The Affinities (18 page)

Good advice—we all nodded sagely—but easier said than done.

Amanda was still sleepy and she snuggled against me. I saw Damian's eyes linger on us a moment. He didn't seem jealous but he did look a little frustrated. Or maybe it was just the weight of the responsibilities he had recently shouldered.

It occurred to me to wonder what I might have been doing if Damian hadn't more or less adopted me a few years ago. Six months after I joined the Rosedale tranche I had been working in Walter Kohler's ad agency, putting together text and images on an Apple platform and proofreading copy on the side. The job was well paid but was only mildly interesting, and Damian told me I was wasting my time there. “Come work for me. I talked to Walter, and he's agreeable, if that's what you want.”

“Work for you doing what?” Back then, Damian's main business had been his law practice. “I don't have any legal training.”

He told me he was setting up a Tau-specific pension fund (which would eventually become TauBourse) and devoting some of the profits to pro-bono work on behalf of the Affinities, including petitioning InterAlia for greater transparency in their management of Affinity groups. He had already enlisted all the legal talent he needed, but what he wanted was a cadre of people who understood Tau and who were flexible enough to act in various capacities as needed, from driving cars to conducting research to writing briefs. Gophers, in effect, but we would be described as “consultants.” The drawback was that none of this would exercise my artistic talent.

And I surprised myself by being okay with that. Photoshopping images of puppies for pet food ads was what I had been doing with my artistic talent lately, and the muses weren't impressed. I liked Damian's passionate attitude toward the Tau Affinity and I was excited by the idea of playing a role in its evolution. Plus—no small thing—Amanda had already agreed to join his team. The work appealed to her serious side, what Lisa had once described as her desire “to do good
ferociously
.”

Since then I had driven cars for Tau, written press releases for Tau, arranged catering for Tau, rented hotel rooms for Tau, negotiated property purchases for Tau, even mopped floors (on one memorable occasion) for Tau. Damian was my boss, but we tended not to use that word. He initiated and organized the work, but we performed it collaboratively. Even the menial work contributed something to Tau, which made it bearable, and most days I was working alongside Amanda, which was more than merely bearable. In just a few years that work and those relationships had fused into what I thought of as the heartbeat and the music of my life.

Some days it made me feel invulnerable. I was Adam Fisk of the Tau Affinity, with a host of loyal brothers and sisters—almost seven million of us, according to the most recent census. Take me on and you take on my tribe. But I wasn't invulnerable, and neither was Tau, and this weekend retreat had made that obvious.

We needed to stay together where Gordo could keep an eye on us, but that didn't mean we had to stay awake all night. Professor Navarro had the bright idea of moving sheets and blankets into the living room for makeshift beds, which we did, and he promptly curled up on one of them. Navarro wasn't one of those elderly people who have trouble sleeping: he snored like a drunken longshoreman.

Amanda stretched out on the sofa, and I was about to move to a blanket on the floor when my phone buzzed. Rachel Ragland's number. A call at this hour probably meant she was drunk, either belligerent and accusatory or wanting to make tearful amends. I considered ignoring the call. The ugly word “tether” echoed in my head. I took the phone to a vacant corner of the room. “Rachel? What is it?”

But it wasn't Rachel on the other end. It was her daughter.

*   *   *

“Is that Adam?”

“Suze?” I asked.

“Adam from the beach?”

“Yep, it's me. What are you doing awake at this hour?”

“I still have the picture you drew of me. I colored it.”

“That's great. Suze, is your mommy around?”

“Yes but not awake.”

“Maybe you should be asleep, too. Does she know you're using her phone?”

“No,” she said, and for a moment I mistook the tension in her voice for guilt.

“Well, it's not a good idea to use your mom's things without her permission.”

“I'm sorry.” Suddenly she sounded near tears.

“Suze … is something wrong?”

“I
wanted
to ask her, but she
won't wake up
!”

“I don't understand. Are you at home?”

“Yes!”

“Your mom's in her bedroom?”

“
No!
She's on the
couch
! I'm looking at her
right now
!”

“What happens if you try to wake her up?”

“Nothing!”

Amanda overheard some of my end of the conversation—she sat up and gave me a concerned look. No one else was paying attention. Gordo sat by the window, his own phone in his hand, talking to one of his security people. Navarro's snoring had settled into a growling rhythm, like someone trying to start a chainsaw.

“Go to her now,” I told Suze. “See if she wakes up.”

“Okay…”

“Are you with her?”

“Yes.”

“Can she see you?”

“Her eyes are closed.”

“What if you touch her?”

A pause. “I don't want to.”

“Why not?”

“I don't want to get the blood on me.”

I closed my eyes and said, “Suze, tell me about the blood. Is Mommy hurt?”

“She cuts herself sometimes. Maybe she cut herself too much.”

“Try to wake her up. Say, ‘Mommy, wake up!' Real loud. Can you do that for me?”

She didn't just call it out, she screamed it. When she stopped, I said, “What happened?”

“Nothing! Maybe her eyes came open a little bit but they closed up again.”

“Okay,” I said, though
okay
was far from what I felt. “Okay, Suze, you need to call 911. Do you know how to do that?”

“Yeah but…”

“But what?”

“Mommy said never call 911 if she's passed out. Because people might come and take me away from her. She said just wait for her to wake up. But there's more blood this time. Your number was in the phone so I called it instead.”

“That's good, Suze, that's smart, but you're right, this time's different. Your mommy would want you to call 911. The 911 people know how to help, and they'll tell you exactly what to do.”

“I'm afraid.” It sounded as if the tears were about to brim over.

“Sure you are, but that's part of being brave. Even the bravest people get scared. That's when they ask for help, right?”

“I guess.”

“So I'll hang up, and then you call 911. Right away, okay? Don't wait. They'll stay on the phone with you until everything's fixed up. After that I'll call back and check on you. Okay?”

“I
guess
.”

“Don't guess, Suze. Just do it.”

“Okay.”

“I'll hang up now, but I need you to promise to make that call. Do you promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Say it for me.”

“I promise.”

“Good girl.”

I ended the call and looked at the phone in my hand. The phone was shaking. Because my hand was shaking.

Amanda came over and touched my shoulder, and I told her what Suze had said.

She frowned and nodded. “God, that's awful. It sounds like Rachel's a cutter.”

“A what?”

“Self-injury. It's a personality disorder. People cut themselves, burn themselves, things like that. Enough to hurt, but not enough to do real damage. So it probably wasn't a suicide attempt. You said she had psychiatric drugs in her bathroom?”

Her stash of pharmaceuticals, the kind prescribed for ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety, even a couple of antipsychotics. Most of them had been prescribed to Rachel, though I had seen a different name on a couple of the labels—Carlos something-or-other, her barroom buddy.

Amanda's Tau telepathy was acute enough for her to guess what was going through my mind. “You didn't take advantage of her, Adam. You didn't know she was crazy until—”

“Until after I took advantage of her.”

“No. You didn't do anything wrong.
Rash
, maybe, but not wrong. That's the thing about outsiders. They're unpredictable. Not always bad, but dangerous in all kinds of ways, to themselves and others.”

I opened my phone again and tried Rachel's number. I was gratified that the line was busy. I hoped it meant Suze was doing what I had told her to do.

Amanda said, “Rachel's damaged in ways you couldn't have known about. I just don't want you to be collateral damage.”

“I'm thinking about Suze. Does she count as collateral damage?” I looked at the others in the room, my tribe, all of us leaning on each other in one way or another. Suze didn't have a tribe. She barely had a mother.

Amanda took a step back and said, “What I mean is—”

I could guess what she was about to say. My welfare was more important to her than Rachel's. She didn't want me to get hurt. Outside Tau, people were unpredictable and relationships could go wrong in countless ways. Misunderstandings were inevitable. And so on.

But she didn't finish the sentence.

*   *   *

At the time—when the window glass shattered, when the drapes billowed as if an invisible finger had tugged them, when Amanda looked startled and then fell down—we didn't understand what was happening. Later, we reconstructed it this way:

Gordo MacDonald had put his security detail on alert. Marcy Britnell, a Tau from Cleveland and formerly a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was working the tree line at the western edge of the property, armed with a pistol and equipped with a pair of IR goggles, when she spotted a figure in the forest. The figure appeared to be carrying a long gun, and Marcy quietly called the news in to Gordo while keeping the stranger in view.

Gordo didn't want Marcy tackling the intruder by herself, so he told her to hold her position while he sent out a couple more of his people. And that's what Marcy did, until she saw the figure raise his weapon and aim it toward the house. At which point she leveled her pistol and shouted to the gunman to lower his weapon and stand down.

The gunman didn't lower his weapon. Instead, he began to swing it toward the sound of Marcy's voice. Marcy wasn't sure how visible she was in the moonlight, but she was taking no chances. She squeezed off a shot.

The gunman twisted to the left, obviously hurt, and reflexively fired a round of his own.

The rifle he carried was a Remington 783, and the bullet he fired went nowhere near Marcy Britnell. Instead it flew toward the house, clipped a pine bough, penetrated the glass of the sliding doors that adjoined the deck, pierced the coarse fabric of the curtains, passed within inches of the phone Gordo was holding to his ear, and struck Amanda just under her left shoulder and inches from the curve of her spine.

I looked away from her at the sound of the bullet cracking the window. I saw the curtain billow and settle back as if a wind had lifted it, and I saw Gordo pause in mid-conversation, mouth open but motionless as he tried to sort out what was happening. When I turned back to Amanda she looked perplexed. Then she fell toward me, eyes open, and I caught her.

*   *   *

In those days we liked to talk about “Tau telepathy.” It wasn't really telepathy, of course, but we understood each other so deeply, so intuitively, that it often felt that way. What we discovered that night on Pender Island was something even deeper than Tau telepathy. Call it Tau rage.

Amanda tumbled into my arms, struggling to say something that emerged as a choked whisper, and time began to stagger forward in a series of static moments, snapshots taken in a glaring light. Probably everyone else in the room could say the same thing. But we worked in concert despite our confusion. I went to my knees, Amanda's weight carrying me down. I helped her to lie on her right side. I could see the wound now, a flower of blood on the back of the wrinkled white blouse she was wearing. The wound was bleeding freely but not gushing. Her eyelids fluttered and the pupils of her eyes rolled upward.

I said, “Amanda?”

Hands pulled me away from her, and Gordo MacDonald knelt down in my place. “I'm qualified in emergency first aid,” he said, “and Marcy's on her way in—Marcy did time in Afghanistan as a field nurse. Let us look after her.”

Before I could answer he had taken a knife from his belt and cut away her blouse. Amanda gasped, a sound like water bubbling over rocks.

The exterior door flew open almost immediately. It was Marcy, breathless, with a plastic case the size of an overnight bag in her hand. A med kit, which she had stashed in the trunk of one of the cars that had come over on the ferry. She looked frazzled and breathless, but she moved straight to where Gordo was tending Amanda. She inspected the wound, checked Amanda's pulse, called her name and got a weak response. “Hang in there,” Marcy said. She turned to Gordo and added in a low voice, “We need professional help.”

“The shooter?” Gordo asked.

“Nelson's bringing him in.”

*   *   *

Damian was on the phone to a Tau contact back in Vancouver. He put down the handset and began a brief, intense conversation with Gordo. I couldn't hear what they said. All my attention was still focused on Amanda.

She was alert enough to murmur something about the pain. Marcy took a syringe from her kit and with practiced efficiency gave her a shot of morphine. Almost immediately, Amanda's eyes drifted to half-mast. “She'll be okay, Adam,” Marcy told me over her shoulder. “I mean that.”