Sanctuary. (Refuge> churches> law> the protection of person and property> the balance of the rights of the individual with those of society> Locke> Paine> rebellion> Gandhi> the lone crusader on a higher moral plain…) Sanctuary was all of that for the Sleepless. Her community. Why, then, did she feel as if Tabitha’s death had pushed her to a place where the refuge was violated (Becket in the cathedral, blood on the stone floor…)? To a place where nothing was safe after all?
Slowly Miri climbed down from the playground bubble to look for Tony, who would not have the answers either but would understand the questions. He would understand as far as she did herself, anyway, which suddenly didn’t seem very far. Something vital was missing.
What?
In late October Alice had a heart attack. She was eighty-three years old. Afterward she lay quietly in bed, pain masked by drugs. Leisha sat by her bedside night and day, knowing it couldn’t be long. Much of the time Alice slept. Awake, she drifted in drugged dreams, and often there was a small smile on her wizened face. Leisha, holding her hand, had no idea where her sister’s mind wandered until the night Alice’s eyes cleared and focused and she gave Leisha a smile of such warm sweetness that Leisha caught her breath and leaned forward. “Yes, Alice? Yes?”
Alice whispered, “Daddy is w-watering the plants!”
Leisha’s eyes prickled. “Yes, Alice. Yes, he is.”
“He gave me one.”
Leisha nodded. Alice relapsed into sleep, smiling, in that place where a small girl had her father’s love.
She woke a second time a few hours later to clutch Leisha’s hand with unexpected strength. Her eyes were wild. She tried to sit up, gasping. “I made it! I made it, I’m still here, I didn’t die!” She fell back on the pillows.
Jordan, standing by Leisha at his mother’s bedside, turned his face away.
The last time Alice woke, she was lucid. She looked at Jordan with love, and Leisha saw that she would say nothing to him, because nothing was necessary. Alice had given her son everything she had, everything he needed, and he was safe. To Leisha she whispered, “Take…care of Drew.”
Of Drew, not Jordan or Eric or the other grandchildren. Alice knew, somehow, where need was greatest. Hadn’t she always known?
“Yes, I will. Alice—”
But Alice had already closed her eyes, and the smile was back on lips that twitched in private dreams.
Afterward, while Stella and her daughter pinned up the sparse gray hair and called the state government for the special permit for private burial, Leisha went to her own room. She took off all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Her skin was clear and rosy, her breasts sagged slightly from decades of gravity but were still full and smooth, the muscles in her long legs flexed when she pointed her toe. Her hair, still the bright blond Roger Camden had ordered, fell around her face in soft waves. She thought of seizing a scissors and hacking the hair into ragged chunks, but she felt too old, too tired, for theatrical gestures. Her twin sister was dead of old age. Asleep for good.
Leisha pulled on her clothes, not looking again at the mirror, and went to help Stella and Alicia with Alice’s body.
Richard and Ada and their son came to New Mexico for the funeral. Sean was nine now, an only child—was Richard afraid that a second baby might be Sleepless? Richard looked content, looked as settled as his and Ada’s wandering life could be, looked no older. He was mapping ocean currents in a highly-farmed section of the Indian Ocean, just off the continental shelf. The work was going well. He put his arms around Leisha and said how sorry he was about Alice. Leisha knew that Richard meant it, and through her grief a part of her mind reflected that this had been the most important man in her adult life and that as he held her she felt nothing. He was a stranger, linked to her only by the biology of parental choice and the past of finite dreams.
Drew, too, came home for the funeral.
Leisha had not seen him in four years, although she had followed his spectacular career on the newsgrids. She met him in the stone-floored courtyard, bright with cactuses kept in forced bloom and exotics under humidified, transparent Y-bubbles. He drove his chair up to her without hesitation. “Hello, Leisha.”
“Hello, Drew.” He still had the same intense green gaze, although in every other way he had changed yet again. Leisha thought of the dirty, skinny ten-year-old, the gawky teen trying hard to be a donkey in coat and tie and borrowed manners, the drama major with clipped hair and retro lace-cuffed clothing, the bearded drifter with sullen eyes and weak, dangerous resentments. Now Drew wore quiet, expensive clothes, except for a single, flashy, giveaway diamond arm cuff. His body had filled out, his face had matured. He was, Leisha saw without desire, a handsome man. Whatever else he was he had learned to keep hidden.
“I’m so sorry about Alice. She had the most generous soul I’ve ever known.”
“You knew that about her? Yes, she did. And she created it for herself, with very little help from those who should have helped her.”
He didn’t ask what she meant by that; words had never been Drew’s medium.
He said, “I’ll miss her tremendously. I know I haven’t been here in years.” He spoke without a tremor of embarrassment. Drew had apparently made his peace with the final awkward scene between him and Leisha. But if so, why stay away for four years? Leisha had sent enough messages inviting him home. “But even though I wasn’t here, Alice and I talked on comlink every Sunday. Sometimes for hours.”
Leisha hadn’t known that. She felt a flash of jealousy. But was she jealous of Drew, or of Alice?
She said, “She loved you, Drew. You were important to her. And you’re in her will, but that can all wait until after the funeral.”
“Yes,” Drew said, without apparent interest in his inheritance. Leisha warmed to that. The child Drew was still there, under the flashy arm cuff and the strange career neither of them mentioned. And yet she should mention it, shouldn’t she? This was Drew’s work, his achievement, his individual excellence.
“I’ve followed your career on the grids. You’ve been very successful, and we’re proud of you.”
A light kindled in his eyes. “You watched a grid performance?”
“No, not a performance. Just the reviews, the praise…”
The light went out. But his smile was still warm. “That’s all right, Leisha. I knew you couldn’t watch it.”
“Wouldn’t,” she said, before she could stop herself.
He smiled. “No—couldn’t. It’s all right. Even if you never let me put you into lucid dreaming again, you’re still the single most important influence on my work that I’ll ever have.”
Leisha opened her mouth to reply to this—to the sentiment, to the sting below the sentiment, to the stubborn ambivalence below both—but before she could speak Drew added, “I’ve brought someone with me for Alice’s funeral.”
“Who?”
“Kevin Baker.”
Leisha’s awkwardness vanished. Drew might confuse her still, this son she had not birthed who had become something she could neither envision nor understand, but Kevin was a known quantity. She had known him for sixty years—since before Drew’s father had been born.
“Why is he here?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself,” Drew said shortly, and Leisha knew that Drew had learned, from Kevin or the datanets or somewhere, everything that had happened between her and Kevin. Sixty years’ worth of everything. Time just piled up, Leisha thought. Like dust.
“Where is Kevin now?”
“On the north patio.” Drew added to her back as she left the courtyard, “Leisha—one more thing. I haven’t changed. About what I want, I mean.”