Startled by seeing familiar features on a face on her dream-beach, Mary awoke with a start. She was standing before she realized it was morning, and that she was no longer dreaming. Her right hand was shaking. It took a moment before she remembered where she was and what was going on. The clock above the television told her it was minutes before ten in the morning. Maybe Robert had returned and decided not to disturb her. Maybe.

She rounded the couch, then raced to the stairs, took them two at a time; but before reaching the top, she spotted Jenn sitting below in the living room. Mary c.o.c.ked her head, stopping in mid-stride.

"Hey, sweetheart," she said, doing her best to sound rea.s.suring even though she was well beyond frightened herself.

Jenn's legs were together and bobbing, her clasped hands rested over her thighs, and her head was slightly bowed.

Much slower than she'd climbed, Mary descended the stairs carefully, as if Jenn might feel heavier steps. Then she drew close to her, bent to one knee, taking Jenn's hands in hers. The little girl looked up, her eyes dark and full.

"Did you mean it?" asked Jenn.

"Mean what?"

"When you said that you wanted to have a girl like me?"

Mary looked away: The girl had lost her mother, and now her daddy hadn't come home. Jenn felt utterly unwanted. "Oh, honey," said Mary, bursting into tears, thinking that she wasn't wanted herself: her mother was angry with and ashamed of her, and Scott had discarded her like old drumsticks. And what would he decide once she told him? Mary hugged Jenn, who began crying, too, and that's when she had the thought of bringing the little girl home with her. She would call the police, fill out whatever report she had to, but the girl wasn't going to be placed in some home, just another overgrown fetus with a hungry mouth. No way.

She picked up Jenn, who held on a little harder than she had to. "Come on, sweetheart. Why don't you come home with me?"

"Okay," said Jenn. Then she pulled back. "Do you think he's all right?"

"He'll be fine, honey."

Jenn searched Mary's face, her eyes wider than ever.

"What in G.o.d's name were you thinking?" Freddie screamed, one hand on her forehead, the other planted on her hip.

Mary looked up at the darkening sky, thinking, Well, girl, what exactly were you thinking? "We went to the police and filed a report, Mom. Where else was she going to stay?"

"Well, I don't know. Certainly not here." Freddie was slowly moving away, toward the street, her sandals sliding along the driveway. Pebbles skittered away from her feet.

George, who'd been silent until now, laid a hand on Mary's shoulder. "You did the right thing, honey. I'm proud of you."

Freddie whirled around. "Oh, for Christ's sake, are we an orphanage? Come on, George, your daughter comes home with that little p.r.i.c.k's fetus inside her and all of a sudden you're Mister Philisophical!" She turned away, throwing her hands up. "Maybe we're not an orphanage after all. We're a f.u.c.king asylum!"

As if to protect her, George stepped in front of his daughter. "Give us a moment, Mary. I'm so sorry."

Mary nodded, slowly turning away from her father's voice, which became a whispery growl she'd never heard before. The tears came before she opened the front door.

Freddie hadn't spoken to her in more than a week, and to say that the mood had been heavy around the house would be a little like saying constipation was strangely liberating. It seemed to Mary that her mother wasn't just disappointed, wasn't merely embarra.s.sed or ashamed. No, it kind of seemed like Freddie hated her.

The words wouldn't go away: We're not an orphanage after all. We're a f.u.c.king asylum.

Ever since Scott had cast her aside, she'd believed the worst treatment a person could suffer was that sort of apathetic dismissal. It was that blank look that had hurt the most, a look that seemed to say, Do I actually have to say this and deal with your reaction? Couldn't I just send you a card?

But her mother's invective had left this in doubt.

Today was no different. Mary had made it up around six, just in time to drag Jenn out of the bed in the guest room (which she'd begun thinking of as Cell Block Jenn), get her dressed and to school in time for the warning bell. When she'd returned home Mom and Dad had been sharing breakfast in the kitchen, but the moment she'd strolled in Freddie had shot up and brushed past her. Dad had glanced down at his bowl of oatmeal, casually shrugging and apologizing that things had come to this. The whole thing was wearing him out.

And that's when it hit Mary that she should reach outside of her family and single friend, that she should tell Scott about the baby. He should know, right? Sooner or later, whoever came for abandoned children would come calling, and it would be just her and Grady again, alone in Cell Block Mary. Maybe Scott had missed her, maybe he had had second thoughts. Perhaps the field wasn't as large as he'd thought. And wouldn't he care, wouldn't anyone care, about a new life?

Mary excused herself. She changed, then sat beside Grady on the bed. The spiky spitfire's customary rising time wasn't even around the corner, the corner being noon. Mary kissed her on the forehead, whispered that she loved her, then took off for the wrong side of the tracks.

Locals called this section of Simola Straight Third Area, and driving through it had always given Mary a case of the nerves. She'd borrowed Dad's ancient Lincoln, but even this heap looked like a Rolls in this part of town. She struggled to keep her speed at the prescribed twenty-five miles an hour. It seemed neither air conditioning nor gainful employment existed in this part of the world: people were milling about outside, some of them leaned back against the odd cinder block wall, cigarettes dangling from their lips, others...o...b..ting in loose groups and talking not only with their hands but with their entire bodies. But they all put the daily grind on hold when they spotted the white b.i.t.c.h sliding by in the wheels that looked as good as they had the day the factory sticker had been taped over its window. Those aren't eyes, she thought. They might as well be bullets.

When she pulled into Scott's driveway, drums boomed from behind the garage door. This terrified her. Somehow, she hadn't expected to show up and see him right away, but now that it seemed likely, adrenaline surged through her. She gripped the steering wheel as if it were the edge of a cliff, drawing a deep breath. No big deal. After all, this wasn't about her. This was about the Peter Pan banging away on a taped-over set of drums.

Mary opened the door, got out and listened to Scott play. He'd improved. He'd always been good, perhaps better than good, but G.o.d, he was sounding more and more like those Rock and Roll G.o.ds he'd invoked since she'd first seen him stroll into Freshman Comp four years ago.

Approaching the door, she continued to breathe deeply. She pulled open the screen and lightly rapped on the door, not noticing that she was tapping her foot to the beat. She waited, listening for sounds, but heard nothing. She knocked again. This time someone yelled that he was f.u.c.king coming, hold your f.u.c.king horses.

The door opened and a cloud of pot smoke wafted out. An oversized boy stood before her; he must have been six-four or five, and his long, oily hair stretched to the middle of his stomach, and his eyes were gla.s.s, his smile missing two teeth at misfortunate spots. He took an eyeful before cracking his broken smile wider that a photographer for Heavy Metal might have suggested. He nodded. "T'sup."

"Scott around?"

The boy stepped aside, ushered her in, mumbling, "In the garage." He p.r.o.nounced it gay-rawge.

Mary eyed him as she slide past, thinking of Mike Randall. She wasn't sure this boy would even go to the trouble of pouring moonshine down her throat.

Before she knew it she was at the door, her fingers at the k.n.o.b, and then the thing was swinging open.

Scott stopped, his arms above his head. A vaguely stunned look spread over his face. He dropped his sticks on the cement floor. He was high as a mushroom cloud. "Mary," he said, as if he needed to remind himself of her name.

She nodded, looking over him dispa.s.sionately. This was the guy she'd been pining for? "Hey," she said, but a thought pa.s.sed through her mind, quickly. What if he said, Yeah baby, I'd love to help raise a rugrat. Oh, the things I could teach her.

The adrenaline had pa.s.sed and Mary was left sizing up a boy who might never make the trip to manhood, a boy who might play in a successful band, but who more likely would work at a gas station until his liver gave out, burying his half-life beneath a deluge of alcohol and an ever increasing a.r.s.enal of drugs. She suddenly understood that she had done some growing up over the last couple of months, and Scott had done some drinking and smoking and probably some f.u.c.king. Mary smiled. It wasn't cruel, the smile, but soft and so radiant that the drummer's mouth dropped open and he whispered, "Wow."

"Never mind," said Mary, turning and moving toward the door without even a backward glance. She pa.s.sed the overgrown pot-head slumped on the couch, a gla.s.s bong between his legs. "Hey, where ya goin'?" he asked. "Don't you wanna suck my bong?"

Mary got the h.e.l.l out.

Mary was at home alone when the first of the cramps. .h.i.t her. She cried out, doubled over, and grabbed hold of her bed sheets. The cramps were sudden and violent, and they caused her to squint, to grimace. Slowly, using the sheets as leverage, she shoved herself from the bed, onto the floor, and crawled to the bathroom.

Propped against the bathtub, Mary stared at the toilet, her eyes unfocused. It was in there, floating and miniscule and dead, a small ma.s.s of blood and tissue, created and now uncreated.

It was over.

Her mother had no reason to hate her anymore, her father had no reason to be afraid, and Grady could stop talking about buying diapers and cheese and formula. As suddenly as she'd found out, it was over. And so Mary just sat there, dumbly staring at the toilet, wondering what it was she was feeling. She'd been terrified of being a mother, but that didn't mean she hadn't wanted it. She hadn't really thought about it much, but it was dawning on her that she wanted it more than anything. America's New Woman would frown on her, but she hadn't really wanted to go off to college, to start a career, to be ambitious and daring. There was no romance in it, no life, just go, go, go, deposit the check and report back in the morning. But to fall in love, to have that ring pushed onto your finger while he knelt there before you, to stand in the narthex of a church dressed all in white, every eye in your world on you for the briefest and most eternal of moments, to live in the world of Happily Ever After.

But it was over.

The father was a stoner who picked up a set of sticks and banged around once in a while, and maybe he'd someday be immortalized on a compact disc and maybe he wouldn't, but either way he wasn't even close to a man, and she doubted he ever would be. And just over the rim of a f.u.c.king toilet was the tissue that bore their genetic imprint; but just like their union, it was dead and small and unfinished. And she was just sitting here, empty. And the emptiness was worse than death.

Mary wanted to get up, wanted to flush the toilet, rush to her bedroom and cry, wanted to do a lot of things, but she only sat there, the minutes clicking away like hours, the hours like years, until Grady knocked on the bathroom door.

And a new future was born.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Where Sarah Was.

1.

Sarah thought: Years have pa.s.sed and the world has changed, but I have not.

But that wasn't exactly right, was it? She had changed, her sense of the world and of the people that populated it had deepened, and her sense of herself had grown, but physically she looked a perpetual thirty, even though more than a century had ticked away. To the people she shared her days with, she had changed very little. And the only way she had been able to evade the obvious question was to keep on moving, just as she had as a child.

The more things change . . . .

She'd worked as a seamstress, a moonshine runner, a nanny, and now as a bartender, but she could only work in one place for so long before people started wondering if this strange and quiet employee had found in Florida what Ponce de Leon had not. If it would have made a difference, she would have been happy to explain that she hadn't found the Fountain of Youth any more than the old Conquistador had. (In his search for the magical elixir, the short b.a.s.t.a.r.d had only found, ironically enough, a sunny place for the old to relax until they died.) No, she'd just been born different. Among them, but not of them.

And really, when you got right down to it, the world hadn't changed much either. Oh, eras had come and gone, technology had been redefined and redefined, social mores had been erected and then eroded, but people had by and large remained the same. Although many seemed to feel that the human race was continually moving into the light of science and reason, they had really only buried their superst.i.tions beneath layers of jargon and rhetoric, beneath the sands of physics and the delight of escaping the planet to set foot on the moon. Sure, their knowledge had grown, but their sense of themselves had not.

Yesterday, in a place called Dealey Plaza, a man who had dreamed of the moon had been killed. Murdered.

A coup.

And so it was in all countries, in all cities, during all times. Humanity wanted what no one could ever really gain, the power to control the hearts and minds of the ma.s.ses, but power, in a very real way, even among her own kind, didn't really exist, or if it did it was so fleeting as to be a vapor one struggled to find in the air as if floated away.

Caesar was dead.

She'd kept the bar open normal hours, and although many patrons had imbibed excessively, the place had cleared well before closing. She'd cleaned up, then gone upstairs to sleep.

But this morning she felt somehow different. No doubt the world would mourn for a time-although many would secretly throw parties, of that she was certain-but it would soon revert to its habit of slow erosion. The change, as was the case in all true changes, lay within her.

Sarah had lived in North Florida for the better part of two decades, and sooner or later she would be forced to outrun those old cries (the words had changed over the years, but not the fears behind them.) She'd caught wind of a small community of Spiritualists farther south, and she'd been thinking about it for awhile. So she tossed her clothes into a bag, locked the bar's door behind her, and walked to the bus station, hoping she wouldn't run into anyone she knew before stepping on, and while she walked she thought, The king is dead. Long live the king.

Sarah disembarked and made it to a cafe before deciding to turn back.

The cafe had six tables, which were arranged in a circle. An old man stood behind a counter, popping his dentures out of his mouth, then re-swallowing them in some sort of time-pa.s.sing game. Behind him was a handwritten sign that announced that he made the best burger in Central Florida. A long cooler sat to the right of the counter; in it were tubs of homemade ice cream. She smiled at the old man, who proceeded to swallow his teeth and bid her a good morning. "h.e.l.lo," she answered, strolling closer to the counter. "I've just moved to town, and I was wondering-"

"Moved?" asked the old man, licking his gums.

Sarah nodded. "Yes."

The old man looked down and around, then said, "Moved, huh."

She stared at him, then understood. This was a closed community, threatened by a vastly different outside world. "Actually," she said, "I'd like to have my palm read."

He nodded, seemed to relax a bit, popped his dentures out, then swallowed them again, pointing down the road outside. "Go to Earth Cathedral. Palmists in there."

"Who should I ask for?"

"Monty Greer."

Sarah stiffened. "Monty . . ."

"Yeah, Doctor Montague Greer."

At first, Sarah had no idea why she'd fled. Perhaps she was frightened of thinking back to the last time she'd seen Montague. It had been a long time since she'd thought that far back. She wasn't sure she was ready.

The cabbie drove her to downtown Simola Straight and dropped her off. She saw a pub named the Tin Lizzy and strolled in, ordered a gla.s.s of water and just sat there, almost too stunned to think. But in moments, all thoughts of Ca.s.sadega and Montague Greer would go away.

In moments, Jimmy Lieber would walk in.

When Sarah married Jimmy, a sense of foreboding came over her. She might live another ten years, or sixty, for what it was worth, but she certainly didn't feel like it. Even as they basked in their happiness, she couldn't shake the portentous thought that things were winding down, that the book of her life was soon to end. And she hadn't been able to tell Jimmy, good old six-pack Jimmy, the stories that populated that book, which was certainly sad, because it was, on the whole, a good book. But she knew that Jimmy couldn't accept the narrative that had joined her years, so she had invented a past she was certain her husband could digest. Beyond this invention, Jimmy hadn't pried. He'd only loved her.

Sarah had been alone so long that married life did not come easily to her. Jimmy hadn't wanted her to work, so she'd stayed home and taken care of their modest place, waiting for her husband to return each day. Which he did, unfailingly, at half past five every afternoon. Although the morning and afternoon were lonely hours, once five thirty rolled around, she couldn't keep the smile off her face. Jimmy wasn't perfect, but he was a good man, a kind man, an attentive man. They shared a bottle of wine and dinner every evening, and made love every night. Life, for the only time Sarah could remember, was whole and complete.

Then came the month she didn't bleed.

It was during her pregnancy that Sarah began to think of the past. Here she was, about to have a child, and it was frightening to believe that the boy might be plagued with her race's separation from humanity.

For the first time in decades she thought back to that night, the night of the fire. Daniel had shown her a picture of her people's migration, then had begun to paint-in maddeningly broad strokes-their history, but that evening had been cut short.

Doctor Greer, the old man had said. Doctor Montague Greer.

It couldn't be the same person. Couldn't be.