Parasite (Parasitology) (32 page)

“I got lost somewhere in the middle of that sentence,” I said. “Do you mean I fainted?”

“Duh, that’s what I said. You had a simple vasovagal attack. What
else
could that mean?”

I stared at Tansy. Finally, I said, “I honestly do not know how I’m supposed to respond. I mean, I have genuinely no idea what I’m supposed to say. Can you please pretend I said the right thing, and tell me where Nathan is?”

She sighed, pushing herself to her feet. “I really hoped you’d be fun, you know,” she said. “Stay where you are. Don’t touch
anything
. I’ll be right back with your stupid
Nathan
.” Spinning on her heel, she stalked away toward the front of the bowling alley.

I sank back on the cot, pulling the lab coat up around me like a blanket. I wasn’t cold, exactly, but I still felt like I needed the warmth.

“She doesn’t mean to be spooky,” said an apologetic male voice from behind me. I gave a little shriek and spun around, nearly falling off the cot again. It wasn’t my best day for staying upright, apparently.

Adam was standing in the corner, hands twitching against his thighs, a solemn expression on his face. “She can’t really help it. She knows that she upsets people, but she doesn’t know how to stop doing it. Mom says it’s because Tansy’s body’s brain was dead for too long before she could get Tansy in there, but we don’t really know for sure. It’s hard to know what’s normal for us and what isn’t. The sample size is too small.”

“I… you… what…” I managed.

Adam’s eyes widened. “Did I scare you? I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

I took a deep breath, waiting for my heart to stop trying to pound its way straight out of my chest. Finally, I asked, “How long have you been standing there?”

“I was watching you sleep, just in case you, you know. Had a bad dream or something.” Adam shrugged, looking suddenly awkward. “I have bad dreams sometimes, and it helps if I’m not alone when I wake up.”

I blinked at him, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying. If Dr. Cale was telling the truth about what she’d been able to do—and I had no reason to doubt her, even if Nathan wasn’t quite so sure—I was talking to a tapeworm that had been given full control of its very own human body. And that same tapeworm had been watching me sleep, just in case I had bad dreams.

This situation was creepy on so many levels that I didn’t even know where to begin. Adam was still watching me earnestly. It was clear that he had no idea that I could construe what he’d
been doing as even remotely wrong. Why should he? If Dr. Cale and Tansy were his models for normal human behavior, standing there staring at me while I was unconscious probably seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.

“Oh,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough. I hesitated before adding, “I have bad dreams, too, sometimes. Thank you for watching me.”

Adam looked relieved, and smiled. “I was glad to do it. Mom and my big broth—um. Mom and Nathan are arguing right now. He wanted to leave when you fainted, but she convinced him that he should stay until you woke up at least, and listen to what she had to tell him.”

“What was that?” I asked, feeling obscurely stung. Never mind that they were probably discussing all the scientific details of the
D. symbogenesis
design, and those would have been over my head anyway; we came here because I wanted answers, and I should have been included in the process of getting them.

“Why she never contacted him after she left SymboGen.” Adam’s smile faded. “He’s really upset about that. He doesn’t believe her when she says I’m his brother, and he doesn’t believe Mom had good reasons for doing what she did.”

“I…” I stopped. Finally, I scooted to the side, patting the cot with one hand. Feeling a little silly, I said, “Why don’t you come and sit down?” Adam wasn’t going to hurt me, and I’d be more comfortable if he wasn’t looming over me.

“Okay,” said Adam. He obediently trotted over to sit down on the other end of the cot, beaming like he’d just been invited to his first real party.

Having him that close was almost worse than having him looming had been. I swallowed my anxiety—I was the one who asked him to sit down, I would live with it—and said, “Family is important to Nathan. It’s so important that he told me his mother was dead right after we started dating. That’s how sad he was that she was gone from his life. So finding out she
was here with you this whole time is hard for him. It hurts him.” Inspiration struck, and I added, “How would you feel if you found out your mother had gone away to live with another family for years and years, and never even called to let you know she was still alive?”

“Sad,” said Adam, after a pause to consider his options. “But happy, too, because it would mean my mother was still alive, when I would have been worried that she wasn’t.”

I blinked. That wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. “It wouldn’t bother you that she’d been off doing things without letting you know that she was all right?”

“No. Should it?” Adam asked the question with apparently honest curiosity, giving me a hopeful look at the same time, like I was somehow going to unsnarl all the mysteries of human behavior. Boy, was he going to be disappointed if he started looking at me as someone who knew what the hell she was talking about.

“Um.” This time, I thought a little more before I opened my mouth. It didn’t help as much as I’d been hoping it would. “That depends,” I said, finally. “Don’t you like to know what your mother is doing?”

“I can’t always,” he said. “Sometimes she has to go away for days, and I can’t go with her, because it’s not safe.”

“It’s not safe?” I echoed, and frowned. “Why not?” Adam looked perfectly normal. As long as he didn’t start talking about being a tapeworm in a human suit, he wasn’t likely to run into anything terribly dangerous—and even if he did, it wasn’t like that was illegal or anything. Anyone who heard him would just assume he was crazy. Heck, I had scientists with diagrams trying to make me understand
how
he could be a tapeworm in a human suit, and I still kind of thought he might be crazy.

Adam shrugged. “Sometimes it’s not safe because she’s going places that aren’t safe. Like South America. And Africa, once. She took Tansy when she went to Africa, because she said it
wasn’t safe for her, but having Tansy with her would make da—darn sure that it wasn’t safe for anyone else, either.”

His hastily edited “damn” struck me as oddly charming. It was like talking to one of the kids who came into the shelter to look at the kittens and puppies. “But you couldn’t go with her, because it wasn’t safe.”

“Yeah.” Adam nodded earnestly. “Tansy makes it a little safer by being dangerous at people, so they back off being dangerous at Mom. But I don’t do that, because I’m not dangerous at anyone. I’d just be something else for them to be dangerous at. Anyway, I do okay with helping in the lab, but I can’t help too much in the field. I just get in the way and drop things that aren’t supposed to be dropped.”

“He dropped a jarful of leeches once,” announced Tansy blithely as she walked back out of the shadows. I managed not to jump. Barely. “It exploded, ker-smash, and then there were leeches
everywhere
. It was like Leech-a-palooza in the lab that day. This one tech got a leech inside her
nose
.”

“By ‘got’ do you mean you put it there?” I asked.

Tansy grinned. “You’re starting to catch on. So, like, can you walk and stuff? Because Doctor C says if you can walk, I should bring you over to her private lab. That’s where she’s got Nathan. She’s showing him a bunch of old slides and stuff, totally boring. I said you might want to go sledding with me instead.” She gave me a hopeful look.

Sledding on a dirt hill with the resident socially maladjusted possibly-a-tapeworm? I could think of a lot of things I’d rather do, including making a return trip to SymboGen. “I really need to talk to Nathan,” I said, standing.

“Whatever. Suit yourself.” Tansy rolled her eyes in exaggerated disgust. “Adam, Doctor C says to tell you it’s time for your pills, and you need to go to your room so you can take them.”

“Yes, Tansy,” said Adam. He looked at me shyly as he stood. “It’s really nice to finally meet you, Sal. I hope you like it here
enough that you’ll come back sometime. I think Mom would like that, too.” He turned before I could say anything, walking quickly into the shadows.

“I guess he’s sweet on you, too,” said Tansy. She sounded faintly disgusted. “Like you’re all that just because you’re all living in the world, doing stuff without supervision. Whatever. Like
that’s
so impressive. Come on, I’ll take you to Doctor C.”

“Thank you,” I said—both because it was the right thing to say and because I was a little bit afraid that if Tansy thought I was being rude to her, she’d stab me with a scalpel. She seemed like the kind of girl who regularly carried scalpels around just for stabbing people. “I’m sorry I’m taking up so much of your time.”

“Whatever,” she said, for the third time in as many minutes. “It’s not like I’d be doing anything important if you weren’t here.”

“Sure you would,” I said. “You’d be
sledding
.”

Tansy blinked at that. Then, slowly, she grinned. She never seemed to smile; it was always grinning with her, big, wide grins that showed off all her teeth at once. “Hey, that’s right. I’d totally be sledding if you weren’t here. You’re pretty smart to have figured that out, you know?”

“If you say so,” I hedged.

“That, or I told you, and you’re trying to play smart.” Her expression turned suspicious. “Are you trying to mess with me?”

“Honestly, I just want to get to Nathan.”
Before you stab me with something
, I added silently. Of all the unnerving things I’d encountered since arriving at Dr. Cale’s lab, Tansy was definitely the most upsetting.

“Fine.” She started walking. I followed.

We were about halfway across the bowling alley before she said, “You better not be here to try and talk Doctor C into running away with you. We need her here. You can stay if you
want—she’d probably like it if you stayed, because then her son would stay, and they could be all ‘rar, we fight the medical establishment and their dangerously lax and corrupt distribution channels’ together—but you can’t take her.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “We just came here to get some answers. That’s all. Once we have them, we can go.” Assuming Nathan was willing to leave his newly rediscovered mother. Tansy might be kidding when she said that we could stay, but I was starting to be afraid that Dr. Cale wasn’t going to let us leave. Even if she did, we could still wind up remaining here with her for as long as Nathan wanted to talk to her.

Tansy looked back over her shoulder at me. The look on her face was actually serious for the first time since I’d turned to find her sitting on the hood of Nathan’s car. “Didn’t Doctor C warn you about what happens when you ask questions?”

It took me a second to realize that she was talking about that children’s book again. I was going to need to find a copy. “I’m sure I want to know,” I said.

“Okay,” said Tansy, with a very small shrug. That seemed to exhaust her available conversation. She was silent as she led me onward, into the dark.

Dr. Cale’s private lab was a small room—even smaller than the office where we’d first gone to speak—with hand-drawn charts and black-and-white photographs of tapeworms covering the walls so completely that I wasn’t even sure what color the paint was. Since this looked like it was one of the original parts of the bowling alley and not a room that had been constructed by walling off a piece of the larger spaces, they were probably something eye-searing, green or purple or another bowling-related color. As I thought that, I realized that I didn’t really know very much about bowling alleys. It had never seemed important to me before.

A low counter split the room in half, and more counters lined
the walls, covered in lab equipment and manila folders. Nathan was sitting on a stool at the central counter when Tansy led me into the room. He was bent over a microscope—a position I’d seen him in a hundred times before—and was so focused on whatever was on the other side of his lens that he didn’t even look up when Tansy pushed me toward him and announced, loudly, “I am going to go throw myself down the side of a large hill multiple times.”

Dr. Cale was at one of the other counters, preparing a fresh slide. She looked toward Tansy, saying mildly, “Just don’t break any bones that you think you’re going to need later. I don’t want to spend another six weeks listening to you whine about how I won’t let you go outside.”

Tansy sniffed haughtily before turning on her heel and striding back out of the room. She tried to slam the door behind herself, but the hinges were configured to allow people time to get out of the way, and the door swung gracefully shut instead.

“She broke her ankle once, when she tried to snowboard on a cookie tray,” said Dr. Cale. She had the same fond, nostalgic tone that Mom always got when she was talking about something Joyce or I had done as children. The “my little girls can do no wrong” voice. She picked up the tray with her slides and wheeled her way over to Nathan, one-handed. “I have never in my life had a worse patient, and that includes myself.”

“I find it hard to believe that anyone could be a worse patient than you,” said Nathan, lifting his head from the microscope. “I remember when I was a kid, and you got the flu. I thought Dad was going to lock you in the bedroom, just so the rest of us could get some peace.” He turned to look at me, betraying awareness of my presence for the first time. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” I said awkwardly, not moving away from the door. I wanted to add something about how he’d left me to wake up surrounded by potentially dangerous strangers, but I couldn’t
find the words. So I blurted the first thing that came into my head, instead: “Is there a copy of
Don’t Go Out Alone
that I could read? People keep talking about it, and I want to know what happens.”

“Of course there is.” Dr. Cale put her slides down next to Nathan before she wheeled herself over to a bookcase, leaning up to pull a slim volume with a cover the color of a slow-healing bruise off the top shelf.