The Adoration of Jenna Fox (27 page)

"No, all over." He pulls me close
with one arm while he drives with the other. I notice my shoulders trembling
for the first time. I try to make it stop, but I can't control them. Is this
what Father talked about?
If there are conflicts with your original brain
tissue. . , signals that might create almost an antibody effect. . . one trying
to override the other . . . that's why we have backups. Just in case.

Ethan leans over, one eye on the road, and rubs
his lips against my temple. It sends a current through me, and for at least a
moment, disconnects me from my thoughts. "It's okay," he says. He
straightens, returning his full attention to the road, but continues to rub my
shoulder. I look at him, wondering how someone so gentle could ever swing a bat
into someone else's skull. Do we all have surprising capacities hidden within
us? "Don't worry about
Allys
telling. She's been
out for four days. If she had told someone, we'd know it by now."

"Maybe," I answer. "Or maybe
not. You said the FSEB is a bureaucratic machine. My guillotine order may just
be delayed in paperwork."

He's silent, but his eyes dart back and forth across
the passing landscape, like he is reading words that are hidden from my view.
He rubs my shoulder more vigorously. Finally he blurts out, startling me,
"The
greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and
if I repent of anything
..." He pauses, waiting.

I smile and concede.
"It is very likely
to be my good behavior."

"No way of thinking or doing,
however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes
..."

"Or in silence passes by as
true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow.
" I put my hand up to stop another quote
from leaving his lips. "Ethan, I truly appreciate the effort, but I can
recite Thoreau all day long and still be afraid."

"But maybe I can't," he says. He
squeezes me. "And feel. Your shoulders have stopped shaking. Guess you
don't know as much as you think."

I notice. The trembling is gone. Afraid but
calm. It's a slightly better place to be. I think of the wild energy of
cyclones, but at their center is a tiny circle of calm. That is what Ethan has
given me. I lean in closer to his shoulder. "Maybe she's not sick. Maybe
she just doesn't want to see me."

"She didn't look good the last time we saw
her. Her color. Something about her was off."

It's true. I remember noticing her yellow
pallor and the way her pills stuck in her throat. Another virus? It couldn't
be, not again, but of course, deep down, I know it's possible. Deadly viruses
are the plague of our age.

The road to
Allys's
house dips and weaves. It's a road I have not yet traveled on. It winds deeper
and deeper inland, getting narrower, the trees choking the road. Is this really
a place I want to go? Does Ethan really know the way?

"She lives this far?"

"Not so far. It only seems that way when
you haven't been somewhere before."

He turns down an impossibly narrower lane. The
road is uneven, not quite paved, a mixture of heavy gravel pressed into dirt.
It is nor a road on which I can picture
Allys
walking. No homes can be seen from the road; tall scrubby bushes obscure the
view. We arrive at a driveway, marked by a simple white post with an address.
Ethan maneuvers his truck down the narrow path and we are swallowed up by
overgrown oleander, pink and white blooms brushing our windows. It is a cheery
contrast to our reality and the reason we are traveling such a long and unknown
road. The flashing of white, pink, and green briefly transfixes me.

Our tunnel finally opens up to a large expanse,
an emerald lawn skirting a small gray house with a deep shady porch. It is a
silent house, still, like it is waiting to breathe, and I brace myself against
the seat.

"Maybe no one's home."

"They're home," I say. Which
neurochips
are already reaching beyond what my neurons
know? How are they telling me? Or is it simply what they call intuition? But I
know with precise certainty. We are being watched. Eyes size up our car.

We park on the circular drive and walk up the
porch steps. Ethan's heavy boots boom against the silence. Even birds are
afraid to chirp.

I hesitate on the last step. "I'm not sure
—"

"I don't feel good about this
either."

My imagined stomach catches. "She's our
friend." It's a question as much as a statement.

"I'm not reassured," Ethan answers.

The door opens before we can knock.

"Is
Allys
home?"
Ethan blurts out.

A woman stares at us, her face blank and her
eyes dark and circled. "I remember you," she says. The hollowness of
her eyes reminds me of Mother when I looked up from my bed in the hospital in
those days that I traveled a thin line back and forth between life and death,
days where she never left my side. "Ethan," the woman finally adds.

"Yes, I picked
Allys
up once for school."

"That was kind of you." Her gaze
drifts away like she is recalling an important moment.

"And I'm Jenna," I say, holding my
hand out.

Her focus jerks back, her pupils small, hard
beads. "Jenna," she says, like she knows who I am. She looks at my
outstretched hand and slowly reaches out and holds it. She runs her thumb along
my knuckles like she is counting each one and then she doesn't let go. I look
at Ethan, afraid to pull away. She sees us exchanging glances and drops my
hand. Her back stiffens. "
Allys
isn't
well," she says.

"May we see her?"

A hand reaches around the door and pulls it
open wide.

"Why not?" a man says. He is clearly
as spent as the woman, the circles under his eyes and the lines of his forehead
speaking of days of no sleep.

"She might not be up to it," the
woman protests, blocking the way.

The man's voice is tender, barely a whisper, a
short knife in the tension that grips the house. "They're her friends,
Victoria. If not now, when?"

She steps aside. "This way," he says.
My feet don't move, but Ethan's nudge at my elbow overrides a flurry of
thoughts to flee. We follow him through the entryway and down a long hall. I
sense the woman's presence close behind, watching our moves. M
y
moves.
Before we reach the last room on the left, I stop.

I can already smell death. Memories shake me.
Smell.
It was my last connection with this world before I was swept into a dark
empty one. It is distinct, sweet and yeasty, the smell of death, like spoiled
bread, damp and swollen, coating walls, nostrils, skin, anything within reach,
trying to tag it all. Even when I could no longer see, I could still smell
death crawling over my skin.

"She's in there?" I ask.

"Yes," her father whispers.
"It's okay. She'll want to see you."

We take two more steps. Before we can even see
her, we can see medical equipment jamming the room. Suction pumps. Trays of
gauze, minty mouth swabs, cups of crushed ice, and stacks of white towels.

Ethan steps back and steadies himself against
the wall. "She's too sick to be here. Why isn't she at a hospital?"

Her mother answers from behind us. "
Allys
is assigned to Comfort Care only. Her liver is
shutting down. And her lungs. Heart. Kidneys. Shall I go on? Pretty much all of
her organs are in some stage of failure. And on top of that, her condition has
triggered systemic lupus. Her body is basically attacking itself."

"What about a transplant?" Ethan
asks.

"Which organ? She has too many involved.
The numbers add up fast. They said she is beyond saving."

"There was damage when she had her last
illness," her father adds. "We knew that. But they thought
medications would control the damage. She was doing so well. We thought . .
."

He breaks. I watch him sob, hang on to the
wall, wiping his eyes, embarrassed, and then looking down, pinching at the
bridge of his nose. His shoulders quake and soft moaning breaths escape as he
tries to suppress his grief. I have never seen my own father sob. But now the
soft breaths of this man cut through me, weaken me, and I fear I may fall to my
knees. These are sounds I have heard before. The sounds of a grown man crying
when there is nothing left to do. The sounds of my father.

I grab Ethan's arm and pull him into the room.
Allys
turns her head as we enter. Ethan can't suppress his
reaction. "Oh, God."

"You're no prize either, Ethan." Her
voice is raspy and weak.

"
Allys
," I
say. She is small, sunken into sheets and pillows, like she is already half
swallowed up by another world. Except for her right arm, her prosthetics are
gone, stored away. Her stumps barely peek from her gown. An oxygen tube lies
across her upper lip, and a large patch is pressed against her chest.

"Come closer," she says. "It's
hard to talk."

Ethan goes to one side of her bed, and I, to
the other. "We didn't know you were so sick," he says.

She smiles, her lips a weak yellow smear across
her face. "That's an understatement. I'm dying. When organs start shutting
down, it doesn't take long. I always knew it was a possibility. My parents were
in denial." She makes an effort at a chuckle. "Maybe I was,
too." She coughs, her face wincing in pain from the effort. She presses a
button on a pad near her fingertips. The patch on her chest clicks. "Sweet
elixir," she says and smiles.

"
Allys
, is there
anything we can do?" I ask.

"No, Jenna. It's all been done. This
little train was set in motion decades ago by people who thought they were
above the system. It will probably take decades more to stop it. Only the FSEB
can fix this mess we've made. But it's too late for me. With everything I would
need, my numbers would be way over the top. It's the law, remember?"

I am silent. For someone so sick, her voice is
amazingly harsh.

"Hold my hand," she says.

Ethan reaches out.

"No. Jenna. I want Jenna to hold my
hand."

Ethan and I look at each other. How can you
deny a dying person a simple wish? I reach across her bed and take her
prosthetic hand. "Your hand is so soft. Much softer than mine." She
touches gently at first, then squeezes hard. She pulls at me.
"Closer," she says. I lean down until my face is close to hers, her
sweet, sickly breaths hot against my cheek. She pushes up as far as her left
stump will allow, and she whispers into my ear.

She lets go and falls back into her pillow, and
I step back.

"What's the secret?" Ethan asks.

"It's not a secret," she answers and
then closes her eyes, her sweet elixir doing its job for another fifteen
minutes.

Ethan swipes at one eye with the heel of his
hand and clears his throat. "We should go," he says.

We say good-bye, but
Allys
has already fallen asleep.

Her father walks us to the door. His composure
is regained. He has returned to the tired man who greeted us, a circle of calm
of his own making. "Thank you for coming," he says. "I know it
meant a lot to her."

Her mother hurries out to the porch before we
leave. "You. Jenna. You live on Lone Ranch Road, don't you?"

"Yes."

"I thought so," she says. She turns
without saying anything else and goes back into the house.

Ethan and I leave, retracing the steps that
brought us here. We don't speak until we get out to the main highway.

"I guess it's moot at this point,"
Ethan sighs.

"What's that?"

"
Allys
won't be
telling anyone about you now."

I stare out the window. The landscape sweeps
past as a gray blur because I am focused on a distance somewhere between the
window and the world around me. An inexact distance that holds nothing but
Ally's words. Ethan underestimates her. "She already did," I tell
him. "That's what she whispered to me.   That's what she meant.
It's not a secret. She told her parents. She told them to report me."

A swath of red flushes Ethan's face beneath his
eyes and his hands tighten on the steering wheel. "I won't take you
home," he says. "You can come to my house. Anywhere. I'll take you
somewhere where no one will find you. . . ."

Ethan continues his desperate plans for my
escape, but I find myself drifting, wondering where Ethan's anywhere might be,
caught up in a world of maybes and what-ifs and wanting to stay there because
it is a much safer world for me to be in than the one I am.

Leaving and Staying

I almost could.

I could almost leave and never look
back.

Like Mr. Bender, I could leave
everything I was behind,