“How was your drive?” I ask her.
“Good.”
Xavier crumples up the empty Cheetos bag, aims for a trash can ten feet away. Tosses. Misses. Goes to retrieve it, but rather than drop it in, he backs up for another ten-foot shot.
I glance at my watch. “We should probably get going. They’re expecting us by five thirty and it’s still almost an hour to the Three Sisters.” The famous mountain range wasn’t far at all from the Lawson Research Center and, coincidentally, was near the town where I grew up.
On his fourth try, Xavier finally hits his shot, and the three of us remove the cameras, the heart rate monitor, and the radio frequency (RF) jammer from the van. Even though Charlene and I have used them all before, Xavier insists on re-re-re-explaining how they work, how to keep them concealed, how Charlene would use the jammer and heart rate monitor tomorrow when she was in the chamber.
“Right.” She takes the nearly invisible monitor that’ll record her heart rate and, in a gesture of modesty, turns to the side before unbuttoning her shirt to press it against her chest, just above her heart. Xavier confirms that it’s recording her heart rate, prints out the results on the small portable printer we’re going to take with us. Then, monitor removed and shirt rebuttoned, Charlene climbs into the rental car.
I turn to Xavier. “So you’re going to get B-roll of the mountains?”
He pats his video camera. “I’ll get footage of everything around here. By the time you’re done with your little study, we’ll be ready to edit this puppy. Get it to the network. Actually meet a production deadline for once.”
“Great.” I grab the gear we’ll need and join Charlene in the car while Xavier closes up the van.
He takes off, and a moment after I start the engine, Charlene turns to me. “I saw you with that family in the parking lot. You really are good with kids, Jevin.”
“Thank you.”
“With everyone.”
“Thanks.”
A pause. “It’s been a long time since you were onstage. Do you ever think you might—”
“No.”
Another slight pause. “Okay.” As I’m backing out of the parking spot, she reaches over and gently places her hand on my knee. Despite myself, I feel a tingle of intimacy at her touch.
I stop the car. Let it idle.
“We need to get used to this,” she says softly.
“Yes.”
On the video we sent to the LRC, we’d portrayed ourselves as being deeply in love, and from what I could tell, it was one of the main reasons we’d been chosen for the study. Consequently, I know that if we’re going to pull this off, I can’t let on that her touch makes me uncomfortable in any way.
But yet it does, because in the last few weeks my feelings for her have strayed beyond the kind a co-worker can comfortably have for someone if they’re going to remain simply co-workers. Part of me knows that, yes, it’s been long enough since Rachel’s death that I should be able to move on and start dating again, but another part of me isn’t so sure that I’m over the loss in the ways I should be before delving into another serious relationship.
Charlene removes her hand. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it’s not going to be easy being a couple.”
“I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. If you’re not up to—”
“I’ll be fine.”
A moment passes. The car is still idling. “We were good on stage together.” Her voice is gentle, like a brushstroke on canvas. It’s an enigmatic statement and I do my best not to read too much into it.
She’s just trying to tell you that you’re a good actor, that together the two of you can pull this off.
“Yes.”
“So then,” she takes a small breath, “I’m not sure how to put this, but… you’re going to be alright being my lover for the next three days?”
Pretending to be your lover. Pretending.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I have a sense that there’s another layer of meaning beneath my words, a layer that I may not have intended, and a wash of slightly uncomfortable silence fills the car. Rachel’s ghost seems to drift between us. Linger beside my shoulder.
Finally, I pull out of the parking lot and Charlene nods. “Good.” But by then I’ve nearly forgotten what words of mine she’s responding to.
I merge onto the highway and head toward the Lawson Research Center. Despite the meta-analysis Fionna ran on the test results, I’m still convinced that Dr. William Tanbyrn and his team are faking it somehow, because if they’re not, if their findings are true, I don’t have any idea how to wrap my mind around the implications.
Hollow Bones
From an early age Riah Colette knew that she was different.
She would go through the motion of hugs and good-night kisses with her mom and dad and little sister, Katie, but rather than enjoying the gestures, she would only notice how firm the hug was or how wet the kiss.
Her parents and sister spoke about love, said that they loved each other, that they loved her — but she couldn’t understand what they meant, not in the sense of feeling something nice or meaningful toward someone else, which seemed to be the case with them.
Riah wasn’t blind to the cues of affection that her dad gave her — the smiles and winks and the way he would position himself just so as he brushed against her when he passed her in the hallway.
He preferred her over Katie. That became especially clear by the way he began to treat her when she turned thirteen and started to look more like a young woman than a little girl.
And then there were the nighttime visits.
Katie wasn’t old enough yet to earn that kind of special attention from their father, and at first Riah thought she should probably feel bad about it — that there was some sort of shame or injustice in her dad’s favoritism toward her, but since he was her father, she had the sense that it was a good thing to please him. And so, the times in her bedroom late at night when he would knock on her door and she would tell him to come in, well, after a while they stopped feeling so awkward and became a way of making him happy.
Besides, he almost always gave her a present the next morning — a hairbrush, a pair of earrings, new underwear — as long as she promised not to tell her mother or Katie about the visits and as long as she kept the gifts a secret. And she had agreed.
One time when Riah was fourteen and she and Katie were in the woods near the stream on the edge of their property, Katie found a bird with a broken wing and brought it to her. Katie, who was nine at the time, was clearly troubled by the prospect of abandoning the bird in the forest. “We have to help it. If we leave it out here, it might die.”
Of course it’ll die, Riah thought. All things die. So will you. Someday.
But she didn’t say any of that.
“Here,” she said instead, “let me see it.”
Riah had always been good at pretending that she cared about animals, and she could tell that her sister had no idea what was about to happen.
Katie handed Riah the bird, and she was struck by how light it was, as if its bones were made of air or the rest of its body was made entirely of feathers.
The lightness of the bird made it seem like what was about to happen would not be all that significant — after all, since the bird was so small, so tiny and young and helpless, not much would be different in the world after it was dead. Not really.
Riah didn’t know what kind of bird it was, but it had blue feathers with streaks of gray and an orangish-yellowish beak. She could see the concern in Katie’s face but felt only curiosity herself: What will it be like to watch this bird die?