Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

She said wearily, “Take Jason home, Tim. I can deal with this.”

“All right,” Tim said, “if you promise not to leave the hospital until I get back.”

“Promise.” She wasn’t leaving the hospital until she could take Colin with her.

When they finally let her see Colin, hours later, he lay in a recovery room, tubes stuck into his little body, an oxygen line in his nose. The woman who’d been talking to him, either a cop or a social worker, nodded and left. Colin peered out from under his white hospital blanket and said, “Did Paul die?”

“What, honey?”

“Did Paul die?”

“Who’s Paul?”

“I told that lady. The nice one who gave me this.” He held up a small toy airplane.

“Paul will be fine. How do you feel, honey? Does anything hurt?”

“I had to tell the lady. That I could hear the tree was going to fall. The police said I had to tell everything. My real name, too. I’m sorry, Grandma.”

“It’s all right. As long as you’re okay, everything is all right.”

His eyes were closing. Marianne said, “I’ll be right back,” but he might have already been asleep.

The social worker, joined by a cop, waited for her in the corridor. They found an empty waiting room. Marianne explained about the aliases, and the social worker told her what Colin had said.

A third-grade bully, with metal-capped boots. Kicking Colin in the bathroom, threatening to do it again under the tree, until by sheer chance a dead branch cracked and fell on him. Paul Tyson had taunted Colin, using his real last name.

“You are cleared of suspicion, Dr. Jenner,” the social worker said. As if that was what mattered. “And we’ll follow through with Paul’s parents.” Then the woman, who went around dispensing toy airplanes in return for children’s truths, closed her tablet and left. The cop followed her, but only after a hard look that told Marianne exactly what were his sentiments about alien-loving Embassy scientists who wanted a spaceship built.

She checked on Colin once again. He was still asleep. Her cell would not work on the hospital ward. She took it outside, defying Tim’s orders, and called Jonah Stubbins.

Tim and Marianne stood in the apartment’s tiny kitchenette as he made coffee. It was after midnight, but Tim could drink coffee at any time of the day or night and still sleep. Marianne, nearly twenty years older, could not. Her body ached for sleep but she had to do this, now, tonight. Jason lay asleep in the boys’ room, curled up in Colin’s bed. She had found him holding Colin’s old stuffed elephant and she’d almost burst into tears. Stress.

Tim poured hot water on cheap instant-coffee crystals; he would drink anything with caffeine. “And so Colin thinks he made the tree branch fall on the little shit.”

“No. But he lured Paul to stand under it because he knew it would fall.”

“The social worker didn’t believe that.”

“No, but—”

“I’m not sure I believe it, either,” Tim said. “I’m more interested in how this Paul Tyson knew who Colin was. I want to talk to that kid.”

“It doesn’t matter how he knew,” Marianne said wearily. “It only matters that our identity is out yet again. I can’t keep moving like this. It’s not good for the boys.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be good to stay here now, either. You gotta see that, Marianne.”

“I do see it. Tim, I’m taking Stubbins’s offer to move us all to the Venture building site and get a tutor for the boys. They’ll be safe, and I can work just as well there.”

Tim paused, coffee cup halfway to his mouth. He put the cup, undrunk, on the tiny counter. “Yeah? I thought you wanted to be close enough to see Ryan.”

“I can’t do both. Jason and Colin must come first.”

“I get that.” He picked up the coffee and drained it in one gulp, hot though it must still be. Marianne waited, knowing what was coming.

He said, “And while the boys are being tutored and you’re working on your computer, what am I supposed to be doing? You won’t need a bodyguard there, or the kids to be taken to school, or anything like that.”

“I don’t know what you could do.” Actually, now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure what he did all day now. “I’m going out,” he would say, but where? And why hadn’t she thought to ask before now? Self-focused, that’s what she’d been.

“Tim—”

“You don’t want me to go with you, do you?”

She said gently, “I think we both know that this relationship isn’t really working. And that it never had a future.”

He didn’t answer, and despite her relief that he wasn’t going to make a scene, her pride was bruised. Dumb, dumb! She should be glad that Tim wasn’t hurt—as it was clear from his face that he was not—and that they didn’t love each other. He had never felt about her the way he’d felt about Sissy, and for her the attraction had mostly been sexual. That had drained away. Stress, or acceptance of how different they were, or maybe just the passing of time.

She suddenly felt very old.

Tim said, “I’ll miss those kids. Can I come see them sometimes? And what will you tell them?”

She hadn’t thought that far. “Yes, of course you can come see them. We’re leaving as soon as Colin can travel. Stubbins will send a car.”

He moved toward her, and she tensed. But his kiss lacked all passion. “Go to bed, Marianne. You’re exhausted.”

She did. When she woke, in midmorning, Jason had been taken to school. Tim’s things were still in his room. He wouldn’t leave until Colin was discharged and Marianne and the boys safely transferred to Stubbins’s protection. The innate decency of this moved Marianne. But she couldn’t afford any more emotion. Hastily she dressed to go to the hospital.

One more trip before they could leave for Pennsylvania. Marianne drove alone to see Ryan. It was a lovely day, amazingly warm for November, and Ryan sat outside in an Adirondack chair. He wore his own clothes, his hair neatly combed. He gave his mother a tired smile. “Hi, Mom.”

Encouraged, she said, “Hello, Ryan. How are you?”

“Fine.” But a minute later his face sagged again and tears filled his eyes. “I want to go home.”

Marianne took her son’s hand. He said that often, always when he seemed most stressed, the words seeming to rise unbidden to his lips. They were unbidden, she knew now: unwilled, pushed up from some place deeper than rationality. The words were not literal. There was no specific geographical place Ryan wished to return to. He wanted to go back to the past, to the “home” where he was the child that his depression had regressed him into being, the child who was happy and cared for, the child who’d assumed happiness and order were the way the universe worked. Who had not yet been broken by an entirely different universe.

She had always thought it was Noah who was the weakest child, the drifter who belonged nowhere. She had been wrong. Noah had gone, happily, to the stars. But there was no way for Ryan to go where he wanted. Connie was dead and his beloved job with the wildlife agency gone, and the past could not come back again.

“I want to go home,” he said again.

“I know, sweetheart,” she said. “I know.”

He said nothing for the rest of her visit. Marianne sat for an hour just holding her son’s hand in the soft autumn sunlight.

S plus 6.2 years

Jonah Stubbins was building his starship, the Venture, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The site made sense.

Part of the Allegheny Plateau, the area was free of hurricanes and tornadoes. Its geography shielded it from superstorms. Earthquakes were rare and mild. Before global warming had reached its present state, deep snow and ice storms had been frequent here, but no more. Creeping desertification, not yet far advanced, nonetheless had proven drying enough to cause many farmers to sell their gentle hills. Once coal had been mined here, but never in the quantities found farther east, and most lodes were played out. Stubbins had gotten huge swaths of land reasonably cheap.