Walcott finally lowered his raised foot to the floor. He nodded. “I’ll think about that. Do you really think I could be in actual physical danger, Ms. Camden?”
Leisha thought of Sanctuary. The queasiness returned to her stomach; it had nothing to do with what did or did not happen to Walcott. She folded her arms across her belly.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
10
Jordan Watrous poured himself another drink at the Hepplewhite secretary set up as a bar in his mother’s living room. His third? Fourth? Maybe no one was counting. From the deck cantilevered over the ocean floated the sound of laughter. To Jordan’s ears the laughter sounded nervous, as well it might. What the hell was Hawke saying now? And to whom?
He hadn’t wanted to bring Hawke. This was his stepfather’s fiftieth birthday; Beck had wanted a small family party. But Jordan’s mother had just finished decorating her new house and she wanted to show it off. For twenty years Alice Camden Watrous had lived as if she had no money, not touching the inheritance from her father except, Jordan later learned, to pay for his and Moira’s schooling and computers and sports. She had treated her money as if it were a large, dangerous dog she had custody of but would not approach. Then, on her fortieth birthday, something apparently happened inside his mother, something Jordan didn’t understand. That didn’t surprise him. Much of people’s behavior baffled him.
His mother had suddenly built this big house on the ocean at Morro Bay, where a few miles out gray whales lifted their flukes and spouted past. She had furnished it with expensive, understated British antiques bought in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Beck, easily the sweetest-tempered man Jordan had ever met, smiled indulgently, even though his wife had hired a different contractor, not Beck, to build the house. Some days Jordan, driving out to the site with his mother, had found Beck working alongside the union carpenters and their robots, nailing boards and aligning joists. When the house was finished, Jordan had waited apprehensively for what new sides of his mother might emerge. Social climbing? Plastic surgery? Lovers? But Alice had ignored their fashionable neighbors, let her stocky figure stay stocky, and hummed contentedly about her British antiques and her beloved garden.
“Why British?” Jordan had said once, fingering the back of a Sheraton chair. “Why antiques?”
“My mother was British,” Alice said, the first and last time Jordan had ever heard her mention her mother.
The birthday party for Beck was also a housewarming. Alice had invited all of her and Beck’s friends, her colleagues from the Twin Group, Moira’s graduate-school friends and professors, Leisha Camden and Kevin Baker, and a Sleepless whom Jordan had never laid eyes on before, a pretty young redhead named Stella Bevington whom Alice had hugged and kissed as if she were another Moira. Calvin Hawke had invited himself.
“I don’t think so, Hawke,” Jordan had said in the factory office in Mississippi, and with anyone else that would have ended it.
“I’d like to meet your mother, Jordy. Most men don’t speak as well of their mothers as you do. Or as often.”
Jordan couldn’t help it; he felt himself flush. Since he was in grade school he had been open to the charges of being a mama’s boy. Hawke hadn’t meant anything…or had he? Lately everything Hawke said stung. Was that Jordan’s fault or Hawke’s? Jordan couldn’t tell.
“It’s really a family celebration, Hawke.”
“I certainly wouldn’t want to intrude on family,” Hawke said smoothly. “But didn’t you say it was a big housewarming, too? I have a gift I’d like your mother to have for her house. Something that belonged to my mother.”
“That’s very generous of you,” Jordan said, and Hawke grinned. The manners Alice had drilled into her son amused Hawke. Jordan was astute enough to see this, but not astute enough to know what to do about it. He steeled himself to frankness. “But I don’t want you there. My aunt will be there. And some other Sleepless.”
“I perfectly understand,” Hawke said, and Jordan thought the matter was closed. But somehow it kept coming up. And somehow the stings got worse in Hawke’s innocent-sounding phrases, and because they were innocent Jordan felt guilty at snapping back at Hawke. And somehow now Hawke stood out on his mother’s deck talking to Beck and Moira and an admiring crowd of Moira’s college friends while Leisha, completely silent, watched Hawke with a blank expression, and Jordan slipped away to splash his third—fourth?—whiskey into his glass so fast it spilled on his mother’s new pale-blue rug.
“It’s not your fault,” said a voice behind him. Leisha. He hadn’t heard her footsteps.
He said, “What do you do for whiskey spills? Carbo-eaters? Or would they hurt the rug?”
“Forget the rug. I mean it’s not your fault that Hawke is here. I’m sure you didn’t want him to be, and I’m sure he steamrolled right over you. Don’t blame yourself, Jordan.”
“No one can ever tell him no,” Jordan said miserably.
“Oh, Alice could have, if she’d wanted to. Don’t doubt that. He’s here because she said it was all right, not because he maneuvered you into an invitation.”
The question had bothered him for a long time. “Leisha, does Mom approve of what I do? Of the whole We-Sleep Movement?”
Leisha was silent for a long time. Finally she said, “She wouldn’t tell me, Jordan,” which was of course true. It had been a stupid question, stupidly blurted out. He mopped ineffectively at the rug with a napkin.
Leisha said, “Why don’t you ask her?”
“We don’t talk about…Sleepers and Sleeplessness.”
“No, I can believe that,” Leisha said. “There’s a lot this family doesn’t talk about, isn’t there?”
He said, “Where’s Kevin?”
Leisha looked at him with genuine surprise. “That wasn’t a non sequitur, was it?”
Embarrassment flooded him. “I didn’t mean to imply—”
“It’s all right, Jordan. Stop apologizing all the time. Kevin had to see a client on an orbital.”
Jordan whistled. “I didn’t know there were Sleepless on any of the orbitals.”
Leisha frowned. “There aren’t. But most of Kevin’s work is for international clients who aren’t necessarily, or even usually, Sleepless but who—”
“—are rich enough to afford him,” Hawke said, coming up behind them. “Ms. Camden, you haven’t spoken to me all night.”
“Was I supposed to?”
He laughed. “Certainly not. Why would Leisha Camden have anything to say to a union organizer of underclass morons who waste a third of their life in zombie nonproductivity?”
She said evenly, “I have never thought of Sleepers that way.”
“Really? Do you think of them as equals? Do you know what Abraham Lincoln said about equality, Ms. Camden? You published a book about Lincoln’s view of the Constitution, didn’t you, under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kaminsky?”
She didn’t answer. Jordan said, “That’s enough, Hawke.”
Hawke said, “Lincoln said about the man who is denied economic equality: ‘When you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you?’ ”