Shelter (11 page)

    "I have a dog, Roberta. My dog's very good at sitting and staying, which is more than I can say for you. I shouldn't even be letting you talk to me like this." A whine had crept into his voice. He's lonely, she realized in a flash. He doesn't have a life either. I should have realized that before. Well, Sergei. Welcome to the club.

    ''I'm sorry," she said. It was the first time she'd ever apologized to him. "Look, let's do it this way. I'll call from public phones, if they're working. I'll find some way to call you every hour, Sergei, I promise. Is that good enough? I probably won't be out that long, anyway. I may not be out any time at all, if there's still too much water. You can track me on the GPS. If I don't go to Jefferson Square Park, you can send a SWAT team to haul me in, okay?" I'll go straight to the park, Daddy, and come straight home.

    "Be careful," he said. He sounded very unhappy.

    "Of course," Roberta said. She hung up and gestured to Meredith: Follow me. In Roberta's bedroom, she found clothing for both of them—although Meredith, taller than Roberta, had to squeeze into sweats—and then began stuffing a backpack with supplies: blankets, the first-aid kit from the bathroom, bottled water, a flashlight. Once they'd gotten outside the building, picking their way gingerly around dead bots, down stairs coated with slime, and through the four inches of water still covering the first-floor foyer, Meredith said, "Is that guy in love with you or something? Why's he letting you do this?"

    "Oh, probably. I think he's doing it because he thinks you're Zephyr, and he thinks I'll be able to get some juicy information if you think no one's listening. Which of course I'd repeat directly to him. Right." Or else he's letting me do it because Preston told him to, but I'm not going to mention that possibility at the moment. "How did you wind up in Zephyr's apartment, anyway?"

    Meredith turned her ruined face away. When she spoke, her voice was distant. "Long story. How are we getting to this park? You have a car?"

    Change the subject; fair enough. "Sorry, no. If I had a car, it would be bugged."

    "Yes, of course. So we're walking?"

    "If we can." Roberta, dismayed, surveyed the street, layered with mud and debris.

    Meredith wrinkled her nose. "You really think those people will be in the park?"

    "No. It was an excuse to get out of the house. Let's just walk as far as we can. We need to give Sergei something interesting to watch, anyway. Reality TV." Roberta glanced at Meredith's pale, scarred face and said, "Are you feeling well enough for this? Do you still have a fever? Goddess only knows what bugs might be out here—gerrns, I mean. Not the electronic kind." She wasn't sure she really cared how Meredith felt, but she didn't want anything bad to happen to Meredith under her care. That would only get her into more trouble.

    "I knew what you meant. Thank you for asking. My fever broke during the night, yes. I—I've been sick for a long time. With more than the flu. Soul sick. And I feel like maybe I'm starting to come out of that too, except I feel guilty for even calling Kevin. If we can find a phone that's working—not your phone—I want to try to call him, to make sure he's okay."

    Kevin won't be answering, Roberta thought grimly. "You don't want to do that if you're with me. First of all, I don't think we're going to find a working phone. But even if we did, Sergei's following us on the GPS; if we stopped to make a call, he could pinpoint and trace it. That's what you're trying to avoid, right?"

    "Right," Meredith said quietly. "Okay. I'll go out by myself later, or wait until I can get back into Zephyr's place."

    They picked their way gingerly through the muck, and Roberta wondered how Meredith, so famously afraid of dirt and contamination, was coping with this. The air smelled of rotting things, and the neighborhood—a corner of the Soma District somehow untouched by gentrification—looked even grayer and more forlorn than usual. Roberta saw Meredith shiver and hug herself "I think I just stepped on some kind of body. An animal."

    "Don't think about it." But Roberta found herself remembering the dog she'd seen yesterday. Lassie, come home. No, don't think about it. Change the subject. "Does anyone else know you're back?"

    Meredith had bent down to pick something up from the mud. She straightened back up, holding a beslimed picture frame—Roberta felt her eyebrows rising, since even she would have been loathe to touch the thing—and began wiping muck from the glass with her sleeve. Roberta's sleeve; Roberta's sweats. Thanks, Merry. "My father. Kevin." No, not Kevin, not anymore. "I don't know if my mother knows yet or not. Probably not, or she'd be here. I'm assuming Daddy's going to tell her, at some point, but she's going to have a fit when she sees—what I look like. So will Kevin, for that matter. I didn't even warn him when I called him yesterday. I was out of my head."

    You've been out of your head for longer than that. Roberta debated how much to say. "Your father called me last night. He wanted to make sure you were safe." A rush of anger shot through her. "It's the first time he's talked to me since before—"

    "I know. He had to protect himself too, Roberta. And he couldn't have done much to help you back then. I don't know if you believe that or not, but it's true."

    "Why are you sticking up for him? I thought you hated him."

    "I used to. I don't now. At least, not the same way. That's—part of the long story. Here, look. Look at this." She passed Roberta the picture frame. It was sterling, stamped with an ornate Victorian floral pattern; it had cost money. Beneath the broken glass lay a photograph of a coffee cup sitting on a table. It was a plain coffee cup, blue glass; the table, brown wood, was similarly unremarkable. "What do you make of that? Why would someone put a picture like that in such a fancy frame? Why would anyone take a picture like that in the first place?" .

    "I don't know," Roberta said, passing it back. "Who understands why people do anything? Maybe the mug was a gift."

    "But then the person would have the mug." Meredith sounded fretful. "Why take a picture of it too?"

    Roberta, unwillingly, found herself being pulled into the game, so much like one Fred would have played. How many stories can we tell about this object? She sighed and said, "Okay, maybe the mug was special to the person who took the picture, but that person couldn't have the mug because, uh, it belonged to someone else who didn't want to give it up. It was Great-Grandma Alba's favorite coffee cup, say. Or it was the coffee cup Great-Grandma Alba used to bail out the, uh, canoe so she wouldn't drown, or it was the only thing she saved from her house fire, or it's the only object she has from her ancestors who crossed the Sierras in 1867: Anyway, it's some kind of symbol of hope, right? It's some kind of weird family heirloom. And whoever took the picture wanted it but couldn't have it because someone else wanted it more: the person's parents, or ex-spouse, or whatever. So the person took a picture of the mug instead. How's that?"

    Meredith was smiling. "You're very good. I'm impressed."

    Don't try to flatter me, Meredith. "We've all got things like that," Roberta said coldly. "We all have stuff that means more to us than anyone looking at it could ever guess. Rocks. Coffee cups. Little scraps of junk. All the crap we collect so we won't forget things. We think we keep our memories in our head, but most of them are outside somewhere, in our stuff. That's the problem with being where your father is, you know. He can't touch anything. He doesn't have hands. So he has to jerk people around instead."

    Meredith hugged herself, looking down at the ground. "He wasn't very good at touching people when he did have hands. That's the problem. He's been overcompensating ever since he died."

    "Is that why you hated him? I wish you hadn't hated him. If you'd talked to him, when you and I were both in the hospital, he wouldn't have fastened on to me. None of this would have happened to me."

    "Don't bet on it," Meredith said quietly. "He's fastened on to all kinds of people, for all kinds of reasons. And—everything happened for a lot of reasons. It's not all Daddy. You can't blame everything on him."

    "Or on you?" Roberta kicked a lump of mud, which flew into the air and landed with a splat a few feet away. She saw blue ticking through the grime: it was a pillow. "How much can I blame on you, Meredith?"

    "Too much," Meredith said evenly. "But not everything. How far is this park?"

    "Too far." Roberta checked her watch. "I promised Sergei I'd call him in an hour, which means we need to be home by then. We're not going to get to the park in time in this mess. We've been out fifteen minutes. So we walk for another fifteen and then turn around. The important thing's to keep moving in the right direction so Sergei doesn't get too suspicious, or so he can maintain deniability if his bosses question him, or something. I really don't know why he's letting me do this."

    "Okay. Keep slogging, then."

    They kept slogging. Periodically, Meredith bent down to poke at things in the mud; Roberta scanned the street for shopping bags and wheelchairs, not that she expected to see either. Finally Roberta said, "So you never found any trace of him?"

    She didn't need to say Nicholas's name; they both knew whom she meant. "No, of course not." Meredith didn't look at her. "I wasn't supposed to. That's how the system works. It works very well."

    Roberta thought of saying, Your father knows, but then remembered what Preston had said: that the information he had about Nicholas would endanger Meredith's—how had he put it? Fragile condition? Meredith probably knew that Preston knew where the child was, anyway. "So that's why you came back? Because you gave up looking?"

    "No." Roberta waited, but no elaboration seemed forthcoming: that must be part of the long story. "Have we been out half an hour yet?"

    Roberta checked her watch. "Almost. We might as well turn back now. It will make Sergei happy." She noticed that Meredith was still cradling the framed picture of the coffee cup. "What of his did you take with you? When you left? You must have something." It was a cruel question; she didn't care.

    "You mean, other than the pictures in my head?" Meredith reached under her sweatshirt and pulled out something on a thong. She pulled it up over her head and passed it to Roberta. "This. It's a little grotty. I haven't washed it in a while." More evidence that her famous compulsions had faded. "But you asked."

    It was a spirit bundle: some feathers, a lock of fair hair, a scrap of white fabric with tiny blue snowflakes on it. "His hair?"

    "Yes. From-the last time I saw him, The last time we saw him."

    Roberta passed the bundle back to its owner, noticing how careful Meredith was not to drop it. If it fell in the mud, it would never get completely clean. "And the fabric's from the hospital robe?"

    Meredith, tucking the bundle back under Roberta's sweatshirt, shook her head. "Not from that time. It's from when we brought him home, when he was a baby. A prayer for him to be well, for him not to be scared anymore, for whoever has him now to love him."

    Roberta looked away, moved despite herself. "Meredith, it may have worked. The brainwiping. It works, for a lot of people. They're happier afterwards. "

    "Maybe. Or maybe he wound up like—like the people we came out here to look for."

    Any sympathy Roberta had just had for Meredith vanished. "No. Mason and Camilla are just homeless, not wiped. Most homeless people never did anything wrong except have rotten luck and not enough money. Even if they're mentally ill, that doesn't automatically make them dangerous. They're not all criminal or psychotic."

    "I know that, Roberta. I do. I'm not stupid. I'm sorry I said the wrong thing about your friends." Meredith paused and then said quietly, "I was homeless for a little while, in Mexico. I know how people look at you. Or don't. And it may be even worse here."

    Roberta felt her eyebrows rising. Meredith Walford, homeless? She must have slummed and slept in a park for a few nights. On the other hand, Mason claimed that he'd been a bank president once, and maybe he had. And Meredith hadn't gotten those scars at any five-star resort.

    Never mind. She didn't want to hear about Meredith's adventures; she had her own problems. Change the subject. "Anyway, Nicholas is probably fine. He's a kid. Kids heal more quickly, learn more quickly. They're more adaptable."

    "That's what we have to hope."

    They trudged along for another minute or two, and then Roberta said, "I don't have anything from Fred. Nothing I can hold, anyway."

    "No. You wouldn't."

    "Fred and I were trying to help him, Meredith."

    "I know."

    "You knew it then. You could have said something. You could have spoken up when—"

    "No. I didn't know what had happened to Fred; I still don't. No one does, except maybe Daddy, and he's not talking. The conspiracy charges would have stuck anyway. They were true."

    Roberta shook her head, the taste of old rage in her mouth. "You were the one who brought the corruption charges!"

    "Yes, I was. And they wouldn't have stuck because they weren't true, and everybody knew it. I even knew it—I was just crazy, Roberta. I lost my mind. There's nothing I can say to apologize for that, except that I know it was wrong and I knew it then and that's part of why I went away."

    "You went away to look for Nicholas."

    "Yes. But when I couldn't find him, I stayed away because—because everything came crashing down on me. All the lies I'd told, all the people I'd hurt, Kevin and you and my parents and that poor homeless guy, the baggie at the bottom of the hill." Meredith's voice was oddly dreamy, a soft singsong; Roberta suspected she'd made this speech to herself many times, or worked on composing it. "And Nicholas himself He wanted help all along, and I wouldn't let him accept it from anyone but me, and I couldn't do anything for him. That's why things turned out so badly. I forgot everything I'd ever known about interdependence. I thought I had to do everything by myself."