What We Lost in the Dark (18 page)

It wouldn’t have made any difference.

I missed Rob terribly, was the truth. I was displacing pounds of grief with pounds of pizza, and pounds of fear with pounds of anger. I had lifted a flap on the corner of my mind and peeked at what it would be like to miss him forever. When I did that, I thought,
How could such a thing ever be possible?

Anything is possible.

I said, “Thank you, Gid.”

With his help, I threw Angela over my shoulder, fire-carry style, to take her out to the car. I really only intended to go tether the Odyssey—if,
oh please
, it was still there.

I never meant to do anything else.

The next day, I went to the clinic for a battery of tests that were repeats of tests I’d had a month earlier.

Usually, I had my clockwork-timed medical workup four times a year: blood and tissue taken and some various kinds of whateverograms to chart the progress of my condition or the lack of progress of my condition. When I went to the clinic, I saw the same nurses I’d seen for fifteen years, including my godmother Gina. And everybody acted the same way. Everyone slapped fists with me and gave me things.

I still really do like getting things. It’s one of the prerogatives that attaches to the shared belief that you will die young and miss some of the allotted birthday presents.

That day, I put on my full level-five biohazard regalia to go to the clinic. I started with long underwear because it was three degrees outside. Then I put on a turtleneck and sweats, long socks and tall boots, with gloves and a bandana with a hat meant to protect the necks of people studying mosquitoes in the Amazon. This, and sunglasses that cost about four
hundred dollars, and an umbrella, is what I always have to wear to walk from my mother’s car to the clinic door and from the clinic door to my mother’s car, whether in record summer heat or the dead of a Minnesota winter. People who don’t know me roll up their car windows because they think I must be the Pied Piper for killer bees.

There was no reason even to ask why they couldn’t just look at the blood I’d had in my veins thirty days earlier.

With anything medical, it’s best to do it three times and bill for it four times. Even then, you could walk in carrying your severed arm and the intake specialist would ask for your insurance card and politely offer to help you get out of your backpack, given that you had only one arm and the other was spurting arterial blood.

“Ginger!” said Gina.

It was my clinic nickname, in reference to the auburn color of my hair—although the texture of my hair and the shape of my eyes are clearly Asian. My mother describes me as “Eurasian,” but that makes it sound like I’m on a poster for tourism in Thailand. People expect “Asian” to be little and size zero. But Chinese people are not always little and delicate. On the other hand, Japanese people tend to be the ones who get the kind of XP that leaves you blind and with an IQ of 50 by the time you’re ten years old. So XP-wise, I drew the better genetic Asian card.

Gina disappeared behind the sprawling, bean-shaped countertop and came back with a Macy’s bag. She had not given me anything in about three weeks. With a conspiratorial smile, she pulled out a little purse with about sixty zippers and pockets, the size of a paperback. I smiled, but I have to admit, I was annoyed in general. Despite my hope and joy over the prospect of not having to wear the killer bee
gear—or at least less of it, at least someday, at least maybe—I was still a kid. I was pissed off about having not only all the blood draws and skin slides and mouth swabs and vision-field tests I’d just had in November, all over again, plus an MRI and a bunch of other procedures I hadn’t had for years.

I was also fiercely hungry. Gina brought me a bran muffin. “Great,” I said. “What a treat.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“Not much.”

“You’re welcome,” Gina said.

“Gina, Gina,” I said. “Is my mom just over the rainbow here? What do
you
think of this clinical trial?”

“Forget about it; I think it’s the most promising thing in years,” she said in fluent Brooklyn. “I’m telling you, Al, it’s the most promising thing ever.”

So I offered myself up to be bled and scraped and imaged. When the technicians and nurses took away my blood and tissue and pictures, I sat madly paging through the kinds of celebretrash magazines that my mom would not allow in our house, because there are always one or four tests that need to be repeated. This time it was the MRI, which made me want to scream. I ditched the beheaded remains of the bran muffin in the trash. Everything in a hospital that looks clean is really swarming with MRSA germs. You can get sick standing there. All of the tests took seven hours, and that was just the first battery.

I got home in the early afternoon. I was ready to hit the bed when my mother asked, “Why is Rob Dorn sending me text messages?”

I was too tired to lie. “I wrecked my phone while I was taking pictures, and I could not get to it, and it’s totaled,” I said. “I’m sorry, but that is what happened.”

“You need to go to the store right now then, and you need to replace it.”

“It’s not dark out.”

“I didn’t lose the phone, Allie.”

“Mom, you don’t want me to go outside except to go to the clinic under pain of death! You can’t be two kinds of drill sergeant.”

She relented, and I collapsed on my mattress waking vaguely to notice that there was a new phone, unboxed, under my hand. Well, that was why we paid for the protection.

Relieved that Rob had texted me back, no matter what he’d texted, I hit the bed seriously.

When I woke up, I sent a text immediately: I love you. All is forgiven.

And he answered, immediately: I love you too but I really was texting your mother. I know we need 2 talk but busy now.

And so I texted Rob: I am going to find out where he hides what he does. I do not need you. FU very much.

And then I fell asleep.

My rhythms were a mess, because I woke up twelve hours later, early the next afternoon. Turning in bed, I reached out for my bottle of knockout pills, took one, and was out again.

THE HOT, SAVORY smell of veggie chili woke me. Ravenous, having eaten nothing since the previous morning, I jumped up with fuzzy teeth, rumpled hair, wearing a Notre Dame sweatshirt with a big hole in the elbow over pink long underwear. Rob was standing in the kitchen with my mom, eating a mug of chili.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi. You came home early.”

Rob set the chili down.

“I missed my girl. You’re still my girl, right?”

I blinked. “Of course. If you want me to be.”

“I thought about nothing but you for all those days. Allie, I love you so much. It would be better if we broke up. But I love you so much.”

“Why would it be better if we broke up?”

“It just would. You’re starting college … and all.”

Again, I had the strong sense that the “and all” was missing, but I decided not to push it. “I’m going to brush my teeth before I give you a kiss,” I said.

“It’s okay. You look like a Doctor Seuss drawing.”

“That’s what every girl dreams of a guy saying.” I toddled off to the bathroom, and then turned back. “Did you get my text?”

“That was why I came back. The last thing you said, honey, that’s not happening.”

“You broke up with me. You don’t get to call the shots anymore.” I put my hand up and touched the chain under my sweatshirt. The ring was there, but so was the pendant that had belonged to the lost girl.

“Allie, don’t be like this. This is what started it before.”

I stared at my mother, who had made no move to give the two of us space to have what was clearly a very private discussion. She shrugged and hustled Angela upstairs. I could imagine the two of them hanging over the balcony like bats to hear us better.

“Come with me to get my parents tomorrow night. They stayed until the last day with my mom’s brother. Come on.” He took a step toward me. “You’re not wearing it.”

I pulled out the chain.

“So that’s how it is,” Rob said, glancing at both of the charms on my necklace.

“That’s how it is,” I said, my voice thick in my throat. I turned to go brush my teeth. When I came out of the bathroom, he was gone.

I waited an hour, and then, on my new phone, I texted: At least be happy about the clinical trials!

An hour later, he wrote back: I can’t be in them.

Why not????

Wrong kind of XP, he wrote.

I wanted to run after him, then. I wanted to put my arms around him and say it was just a matter of time—months, not years—before they figured out the key to his kind. Instead, I asked him to let me take him out to dinner the next night, before he picked his parents up, at a nice place, The Flying Fish—which was the only place still open in Iron Harbor, that at least we could talk.

Good, Rob wrote.

But it wasn’t.

We were finishing our chicken parm when I finally asked Rob, “Are you sure?”

It had been such a sweet night, just us two, pretending that things were the way they’d once been. I hated to get down to cases, but I was never patient, and I had to know. He understood right away.

“About the clinical thing? Yes. Bet your butt. Your mom checked it out before she told me.”

“Jackie told you?”

“She’s a good person, Allie. Why would she not tell me? You’ve always known, I have it worse than you,” he said.

It was a fact, and not one I wanted reiterated, although I had asked for it. Rob had already had a baby melanoma removed, leaving a gnawed-looking pouch of scar on his shoulder. I knew then that there were plenty of things he wasn’t going to say, no matter what, and would I change that?

No. I looked over at him, at his slender white hands and
his black curls, his dark and deep-set eyes. Rob was Rob. I wouldn’t change anything about him.

“Are you going to be angry with me because I’m having gene therapy or whatever it is?”

“Like I don’t want you to live and be healthy? How would you be if the situation were reversed, honey?”

“Jealous. But … happy it was one of us.”

All at once, Rob wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was intently watching something just over my head, outside the little curtained cubicle where we sat. The Flying Fish is a sort of combo Italian-seafood place. It’s meant to be romantic (at least for Iron Harbor), and there are six or eight raised, scooped little booths, nestled against poofy banquettes, with cove ceilings and plaster angels and velvet drapes across them for people who want to make out in public but not be seen. We’d done that in the past, but I got the distinct feeling we weren’t going to now.

Barely opening his lips, Rob said, “Don’t move, Allie. And don’t speak too loud.”

“Why?”

“I can see Garrett Tabor and his father across the restaurant. But they can’t see us. I wish I could hear them. They’re having a fight.”

My heart thumping, I slowly turned my head and peered through the break in the drawn red drapes. Rob was right. Oblivious, their nearly identical profiles rigid, the two Tabors were hissing at each other. They were animated, with ugly gestures and expressions, but deliberately keeping their voices low. “They can’t be talking about anything personal,” I said. “They’re in a public place.”

“That’s what we were just doing,” Rob pointed out. “If only you had that camera.”

“I do,” I admitted, pulling it out of my front pack. “What are you going to do with it?”

“We can’t hear them, but we can record them,” Rob said. I was so proud of him at that moment; I wanted to leap across the table and sweep him into my arms. Rob could have just pulled the curtains tighter. Instead, he knew that I would want to know what my sort-of boss was talking about to my sort-of murderer. I hadn’t even told Rob about my solo dive, because I figured it would outrage his protective-guy instincts. But they were already there, and they were already wrapped around me. Slowly turning the volume up on the camera, making sure the lens was jutting out to just the correct angle, Rob put his fingers to his lips and pressed the
RECORD
button.

Just then, the server breezed in and said, “Does anybody here want dessert? Want to just look at the menu?”

Furiously, like mutes, we nodded our heads, and she set the card between us and backed away. Before she could exit, Rob touched her forearm, pointed to tiramisu, and made a sign for “two.”

A moment later, she returned with cups of the thick, creamy dessert, waving her hand at us as though she couldn’t speak either.

Rob continued to record. At one point, I heard Dr. Stephen say, distinctly, “What I did!”

But the rest of it was muffled, the sound of distant voices. The two men got up, and Garrett Tabor threw down some bills and stalked out of the restaurant. After a moment, Dr. Stephen added another bill and left, quietly.

I almost laughed. On top of everything else, Tabor was cheap, too.

WHEN WE GOT back to Rob’s apartment over the garage, he hooked up the camera to his biggest computer and uploaded two minutes of video. It consisted mostly of a close shot of Dr. Stephen’s face. We could see him shake his head, spread both hands in anger or despair, and I could even lip-read well enough to see that he whipsered, “No! No!” on three occasions.