Gregg Hurwitz - The Program

He kissed her stomach, then laid his cheek on it again.

He thought he heard a heartbeat. Was it possible to hear a heartbeat already? It must have been Dray's. Or his own.

She took a deep breath. "Sometimes I wonder if I've got enough left to make another run at a blue-and-yellow nursery."

"You do."

"Oh," she said. "Are you still here?"

He knew she could feel his smile against her skin – he felt her stomach tense on the verge of laughter. "Don't," he said.

That sent her over the edge, her laughter bouncing his head. He made pained groans and objections, as if the abdominal tumult were inflicting great abuse on him. Finally she quieted, sniffling a few times.

Dray was never big on tissues.

She watched him curiously as he stood and pulled on his shoes, but she didn't ask where he was going. He paused by the door. "Ginny's bottom lip disappeared when she smiled."

Dray made a soft hum, a noise of pleasure and longing mixed together.

He said, "Remember her laugh when she really got going?"

"The hiccupping one?"

"And when she colored the bottoms of her feet with Magic Marker and ran around on the new carpet? That expression she'd get when we'd ground her – the slanted eyebrows? Furrowed brow?"

"The demon-spawn scowl."

They looked at each other, smiling.

"Yeah," Dray said. "I remember."

Tim's hands sweated, as they always did when he approached the front walk. The bordering lawn, uniformly green, rose to the precise level of the concrete. Like Tim's lawn used to. He stood in the night chill, the parked Blazer at his back, and gathered his courage.

After hitting a snarl of traffic – L.A.'s eternal antidote to sanity – he'd found himself in Pasadena, then at the house.

It struck him that The Program's regression drills didn't depend on implanted memories alone. Most people had pain that could be accessed and exploited, exposed nerves to pluck like harp strings. TD sniffed out the hollows in which trauma was buried; he cracked people wide, and they welcomed him like a conquering god.

Tim stepped up on the porch and rang the doorbell. A snowball plant rose from a terra-cotta pot, the perfect bulb of the crown picked clean of dead foliage. A single brown leaf lay on the soil.

The even cadence of footsteps. A darkness at the peephole, then his father opened the door, blocking the narrow gap with his body. "Timmy." His eyes flicked over Tim's shoulder at Dray's Blazer. "You brought the truck for your mother's desk?"

Tim had been steeling himself, but he felt a sudden calm. "Why do you always want to bring me down a peg?"

Easing out on the porch, his father plucked up the solitary dead leaf and folded it into a handkerchief he produced from his pocket. He returned to his post at the door. "It's nothing personal. I make it my business to oppose self-righteousness."

"So you started on me when I was five."

"That's right."

"That's bullshit. It was personal. Why me?"

His father looked away, and in that instant Tim saw him with detachment – a man in his fifties standing in the doorway of another suburban house. His father kept his eyes on the street, his face pale. "Because you thought you were better than me."

A car turned onto the street, its headlights bleaching the house.

He cleared his throat, fixed his gaze on Tim. "Why don't we haul that desk out for you so you can get on your way?"

"I don't want the desk."

If he was disappointed, he didn't show it. He nodded definitively, a single dip of the chin. "Where's your music, Timmy?" He crossed his arms, a union-boss show of opposition. "This is your big scene, isn't it? You sat at home, dreamed it up, dreamed up how you could take a big stand against your old man, and here you are, your moment in the sun. You deserve a musical score, don't you think?"

A beep sounded – an annoying rendition of some classical motif. Tim followed his father's gaze down to the electronic monitoring bracelet at his ankle.

The parole officer's beckon.

Tim's father glanced back up, a ripple of chagrin disrupting the inscrutable mask.

The halting melody followed Tim back down the walk.

As Tim folded clothes neatly into his overnight bag, Dray watched him morosely over the top of the paperback she was pretending to read. He'd already touched up his disguise, trimming his goatee, plucking his false hairline, giving his hair a touch-up rinse.

He finished packing and joined Dray beneath the sheets.

In less than eight hours, he'd be sitting in the passenger seat of Randall's van. He rehearsed his story in his head, trying to make Leah's desertion plausible.

They made love deliberately, taking nothing for granted. Each touch seemed heightened – she shivered when he kissed the edge of her wrist, the inside of her elbow, the point of her jaw.

They fell asleep in a warm tangle.

The phone rang at six-thirty, jerking Tim from a deep sleep. He'd no sooner pressed the receiver to his ear than the marshal let loose with a string of Mediterranean expletives. After a few disoriented seconds, Tim caught up with his stream of discourse.

"This morning I find my niece – God bless her – zoned out on the couch, phone bleating in her hand and Betters's video in the VCR. She called in and signed up for the Next Fucking Generation Colloquium -put two grand on my wife's goddamn Visa."

Tim sank his teeth painfully into his lower lip; a chortle here could prove fatal. Beside him Dray shifted and groaned unhappily.

Tannino didn't pause long enough for Tim to respond. "Bring me something back, Rackley, however small, to get us on that fucking ranch. Once we're there, we're gonna go full bore on his ass."

Looking crisp and mean in her uniform, Dray stood in the driveway as Tim backed the Hummer out of the garage. The steam from her coffee mixed with her clouding breath to shroud her face. A furious knocking on the passenger window made him punch down on the brakes. Leah gestured emphatically at him, running around to the driver's side.

When Tim rolled down his window, she said, "I want to go. The mail goes into TD's cottage, and only Lilies, Protectors, and Stanley John are allowed in there. You can't get your hands on that stuff. You need me."

"It's not safe for you up there."

"You don't get to decide that for me. You said it was my choice. I trusted you."

"Leah -"

"No, wait a minute. Since I've been off the ranch, I've been mostly upset and scared. But you know what? I'm sick of it. And the more I think about it – him, everything – the more pissed off I get. Now I want to go back there. And you can't stop me."

In the rearview, Tim noted her taxi pulling away from the curb. "No," he said. "I can't."

"What about Will?" Dray asked.

"I left him and Mom a note explaining."

"A note," Dray said. "Swell."

The Hummer idled and shot exhaust. Leah appealed to him with earnest eyes.

"Get in," Tim said.

Leah fidgeted in her seat, her foot twisting around the back of her calf as if scratching an inextinguishable itch. They passed a long school bus filled with chanting students waving pennants – just another away game in paradise. Leah watched it recede into traffic. "Do you know what it's like? To leave something that means everything to you?"

His back pocket still felt empty without his badge. It had been presented to him on a Georgian dais at FLETC graduation, and he'd silently pledged to hold and honor it until it was sunk in Lucite and holding down the stubs of his pension checks.

The clouds broke furiously, unleashing torrents of rain. They fought through clots of traffic and minilagoons, moving from one freeway to another until they finally exited. Leah's silent discomfort grew more pronounced as they neared the Radisson.