“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. But that’s all that’s going to happen.” She paused. “You’re not a danger to me or my daughter, Gary. I can see that, just looking at you. And you are on Rathlin.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know enough.” A faint smile touched the corners of her lips and vanished. “Eat your soup,” she said.
“You really should,” Moira interjected, her voice serious and earnest as only a child’s can be. “Máthair makes very good soup.”
The man nodded.
“You’re sweating,” Moira told him.
He touched his sleeve to his forehead. “It’s a bit warm in here for me,” he said. The spoon sizzled as it touched the broth.
After lunch, Caitlyn went outside and stood in the sunlight, her eyes half-closed. She could hear the sea pounding relentlessly against the cliffs; to the northwest where the ruins of Robert the Bruce’s Castle were hung in moss and vines. Gulls swung over-heard in the rare blue sky, calling in the harsh voices. A few minutes later, she heard the door to the cottage open and shut again, and footsteps crunching over the gravel walk. “What did you mean, that I was on Rathlin?”
Caitlyn swiveled her entire body to turn to him. “You don’t know about Rathlin? The Belfast Infection of ’62?”
He lifted his shoulders. “I heard something about Belfast, I think. Not a lot.”
Caitlyn nodded. “I suppose it wasn’t much compared to what happened in New York the first time. Still, the outbreak was a nasty one. No one knows where it started or why, only that most of Belfast was affected. Five thousand or more people drew the black queen and died in the first day; people fled the city in droves during the panic. Afterward, the government decided that they if they wanted to bring the people back to the city, they had to show Belfast was clean and safe. They didn’t want the jokers staying around to create yet another Jokertown-that wouldn’t look good. One of the politicians got the bright idea that maybe they should just move the jokers out. Relocate the resulting Jokertown to an island. And, oh yes, make sure that they were sterile and couldn’t produce more monsters. So they moved the hundred or so inhabitants who once lived here on Rathlin and brought in the jokers, and of course the relocation and sterilizations were all ‘voluntary’…”
Caitlyn tried to give her smile a sardonic twist. “They brought maybe three or four hundred of us in before they were stopped-too many protests from the United Nations, Jokers Amnesty International, the JJS, and nearly every human rights organization. But they also didn’t move us back. To make it look better, they gave us some limited self-government.” She laughed, a sound with an edge of bitterness. “You Yanks did the same thing with your Native Americans, putting them on reservations. Officially, we’re part of the UK. Unofficially, they leave us alone and try to forget us. Eventually, Belfast got its Jokertown anyway. Most of us already here on Rathlin-the Relocated-stayed. Why not? This is our island now. There are less than two hundred of us left; we’ve gained a few people over the years who came here, but we’ve lost far more.” She paused. “Not many left. Most just died.”
“You must have come here later.”
She shook her head. “I was with the initial group. I was sixteen, then.”
The man was staring at her, and she could see him doing the calculations behind his eyes. “Thirty-three years ago… You can’t possibly be forty-nine.”
“Touch me,” she said to him. When his eyes widened, she laughed. “Go on: my face, or my arms.”
His hand reached out to her cheek. She nearly flinched, expecting his skin to be hot, but it felt nearly cool. He stroked her cheek, pressing once. She knew what he saw, what he felt: a slickness like hard rubber that would not easily yield to the press of his finger-tip. Like touching a doll’s face.
The touch, though, was nice, and his hands were gentle and his chocolate eyes sad, and the baritone of his voice was rich and deep like a cello. Almost ten years, it’s been. An entire decade since you’ve been held and kissed and loved… She tore the thought away as Gary ’s fingers dropped from her face. You can’t think that way. You can’t.
“That’s what the virus did to me. It left me a permanent sixteen. I suppose I’ll always look this way. My body’s slowly hardening, calcifying. I came here because my mother was one of the Relocated; they knew I might have been infected, but no one was quite sure at first. I know now-and I don’t need the blood test to tell me. It’s moving through the rest of me now, faster and faster. I can’t turn my neck, can’t bend over easily, can’t bend my knees or my elbows all the way. And it’s spreading inside, or so the doctors tell me. Sometime soon…” She continued to smile; she had no choice. But twin tears trickled down the ceramic gloss of her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. It was the same thing he had told her, the man who’d been Moira’s father.
“Don’t be sorry for me,” she said. “Be sorry for her.”
The man glanced back at the cottage. His gaze moved across drystone walls, erected over a century ago. Stones that would still be there long after she was gone. “Your daughter carries the virus too.” There was no question in his voice. Caitlyn nodded in reply.
“Aye. She does. When they came out with the blood test, I had her checked.”
“You said they sterilized the Relocated…”
“They did. Maybe they botched my surgery. Maybe my tubes grew back. Maybe the virus wouldn’t allow it. Who knows? Maybe I should never have left the island.” She took a deep breath, feeling the pain in her chest as muscles resisted expanding. “And maybe I should never have come back here after I did.” Caitlyn lifted her arm and daubed at the tears with the sleeve of her cotton sweater. Her arm moved like a clumsy stick. “Have you ever done something you felt was right, but you knew at the same time was incredibly stupid, something you knew would end up possibly hurting you more than you could bear?”
“Yeah,” Gary answered, his voice no more than a whisper. “I know that feeling real well. Real fucking well.”
Inside the cottage, Moira turned on one of the cassette tapes Caitlyn had bought her at the store in Churchill Bay. Her high, little-girl voice sang along with a bright, cheery children’s tune. “She carries the virus, aye,” Caitlyn said, smiling at the sound. “It’s in her blood, from me and from her father who had a minor ace, and if she’s like almost all who carry it as a latent, it will manifest itself when she hits puberty. When that time comes, I have a 99% chance of watching her either die in agony or becoming horribly disfigured for the rest of her life.” She turned back to Gary, feeling her face still trapped in the eerie smile. “I could have had an abortion. But I was scared, and I was still in love, and I was stupid. I should have had an abortion. Instead, I listened to him, the father who said he’d love me forever and who told me that after all the chance that the virus would get passed on to her was just one in four and that I should have the baby. I promised him I would. I kept my promise. And I found out that for him ‘forever’ was only until he fell in lust with some nat woman he met in the pub. By then I was so big with Moira that it was too late to do anything but carry her to term. Now I have to look at her every day and know that I’ll lose her soon… or worse. I have to look at the eyes of the people here on Rathlin with me, who stare at me and wonder what kind of monster would condemn her child to that.”
Caitlyn took a deep, sobbing breath. “That’s something I wonder myself, every day.”
Someone was pounding on the door. “Caitlyn!” a man’s voice called. “Aye ye in there?”
“I’m here, Duncan,” Caitlyn called back. She saw Moira sitting up her bed alongside. The clock on the nightstand said 7:00 AM and the sun was barely up. “Go on, girl, and let Constable MacEnnis in. Start the coffeemaker going. I’ll be right there.”