Pile of Bones (25 page)

“Hello, sir,” Carl said, putting down the book. “How do you feel?”

“Like there’s glass in my throat.”

“They pumped your stomach,” Ingrid said. “You’re going to be sore.”

He looked at her strangely. “We were at Carl’s place together. Then—” He frowned. “I don’t remember what happened after that.”

Shelby sat down by the bed. “Don’t worry about it. Just relax.”

“Why am I here?”

“Well—” She looked at Carl for a moment. “You fell into Wascana Lake.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It was dark, and you slipped.”

“Were we walking home?”

“Yes. We took a shortcut through the park.”

“I don’t like it there at night. The ducks get angry.” He frowned again. “What was I doing so close to the water?”

“You thought you saw something,” Carl murmured. “But it was just a shadow.”

“Oh.” He looked down at the toy in his hand. “Hey.
This
guy. I remember buying him at Tramp’s. Did you bring him?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.”

His eyes started to close. Then he looked at Carl. “Were you reading to me?”

“A little. Yeah.”

“That’s funny.”

“Should I keep going?”

“S’okay. I’ve heard that one before.” He suddenly looked at Ingrid. “Did you walk home with us? Were we having a marking party?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“I’m sorry. You must be tired. I sure am.”

“It’s okay if you want to go back to sleep.”

“I may just do that.”

He closed his eyes again. Within seconds, he was snoring quietly.

“I can’t do this,” Carl said. “I can’t lie to him.”

Shelby touched his hand. “We don’t have a choice.”

“How can we—I mean—” He looked at Ingrid. “You’ve been doing this for longer than us. You know more. Isn’t there a way around the rule? Some exception?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“This is nuts. We can’t just pretend. He’s going to figure it out.”

“He doesn’t remember any of it,” Ingrid said. “You know how this works. Roldan’s gone. That part of him no longer exists.”

“There must be something left.”

“There isn’t. The park protects itself. He doesn’t remember a thing.”

Carl seemed to shrink into the chair. Ingrid thought about the time when Fel had nearly died. She’d come close to forgetting it all. A few moments more, and the miles would have bled out onto the ground, leaving only confusion behind. When your park ego died, that was it. You remembered nothing. Some people rediscovered the park—decades later, when everything about them had changed—but most never found their way back. They continued on with their lives, always wondering about that strange night that they couldn’t explain.

“We could just tell him,” Carl said. “If anyone was going to believe such a weird story, it would be Andrew.”

“If you tell him,” Ingrid replied, “he’ll never find his way back. He’ll always doubt. And you could be denied access, too. The rules are there for a reason.”

“The rules are bullshit.”

“It’s better for him if you say nothing.”

“How are we supposed to hide this from him?”

“He has a point,” Shelby said. “Andrew sees us all of the time. How are we going to explain where we go in the middle of the night?”

“You’ll just have to get creative.”

“He notices everything.”

“You may have to distance yourself from him.”

“No,” Carl said.

Ingrid lowered her voice to a whisper. “In case you’ve forgotten, we’re all being hunted. If you want to protect your friend, the best thing you can do is stay away from him.”

She knew that lie well. Even before Neil was born, she’d hidden the park from Paul. What was she supposed to say?
Can you cover my shift while I strap on a gauntlet and fight in the Hippodrome? Can you babysit for me while I stand guard outside a whorehouse?
She told him that she was studying for her comprehensive exams at the library. Paul didn’t realize that comps took only a year to prepare for. He was so far removed from academia that whenever she mentioned something about it, he’d nod politely, then go back to playing Mass Effect. He was so proud of her.
My sister the doctor!
Even when she reminded him that she’d only be a doctor of philosophy, he still pretended to bow and asked if she could write him a prescription for painkillers. Her baby brother. He loved her fiercely, and all she did was lie to him.

Ingrid watched Carl as he put the chamberlain through a series of poses. Men and their action figures. When Neil first started yelling
Destroy the pigs!
and insisting that Paul build him a catapult, she feared that he was entering some inevitable stage of violence. Maybe that was better than princesses, though. Lots of her friends on the Regina Moms forum complained that their daughters lived and breathed princesses. Everything had to be pink and covered in sparkles. At least those damn wingless birds were teaching him about trajectories and ballistics, or so she told herself while listening to him recount the heroics of Ice, Lightning, and Laser.

Carl and Shelby were talking quietly. She chose that moment to slip out of the room. At this point, they didn’t really want her advice. They would have to work things out on their own. Losing a member of your company was terrible. The rules were clear on how to handle it, but they couldn’t prepare you for the seismic aftereffects. Andrew might never see Anfractus again. Roldan had been his guide, his Virgil. Now the auditor was nothing but water in the
grass, a dark impression that would fade by morning. If the park chose not to reveal itself to Andrew, he would spend the rest of his life wondering if his friends were keeping a secret from him. The half-life of their lies would cast a subtle radioactivity around everything they did. Their hollow excuses would fill him with dread, but what could he say? These were his friends. He had to trust them.

She walked into the waiting room just as the doors were sliding open. A small spark in a yellow coat burst through them, his arms full of brightly colored stuffies. He saw her and began to jump in ecstasy, nearly dropping the plush birds.

“
Mummy!
That is mine mummy! Mine Uncle Paul brought me here in the car, because he knows how to drive!”

He flew to her. She picked him up, getting a faceful of stuffed animals.

“Hello, my sweet. I see you brought your friends.”

“I brought Ice, and Laser, and Monster, to protect you.”

“That was very thoughtful.”

“And the red bird is in mine pocket, because he has no bubble and could not survive in space with the others.”

Paul walked through the doors, carrying two coffees. He wore a faded brown pullover, and his hair stood up at odd angles. He must have passed out on the couch.

“He heard your message on the answering machine,” Paul said, handing her a coffee. “Then he woke me up and said you were in the hospital with a broken tail feather.”

“We brought tape,” Neil said into her ear.

She put him down gently. “That was a good idea. Mummy’s tail feather is fine, though. It’s one of my friends who had to visit the hospital.”

“Does your friend need tape? We have a lot!”

“He wouldn’t get into the car unless I agreed to bring all my hockey tape,” Paul said.

“My friend is going to be fine,” Ingrid told Neil. “He had a bit of an accident, but he’s resting now.”

“What happened?” Paul asked.

He’d asked the same question when she’d called him from
the hospital two years ago.
What happened to your leg?
She told him that she’d cut herself on a piece of broken glass. It seemed plausible, but she could still remember the look of suspicion on his face. He was the clumsy one, not her.

“He fell into Wascana Lake,” she said. They’d repeated the lie enough times that it was starting to sound real. “We were walking through the park, and he slipped on some loose gravel. It happened so quickly—”

She allowed herself to trail off. A proper lie, she’d discovered, was vague yet precise. It couldn’t have too many elements, and the more she described it, the less it would make sense. Keep it simple. Let him fill in the details.

“Did he, like, hit his head or something?”

“Yeah. He swallowed a lot of water. He’s okay now, though.”

“Geez. That sounds like it was really close.”

“It was.”

“I guess a drunken kid probably falls in that lake once a year. He was sober, though?”

“Completely. It was a freak accident.”

She regretted the phrase the moment it left her mouth.
Freak accident
sounded implausible, like falling into a wood chipper. She wanted to correct herself, but it was too late. Paul’s eyes narrowed for a moment. Then he took a sip of his coffee.

“Guess he was lucky.”

“Very.”

“I drawed you a picture,” Neil said. “I mean—I
drewed
you a picture.”

“What did you draw?”

“A baby bat with some TNT.”

“That’s nice.”

“Uncle Paul is so damn tired. That’s why we had to get coffee.”

She gave Paul a look.

“Sorry.” He stared at the ground. “It just slipped out.”

“It’s okay. You can go home and sleep if you like.”

“I’m pretty much awake now.”

“The last time I said that, I passed out in the bathtub.”

“I remember that. Neil covered you with towels and said that he found a mermaid.”

“You were so beautiful, Mummy. Like Ice Bird when he freezes the pigs.”

“Thank you, sweet.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m not sure how long he’s going to be here. They might want to keep him overnight, but with the bed shortage, I doubt it.”

“We can hang out for a bit,” Paul said. “It’s kind of like old times.”

“Don’t say that. Those times were horrible.”

“We all made it.”

Paul had seemed so young then. Now there were lines under his eyes. The thought of her brother aging was impossible to comprehend. He would always be six and popping out of the hamper, screaming
I am a meat eater!
Sometimes it was all she could do to refrain from wiping his nose and asking him if he’d remembered to flush.
Dinosaurs always flush,
he used to say, a non sequitur if she’d ever heard one.

She turned to Neil. “Mummy is going to check on her friend. Can you stay with Uncle Paul for a few minutes?”

“I want to come with you.”

There was something strange about taking him past the threshold of the waiting room. He had no memory of the time that he’d spent here. To him, it was just a place full of random noises and colored lines on the ground. All she could think of was how small he’d once been, a miraculous hazelnut in her palm. The moment when they’d disconnected the wires, and she could finally hold him. Every nerve on fire as she settled him into the crook of her neck, so terrified that he might break or melt away.

“You have to be very quiet and good if you come with me,” Ingrid said. “People are sleeping and trying to get better.”

“Laser can help them,” he whispered. “He can take his mask off, and his face will change. He will be real. Won’t they like that?”

“I suppose it can’t hurt.” She took his hand. “Okay. Let’s go.”

They walked down the hallway. Neil was fascinated by the machines. He took them in silently, and she knew that he would have hundreds of questions later. What was that liquid? Why were those sturdy beds lined up against the wall? What did the lines mean? Somehow, it would all become part of whatever mythology he was crafting.
Those proud birds needed dialysis for their nests in space.
It was strange to think that he used to talk in sentence fragments, that his vocabulary was once a series of random words:
couch
,
star
,
li-berry
. Listening to the sound of his shoes on the linoleum, she recalled his first steps, the shock of seeing him upright as he chased after a block. How did it happen? She used to carry him in a sling, and now he was beside her. Now she understood what it meant to grow like a leaf. Whenever she turned her back, he changed in some small way, his roots churning.

When they reached the room, he hung back slightly, observing from a safe distance. His grip on her hand tightened. Shelby looked up.

“Hi, Neil,” she said.

He looked at Andrew but didn’t reply. Then he walked slowly over to the bed. He arranged the birds carefully on Andrew’s lap.

“What are those?” Carl asked.

“Don’t ask that—” Ingrid began.

But it was too late. Neil began to explain where the birds came from, and how they were able to survive in space (except for the red one in his pocket, deprived of a bubble). He waved his hands as he described the antipathy of the pigs, who wanted to eat the birds. Carl and Shelby listened politely. When he started talking about how Ice Bird could eat only frozen gummies or pieces of asteroid, Shelby raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

A nurse came in. She thought that this would distract Neil, but he continued with the story, explaining in great detail how the golden eagle appeared only when you got three stars. The nurse checked Andrew’s IV. There wasn’t much point in keeping him sedated anymore. He’d
most likely sleep through the night on his own. Ingrid was about to ask if they could discharge him, when the nurse turned to her and smiled. A shock went through her.

It was Mardian.

He was wearing a blue uniform, and his hair looked slightly different, but the resemblance was unmistakable. She could see the spado’s shadow hovering just behind him. Neil seemed to see it too, because he suddenly ran to her, burying his face in her stomach. Ingrid held him close and met the nurse’s gaze. His smile was brittle. There was something underneath, something with claws scratching to get out.

Mardian said nothing. He just smiled, then left the room. Ingrid felt the blood pounding in her ears. They’d been found—and so easily. Latona’s influence was everywhere. How many others were watching them right now?

“We have to go,” she said.

“That’s okay.” Shelby reached out to pat the stuffies. “It must be long past his bedtime. We’ll call you in the morning.”

“No. We all need to go. Right now.”