The Dig (43 page)

“Very well. I had to ask. Tah-tah, all! I’ll hopefully be back within a fortnight.” She turned and opened the door.

“Hang on a sec,” Peter called behind her. She paused on the step and glanced back. “You know that package is going to be in Meier’s hands tomorrow. It might be a bit easier for you to convince
him
to let you take it on a field trip.”

Tuni smiled. Jon? Oh,
very
easy.

“You’re out of your lovely mind, Tuni,” Dr. Meier told her twenty-six hours later. “The freedoms of the field have clogged your once logical mind.”

“It’s six hours, tops, Jon. Don’t be a fuss-pot. By the way, is that a new sweater vest?”

He shook off the compliment and hugged the open box closer to his chest.

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for this package?” he said. “I woke up at five this morning to get here early just to
wait
by the dock for FedEx.”

“You are a great man, Jon. I understand the sacrifice. Not quite the magnitude of
Matthew’s,
of course, but definitely agonizing. Let me cure your pain again in six hours, okay, dear?” She stepped closer to him and leaned down, prying the box from his hands.

He made a halfhearted attempt to hold on to it, but he knew it was useless. Had she intentionally given him that glimpse of cleavage? She didn’t have to, but he was appreciative nonetheless.

As she sauntered away like a runway model, he called behind her, “You take care of that thing as if it were Matt Turner himself, understand?”

“Cheers, Jon. I’ll send your love to Matthew.”

Matt sucked his lemonade through the straw and pretended his father wasn’t staring at him. He reached for the plastic fork and began to shovel mashed potatoes into his mouth. While he ate, he hummed nervously and rotated his ankles beneath the sheet. The awkwardness became unbearable, and he reached for the remote, pointing it to his new room’s corner-mounted LCD television.

“That’s pretty rude, Matthew,” his father said. “I’m not here to watch you eat and flip through channels.”

“Hmm, no?” Matt replied sarcastically. “Why
are
you here?”

“I’m here to help you… and to talk to you.”

“Right,” Matt nodded exaggeratedly. “I’m just not sure I’m in the mood to help you clear your conscience.”

“Boy, I was here every single day, making sure they—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that the last few times. You fluffed my pillows, you yelled at helpless nurses. Admirable. You should be knighted.” He stuffed a chunk of meatloaf into his mouth.

“Boy, I know you despise me, but I didn’t do any of that for myself, understand? You think it’s all some sort of atonement for…
ahem
… my guilt.” Matt nodded and smiled his agreement. “But I—that’s why you need to… ah, damn it, forget it. I told her you didn’t want to hear any of it.”

“Mom was right. Listen to her, please.”

“I’m not talking about your mother, son. I’m talking about your
girlfriend
.”

Matt swallowed a half-chewed bite of meatloaf.

“Tuni?”

“Yeah, the black girl.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Matt exclaimed. “You’re still such a racist.”

“How is that racist? Is she not black? I’ve had many conversations with her, okay?”

“Right, Dad, awesome. That’s almost as rich as having black friends.”

“This is ridiculous,” his father said, standing up. “I came here to try to fix what I did—fix it for
you
, not for me, okay? I… I know what
I
got. It can’t…” He reached up and shielded his eyes, his voice cracking. Matt let him continue. “What I got inside me, it can’t be fixed. There ain’t no ‘clearing my conscience,’ okay? There’s nothing I could do to fix that.”

“Look,” Matt said without venom. He tried to keep his chest from quaking—
not in front of him.
“Mom and Iris are in the cafeteria. Go find them and get yourself some lunch. I don’t want to argue.”

His father dropped his hand, revealing his reddened eyes and tears. They looked at each other; it was hard for Matt not to look away.

“When I saw you every day—all the tubes and crap going into your veins and everything—well, I couldn’t help thinking about Jessica Harris…”

Matt stiffened. “Nope. I don’t want to talk about that.
At all,
okay?”

“. . . and how I did that to you. I didn’t give you any choice. You… your little arm with the IV jabbed in it. I thought it was the fastest way—the
only
way… let you get to the end of the imprint. Son of a bitch was doing who knew what to that little girl, and you could save her. That’s all there was to it. I never put it together, you know?”

“Look, I said no…”

“She was twelve; you were twelve. I see it now. For a while now. I know I was just as bad as him, the kidnapper, you know? Except I was doing it to my own goddam son. Four days, I had her torn shirt on your hand.
I
put you through that. I knew what you must have been experiencing. And you came out of it; you tried to be strong. You had seen the other house and told us where to go, and we got her. Bullet in that piece of shit’s head. We got her out of there.”

Matt began to lose his composure and began squeezing his face and ears.

“And what did we do while she was being taken care of and fawned over and going through all her therapy and loved by everyone? We took you out for pizza. Goddammed
pizza.
I think about it every day. There’s nothing I can say or do to undo it, son. So no, my guilt will stick with me until I die.”

He walked out, and Matt screamed inside. He had let him get in his head.
Now
I
feel guilty about
him
feeling the way he should about what
he
did!

He rubbed at his eyes and tried to get his breathing under control. He was shaking with every breath, and he realized he hadn’t been overcome like this since he was thirteen—when Dad thought it would be a great idea to have Matt and Jessica Harris meet in person so she could thank her savior. Yeah, that would show Matt how it was all worth it! He’d stop complaining and help with more cases!

Matt pushed the food tray away and reached for a tissue. He blew his nose.
Ugh, that was horrible,
he thought, and took a deep breath. God, was Tuni
ever
going to call?
Why did she go back to Kenya? She just handed me off to Dad at this place and hopped on a plane. Guess she really got into the whole “excavating old stuff” thing.
What was I thinking?
They had known each other for, what, a week? She hadn’t even led him on.

“Hello, Matthew,” said a blend of South African and English accents.

He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway, a brown box in her hands. He tried to speak, then focused his strength on not bursting into tears.
Damn it, now I’m all raw! Horrible timing!

“Hey,” he finally managed to say.

Tuni smiled as if holding back tears of her own. She stepped in and set the box down on a chair before walking to his bedside, where she rummaged in her purse for a moment.

“Sorry… hang on,” she said as she searched. “Ah-hah…”

He smiled and opened his mouth, and she popped the piece of gum in.

“I figured after two months you probably needed it pretty badly. Now, I’ve a couple of other things for you.”

She watched him and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. They stared at each other in silence until she finally stuck her cupped hand out in front of his mouth. He crossed his eyes, looking down at her hand.

“What?” he said.

“Spit it out, dear.”

He did, and she rolled the gum in a tissue, setting it aside, and leaned close to him. He felt her breath on his lips and looked at her eyes. He’d never really seen them so close. She put her hand behind his head, closed her eyes, and kissed him passionately. Putting his arms around her, he pulled her closer, and she climbed onto the bed with him.

A woman’s voice from the doorway said, “Oh… ,” but they ignored her and she must have left.

A few minutes later, an older nurse poked her head in and asked Tuni to move off the bed if they must carry on so in this facility. They laughed, and Tuni slid off. After wiping her lipstick from Matt’s face with a tissue, she grabbed the chair from the corner, pulled it close to his bed, and plopped down on it.

“Sooo…” Matt said. “When did we start, um… maybe my memory is a little rough…”

“Hush. Don’t ruin it.” She reached into the box. “. . . and the final thing I’ve brought you…”

“Wait—was the gum the first thing?” he asked, grinning.

“Yes,” she replied with an eyebrow flick.

“When can I have more of the second thing?”

“Plenty of time for that, dear. But I only have four and a half more hours with this one before it has to go back.”

He tried to lean forward to see, but his abdominal muscles were still weak and unresponsive. Her hands reappeared, holding the shoulders of a full k’yot middle minus the holdstrip. He looked at the center of it and saw that it was fully intact.

Definitely not mine—er, Irin’s, that is.

“They dug that up at the site?” he asked, reaching out for it.

“Whoa, crazy man! Are you trying to
touch
it?”

“Oh, God, what am I thinking? I… I guess I’m so used to touching them—can you grab some gloves from that box there?”

Tuni found the box of latex gloves and pulled out a pair. He slid them on and ran his fingers down the threads.

“No,” she answered. “This was not at the site you knew. This is from a different place. I take it you haven’t been watching the news.” She smiled cunningly.

“No. They just have basic cable, so I’ve been watching the Discovery Channel and National Geographic since they moved me in here yesterday. What’s happened? I don’t know
anything.
My dad tried to tell me some stuff about Rheese and Hank, but I pretended I wasn’t interested, and he stopped trying. So they found Hank? And did they ever catch Rheese? You know he did this to me, right?”

“Well, everyone figured as much after he fled, but no one knew exactly how he did it. Specialists wanted to run CT scans of your body—apparently, it’s standard practice with comas—but your father wouldn’t allow it. He said that
you
wouldn’t have wanted it.”

“That’s true,” Matt agreed. “You know a CT scan is like two thousand X-rays all done at once? And it’s not like it was a normal coma. He knew they wouldn’t find some brain anomaly keeping me knocked out. Although I’m still not sure what he stuck to me—do you know anything?”

Tuni blushed and looked away. “Actually… er, Pete and I sort of gave you a once-over to look for something on your body, but we couldn’t find anything.”

“You
what
? Did you, like, fully strip me down? What did you see?”

“Well, Pete did, actually. I was sort of
there—
anyway, it’s not important. There’s so much more to talk about. Your father’s theory was that Rheese must have ground up a piece of the k’yot and injected the metal powder into a muscle or something. He said the tiniest little bit would still have an imprint. Seems to be a bit of an expert on you, actually.”

“Yeah, I was his guinea pig for a long time.”

“So anyway, in the end, he said to leave you alone and let you ride out the imprint. That he ‘guaranteed’ you’d awaken on your own. I said I’d stay with you and wait, and I did for a few days here, but then Dr. Meier called and told me what Pete had found. I decided I needed to be there for both of us.”

“You mean the k’yot there?”

“No, Matthew, I mean the metal dome this k’yot was excavated from.”

M
ATT LEANED OVER TO
T
UNI AND
pointed to his ears, mouthing,
Thanks for thinking of the earplugs.
She smiled and gazed out the window. Lulled by the muffled beat of the helicopter, he clasped his hands together and squeezed. He felt stronger than he had before any of this; the physical therapy had improved his physique while retraining his body for normal use. Breeze had told him he had progressed faster than most but that he was also fortunate in having only a couple of months of inactivity to work through. That had been four months ago, and he had bought a home gym to try to keep it up.

Tuni slapped his sleeve, and he turned to see her bouncing in her seat. He leaned over and peered out her window.
Oh, my God,
he thought,
it’s huge
! Even though he had seen news video from helicopters over the sites, they looked so much bigger in person. In the distance he could see a massive clearing with vehicles and equipment everywhere. Tuni pointed farther to the left, and Matt could see another clearing, separated from the larger one by a half mile of forest. Both clearings were dotted with tree stumps.