Love? he thought. You don’t know jackrabbit about love.
Cal saw Jake’s father Chuck Barnes scowling beneath his trucker’s cap. His wife sat cowering beside him like a plump beige mouse taking shelter under a cabinet. Mandy and Jake started dating last March, nearly a year ago, but it wasn’t until last week that Mandy had informed Cal that she was in love with him.
Jake had been driving the van when it left the road. Mandy had been sitting next to him in a new sweater she’d bought just for the party. He was her first real boyfriend.
The woman from Boston cleared her throat, as though she’d noticed that Cal’s attention had been drifting.
“Their lack of mobility and their inability to communicate immediately can be very difficult to deal with,” she said. “In most cases you can expect them to make incremental improvements in both of these areas. Some differently biotic people have shown marked improvements over time, to the point where many of them can move and talk nearly as well as they did in life.”
Sandy Trafton raised her hand, Bill’s arm tightening across her shoulders. The grief counselor gave her an encouraging nod.
“Why do some differently biotic people make improvements?” she said, her voice raw from crying. “How can we help them?”
That, Cal noted, earned a pale smile from Mayor Marshland.
“I’m afraid that we don’t understand the why of almost anything that concerns the differently biotic,” the counselor said. “Some studies indicate that db people respond favorably to encouragement and support.” Here she paused, her eyes flitting across the room as though to gauge who would and would not be providing encouragement and support. She stopped upon Chuck Barnes, who had crossed his thick arms, resting them upon his belly.
“Love,” she continued. “They seem to respond to love, just like any teenaged child.”
Cal saw Chuck make a comment that only his mouse-brown wife could hear. Chuck did not seem to notice his wife recoil from the comment as though from a blow, nor did he seem to notice the tears that were coursing down her pale cheeks.
“So we know a little about the how, but not the why. Since teens began returning from the dead—and new research indicates that the phenomenon may have begun as many as five years ago, much before the Dallas Jones incident—we have tried our best to study the phenomenon, but various...” She trailed off, again settling her eyes on Chuck. “...social forces have made a serious scientific inquiry difficult.”
Cal didn’t really care about a serious scientific inquiry. He just wanted his daughter back.
He wondered how he would have felt had something happened to her prior to the whole db phenomenon, back in the days when there was absolutely no hope of her returning. Would he have just let the massive tide of grief roll over him in one annihilating wave?
Mandy was dead. No matter what happened, Mandy was dead. But it hadn’t hit him yet, not in the way it should have, because he could still allow himself to believe that she was coming back. He could still deny what had happened to her because he could still hold hope that she would open her eyes and return to him.
But not everyone came back.
The grief counselor was still talking about other changes that could occur when she said something that snapped him out of his thoughts. “But perhaps the most traumatic aspect of a return that a parent can deal with is the lack of expression.”
Cal watched Bill’s hand moving in slow circles on his wife’s back and tried to swallow back the lump forming in his throat.
“Your child, if he or she returns, will not express emotions in the same way that they used to. Their facial muscles simply won’t work properly, and so much of the communication that used to pass between the two of you will be gone. You mustn’t confuse their inability to express these emotions with their not having them. I assure you, your child will be just as sensitive as they were in life, they just will not be able to show it. Do not get discouraged when your child doesn’t seem to be responding to your efforts to reacclimate them to ‘life.’”
She paused, her smile and voice softening.
“Don’t stop showing them affection and love. Your child most likely will not be able to smile, or frown, and will not be able to communicate the thousand little things that we can communicate with our eyes and mouths. It may not sound like much now, in light of what just happened, but dealing with the lack of emotional responsiveness and expression will be one of the most difficult things you will face as the parent of a differently biotic child. If you have ever tried to talk to your child when they were playing a video game or engaged in the Internet, you can imagine what I’m talking about. You will be able to see your child’s face, you will be able to see them move, but when you speak to them or hug them you will get the sense that they aren’t really there.”
“That’s because they aren’t really there,” Barnes said, his gravel voice rumbling around the room like the cough of an old pickup truck.
“I’m sorry?” the counselor from Boston said, her face going blank much like the db children she’d just been describing. Cal had been expecting this from Chuck. He was more interested in the reactions of the other parents than in Chuck’s predictable meltdown.
Chuck stood up, a sight Cal had gotten used to in town meetings when Barnes felt a school budget needed to be voted down. “They aren’t really there. They’re dead. And they aren’t ‘coming back’ or ‘returning’ or any of the above. What ‘comes back’ isn’t our children, and the sooner everyone in this room is aware of that, the better.”
“Mr. Barnes...”
Barnes leveled a squat, calloused finger at her. “Don’t interrupt me, missy. You’ve said your piece, and now I’m going to say mine. I think it is a disgrace the way that you are playing upon these poor people’s grief and loss to get them to subscribe to your warped worldview. My wife is sick—just sick—over this and you aren’t helping. Our children are dead. Dead. There’s no such thing as a return from death. What inhabits their bodies after they pass on is not of this world.”
“You are upsetting my wife,” Trafton said, quietly, but loudly enough for Cal to hear the tremor in his voice. “If you don’t want to discuss this, why don’t you just leave.”
Chuck laughed, leaning forward against the table that was too small for him. “But I do want to discuss this. I want to discuss what we should do if demons infest our children,” he said. “We should burn them. We should burn the corpses right now before they even start to come back.”
Sandy burst into a loud wailing that filled the room with her pain. Trafton came up out of his chair, and Cal could see his arms shaking with rage and frustration. Chuck Barnes, hardened from years of physical labor, and outweighing Trafton by a good forty pounds, simply looked at him and shook his head. He got to his feet after a moment’s deliberation, and Cal saw that he was smiling. Certain men took an enjoyment out of casual violence.
Cal wasn’t one of them, but sitting there, he decided that he would beat Chuck Barnes within an inch of the life their children had just lost if he did anything more than smile at Bill Trafton.
“Mr. Barnes,” the grief counselor was saying, as though she could talk the men back into their seats. “It is now illegal in the state of Maine to harm the differently biotic. It is also illegal to...”
“Laws! Laws!” Barnes said, his eyes, full of contempt, still fixed on Bill Trafton. “You think passing a human law makes something all right?”
“...interfere with the body of a deceased young adult before the requisite seven days have passed.”