Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

My fears for Kait deepened during the drive. She was sicker than I had realized, and her exposure to the thermal shock had made matters worse. Ashlee took Kait’s temperature with the thermometer from the first-aid kit, then frowned and fed her a couple of antipyretic capsules and a long drink of water. We were forced to stop several times for Kaitlin to lope away from the van and relieve her bowels, and each time she stumbled back she was visibly weaker and unspeakably humiliated.

We needed to get her into a reputable hospital. Hitch placed a call to Sue Chopra and reassured her that we had survived, though Kait was ill. Sue recommended crossing the border, if possible, before admitting Kait for medical care, since young Americans in-country without papers were currently being jailed. The No-gales border crossing was swamped — there had been a rumor, this one false, of an impending arrival in that city — but Sue said she would arrange for someone from the consulate to escort us through. A hospital room would be waiting in Tucson.

Ashlee administered a broad-spectrum antibiotic from our medical kit and Kait slept fitfully through the hot afternoon. Hitch and I exchanged driving duties.

I thought about Ashlee. Ashlee had just lost her son, or believed she had. It was remarkable that she was able to care for Kaitlin at all — moving under the weight of her grief with great deliberation. And Kait responded to this kindness instinctively. She was at ease with her head in Ashlee’s lap.

It occurred to me that I loved them both.

I obeyed Ashlee’s injunction: I did not, then or later, ask Kaitlin what had happened to her during the haj.

Maybe I should qualify that. There was a time, as I sat with Kait in her hospital room in Tucson waiting for the doctor to come back with her bloodwork, when I couldn’t restrain myself. I didn’t ask her directly what had happened in Portillo; only why she had gone there — what had made her leave home and ally herself with the likes of Adam Mills.

She turned her head away from me in acute embarrassment. Her hair fell across the crisp white pillow, and I saw the suture line of her long-healed cochlear surgery, a very faint, pale seam along the descending line of her throat.

“I just wanted things to be different,” she said.

Ashlee stayed with me in Tucson while Kait recovered.

We rented a motel room and lived together chastely for a week. Ashlee’s grief was intensely private, often almost invisible. There were days when she seemed almost herself, days when she would smile when I came in the door with a bag of take-out Mexican or Chinese food. In some part, she may have harbored the hope that Adam had survived (though she refused to discuss the possibility or tolerate the mention of Adam’s name).

But she was subdued, quiet. She slept during the sweltering afternoons and was restless at night, often sitting in front of the ancient cable-linked video panel long after I had gone to bed.

Nevertheless, we had come together in an important way. Our futures had commingled.

We didn’t talk about any of this. All our conversation was pointedly trivial. Except once, when I was leaving the room for a run to the all-night convenience store down the block. I asked her if she wanted anything.

“I want a cigarette,” she said tightly. “I want my son back.”

Kait remained in the hospital for most of another week, regaining her strength and enduring a fresh set of tests. I visited daily, though I kept the visits brief — she seemed to prefer it that way.

During my last visit before her release, Kaitlin and her doctor shared some bad news with me.

I didn’t want to trouble Ashlee with this — at least, not yet. When I came back to the hotel room I found Ash somewhat recovered, more talkative. I took her out to dinner, though not very far out: the motel restaurant. It served us sirloin tips and coffee. The framed faux-Navajo prints and cattle-skull decor were reassuringly classless.

Ashlee talked (suddenly she seemed to need to talk) about her childhood, the time before she married Tucker Kellog, memories consisting not of narratives but of snapshots she had fixed in her mind. A dry, windy day in San Diego, shopping with her mother for linens. A school trip to a petting zoo. Her first year in Minneapolis, how astonished she had been by the winter storms, her commute to work blockaded by snowdrifts and windrows. Old shows she used to watch, some of which I had also seen: Someday, Blue Horizon, Next Week’s Family .

Over dessert she said, “I talked to the Red Cross. They’re still down in Portillo, taking names — counting the dead. If Adam survived, he didn’t register with any of the relief agencies. On the other hand, if he’s dead—” She said this with a studied nonchalance, obviously fake. “Well, they haven’t identified his body, and they’re very good at that. I let them call up his genome profile from his medical records. No match. So I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. But I realized something else.”

Her eyes glittered. I said, “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“No, Scott, it’s okay. What I realized is that, alive or dead, I’ve lost him. Maybe I’ll see him again, maybe I won’t, but that’s up to him, if he’s alive, I mean. That’s what he tried to tell me in Portillo. Not that he hates me. But that he’s not mine in any meaningful way anymore. He belongs to himself. I think he always did.”

She was silent for a while, then she drank the last of her coffee and turned away the waitress who offered more.

“He gave me something.”

I said, “Adam did?”

“Yes. In Portillo. He said I could remember him by it. Here, look.”

She had folded the gift into a handkerchief inside her purse. She unwrapped it and pushed it across the table.

It was a necklace, a cheap chain with a pendant. The pendant looked like a lump of pitted black plastic drilled to take an eyelet. It was almost defiantly ugly.

“He said he got it from a vendor in Portillo. It’s a kind of sacred object. The stone isn’t a stone, it’s—”

“An arrival relic.”

“Yes, that’s what Adam called it.”

The arrival of a Chronolith creates odd debris. The steep temperature and pressure gradients near the touchdown site will freeze, crack, warp and otherwise mangle ordinary materials. Souvenir-hunters sell such items to the gullible and they are seldom authentic.

“It’s from Jerusalem,” Ashlee added. “Supposedly.”

If that was true, this misshapen lump might once have been something useful: a doorknob, a paperweight, a pen, a comb.

I said, “I hope it isn’t.”

Ashlee looked crestfallen. “I thought you’d be interested. You were there, in Jerusalem, when it happened. Sort of a coincidence.”

“I don’t like those kinds of coincidences.”

I told her about Sue’s notion of tau turbulence. I said I had been in the turbulence too often, that it had affected my life (if “affected” is the word for an acausal connection) in ways I didn’t like.

Ashlee was dismayed. She mouthed the words, tau turbulence . “Can you catch it,” she asked, “from a thing like this?”

“I doubt it. It’s not a disease, Ash. It’s not contagious. I just don’t care to be reminded.”

She folded the necklace into its handkerchief and put the bundle into her purse again.

We went back to the room. Ashlee turned on the video panel but ignored it. I read a book. After a while she came to the bed and kissed me — not for the first time, but harder than she’d kissed me for a while.

It was good to have her back in my arms, good to fold myself around her small, lithe body.

Later on, I drew open the curtains and we lay invisible in the dark watching cars pass on the highway, headlights like parade torches, taillights like floating embers. Ashlee asked me how the visit with Kait had gone.