The Wonders (32 page)

Minh pulled an olive satin cloak from the pile and brushed it straight before holding it up against Leon. “No, makes you look too pale.” She rummaged deeper into the pile. “How about this one?”

The cloak of synthetic fur looked like a mangy pelt—the shabby trophy from a hunt of the colonial era. Another of Kathryn's jokes.

Leon still hadn't told Minh about the time he should have listened to Hap and urged him to act on his fears. She had heard many times the story of how Leon and Christos raced out of the entertainment center instead of staying with Kathryn in a tight safe group as Hap had ordered them to do. But it was always Christos telling the story.

Maybe he could have helped Kathryn, maybe he could have saved a life, maybe he could have changed something for the better, maybe he could have become a better man, maybe his actions would have ruined everything. He didn't know. But he did know that he hid these things from Minh because he was afraid they would diminish him in her eyes. A cascade of shoulds tumbling back to his childhood.

Leon took the scrappy cloak and lifted it to his shoulders. The Velcro straps barely met around his throat. He tore the Velcro away, tossed the cloak onto the pile and took a few deep breaths before bracing himself and choosing a pale green cotton cloak that settled loosely around his shoulders.

“Now what?” he said. He was unworthy of wearing Kathryn's cloak. He would have to tell Minh what he had done. Minh reached over and touched his arm. Leon placed his hand over hers and changed his mind for the hundredth time. He could never tell her. He must never tell anyone.

Christos slammed a fist on the table. “Now nothing, Leon. Think of Kathryn. Honor her.”

S
HE HAD CONTACTED
Leon and asked him to meet her in Manhattan. At first he didn't recognize her. The gray hair that used to hang over him as she examined his chest was clipped close to her scalp. She wore an oversized scarlet shirt and a teal scarf on top of white linen pants. Back in the basement she was always in black pants and a pastel shirt covered by the lab coat that had grown more stained and threadbare as the year of Leon's surgeries wore on. Here in the diner she stood when he moved toward her. He quickened his pace. He wanted to push forward and embrace her, and yet it wasn't her, it was a new Susan, and he had to respect that.

“Leon, I'm so sorry about Lady.”

Her hand reached out and without thinking he took the hand and shook it. They stood beside a booth in the diner on Seventh Avenue. When Leon went to kiss Susan on the cheek she pulled away and made out to be adjusting her clothes before she settled into the booth again.

“It's a tragedy. I truly am so very sorry,” she said, once they
were sitting facing each other. “It unsettled me in ways I hadn't imagined.”

An old-fashioned chrome-and-red-vinyl bar ran the length of the diner, opposite the booths. Glass domes covered muffins and pieces of pie. A waitress came over with her pen and pad poised, and listed the lunch specials in a monotone. They ordered the soup of the day.

“Susan, I . . .” Leon wasn't sure what he wanted to say, even though he had been fretting about it all the way down from Overington. He had asked the driver to turn down the radio to give him space to think. Now he wished he had made notes or rehearsed the conversation the way Minh suggested. “Thank you for contacting me. I wanted—”

“I shouldn't have ordered food,” Susan interrupted. Behind her another waitress was reciting the specials to a pair of customers. “This isn't social. Leon, I've contacted you because I have to make a confession.”

He could see their soup coming. Two big steaming bowls of crimson tomato soup carried precariously by their bored waitress. She landed the plates on the table and pushed them toward Leon and Susan. The soup rocked inside the bowls.

“I want to give you money,” he said. “However much you need. To make hearts for people who can't get them. I'm very very rich. I'll be rich for the rest of my life.”

Susan dropped her forehead to the V of her hand and rested her elbow on the table. She was silent for a moment. Leon took a breath, ready to persuade her, but she spoke first.

“When we sent you off with the new heart and I took Howard to the coast for his last few weeks, I was so angry, Leon. Angry at Howard's final year spent in a basement, hiding, working madly. Angry at his ambition, at his stubbornness, even at
you. I spent a year watching him deteriorate. You know we did what we did because he was dying.”

“I know,” Leon said. “I know and I'm more than grateful.”

“Yes, but you don't understand. After he died, I decided that we had wasted that time. Sure, we saved you, but one life? One life in exchange for our last year together? I wished we hadn't known he was dying. If we hadn't, he would have worked at a normal pace, thinking he had years to complete his project. We could have spent our time like normal people. We could have drunk wine and swum in the sea and traveled. But no, he had to finish that work because he knew he was dying. So I decided, Leon, that it was better if people didn't know they were dying. That no one should know how much time they had left.” She paused.

The hollow deep rumble of traffic and the hooting of horns washed into the diner as a man held open the diner door and spoke a few words with an acquaintance passing by. Leon leaned forward to hear better as Susan went on.

“Then Lady Lamb and the whole kidnapping thing. It was so shocking—taken in her prime. And, Leon, I realized I was wrong. I thought about how young you are. You do need to know. It has to be your choice how you spend your remaining time. The problem is the battery. Inside the heart, sealed in there, is a battery that will run out. We had no choice. At the time we had no other way to power the heart, and the design didn't allow an external battery, so we used Howard's experimental metabolically recharging battery. It has a limited life.”

When the man crossed back to his seat at the counter, the tide of noise receded with the slowly closing door.

More I would, but Death invades me,
Leon remembered. “How long?”

T
HE IRONY DIDN'T
escape Leon. What use was being a Wonder when after all the suffering, the surgery, the pain, the training, the struggle to become something more than human, you simply died like everybody else? Kathryn had died, and he would follow soon enough. Maybe one more year, maybe, if he was lucky, three or four. The hype of the Wonders had made him feel immortal. What a fool.

After Kathryn's death there were some celebrations: the fundamentalists who had feared and loathed Kathryn called it a triumph that someone had assassinated her and held religious services to give thanks. The rest of the planet mourned. The data world and the real world were swamped with images of Lady, poems to Lady, tributes, TV specials rushed out with montages of footage and hasty interviews with people who hardly knew her, instant books and magazine articles and rambling online posts and conspiracy theories and flowers, flowers everywhere.

At Overington the road was blocked for a week by the vigil
of mourners and onlookers and the flowers piling up until they began to rot underneath, and the stench became so bad that the local authority sent in a bulldozer to clean up. Leon caught a whiff of the sickly sweet putrefaction one day as he sat beside the open window. People were milling around outside, weeping, calling out “Lady” as if Kathryn could hear, still tossing bouquets and dolls and heart cushions onto the fetid overblown mounds along the fence, just as they had years before when that English princess died. What drove them to be so incensed with grief for a woman they had never met?

Three weeks later, news broke of a young actress's botched breast surgery. Her televised sobbing pleas to young women to love and respect their bodies blanketed the media. The herd swerved and galloped after her, leaving Kathryn's memory behind. Bookings at plastic surgeons soared, even as the images of the actress's mutilated breasts were beamed around the world. The fans who had bought skintight suits modeled on Kathryn's wool dropped them off at charity bins until the charities said they would not accept any more, and a month after that, Kathryn and the other Wonders' paraphernalia was being carted in truckloads to landfills.

During this time, Leon and the remaining house members drifted around Overington in a lethargic stupor of misery. The air began to gather an autumn chill as the building louvers rotated with their slow solemn fanning. Maisie and Maximus ambled through the grounds on their daily constitutional and Agnes kicked up her heels with two new ponies that had been sent by a retiring television trainer. Rosa the chimp had a new companion as well, a pet chimpanzee confiscated from a convicted drug dealer who had arrived at Overington half-starved and fearful. That gave Yuri a task to keep him occupied and not thinking constantly about Kathryn—the rehabilitation of the
new chimp and the appeasement of a jealous Rosa. After a few weeks, Christos buried himself in planning for his next project. Rhona and Hap took a vacation in Italy.

Leon and Minh took over the kitchen and the common room. They cooked and ate and read and talked and held each other. Minh sometimes asked what Leon was thinking. He couldn't tell her, not yet.

In the time that fame had untethered the Wonders from the earth, they had drifted in a layer of high atmosphere, insulated in their private jets and penthouse rooms from the ordinary human world.

Death ended that. The loss of Kathryn made everything seem worthless, pointless. With the passing of the days, reality dawned on Leon, the image in a telescope sharpening with each turn of the focus ring. They were normal people with tricked-up bodies and a whole lot of money. The only one of them who had profoundly changed had been Kathryn. She was a mistreated woman in an unhappy marriage who was destined to die of a horrific disease. When she was cured of the disease and the wool grew, after she had escaped the torments of her husband and been rescued by Rhona, she metamorphosed in other ways. She said that her wool had nurtured her instead of being a reminder of her affliction. The wool curled tight against her skin in an elastic layer, stronger and more resilient than skin, continuously growing, twisting, tightening against her body in a snug caress. “I am strong, Leon,” she said once. “I used to be weak but now I am strong and solid. I'm not afraid to be alone anymore.” She was not afraid to be alone, but neither was she alone. She loved her family at Overington. They loved her. Minh may have taught Leon how to love a woman, Christos may have named family as the thing that mattered most, but it was Kathryn, he had come to understand, who had brought them together as family.

And he had married Minh under false pretenses. He had promised her a lifetime together, thinking that a lifetime was long.

As the weeks trudged on, the more the Overington team tried to melt into the background of the celebrity culture, the more rogue journalists pursued them for a “one month after” or “how are they coping now” story. So while everything was being prepared for the full retirement of the Wonders, on balance it seemed easier to turn up to an occasional opening or event than to hide away and be hunted. Tonight it was a charity event at the Mandarin Oriental to raise money for clinics in Africa. Minh and Yuri were already inside, having entered by the mortals' door.

Rhona escorted the Wonders, as usual, down the carpet in the center of the golden ropes that kept the public away from the stars. Behind her came Leon and Christos. Between them a terrible absence where Kathryn should have been. Leon and Christos walked closer together, as if to fill the gap, but the space between them ached like a phantom limb. Studio lights were trained on the carpet. On the flank, in a special area set aside for interviews, camera operators and interviewers with microphones of all shapes and sizes shifted from foot to foot and peered anxiously as each car pulled up at the curb. They called names and greetings and enticements as the celebrities stepped out of the vehicles. “I heard you're in love, Jennifer!” “We're running a whole show on your new movie, Eve!” “Kevin, Kevin, over here.” On the other side of the carpet the paparazzi also were shouting and screaming names, and buoying them up on a raft of noise below was the bubble and chatter and cheers of the crowd of onlookers.