Ben Winters - World of Trouble

“One must have time to heal,” these experts were always announcing. My parents were dead; both of them. A part of me had been gouged out. “Healing will happen, in time.”

There’s no time, now, obviously. I won’t heal. That won’t happen.

I gather Nico up into my arms and hug her tight to walk her through the woods, back to the station. “Okay,” I say gently to Lily, to the girl, whatever her name is. “Okay, come on now.”

“So it’s a group home.”

“Yes. No. Well—group home makes it sound like it’s for criminals or drug addicts,” I say. “This is for policemen.”

Abigail is skeptical. She chews it over for a minute, her eyes darting where they peek out over her allergy mask. She still isn’t entirely convinced, but she seems to have backed off the idea of me putting a bullet in her head. I think we’re done with that.

“What if they all hate me?”

“No one is going to hate you.”

I evaluate the statement as I say it. Some of them will hate her. Officer Carstairs will hate her because she’s not a cop; Officer Melwyn will hate her because she comes from me, and I’ve been nagging him about leaving the porch lantern on all night. Officer Katz will like her because she’s young and good-looking. Most will not hate her, but they will be wary of her because she’s an outsider, and because she’s self-evidently crazy—but most people are crazy at this point, one way or another.

“You’ll do just fine,” I tell her. “There will be space for you, because I’m leaving. The Night Bird will work out the details.”

“The Night Bird?”

“She’s great. You’ll see.”

At last Abigail gets up and flaps open a giant black Hefty garbage bag and starts throwing things inside, clothes and guns and books and hairbrush and bedroll. She unclips her various armaments, leaving only the calf-sheath pistol and packing everything else in a rolling suitcase.

While she’s packing I flip through the forty- or fifty-page document that Abigail handed me along with the map to Rotary, Ohio, which came out of a false-bottom suitcase and is marked TOP SECRET with a red stamp, just like in the movies. My eyes skim dense paragraphs, bristling with impenetrable details and the Greek letters of complex equations: optimal orbital distance, relationship of impact velocity (km/s) to kinetic-energy release (GJ), relationship of energy yield (kt) to mass velocity and initial density, target center versus mass-motion center.

Second to last page: CONCLUSIONS. Last page: PROTOCOL. I can’t make sense of any of it.

On the blank back page of the TOP SECRET document I jot down the timeline I’ve managed to get out of Abigail, structuring the narrative. In mid-July, Jordan tells Abigail that Hans-Michael Parry, a.k.a. Resolution, has been located in Gary, Indiana; he tells her that soon the various “teams” will be gathering in Ohio, at the police station in a small town called Rotary. But then, sometime after July 21—after Jordan has put Nico on that helicopter, her and one other girl flying off from Butler Field at UNH—he tells Abigail they’ve got new instructions. Jordan and Abigail are to stay put in Concord because their designation has been changed to “backup team.”

And then, abruptly on the morning of August 13, Jordan disappears. No signs of foul play, but neither does he leave a note or any new instructions. He’s just “gone,” Abigail says, whether to Rotary or off on some new adventure she has no idea.

He’s just gone , and she’s been sitting here alone since then, staring into the corners, feeling the Earth’s rotation in her inner ear and choking on cosmic dust.

Now she seems more clear-eyed, calmer, as if simply having somewhere definite to go has allowed her to walk steady in her uneven world. She walks to the door of the store and doesn’t look back.

On the way out, on the top shelf of a dresser, is a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. I’ve seen them before—the same ugly pair Jordan was wearing the first time I met him, at UNH.

I lift them, turn them idly between my fingers. “Jordan forgot his sunglasses,” I say.

“Those things?” says Abigail, and snorts. “Are you kidding me? He’s got a million of those fucking things.”

“I made coffee. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? It’s not gourmet or anything, but it’s coffee. It’s something.”

“No, thank you.” The girl looks up, looks at me quickly, a frightened bird, and then quickly down again. “Do you have tea?”

“Oh, shoot,” I say, “no. I’m so sorry. Just coffee.”

Lily doesn’t say anything else. She’s sitting on the edge of the thin mattress in the holding cell, staring at her hands folded in her lap. The politeness and patience I am showing her, the composed and even casual demeanor, is all artifice, a strategy designed to achieve a goal. The feeling I have inside is of having been exploded—like all of the things that for so long have defined me, all of my habits and memories and idiosyncrasies, everything that I have built up around whatever core there is of me, all of it has turned out to be plaster, and now it has been blown up and I am watching the powder drift in the atmosphere and settle slowly on the ground. The question now is whether there is or ever was anything underneath all of that, or was I always papier-mâché, a dragon head in a parade, all exterior adornment and nothing inside. I think there is something that remains, a hard warm stone like you find glowing on the ground after a fire. But I’m not sure. I don’t know.

I am leaning against the back wall of the holding room, on the good-guy side of the bars, sipping from my thermos with exaggerated calm. From down the hall, in the garage, there is an occasional rattling blast of sound, Cortez grinding away at that concrete wedge with a diesel-fuel jackhammer. My sister’s body is in the dispatch room, wrapped in a wrinkled blue tarp.

“So why don’t we start by getting your name straight,” I say. “It’s not Lily, that much I know.” I laugh a little, and it sounds hollow, so I stop.

The girl watches her hands. The jackhammer sounds again, growling from down the hall. So far the interrogation is going poorly.

“I wish that I could leave you alone,” I say, “I really do.” I talk slow, as slow as I can force myself to talk. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“I have?” She looks up, genuinely asking, and then her finger runs along her throat, where she has allowed me to reapply the bandage. “I guess I have.”

Mental pictures in strobe-light flash: Two girls, crazy with fear. Tan sandals slipping on leaves. Heavy footsteps crashing through the woods behind them. Nico, facedown, blood flooding from her neck. I blink, clear my throat. Talk very, very slowly. “Your mind is processing trauma. It’s hard. The thing is, though, we’re in a tough spot, so to speak, just in terms of time.”

She nods some more, her small head nervously bobbling up and down, her hands twitching in her lap. “Actually,” she says softly. “Can I—you said, about time…” She peeks up at me, and then down. “How much longer?”

“Oh,” I say. “Sure.” She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious. She doesn’t know. “It’s Monday morning, October 1,” I tell her. “There are two more days.”