Marc Zicree - Angelfire

“Uh-huh.”

“And Minnesota is near Wisconsin, yes?”

“You could say that.”

“Are autumns usually this harsh?”

Cal tilted his head within the hood of his anorak. A banner of steam marked the movement before being stretched and flayed by the wind, and I wondered, irrelevantly, if we would ever again see a jet’s vapor trail. This led to the unwelcome memory that hundreds, even thousands, of people must have been aloft at the moment the Source exchanged our universal constants for its own in-constants.

“Winters up here,” Cal said, “have always been hard, but I’ve never seen it like this so early. When I was a kid, we’d get snow by Thanksgiving most years. Nice, fluffy snow, like a blanket over everything.” He paused, and I suspected that he had gone back in time to a place that seemed kinder through the filter of recent events. “I always knew when it’d snowed the minute I woke up. There’s no silence in the world like the silence the morning after a first snow. And the light. The light is different. It seems to come from everywhere, like… like in the Preserve.”

Ah, now that was the sound of homesickness. I had heard it in my own voice when once I spoke of Kiev. Then I had not yet understood that home is not a place, but the people in it. I had no people in Kiev now. Everything I had was here. This was not true of my friend, Cal.

“We will find Tina,” I said, “and take her there so she, too, can see the light that comes from everywhere.”

He glanced away from me. “I don’t want to take her there, Doc. If we have to take her there, that would mean there’s still something to protect her from.” He turned back to face me, his eyes burning. “It’s not enough to just get Tina away from the Source. We have to shut the Source down.”

“Then we will.”

He laughed without humor, and breathed out a long jet of steam. “You know what I was sitting here wondering just now? I was wondering if I’d be sitting here wondering if I’d accepted that job in the D.A.’s office in St. Cloud instead of buying the New York hype.”

“The New York hype?”

“You know-if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. I wanted to make it.”

“And what has New York hype to do with your being here?”

He did not answer me directly. “You know what I wanted more than anything, growing up? Not to be like my father. Not to do to the people who loved me what he did to us.” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

“Meaning? You are nothing like the man you described to me, Calvin. That man was selfish, shortsighted-”

“I worked evenings and weekends. Tina took buses to ballet practice, cabs to recitals. A prima donna with no one in the audience to cheer just for her. She was lonely, Doc. And I was trying so hard to fit into Stern’s zoo, I didn’t notice until she was beyond my reach.”

“Calvin,” I objected gently to his self-reproach, “you have always done for Tina what you felt she needed.”

He shook his head. “We’ve all seen it, Doc. The Source twists people physically who have already been twisted by life. And Tina… There was a hole in Tina that I put there. The Change had plenty to work with.”

The snow changed to a wafting mist. The wind eased to a mere moan, which seemed, at this moment, to come from within Cal Griffin himself.

“Now we argue nature and nurture,” I observed. “You and Tina have had much the same experience, yes? An absent father, a mother struggling to make a home for her children. The painful loss when she died. Yet, only Tina changed. Have you not considered that this perhaps was due to her nature?”

He made no answer.

I leaned close to him and put a hand on his arm. “There is an old Russian proverb: ‘Shit happens.’ ”

He let out a bark of laughter. “Old Russian proverb, huh? Is that a literal translation?”

“No. The literal translation is ‘You go uphill and the devil grabs your foot,’ but the point is the same.”

He nodded, smiling at me from the depths of his hood. “I’m going to go scramble up some breakfast. Believe it or not, it’s morning.” He stood, stretched, and made his way to where the supplies lay beneath their protective shroud of nylon. In a few paces he was no more than a vague shape in the lightening gloom.

“Nice try, Doc.” Colleen stepped into the place Cal had vacated.

I shook my head. “I am not sure he listens.”

“Why should he? You don’t. I’m beginning to think it’s one of those ‘guy’ things. Only affects people with that broken X chromosome.”

She had surprised me yet again. “What do you mean? When do I not listen?”

She crouched next to me. “Viktor, for a wise man, you have some surprising gaps in your smarts. They say a person can’t talk and listen at the same time. You’re living proof of that.”

“I don’t-”

“What did you just tell Cal: Shit happens? Why can’t you take that to heart? I bet somewhere, deep down inside, you still blame yourself for Chernobyl.”

My face grew warm, damning me, and I had to deliberately misunderstand her. “Nonsense. I have never blamed myself for Chernobyl.”

“No? But you made yourself responsible for the victims. Every one you lost, you punished yourself for. Just like you punish yourself for Yelena and Nurya.”

The anger that forced its way up into my heart was raw and searing. I meant to direct it at her for daring to trespass on this, my sacred ground, but this sudden rage did not bear her name. “You cannot pretend I was not responsible for them. I was. That was the gap in my smarts, as you call it. I made a choice between the good of many strangers and the good of those few I loved. The choice was a lie. There was no choice. I told you, I had so little effect at Chernobyl. At home-”

“And what about the choice you made back there at the Preserve? Wasn’t that a lie, too?”

For a moment I felt like a tiny ceramic man in a child’s snow globe, frozen and senseless. I turned to look at her without volition. In the wan morning light her face was more solemn than I had ever seen it. Not even a spark of humor reached her eyes.

I thought of all the possible responses I could make, but only one was honest enough to be uttered. “History repeats itself,” I murmured, and felt the chill of this Wisconsin dawn drive itself into the marrow of my bones.

I had not even let myself consider what it meant for me to be back there, within the relatively safe confines of the Preserve, while she and the others were out here, facing what only God knew. There, I was one of many, while they would have been only five against the unknown. Cal had been absolutely right, of course, for any one of us to be absent increased the chances of failure.

“And how is it,” I asked at last, “that you realized this, when I did not?”

Her gaze did not waver. “I listen . I listen to the people I trust. Especially when they can tell me things about myself even I don’t know.” She raised her hands in that so typical gesture of surrender. “Okay, so it doesn’t happen often. In fact, I haven’t really listened to anybody since … well, probably since Dad died. People worth listening to are a rare find.”

I tried to imagine her as a teenager with a teenager’s faith that the people in her life today would be there tomorrow and the next day, and the next. I imagined a girl who smiled much and worried little, whose mouth turned up at the corners, and between whose brows no lines of worry had yet settled. I thought I had seen her in brief flashes over the past weeks, so I knew she had not been completely conquered by the boi baba .

We woke the others to a hurried breakfast before hastily packing our goods back onto our well-chilled horses, who had sheltered the night behind a pair of extra tents. As we worked I wandered through the door Colleen had opened in my mind and visited the room that lay behind it.