you're not supposed to talk about how you got the heart implanted, but I have to ask. It's so incredible. Could you maybe tell me about where it was done? I know it wasn't a hospital. No hospital could have kept you a secret.”

Although Leon had lived in the basement under the university engineering department for a year while Susan and Howard operated on him, the memory of his physical pain had begun to fade as soon as he emerged into the sunlight and caught the train to his hometown. Susan and Howard often appeared in his dreams—after all, theirs were the faces he had watched the way a baby watches its mother's face, trying to read and understand the language they used and what it might mean for him. But he pushed the images away. He would never encounter that kind of pain again and he wanted to numb himself against the memory of it. As he became famous and the questions became more persistent about who had made his heart, who had implanted it, where the operation had been performed, he practiced the tricks of detachment he had used early on to avoid reminders of what he had been through. Rhona had told him not to speak to anyone about it, and in truth, he hadn't wanted to.

But now that Minh had asked, Leon was bursting to tell her how it had been. Something had changed in him. He wanted Minh to know. He wanted her to know how he had changed, even though she had never met Leon before his heart failed,
the man who spent his time reading books about how to live and barely doing the living. Minh, with her different way of being in the world, would understand that everything had changed not only for him but in him. He wanted to be known by her.

Still lying on his back on the cushions, with his arm bent across his face, he started to speak and the words rolled out as if they had been prepared for this moment.

“We were in a basement under a university building. A secret basement that had been blocked off, that people had forgotten was there. No natural light, no view, no other people. Just the three of us underground. It was madness. The intensity, the paranoia, the claustrophobia turned us reckless. We were children trapped inside on a rainy day. We played made-up games with rules that changed as we went along. We repeated phrases thousands of times to make each other laugh. The phrase or word had struck us as funny once, so why not stretch that out, spin it fine, twist it, repeat it, upend it. I put together twenty-four elaborate jigsaw puzzles. I learned to do cryptic crosswords. Susan brought me games and toys as if I was a child in hospital.”

“Susan?”

“My surgeon. And my friend. And my nurse and my shrink and my teacher. I remember once, when I asked her to tell me more about how my new heart would work, she handed me a rubber heart, a royal-blue-and-crimson-colored thing, and instead of waiting for her to explain, I started to juggle it in both hands and poke my finger into the cut-off stem of the aorta. I shook it until the vibrating rubber made a sound like wet gums flapping together. I couldn't stop laughing. Susan caught the laughter. We became a little hysterical. Later I became totally obsessed with anatomy, surgery techniques, biochemistry—I've
always loved research anyway—but early on, everything was a plaything for me. I'd regressed, I suppose.” Leon smiled, remembering the boredom of the first months as he was being prepared for surgery, left alone in the basement for long periods each day. How quickly he had turned to the pursuits of his childhood. “All the games and puzzles and quizzes. Anyway, I asked her if that rubber toy was how my new heart would look. I thought the artificial heart Howard was creating in the screened-off section of the basement would be a flexible, malleable thing like a real heart.”