Safe Passage (29 page)

    
Now it was probably only one in the morning, but
Izzy
felt like the night had gone on forever. He still had no idea what was wrong with his father, and he was annoyed with himself. He saw himself focusing on his father's problem like the sun focusing on paper under a magnifying glass. At any moment the heat would light the paper and he would know what to do. But nothing had happened. He could hear Gideon breathing in the other bed, and knew he was awake. Even Gideon's breathing annoyed him.

    
"What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked. "Here you are, this great runner, and all day you walked around like some physical-therapy patient in the process of being retrained to move your limbs. Just what we need around here, another medical case."

    
"What's
your
problem? One of your girlfriends
dump
you?"

    
"Don't you
wish.
"

    
"Flu, asshole," Gideon said. "You think I should have made a big deal of it with everything else going on? You know how it makes all your muscles ache."

    
''Ache, yes. Turn you into a robot, no."

    
"Fuck off," Gideon said.

    
But
Izzy
didn't care. All day, Gideon had been rubbing his ankles. It had been bizarre. Everything was bizarre. Gideon rubbed his ankles, Merle rubbed his mustache,
Simon
rubbed his ear. Everybody was rubbing something. His father was rubbing his eyes.

    
Which brought him back to the fact that he still didn't know
dogshit
about what was causing his father's problem.

    
"Hey, man, I'm sorry," he said. Gideon only grunted, which meant he was on the verge of falling asleep. Christ, he couldn't even apologize. Except for today, Gideon was never even unpleasant unless he lost a race. Then he'd sulk about it for a day or two until their father made him stop. "You spend so much time building up your power, but even then sometimes it doesn't come through," Patrick would say coldly. "If the power isn't there right at the moment you need it…then it isn't much good to you, is it? So what I suggest is: Stop feeling sorry for yourself and go back to work."
Izzy
felt like his father might be saying that not to Gideon right now, but to him, with the same stern expression in his voice.

    
Shit.

    
This morning, blind, his father had looked the way the dogs did at
Biolab
, watching the other dogs be killed. The way Rusty must feel, caged up and about to go back to the pound—the same helpless feeling Percival would have, if he was trapped. And there wasn't a damned thing
Izzy
could do about it.

    
He felt hot, though the room was cold. He kicked the covers off and reached over to the night table for his glasses. His father had turned the heat down when they went to bed, and still he felt like he was burning up. It wasn't normal.

    
For two days he'd gone around studying his father as if he were a specimen under a microscope, looking weird as hell. Nobody said anything about it because they expected him to come up with something. They'd expected it from the time he'd conned his mother into letting him keep Henry the snake. He was wizard-brain
Izzy
, training to be the great scientist who would make some important discovery. But now that the time had come, his mind was blank.

    
He was so
hot,
his glasses kept sliding down his nose.

    
Christ.

    
What if Jocelyn was right?

    
He'd end up an old man someday, still cutting up dogs-
Izzy
the
Vivi
. He'd be living with some woman twenty years younger than he was, a different woman every year, working in an animal lab, inflicting cruelty after cruelty—and in the end, when he died, maybe that was all he ever would have done.

    
The heat began to radiate out from his chest, into his arms and his legs. There was no pain in his chest, only heat. But maybe he was having a heart attack.

    
When he was at
Biolab
, he thought his headaches were caused by an aneurysm. He hated being neurotic. Tomorrow Gideon would limp through the house and he,
Izzy
, would go around clutching his chest.

    
No way.

    
If he could not help his father, at least he could take other action. He could give up his assistantship when he got back to College Park. It would be crazy to keep caging up animals just because nobody ever told him not to. If there was no point to it, it would be just as crazy as if Percival had kept running after all he did was lose.

    
He was sweating so much that his glasses would not stay on his nose. His nose was like a waterslide, letting them slip all the way off.

    
He would keep away from women, too. He was not going to be some neurotic Don Juan. That was the term his mother had used: Don Juan. He wiped the sweat from the nosepiece of his glasses, but they still wouldn't stay in place. He took them off and put them on the night table. What was wrong with him anyway, that he was wearing glasses to stare into the darkness in the middle of the night?

    
He pulled the sheet up over him. The heat kept building in his chest. It didn't make sense. There was no reason to be having a heart attack at the age of twenty-two.

    
His skin was hot to the touch. He probably had a fever. He hated being neurotic. He closed his eyes because he couldn't stand himself anymore.

    
He supposed what happened next was an act of self-preservation. All of a sudden, though he certainly didn't expect it, he fell sound asleep.

    
He didn't know what time he woke up. It was probably only a few minutes later. The heat in his chest was still very powerful, but it didn't frighten him the way it had before. Even a little bit of sleep could sometimes calm you.

    
An image floated into his mind. It was of everyone sitting around the table just before they'd gone up to bed. He saw Merle letting the cat in, wiggling his nose above his stupid mustache as he did it. He saw the dramatic way his father carried the cat off to bed, to indicate that everyone else should follow. He saw exactly what had actually transpired, except for one change. Now he understood what was going on with his father's eyes. He knew what was causing it, and what would happen next, when his father woke up in the morning.

    
His moment of certainty didn't last. His misgivings and despair returned to him in a sudden rush, and his skin felt hotter than ever. He did not want to become a dirty old man in a dirty old lab. There was no way he could be sure until morning.

    
He reached over to the night table for his glasses. He would not be able to sleep. If he was wrong, he would stay away from women and animals. He would not deserve them. If he was right, he would keep on with his work. The heat in his chest let up a little.
 
In a few hours he would know. Already
a coolness
was seeping through his body. He was onto something. It was like a rainbow.

    
Mag
and Cynthia were the only ones still downstairs.
Mag
hadn't meant to be drunk at a time when the Marines were likely to come, but after Tim O'Neal's call, that seemed foolish, the sort of gesture Percival himself would scoff at. "What difference does it make
now
, Mom?" he would ask…and he would raise his glass to hers, offer a toast,
get
roaring drunk. So when Cynthia came into the living room with glasses and a decanter of wine,
Mag
accepted.

    
She felt the liquor at once, because she had eaten almost nothing all day. For a time they just sat there, drinking and not saying much. She grew hazy. It was a relief. She was too fuzzy to think of Patrick blind, Percival crushed, anything. She studied Cynthia instead. She had never had a chance to be with her like this, without Jason or Joshua or Alfred at her side. All she saw was a pleasant-looking young woman, being polite and courteous to an older woman whose life was in the process of being shattered. She felt fairly objective. She wanted to see what it was about Cynthia that Alfred loved so much, enough to ask for
Mag's
house.

    
Cynthia smiled and poured them both another glass of wine. It was a studied gesture, more practice behind it than grace.

"Here," Cynthia said. It was the first word she'd said in seven or eight minutes, and
Mag
wondered how they'd passed so much time together in silence. Even her grown nieces—the young women she'd felt closest to—would have felt the need to say something at a time like this.

    
But Cynthia was not like the nieces. She was more confident and self-assured.
Mag
could not imagine her as the sort of lash-batting, nail-painting teenager the nieces had been, observing with disapproving frowns while Gideon ran through the rooms dangling his underpants at the twins, who screamed, "Oh, no! It's disgusting. It's crispy. Save us!" The nieces had clutched their hands to their mouths when Percival yelled, "Tell
Izzy
to stop burping!" and looked down their noses as if the boys were creatures of an inferior species. Cynthia seemed too rational for that. And certainly Cynthia was nothing like the nieces now that they had grown up, languid and feminine as cats.

    
"I guess we're a little alike," Cynthia said suddenly, which seemed the worst kind of
non
sequitor
to what
Mag
had been thinking. Cynthia ran a finger around the top of her wineglass. "Both of us having children so young," she said. "When you had Alfred, you were even younger than I was with Jason."

    
"I never wanted children,"
Mag
said. She was going for shock value. Cynthia narrowed her eyes as if she didn't believe her. Maybe she'd gone too far. She hadn't wanted children, but she certainly wanted Percival now. "I mean I didn't want them until after they were born," she said.

    
"You were so young." They both studied the air. Cynthia's voice had begun to waver with alcohol. "Maybe you were even like I was," she said. "Pregnant…before."

    
Mag
wasn't sure she heard that. So drunk. "Oh, no," she began to protest. But maybe Cynthia was confessing. Maybe Cynthia had been like the nieces after all: languorous, giggling,
flirtatious
. Maybe she had lazed around as they had, prone to paralytic bouts of doing nothing, until her reproductive system matured and she was able to remain motionless except for a sultry wiggle of the hip that brought some man along to claim her.
Mag
had always looked down on her nieces for their passiveness. She had never been so narrow-focused herself. It pleased her to think that Cynthia might have been like them. And that it might have gotten her pregnant.

    
But Cynthia certainly didn't sound passive now. "Getting pregnant was my own fault," she was saying crisply. "I never wanted Paul so much. What I really wanted was a baby." She was twisting her wineglass with
an energy
more like Gideon's prerace jitters than the nieces' catlike grace.
Mag
was annoyed.

 
   
"I think that's the wrong approach," she said. "I think you have to want the man first." This was not something she actually believed, but she wanted to disagree with whatever Cynthia said. "First you want the man and then everything else follows."

 
   
Cynthia smiled a warm, energetic smile. "This time I do want the man."

     
Mag's
objectivity was gone now. Patrick often said, "I can't drink because it makes me sneeze, but you, my sweet lily—you can't drink because it puts you on an emotional roller coaster." Cynthia wanted
Alfred
, for Christ's sake. Bully for Cynthia. So she thrust her big bosom into his face and he was probably still smothering. Cynthia wanted the man, big deal. She also wanted Alfred to raise her kids in
Mag's
nice house.

    
"I know you're worried about Alfred taking on two children that aren't his own," Cynthia said, reading her mind. "I can understand your concern."

    
Mag
didn't answer, only flared her nostrils a little and let the wine-breath flow out: dragon's breath. Nastiness ran in her veins along with the liquor. Alfred must have told Cynthia everything. Why should she be surprised?

    
Did Cynthia think
Mag
was some fifteen-year-old student who needed counseling?

    
Well, yes, I am concerned about your two little bastards, she could say. And Cynthia, however stunned, playing the psychologist, would not be able to react.

    
At this moment Jason and Joshua were sleeping with Alfred in his old bedroom as if they already belonged there. Was that part of the plan? But she couldn't project her anger onto the boys because all day she'd been grateful for their presence. They were the only ones who didn't seem to know what was going on and therefore acted normal. Instinctively, everyone else tried to protect them from unpleasantness, until even Simon wiped the hang-dog look from his face and Gideon, who looked more devastated than anybody, showed them how to play Atari.