Betwixt (32 page)

“Ondine, honey, what’s wrong? What’s wrong, baby? Are you all right? What’s going on?”

At first she could only whimper in response, but when Ralph asked, “Is this an emergency? Should I call nine-one-one?” she
managed to eke out a
no.
She didn’t need an ambulance. She obviously didn’t want the police.

“Daddy, I want to come to Chicago.”

“Sure, honey, sure. We’ll buy you a ticket right now. But what’s wrong? What happened? Ondine, you need to tell me
what’s going on so that I don’t worry.” His voice cracked. “You’ve got your dad pretty worried here, sweetheart.”

“Dad.” She rubbed her eyes to think straight. “Dad, something’s wrong with me. Something’s wrong.” She started moaning again
and Ralph tried to soothe her.

“What do you mean something’s wrong? Did something happen with one of your friends? With a boy? Ellen said someone has been
over. Are you all right? Please tell me, honey —”

“No, no. That’s not it. It’s me.” Her voice was choked. She wasn’t going to tell him about the night in the mountains, or
about Nix — she knew that. At least not now. She couldn’t. Ralph, with his scientific mind, wouldn’t understand.

She calmed herself and tried to explain. “It’s me. There’s something wrong with me. I know it. I just don’t know what it is.
I don’t …

“Dad —” She didn’t register the fact that she was saying the words until she heard her own voice say them. “Dad, do you know
someone named Viv?”

Ralph spoke, his voice more serious than she’d ever heard it.

“Did she try to contact you, Ondine? Did Viv contact you?”

“No — no, I mean yes. I mean, I don’t know.”

“Hold on.” She heard the sound of a door closing. He must have been at the lab, she reasoned, and looked at her watch. Ten
AM
. Of course. It was the middle of the day in Chicago. Dr. Mason came back to the phone.

“Ondine, love. Joy of my life. Your mother’s at home right now and we made a promise to each other that we’d talk about this
first, before — well, anyway. Listen to me carefully. There is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect. You are as perfect
as a child could be, and your mother and I — not to mention Max, and Nana, and Aunt Vita, and everyone else — love you so
much, sweetheart. So much. We want to protect you, and I think your mother and I made a mistake in protecting you too long
—”

“I don’t understand.” Ondine’s voice betrayed her panic. “Protect me?” For an instant she had the thought that her father
was in on the Ring of Fire; that she had walked into a circus fun house where everything she trusted, everything she felt
safe and secure about, had been twisted. Even her father. Even the one she depended on the most.

“No, no, sweetie. Don’t get upset.” Ralph took a breath. “I promised your mother we would do this together and I am breaking
that promise, and I hope I’m not doing the wrong thing. But you already sense … I don’t want you to worry any longer. Please,
Ondine. Know that I love you more than anything in the world. I care about you more than I care about myself, and I would
do anything for you, honey. Anything.”

She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t picture what her father was about to tell her. Did she have an awful disease? Was
she about to die? Was she really born a boy?
Ask your parents; they’ll tell you who you are.

“Honey. I do know someone named Viv. Jesus, I can’t believe I’m telling you this on the phone. I can’t. Ondine, just get on
the plane. I’ll —”

“No. No. Tell me now. Who is she?”

“Please promise you’ll get on that plane.”

“I promise, Daddy.”

Ralph Mason took a breath and continued.

“When Xelix was first starting, there was a nurse there who worked for me. Her name was Vivian Greene.”

“What?” Ondine gasped. It was not what she expected, this announcement. Not at all.

“Honey, I told you. I don’t want to do this over the phone —”

Her voice was flat. For some reason, all she could think about was her mother’s toes.

“Just tell me.”

“She was my nurse. She assisted us with the transfers.”

“Did you have an affair with her?”

“No, no, honey. No. Nothing like that. Your mother. She was … we had been trying to get pregnant for many years and it wasn’t
happening. The technology was less advanced than it is today, and we couldn’t … we couldn’t extract your mother’s eggs. Viv
knew about this and — she offered to be a donor. She offered —”

“But I have the same toes as Mom! We have the same toes! You said we had the same toes!” Everything had gotten mixed up, and
when Ondine closed her eyes she felt dizzy, the colors behind her eyelids a mix of orange and blue, black, green, the colors
of her ceiling upstairs. Her dreams. The whizzing balls of light. It was all too much.

“I’m black! I’m black! Viv’s white!”

Her father’s voice dropped. “You saw her?”

She stopped. “No. No. I mean, she told me she was —”

“Your skin comes from me, Ondine. Listen. This is too painful for over the phone, sweetheart. We need to be together for —”

“No.” Ondine’s voice was suddenly cold. “No, you need to tell me now. Then I will get on the plane and we will talk about
it more. What happened? What happened then? What happened at my birth?”

Ralph was quiet for several moments; finally he spoke. “Not your birth, honey. Your conception.” He paused, then continued.
“Everything was fine. Your mother was under sedation, the egg had been harvested. Then the power went out. It was very unexpected.
We had backup generators. There had been a storm — anyway, that’s not important. I rushed to check on what was happening,
and when I came back I found the other attending nurse missing and Viv in her place. She had been
wanting to — I don’t know — do something to your mother. Maybe she was deranged. Some women get like that when they know that
the egg is going to be implanted. She ran out before I could stop her. Nothing was amiss, and your mother was already out.
I had to continue with the operation. Viv …”

“What?”

“We looked for her, and we went to the police and everything, but I never saw her again.”

“She’s my
mother
?” Ondine pictured the woman in the long black coat — her insane hair, her bruise-colored eyes. She covered her face with
her hands.

“No, no. Sweetheart. Your mother is your mother. Trish is your mother. My wife. Your mother. Darling, please. Please forgive
us. It was all so new — the technology. And we wanted a child so badly. We didn’t know what to do. We never knew how to tell
you.”

Ondine heard herself speak. “I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, sweetheart. I know. I know this is hard. But it’s true.” He stopped and sighed. “Get the folder, sweetheart. It’s in
the folder. The one I gave you with all of your insurance information. There’s an envelope in there marked ‘for hospital use
only.’ Open it. It tells the whole story.”

By now Ondine had wandered into the kitchen, where the folder that her father had left three weeks ago was sitting in a
drawer by the door. She cradled the phone on her shoulder and opened it. There was the envelope her father had promised, with
the Xelix logo of a double helix on its side, like the sign for infinity, neatly headed with the words
FOR HOSPITAL USE ONLY
. He must have known she’d never look in there.

“I’ve got it,” she whispered.

“Go ahead and open it.”

She broke the seal. The single sheet of paper inside was the original of her own birth certificate, which she suddenly realized
she had never seen. Trish Mason, mother, Ralph Mason, father. Date of birth, eye color, weight, and length. But under “Special
Circumstances” were written the words: Egg transfer from donor Vivian Greene, nurse, SS # 262-98-8766, 1202 N.W. Glisan #4,
Portland, OR 97209. And under her blood type, the words:

RARE. CANNOT RECEIVE O.

“But my blood type — what’s my blood type?”

Ralph cleared his throat. “You have a very unusual blood type, Ondine. I’d never seen it before; it’s in the Lan group. I’m
sure there’s someone out there in the world who has it — well, Viv, maybe — but I still haven’t been able to locate it.”

“But why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me until now? How could you? Daddy, why?”

“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. It just — it got too late. Mom got pregnant with Max. It was all — normal. Like it had never
happened. And of course we wanted you to be ours, really and truly. You
were
ours and so we just — we lied. We lied to you. We wanted to protect you. I’m sorry, honey. I thought maybe if we waited —
long enough — we’d never have to tell you. But when you called … I just couldn’t take hearing you cry like that. I wanted
you to know that there was an explanation….”

Ralph was crying now and it made Ondine quiet.

“Dad, no. Dad, don’t cry.”

“This means nothing about how much we love you. But it probably explains why you feel different. This is what you feel.” He
sighed and his voice cracked. He sounded far away. “God. They express themselves in the end, don’t they?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“The genes, honey. Of course you would feel it. I think I was just in denial. We, your mother and I, we were in denial.” He
cleared his throat and spoke again, this time deeper, with more control. “Ondine, I’m buying you a ticket right now. Don’t
worry about packing; just bring yourself. We’ll get you some clothes here. Just drive to the airport. I want you on a plane
and I want you here. We need to deal with this as a family. Together. Do you have the number Viv called you from on your cell
phone?”

“No. No … no, there’s nothing.”

“That’s all right. We’ll figure out what to do. She’s not bad. She’s just … she was just —”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to explain.” Ondine was
almost too shocked to do anything but follow orders. She’d pack her backpack. She’d have to get a taxi.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t do this better.”

She had heard her father apologize before, but this felt different. She was …
a test-tube baby?
She tried the word out in her head. It didn’t sound right somehow — too eighties. But that was what her father was telling
her, and that’s what she had to believe. What Moth said, what he had warned, Viv must have told him about. A ploy used by
people like them to try to convince people like her. No. She amended herself. People who were weaker than her.

A little clarity came in — some hint of blue sky out of the storm of the last week, month, too long. She was heading toward
her parents, and something, some hint of what all this was, would be explained. At least there was an answer. She had felt
something, and here was a perfectly logical answer as to why. Things were as they seemed.

“It’s okay. I’m leaving now. Just call me and tell me what airline and when. I’ll be at the airport.” Her voice softened.
“I miss you, Dad.”

“We miss you, sweetheart. And don’t worry, we’ll figure this all out.”

With that they said good-bye. She didn’t have much to put in her knapsack — her sketchbook, wallet, cell charger, toothbrush.
A jacket. She called a taxi, cursing Nix. Everything else she left
as it was. She turned off the lights, set the alarm, locked the front door behind her, and walked steadily toward the curb.
Each leaf seemed to stand out to her, each puddle on the asphalt; each mailbox stood in sharp relief. She was seeing clearly
for the first time in a while. She was ready to find out the truth.

T
HE
I
NVISIBLE
W
ORLD

A
FTER FOUR YEARS OF STRUGGLING
with the lemma of the fay, Moth had only begun to delve into the delicate art of “seeing,” as Viv called it — and quite elegantly,
he thought, for a tribe obsessed with taxonomy, with lists, and with the largely meaningless (at least to him) web of particles
and gases, plasma bodies, and electromagnetic phenomenon Viv studied for communication from the invisible world.

As one of the thirty living scia in the world today, Viv’s main task was to read, capture, and utilize the energy that leaked
between the dimensions (and branes, in string theory) in the form of geophysical phenomena: tornadoes and hurricanes, lightning,
aurora, earthquakes, as well as any number of smaller occurrences that might indicate interstitial dimensional activity, such
as ball lightning, even fire — a relatively low-temperature plasmic occurence. It was an ability she learned from the scia
before her, the ones who trained her, an ability she would then pass on to the scion she would train: most likely Ondine.
Viv told him
she had known the girl since her birth, and in the years leading up to Ondine’s initiation, she had returned to Portland,
from where she had been living in the mountains of New Mexico, specifically to prepare the girl — as well as to protect the
ringer who had migrated down from his original territory of Alaska. That Viv had been Moth’s leader as well was an accident
of timing. A lucky one, Moth reminded himself. At other gatherings — in L.A. a few years ago, once even in New York, where
he met lings from the Atlantic whorl — Viv was spoken of as a scion with great cosmological insight and wisdom. Revered, almost,
though changelings were strict in their use of words with religious connotations.
We are magnetic, physical entities,
Viv always reminded the young man.
Not angels, not gods. Our time in this dimension is enough only to gather consciousness.

Viv had gotten a PhD in physics from Berkeley to help her. In New Mexico she read and studied the signs, coming out for gatherings
only when she had to. Moth was far less adept and his seeing had little to do with his “superhuman” powers — the phrase still
made him smile — which he’d learned enough about in the last few years since he himself went to a clearing, in a forest, one
summer solstice, and had his mind blown, just like Nix, Ondine, and Morgan had.

No. His ability to read the signs was more mundane. More human.