"All right," I said, and I stood up, reluctantly tearing myself away from my baby watching.
"Bring them back here," Rita said, and she smiled. "They need to meet their new sister."
I headed out the door, already imagining the wonderful scene: Cody and Astor stepping softly into the room, their little faces lit up with love and amazement, seeing for the first time the tiny wonder that was Lily Anne. The scene was crystal clear in my mind, rendered with the combined genius of Leonardo da Vinci and Norman Rockwell, and I found myself smiling as I ambled down the hall to the elevator. It was a real smile, too. An actual, unfaked, spontaneous human expression. And surely Cody and Astor would soon be wearing the same fond smile, gazing down at their new sister and realizing as I had that a life on the Dark Path was no longer necessary.
For Cody and Astor had also been condemned to walk in shadows, monsters like me, flung into the darkness by the savage abuses of their biological father. And I, in my own wicked pride, had promised to steer their little feet onto the Harry Path, teaching them to be safe and Code-abiding predators, as I was. But surely the coming of Lily Anne had changed all that. They, too, would have to see that everything was new and different. There was no longer any need to slink and slash. And how could I, in this brave new world, even think of helping them spin away into that dreadful abyss of death and delight?
I could not; everything was new now. I would lead them to the light, set their feet on the path to the Good Life, and they would grow to be decent, upstanding human beings, or the best possible imitations. People can change-wasn't I already changing, right before my very own eyes? I had already had an emotion and a real smile; anything was possible.
And so with a true surge of genuine human confidence that all would soon be rose petals, I drove to the after-school program, which was at a park near our house. The traffic was in full rush-hour, homicidal flow, and I had a new insight into what made Miami drivers tick. These people weren't angry-they were anxious. Each one of them had someone waiting for them at home, someone they hadn't seen all miserable workday long. Of course they got upset if another driver slowed them down. Everyone had a Lily Anne of their own to get home to and they were understandably eager to get there.
It was a dizzying image. For the first time I felt a real kinship with these people. We were connected, one great ocean of humanity bound together by a common goal, and I found myself humming a pleasant tune and nodding with forgiveness and understanding toward each upraised middle finger that came my way.
I made it to the park only a few minutes late, and the young woman standing anxiously at the door gave me a relieved smile as she handed Cody and Astor over to me. "Mr. Um Morgan," she said, already fishing for keys in her purse. "How is, um…?"
"Lily Anne is doing very well," I said. "She will be in here finger-painting for you in no time."
"And Mrs. Um Morgan?" she said.
"Resting comfortably," I said, which must have been the correct cliche, because she nodded and smiled again and stuck the key into the door of the building.
"All right, kids," she said. "I'll see you both tomorrow. Bye!" And she hurried off to her car, at the other end of the parking lot from mine.
"I'm hungry," Astor said as we approached my car. "When is dinner?"
"Pizza," Cody said.
"First we're going back to the hospital," I said. "So you can meet your new sister."
Astor looked at Cody, and he looked back, and then they both turned to me.
"Baby," Cody muttered, shaking his head. He never said more than two or three words at a time, but his eloquence was astounding.
"We wanna eat first," Astor said.
"Lily Anne is waiting for you," I said. "And your mother. Get in the car."
"But we're hungry," Astor said.
"Don't you think meeting your new sister is more important?" I said.
"No," Cody said.
"The baby isn't going anywhere, and it isn't really doing anything except lying there, and maybe pooping," Astor said. "We've been sitting in that dumb building for hours and we're hungry."
"We can get a candy bar at the hospital," I said.
"Candy bar?!" Astor said, making it sound like I had suggested she eat week-old roadkill.
"We want pizza," Cody said.
I sighed. Apparently rosy glows were not contagious. "Just get in the car," I said, and with a glance at each other and a surly double stare for me, they did.
The drive back to the hospital theoretically should have been about the same distance as the trip in from the hospital to the park. But in fact it seemed to be twice as long, since Cody and Astor sat in complete and sullen silence the whole way-except that, every time we passed a pizza place, Astor would call out, "There's Papa John's," or Cody would say quietly, "Domino's." I had been driving these streets my entire life, but I'd never before realized how completely the entire civilization of Miami is devoted to pizza. The city was littered with the stuff.
A lesser man would certainly have weakened and stopped at one of the many pizza parlors, especially since the smell of hot pizza somehow drifted into the car, even with the air-conditioning on, and it had been several hours since I had eaten, too. My mouth began to water, and every time one of the kids said, "Pizza Hut," I was sorely tempted to park the car and attack a large with everything. But Lily Anne was waiting, and my will was strong, and so I gritted my teeth and kept to the straight and narrow of Dixie Highway, and soon I was back in the hospital parking lot and trying to herd two unwilling children into the building.
The foot dragging continued all the way across the parking lot. At one point, Cody even stopped dead and looked around as if he had heard someone call his name, and he was very reluctant to move again, even though he was not yet standing on the sidewalk.
"Cody," I said. "Move along. You'll get run over."
He ignored me; his eyes roved across the rows of parked cars and fixed on one about fifty feet away.
"Cody," I said again, and I tried to nudge him along.
He shook his head slightly. "Shadow Guy," he said.
I felt small and prickly feet on my spine and heard a cautious unfolding of dark leathery wings in the distance. Shadow Guy was Cody's name for his Dark Passenger, and although it was untrained it could not be ignored. I stopped and looked at the small red car that had caught his attention, searching for some clue that might resonate with my own inner sentinel. Someone was half-visible through the windshield of the car, reading the New Times, Miami's weekly alternative paper. Whoever it was gave no sign of interest in us, or anything else besides the cover story, an expose of our city's massage parlors.
"That guy is watching us," Astor said.
I thought of my earlier alarm, and the mysterious bouquet of roses. It was the flowers that decided me; unless there was a slow-acting nerve toxin in the roses, there was no real threat hovering around me. And while it was possible that the person in the car really was a predator of some kind-this was Miami, after all-I felt no twinge of warning that he was focused on us.
"That guy is reading the paper," I said. "And we are standing in the parking lot wasting time. Come on."
Cody turned slowly to look at me, an expression of surprised peevishness on his face. I shook my head and pointed at the hospital; the two of them exchanged one of their patented looks, and gave me a matching expression that said they were disappointed but not surprised at my substandard performance. Then they turned together and began to walk again toward the hospital door. Cody glanced back at the car three times, and finally I did, too, but there was nothing to see except a man reading the paper, and eventually we got inside.