The woman released her grip, stood for a moment looking at them both, her eyes the eyes of a damned soul who has been told that there isn’t any way out of Hell after all. Czernas unslung two of the water bottles he carried and pressed them into her hands. “I’m sorry,” he said.
The woman turned without a word and walked back down the drive toward the gym, slim and small and fearfully alone in the glaring sun. Shango swung his bike around and walked it back across the parkway, the heat from the asphalt baking his legs. After a long moment, Czernas followed.
NEW YORK
A melodic tinkling roused Cal from a profound sleep. Within the cocoon blackness of his still-closed eyes, he tried to remember if it was Sunday, if Mom would be cooking her banana-nut pancakes.
Then recent memory sliced the image in two, and he jolted awake. He pressed himself up, safety and certainty vanishing. The sound was coming from Tina’s room. He noted Colleen and Doc had turned toward the sound as well, Colleen’s hands poised over her half-made bedroll, a disheveled Doc blinking himself toward consciousness.
Cal rose. The others followed.
Tina was sitting up in bed, the Buffy poster on the wall behind her like some protective saint. In her lap, she held the music box that had been her mother’s, clinking out tinny strains of Swan Lake. Her back again arrow straight, the sheen of her fever gone, she continued to peer downward, appearing clear-headed but lost in thought.
Tina looked up, her eyes that startling, unearthly blue, her skin eggshell pale. A line of worry etched between her brows, she lifted the box toward Cal. “Remember how Mom used to keep her jewelry in this?”
Cal nodded. The depository for the few modest but much-prized pieces that Cal had never seen his mother actually wear, only display proudly to the daughter they would someday adorn.
Tina eyed Doc and Colleen timidly, not recognizing them. Cal said, “A couple of friends.”
He stepped close, put a hand to her forehead. Mercifully cool. She turned her head aside, as if unwilling or ashamed to be touched or seen.
Cal glanced over at Colleen and Doc. They nodded and withdrew. He turned back to his sister, saw that she was again contemplating the jewelry box.
“I wonder how it felt.”
Tina’s voice was so low that at first Cal thought she was talking to herself. Her eyes, however, met his and, with a small gesture of her head, directed his attention to the volume by her bed.
It was Nijinsky’s diary; on the cover, the dancer in makeup and costume for Afternoon of a Faun, suffused with passion. Half man, half something else.
“I mean,” she continued, “to go not just a little crazy, like my variations teacher says we all are. But to lose yourself. . “
Her otherworldly gaze slid to the vanity mirror. In a voice flattened and opaque, she said, “Would you cover that up for me, please?”
Cal took a sharp breath but said nothing. He lifted a blanket and draped it over the glass. She nodded and eased back.
Cal sat down beside her, not touching her. “It’s not just you,” he said. “It’s everything. Whatever this is, lots of people have been affected. They’ll have to find a cure.”
At last, something connected, sparked life behind her eyes. “It won’t be like what I read about smallpox or-polio and stuff? Where they can save your life but. . ”
Her gaze returned to the music box. She whispered, “No one will want to look at me.”
“You’re lovely.” And she was, in all her pale strangeness. But from her reaction, Cal could see his words had been dismissed. Worse, regarded as a lie.
Finally, Cal said, “Look. There’s gonna be an awful lot of people working on figuring out what made this happen and making it un-happen. In the meantime, though, because. . well, for a lot of reasons, I thought it’d be best if we left the city for a while.”
Surprise flared, then resistance. “But what about my-!” She stopped, but he knew the unsaid rest of it. What about my lessons, my variations and barre work? The endless, obsessive attention to every nuance of the dance that might, just might secure the future she had so avidly pursued, that he himself had sacrificed so much for. To abandon that, jettison it? To leave the focus of her life like trash by a roadside?
Then her eyes dropped, and her shoulders sagged, and Cal’s heart felt a greater pain than he had known.
“Okay,” she said, and he saw her resignation, her hopelessness that it would ever be the same again, ever be what it was.
“Tina. .” Her focus remained on the blanket. “Tina.”
Sharper than he’d intended. Still, it won her attention, cracked through her glass shell to bring him a look, a presence that, for him, made her Tina. An instant in which he saw the exuberant four-year-old making up steps to a Beethoven sonata, the ardent nine-year-old helping him prep for the bar while wincing through her stretches, her every gesture now bearing the grace of a carefully choreographed move. The tapestry of their life together glowing in the spotlight of his sister’s unyielding passion.
“Listen.” His voice had again gentled. “Even if things don’t go back, even if they get worse-especially if they get worse-people are still gonna need more than food and shelter to get them through.” Cal reached out, touched her silken hair. “There’s such magic in you, in what you can do. You know that, don’t you? I watch you move, just across a room, and I find myself thinking, miracles are possible.”
I don’t know how to do this, he thought. And suddenly her arms were around his neck, very tight, and she whispered, “I love you, Cal. I love you.”
And in that moment at least, he knew that anything really was possible.
Doc and Colleen were waiting for him in the front room. “We’ll be leaving first light tomorrow,” Cal said.
Doc put a hand on Cal’s arm. “Calvin, maybe the penicillin helped, maybe not; there’s no way to know. But I’d rest a good deal more easy if I could send you off with some medicines.”
“You know what the hospitals are like.”
“There’s a man who owes me a favor,” Doc answered. “If he’s out of prison-” Cal started to protest, but Doc cut him off, heading for the front door. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quick.”
Colleen fell in alongside him. “We’ll be quick.” Now Doc was the one protesting. Colleen lifted her sweater to reveal twelve inches of Green River toothpick sheathed at her belt.
Doc raised his hands in surrender. “I never argue with a woman who has a machete.”
As she followed Doc through the doorway, Colleen paused, shot Cal a look. “Thanks for the adventure.”
He returned the look, with gratitude. But in the turmoil of his mind, all he saw were eyes entirely blue.
He had stood in the shadows of Patel’s looted market for some time now, gazing through the broken glass at the brownstone across the street, watching the woman, the dark man and the other as they appeared from time to time at a fourth-floor window. Now two of them emerged from the building into the hot slant of evening sun, headed off down the street, unaware.
That left just the one, alone in the apartment, as he had wanted it. Not that he couldn’t have taken all three quite easily; the sweet hum in his arms and legs and chest told him that. No, it was just that he wanted to give this one his full attention, and all the time in the world.
Slowly, making sure no one saw him, Stern crossed the street and headed toward the apartment.
Chapter Eighteen
NEW YORK
Cal’s eyes felt like they’d been scooped out and boiled, his muscles complained like rusty hinges, but he was determined to get everything ready before it grew dark.