Alternities (39 page)

What did you do, Annie? Run home to Hagerstown? I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.

All the places that he might have expected to find a note—kitchen counter, dresser, the pillows of their neatly made bed—he found nothing. Wallace stood for a long minute in front of the closet, trying to decide which, if any, of her clothes were missing. His memory—was not equal to the task, even without the several new garments to confuse him.

Think, think. Out of habit, he had checked the mailbox on the way in. Empty. Friday is mail day. So she’s been here sometime in the last two days. Belatedly, he thought of the Spirit and turned back to the bulletin board and the rotation schedule. In the box for Sunday, February 12 was the name FINCH.
She doesn’t have the car
.

He went to the bathroom to splash water on his face and found the towels damp.
She was here this morning. You’re being silly
, he told himself, and went out into the quad to knock on Rebecca’s door. She opened the door only a few inches when she answered.

“Hello. Rayne. Back for a while?” Her smile seemed forced.

“Yeah. I was wondering if you’d have any idea where Annie is.”

“Did you check at the clinic?”

“The clinic?” Among the facilities in the Block core was an eighteen-bed three-doctor Federal Health Clinic—more insurance against the war the Block was supposed to survive. “What would she be doing there? Is Katie sick?”

“Katie’s in with my daughter, napping—”

“Katie’s here?”

Rebecca allowed the door to open another foot, “I told her she ought to tell you.” she said, frowning. “Annie’s working at the clinic.”

“Working?”

“As a nurse’s aide. Try to understand. She really needed to get out of the apartment, Rayne.” Rebecca said earnestly.

“Why do you think I won’t understand? What’s she been telling you? I wish she was here instead of there, sure. I haven’t seen her for five weeks. But if she wants to put in a few hours of volunteer work now and then, that doesn’t bother me. It’s not doing Katie any harm, after all. When did Annie say she’d be back for her?”

Rebecca looked inexplicably nonplussed. “Six.”

“That long?”

“Rayne, Katie spends Saturday, Sunday, and two nights a week here.”

“Why?”

A frown. “Maybe you’d better go up and see Annie.”

“Maybe I’d better.”

They caught sight of each other at opposite ends of the clinic’s main corridor. There was no hug. Her hands were clasped in front of her and fluttering nervously. His hands were jammed flat-palmed in his back pockets.

“Hi, Annie.”

“So you are here.”

Her tone was a needle. “You had the schedule. You should have known I’d be home today.”

“I didn’t think I should count on that.”

“What, so you didn’t even tell Katie? You want me to be some sort of surprise visitor?”

The hands fluttered, but the gaze was cool and steady. “I can only talk for a few minutes. They left me a long list of things to do.”

“What’s this all about? Rebecca said Katie’s there half the week.”

“I’m working C shifts until there’s an opening on A.”

He shook his head sharply. “Your job is taking care of Katie.”

“That’s your job, too. So where are you?”

“You know where I am. Earning a living for the family.”

She tucked her hands under her elbows, against her side, as though to smother and still them. “I don’t have the first idea where you are,” she said. “I don’t know where you go or what you do. You tell me I’m not supposed to ask, it’s important, official, like I’m not good enough or smart enough to know. I’m just supposed to carry the load and wait, and jump up and smile when you walk through the door.”

“I never—”

She took a step toward him. “Well, to me you’re just away, and do you know what? It’s getting to where I don’t hardly miss you. In fact, it’s getting hard to see what spaces you used to fill. And I found something else out. There are more ways of feeling good than getting one of your little pats on the head. They say I’m doing a good job here, and I get checks with my own name on them, and both of those things feel just fine.”

“I thought you were volunteering, to get out of the apartment for a few hours—”

“Why? Because you didn’t think anyone would want to pay me?”

He did not have the energy to answer or even parry her challenges. “You’re getting ready to do without me.”

The hands had climbed all the way to her shoulders, wrapping her in a self-hug. “I can’t depend on somebody who’s not here.”

A voice inside Wallace was screaming, Who is this person? Who is this stranger who looks like Annie? He gaped, blinked, opened his mouth and heard himself say, “Neither can I.” Felt his feet carry him out of the clinic and toward the exit doors and the transit stop beyond. Wished that he could make the clock jump forward a week to his next date with the gate.

And understood that Shan, strange and wonderful Shan, real or shadow, was all that stood between him and being completely alone.

Ellen O’Neill did not notice when her husband left their brass-railed blanket-heaped bed. But stirring in her sleep in the silent hours between midnight and dawn, she became aware of the empty space beside her and came fully awake. The glowing hands of the alarm marked the time as a few minutes after two.

Sitting up, she listened for a moment for telltale sounds from the bathroom adjacent or the kitchen below. Hearing none, she threw back the covers and went looking. Collar and tags jingled at the foot of the bed as their terrier raised his head in sleepy curiosity.

“Stay, Roscoe,” she whispered as she glided out of the room. Seeing the wisdom of that suggestion, Roscoe obeyed.

She found Gregory in the darkened living room, sitting sideways in his robe on the couch. “Honey? What’s wrong?”

He looked up, then made room for her beside him on the edge of the couch. “I’m trying to find a way to undo a mistake,” he said softly.

“Can I help?”

“You can hug me.”

Though he accepted her embrace gratefully, as a child accepts the hug of a mother, he remained distant. Something had taken him far away, and his body jangled with the rawness of the pain which had driven him into retreat.

Wrestling demons. That was how she thought of such episodes. There had been few of them in recent years, far fewer than suffered by the earnest and troubled young man she had married twenty-six years ago.

She waited, knowing that if he chose to share more, he would do so without prodding.

“There is an imperative in the blood,” he said slowly, “which compels a parent to save the life of his child at any price, even his own life. Look at our values of noble sacrifice. The woman who goes back into a burning building for her baby. The man who dives into the surf to save a son being dragged out to sea by the rip current.”

“We make heroes of them, even if they fail,” she said.

He nodded, sought a hand to hold. “And we judge them hard if they stand by and do nothing, if they let the baby burn, watch the boy drown. I wonder how God judges them, whether the dictates of biology mean as much to Him as to us.”

“Parents are charged with caring for their children,” she said. “Maybe part of the charge is in our genes.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But is it an absolute? Should a parent steal to feed a hungry child, lie or cheat to protect a defenseless child?”

“Are you asking the parent, or God? The parent would say yes. I would say yes. I would have done that for David, or Sara, or Mark. You would have, too.”

“Yes,” he said. “It amounts to risking your soul, instead of your life, for your child. God would put the sin on one side of the ledger and the good on the other.”

“The good would count for more, I think.”

“But what if a man could save his own children’s lives by accepting the deaths of other children as the price? How does that one sit on the scales?”

“Is that what you’ve done?”

He drew her close, until his arms enclosed her and her head rested on his shoulder. “I went along with something I didn’t believe in, to protect us and ours.”

She drew back from him, alarmed. “Went along with who? Who threatened us? Please tell me that you’re not compromised—”

His expression soured. “Would that be worse? Do you really think patriotism is a higher value? No, don’t answer. These children we’d do anything to save, we proudly send them off to die as soldiers. So we must think country counts for more than family. Though I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said ‘Render unto Caesar…’ ” He smiled sadly. “No, Ellen. I’m not compromised—not in the way you’re thinking.”

“Then I don’t understand—”

“The government that compromised me is our own. The man I went along with is the President.”

“This is scaring me, Gregory.”

He brushed her cheek with his curled fingers. “It scares me, too, sweetheart.”

“Is there going to be a war? Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yes. I thought I would be able to make myself heard. But he’s slammed the door on me. He doesn’t want to hear ‘No.’ ”

“Then there doesn’t have to be a war,” she said.

“No.”

She returned to his shoulder and the comforting embrace of his arms. “It’s all right to put our family first. But you can’t stop there,” she said finally. “You can’t stand and watch while other parents’ babies burn.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m sitting here in the middle of the night. Trying to find a way back in.”

“Isn’t there anyone else who feels the same as you? Someone who’s still on the inside?”

He was a long time in answering. “I don’t know,” he said dolefully. “I just don’t know.”

The woman’s body carried a hundred marks from its encounters with whip and needle, flame and blade. Cigarette burns decorated the curves of her breast and the soft roundness of her belly. She wore Endicott’s initials carved into her right buttock and the bruise shadow of his hands on her throat. Welts of varying vintage were everywhere, from pale scars to the neat crisscross pattern of bright red ridges across the backs of her thighs from that night’s session in the basement bedroom.

It was harder to find marks on her spirit. Like Scheherazade, Rachel seemed to believe she had struck a bargain that would keep her alive, buying the next day with her nightly screams. She no longer believed he would kill her, he thought. She was wrong, of course. He would kill her, in time.

But even he was surprised at how long he had kept her, how he had broken all his own rules with her. Even to taking her into his own bed. She lay naked atop the blankets, an ankle chain securing her to the footboard, her folded arms her only pillow. Sleeping peacefully, the sleep of the exhausted, the cleansed. He had made her life simple as a child’s.

In return, she stole his sleep from him and made his life ever more complex. She had learned not to lecture him, not to argue with him, not to whine or fight, but still she found ways to manipulate him. Give me beautiful marks, she had begged tonight, and he had, with the care of an artist working a canvas. As if what she wanted mattered. As if she mattered. Everything she said, everything she did plucked at the knots held his selfness together.

The closer she came to unraveling them, the more cruelly he punished her. He had nothing to explain, no one to account to, and he would not let her make him think otherwise. The two worst beatings he had given her, savage mindless maulings that had left her half dead, followed the time she forgave him and the time she gave him permission. There was nothing to forgive, and he did not need or permission.

And yet she worked on him, always holding that one little piece of herself back, watching him and keeping silent secrets. She was changing him, and he did not understand how. He had made love to her and even given her pleasure. Another rule broken, another mistake. A repeated mistake. He knew he should kill her now, before her web was complete and he was helpless. And knew he would not, not yet.

Not until he had pierced that final veil. Not until be knew what it was she knew about him.

The meeting in the White House Situation Room had been originally scheduled for 1:00 p.m., postponed until 4:00 and again until 7:00. It had finally convened at 10:00 with one of the principals absent.

All the trouble had begun when the British Airways plane from Glasgow carrying a CIA courier had been diverted by mechanical trouble to Halifax, Nova Scotia. When it became clear that the delay was going to be a lengthy one, a two-seat jet trainer was dispatched from the Air Force station at Bucks Harbor, Maine, to pick up the courier and ferry him to Washington.

Madison had gone personally to Boiling Air Force Base, on the Potomac, to await its arrival. In his absence. Admiral Fisch, the Chief of Naval Operations, took center stage to address the group.

Fisch was a round-shouldered, chain-smoking, bulgy-cheeked veteran of the surface fleet—captain of a cruiser in the Pacific War and a task force commander during the Cuban intervention. His uniform was stretched tight at the buttons, and he walked with a rolling gait which made it seem as though he had never quite regained his land legs.

But Fisch spoke simply and authoritatively, a businessman in the business of war. “Mr. President, I was asked to brief you on our ability to carry out a peacetime attrition campaign against the Soviet submarine forces operating in international waters off our coasts,” he said, standing in front of a wall covered with maps.

“That’s correct, Admiral,” said Robinson.

“Before we discuss tactics, I want to make sure you understand some of the conditions under which our ASW forces will be operating. With your permission—”

“Go ahead.”

Fisch nodded to his tactical aide. “Wally?”

Slender and hoarse-voiced, the aide stepped forward. “Mr. President, the Foxtrot-class vessels are fuel-cell-powered and very quiet—they emit less than one milliwatt of broadband acoustic energy when underway. Cyclops has to pick that up against an ambient noise background caused by ocean turbulence, vessels and storms up to several hundred miles away, surface waves, even sea life.”