J. Dunn: Our Share of Darkness

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

Inside the room the hospital sounds faded. Dad lay unmoving, in appearance already a corpse. Two weeks since the stroke had hit him, and the sight of him still shook me to the core.

I went to the headboard monitor and ran a check. A ritual; the most I could do for him. Everything was nominal, as I d expected. Any change would have triggered alarms at appropriate terminals. It was a good system. Not cutting-edge, but it did the job. I should know—I’d installed it.

This close, I could hear his breathing; impossibly light, a faint whistle at the bare edge of hearing. There was a pause—I gritted my teeth, but the slow rasp resumed a moment later.

Backing away, I found a chair. At first I thought the deathwatch would be a torment. But it wasn’t that bad. Sitting there as the memories rolled by, things I’d forgotten years before. The racquetball that he loved but wasn’t very good at. The way he’d laughed when I lost control of an ice cream cone and wound up with most of it in my lap—Christ, that had to be one of my earliest memories. The first time he’d taken the casing off a computer to show me what was inside, saying that you could put a whole world in there.

Old fool, I thought. You could not. Nothing that mattered would fit inside a machine.

I became aware of a presence behind me. In the hall stood Randy Coover, holding his workcase before him like a shield. As my eyes fell on him he made a move, as if about to bolt. I sighed and got to my feet.

Randy greeted me with a shake of his head. “Hard to believe.”

“It comes. You know that.” I’d attended his old man’s funeral three years before.

“But I talked to him just last month. It’s like it’s not the same man.”

There was a catch in my throat that I couldn’t force an answer past. Randy’s dad had gone quickly—a heart attack during a fishing trip upstate. Dead before the med lifter reached him. “Yeah,” I managed to choke out.

Almost furtively, Randy glanced over his shoulder. I smiled, knowing who he must be looking for. “Chloe coming around?”

“Uhh… yeah. She… did tell me to meet her here.”

“Business?” I could sense that my voice was a little too loud.

He grimaced. “Alex, don’t put me on the spot…”

“Me put you where?”

The lawyer in him suddenly emerged. “Alex, she’s a cli—”

“So she’s your client. Big deal. She’s my sister. I know what she’s up to.” I waved at the open door. “She wants to dupe him. Put him on disc. So she can take him shopping with her, I suppose. That’s what you’re here for, counselor.”

He went rigid, still in attorney-at-law mode. Or almost—there was something in his eyes that wasn’t law school issue. “I’m her lawyer, Alex,” he said, as if ashamed of the fact.

I gave him a disgusted look. “Come off it, Randy. If she wanted to bring in a channeler, you’d handle that too? Same with duping. You don’t know cybernetics, and I do. There isn’t enough memory on the planet to—”

Randy’s workcase buzzed. He fumbled with the receiver. “Hello?” His eyes widened and he made to swing away. Smirking, I crossed my arms.

“Oh, hi… yeah, I’m at the hospital.” His gaze flickered, then he straightened up and looked right through me. “No,” he said quietly. “No, he’s not here.”

I dropped my head, feeling a touch of shame myself. Randy was right. I had no business snapping at him. It wasn’t his fault.

“You’re on your way,” Randy said flatly. I touched his shoulder as I slipped past. “I’ll see you,” I whispered.

“Alex,” he called out before I’d taken more than a few steps. I turned. He had a palm over the receiver. “I do feel sorry about your dad,” he said, each word distinct.

“Thanks, Randy.” I went on my way.

I had to wait for the elevator. As I stepped out, I saw Chloe crossing the lobby with two men I didn’t know. Hard to miss her, in her silk Chinoise-style suit and broad-brimmed hat, the fashion triumph from Shanghai this season. It made me wonder if all the sleek-looking women you saw were as screwed up.

My stomach twisted at the sight of her. The last time we’d talked had been a knock-down, drag-out brawl, and I wanted no rematch. Seeing an office next to the elevator bank, I ducked inside. Heels clicked on the hallway tile, Chloe’s voice ringing out high and shrill: “… he moved yesterday. He heard me. He knew it was…”

Stop it, I wanted to tell her. He didn’t hear anything. He’d never hear anything again.

Then she was past, her steps eager, as if she was going to meet a lover. The two men followed. One of them smirked at the other.

“Now, when we meet my brother, you—” Chloe’s voice cut off. Behind me a throat was cleared. A woman behind a counter frowned at me. “Can I help you?”

I felt my face redden. “Uh, I guess not.”

Leaving the building, I whistled for my car. As I got in the hospital system began paging me.

I spent the rest of the day brooding behind the desk that had once been Dad’s. I knew I wasn’t handling it well, but there was no such category where Chloe was concerned. Rhea might have done better, but she was beaucoup million miles away, en route to a place called “Sears.”

Somebody once said that happy families are all alike, while unhappy ones differ. I don’t know if that’s true. It seems to me that all families vary in their levels of joy and misery, depending on time and circumstance. Maybe in some ideal sense the words are valid, but who lives an ideal?

We were a happy family, more so than most. Looking back, I could see that clearly. No matter what happened, that deep sense of rightness never failed us. Except where Chloe was concerned.

Our happiness was based on what Mom and Dad had. They were soul mates, closer than any other couple I’ve ever known. I hadn’t understood that until I got older and saw what other marriages were like. They were among the luckiest in this bitter world, and they passed their luck on to us. We basked in it, Rhea and I, scarcely aware of its source, taking it as our due, which of course it was.

But not little sister. And that, I think, is where the adage fails. Chloe should have been happy. Why she wasn’t I can’t explain and I doubt that anyone could. What for Rhea and me was the basis of our lives, she took as an insult. She was Daddy’s girl, and Mom stood between her and her rightful place. The dynamics of the thing were obvious, and it was sickening to watch, particularly as she got older—the tantrums, the sulking, the unending nastiness.

Mom never complained, saying that Chloe would grow out of it eventually. As for Dad—he had a weak spot for her, but he managed to control it, most of the time.

But she never did grow out of it, and when Mom died, I saw that she never would.

Chloe said nothing about Mom at the funeral. No need—she’d won, you see. Her great rival was gone, and Dad was hers alone now. All her attention was focused on him. I watched her traipsing around him, acting half her age, solicitously gripping his arm during the ceremony. All the time unaware that she was addressing a shell, that he wasn’t really there anymore, that his heart slept with his wife.

A week passed before the truth hit her. She cornered Rhea and me in the kitchen of the old house where we were staying. Daddy wouldn’t talk to her, he sat staring into space, she didn’t understand…

“He’s fading away,” Rhea told her. “People do that, Chloe. When they’re like him and Mom.”