Eve and Adam (20 page)

“Then why did you tell me?”

He smiles. He hasn’t done that before. I gave him really good teeth. Perfect teeth. But I didn’t design that smile, not exactly. That smile, that’s some alchemy, some kind of magic interaction of, I don’t know, but oh yes. Shiver. And warmth. And a general all-over-body feeling like I really want to cut the distance between us and it’s suddenly very difficult to focus on my outrage.

I have to shake my head, hard, and replay his last statement to find my place again. “Why did you tell me if my mother said not to?”

“I’m not a machine, Evening. I’m a man. And you made me to be free. You did that, right?”

“Yes. Yes.” I made him to be free? No responsibility there. Yes, I made him to be free. I wonder what else I made him to be.

That day in the lab with Aislin comes back to me in high-definition imagery. Aislin ogling, me pretending to be so much more puritanical than I really am, because that’s part of my relationship with Aislin.

I see him now in memory. I see the eyeballs floating, disconnected. They look much better in his head. I see the chest I designed, the stomach I created. I picture all the choices I made.

It’s disturbing.

He’s here and real and beautiful and I made him beautiful. And this is why Solo would destroy my mother? Is this boy, this man, is his existence really some kind of a crime?

In what mad, unholy universe could this work of art—
my
work of art—be a crime?

My phone chimes. I hear it, but I don’t really care much. Then I realize its chimed before. Several times.

“Excuse me,” I say. For some reason, I feel I have to be formal with Adam. I don’t know what the rules are. I’ve never stood around chatting with my own amazingly attractive creation before.

I fumble for my phone, my fingers not finding it in my purse. I don’t want to—almost can’t—take my eyes off him. I apologize again for shifting my line of sight. How dare I not gaze upon you in wonder? How dare I look down at the rat’s nest that is my purse?

I find the phone. It’s a message.

Maddox shot. SF General Hospital. Please come.

To my shame, I hesitate. I think,
damn him and damn her, I’m talking to Adam, here!

But somehow, from some depth of my soul, the better side of me asserts itself and tells me I have to go.

I’ll ask him to come with me.

No. No, wait, who created whom, here? I didn’t create this person just to turn into the same diffident, critical, shy girl I usually am. I’m in charge in this relationship.

Right? I ask myself. Right?

“Adam,” I say. “Come with me.”

– 36 –

She is not quite what I expected. Visually, yes. Visually I know that Evening is the very epitome of young, female beauty. I know this as surely as I know anything. I have been given this truth.

But she does not quite sound as I expected her to.

She does not act precisely as I expected her to act.

I’d learned that she was headstrong, difficult, naive, very smart, very talented, with all the potential in the world.

That phrase is in my head: all the potential in the world.

That girl has all the potential in the world. She could be anything. She can do anything she wants. Anything! But she is frittering her life away hanging out with that drug addict slut loser friend of hers.

Having now spoken with Evening, I agree that she is intelligent. I don’t know if she has all the potential in the world.

A thought occurs to me. “This person we are going to rescue. Is it your drug addict slut loser friend?”

We have been running down the pier toward the Embarcadero. Evening stops.

“What?” Her eyes narrow. “Where did you get that idea?” Before I can answer she interrupts with a slashing hand gesture. “Never mind. I can guess.”

We run some more. We reach a trolley just as it pulls to a stop. We leap aboard, then wait impatiently for several minutes while the driver gets out and inspects his vehicle.

“Don’t believe what my mother told you,” Evening says.

I feel a rush of terror. “Evening, all I really know is what your mother told me. If I were actually to stop believing everything she told me…”

We are sitting beside each other. Her thigh and shoulder are pressed against mine. She turns to me and I turn to her and this brings our faces very close together.

“I—” she says, and then her voice makes a croaking sound. Her eyelids lower, as if she’s sleepy. Slowly, slowly she’s moving closer.

Suddenly, her eyes widen. I see something like alarm in her gaze as she pulls away.

“I have to sit somewhere else,” she says in a rush.

“Why?”

“I just do, that’s all.”

She has not moved. “Where?”

“What?” Her eyes are at half-mast again. “Oh. Yes. This seat in front here.”

She gets up, but just then, the trolley lurches. To keep her from falling over into the aisle I put my right arm around her abdomen and then she slips down a little so that my arm slips up and then stops because it can’t go any farther.

The trolley accelerates away and centrifugal force—that’s a misconception, it’s actually momentum—pushes her back against me.

We are the only passengers.

She struggles a little to stand up, but her struggle is not very forceful, and she sits for a while even after the trolley has stopped decelerating.

“Oh my,” she says in a strained voice.

She repeats it, but with a long pause. Like this: “Oh ……… my.” Then, sounding really as if she isn’t talking to me at all but to some other person entirely, she says, “Yes, getting up. Absolutely getting up and moving. Because, no. Wrong, that’s why. So. Getting up.”

With a sudden heave, an uncoordinated pushing off that I find strangely enjoyable, she stands up. She looks wobbly, although the trolley is moving with admirable smoothness.

Evening drops heavily into the seat in front of me. She blows out a long sigh and runs her fingers through her hair and says—again, as though she’s not really talking to me—“Okay. Okay. I can do this.”

I remember her mother’s words and say, “You can do anything you want.”

She answers, “Mrrgghh,” in a high, strained voice.

Twenty minutes later, we reach the hospital.

– 37 –

The ER entrance is a narrow, automatic door in a slab of concrete. There’s a cheery pink sign above that reads “Emergency Room,” adorned with a blue teddy bear. I think it may be the ambulances-only entrance, but I decide I don’t care. We slip in behind a gurney carrying a wildly flailing drunk.

The drunk is yelling, “Purgatory! Purgatory!”, so no one notices us.

Until they notice Adam.

The gurney falters. The two guys pushing it stare, their jaws dropping a little. A woman doctor comes out, lights a cigarette, takes a puff, and stops. The smoke drifts out of her mouth. She’s forgotten to exhale.

The drunk—he’s an old dude, maybe sixty, maybe a hobo—stops yelling and looks baffled.

“Excuse us,” I say. No one hears me. No one sees me. It’s kind of getting annoying. I do exist, after all, even when I’m standing next to Adam.

There is zero possibility that anyone will stop us as we move past the gurney and into the busy emergency room treatment area. Nurses bustle, doctors amble, everyone looks dopey-tired.

There’s less shouting and drama than you see on TV shows, and the lighting is much worse. Maybe the doctors are all having interior monologues about their love lives, but it seems more likely that they’re all just waiting for their shifts to be over.

Adam stops the place cold.

I’m concerned that people may be dying while the medical professionals stop to stare.

“Where’s Maddox Menlow?” I ask.

Again, there is apparently no sound coming out of my mouth, so I yell, “Aislin! Where are you?”

“E.V.?”

A white curtain flies back and Aislin’s head pops out of one of the treatment areas. I run to her. There’s hugging. Then I look at the bed. No Maddox.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“They just took him to be operated on.”

“Oh no,” I say. “How bad is it?”

She has a hollowed-out look in her eyes. “They shot him in the stomach. It’s … they don’t know. I mean, there was a lot of blood.”

I don’t know why, but I’d just kind of assumed that if Maddox had really been shot, it was in the foot or the elbow or something. Nothing like this. Nothing potentially fatal.

I feel like a jerk.

“Was it those same guys?” I ask.

Aislin looks down at her feet, embarrassed. “Look, he didn’t give them that money, the nine thousand dollars. He used it to buy some stuff. He was then going to resell it, so he could pay those guys and still keep some.”

Despite vivid images in my head of a gut-shot Maddox, I can’t stop the flame of anger kindling inside me. I got him that money. It wasn’t so he could deal more weed.

I lean against the bed. “Did they catch the guys?”

Aislin shakes her head. “I know, all right?” Her eyes brim with tears. “I know what he is. And I finally know I have to get rid of him. But not while he’s maybe dying, right?”

“Right,” I say, but I don’t believe she’s going to dump Maddox, injured or well. She’ll go back to him, like she always does. Suddenly the sheer doom of it all hits me. Aislin will spiral down with Maddox, or whatever asshole eventually replaces him.

And what’s my own great plan? To help Solo destroy my mother? And then what? Wander the city homeless, with my beautiful creation in tow, stopping traffic?

I realize—and I blame Adam for distracting me—that Solo has no doubt already succeeded. The devastating data is probably on its way. My mother’s doom is sealed.

Not about me, I chide myself. This is about
Aislin
.

“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” I say. Aislin sniffles into her sleeve, and I guide her from the emergency room to the cafeteria.

I’m sipping coffee before I realize I’ve left Adam behind.

“He’ll be okay,” I murmur.

“I don’t know,” Aislin says miserably, assuming I’m talking about Maddox. Then, bless her, she worries about me. “What’s happening with Solo? Did you guys do it?”

For once I know that when Aislin says “do it,” she doesn’t mean “have sex.”

“He took the flash drive and left,” I say.

“Oh.” She doesn’t know what to say, and that’s okay, because in her place I don’t know that I would be thinking about anything.

Why do I love Aislin? Because with her whole life falling apart, she thinks about me. She still cares about me.

I’m not as good a friend as she is.

“So … your mom?” she manages.

I shrug. My stomach is churning; my head is fuzzy. I’ve been reacting to Adam, not even thinking. What is the matter with me? Solo’s busy destroying my mother and I’m sighing over Adam.

It’s just that he’s so … perfect.

I’m so confused.

“Aislin,” I say, “there’s something I have to tell you. Show you. Some
one
.”

“Okay. Do you have any Kleenex on you?”

I grab a couple napkins from the dispenser. “It can wait,” I say. “You’ll see, soon enough.”

Suddenly someone sits down in one of the spare chairs. It’s rude, so I shoot the interloper a chilling look.

He’s a good-looking twenty-something Asian guy. He doesn’t smile. He’s wearing a green leather jacket. It takes a few seconds before I realize that I’ve seen him before. In Golden Gate Park.

The blood drains from Aislin’s face.

“Get out of here, you piece of crap” she snarls.

The guy looks at her, vaguely interested and not at all intimidated. He crosses his arms on the table and leans forward.

“I don’t suppose either of you ladies has a spare twelve thousand dollars, do you?”

“It’s nine,” I say.

“It was nine.” He makes a sort of sympathetic shrug. “Interest rates are high.”

“Actually,” I say with all the superior condescension I can manage, “the prime rate is quite low.”

It’s an amazingly stupid thing to say, but he takes it in stride. “We’re not the Fed. Our rates are higher.”

He sees my surprise. “Yeah, I know, I’m a thug so I must be unintelligent and uneducated. Truth is, I do work with some people who are like that. But I’m three credits away from a business degree.”