“So why do we let them dictate to us?” Quinn wondered. Her head bobbed at the stairs. “Those three. Especially Kai.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Then what exactly do you see? He’s got the Benefactor, so he’s got the money. Wouldn’t your life be easier with a couple grand a month more?”
“It’s a firewall.”
“Like you and Tinkerbell, huh? And what if you or Kai get caught. Where does that leave us?”
QUINN More or less feared Shane, and then resented herself for being afraid. Shane’s eyes were sleepy, dark brown pools, and they simply betrayed nothing. No matter how much she dug into the woman’s past, utilizing every tool at her disposal, there was nothing there before roughly 2013. Obviously, “Shane Acosta” was not her real name and yet that identity tracked. She looked like a real person, and Quinn could not figure out how she’d done it. It scared her that this frazzled single mother, who couldn’t find a babysitter for her kid, might be smarter than her. Which was why, when she’d heard Shane awake and moving in her room, she’d gone downstairs and turned on the TV. To see if she could get her alone for a moment, away from the men. To put out the first simple feelers.
“There are contingencies in place. This woman—Tinkerbell— had to beat multiple brain scan polygraphs. She’s the real deal, and she’s putting herself at just as much risk as we are.”
Quinn picked up an empty beer bottle that wasn’t hers and began to glumly scrape the label free from the coffee-dark glass.
“Shane, if you want to broach subjects that no one else will…” Outside the window, dawn had begun to crack the night, and there was that eerie blue-gray glow overcoming the woods. Quinn had a cruel and excited look, like a sorceress about to conjure black magic into the room. “I’m with you. One thing you should know, though. If we get caught”—a burst of winter wind rattled the windowpanes—“I have a bottle of prescription painkillers that I’m going to eat like cereal.”
On their last day, over dinner, talk turned to Kate Morris and A Fierce Blue Fire.
“We should thank our lucky stars,” said Kai. “They’re so obsessed with Morris, they have no idea what they’re looking for. That’s why I was saying PRIRA is our friend. Eviscerating civil liberties is every Fed, cop, and politician’s first approach. It keeps them looking at all the wrong people in all the wrong places.”
“And that dumb floozy helped to pass it,” said Murdock.
“I think,” said Allen, “that you folks should accept the idea that her movement has been complementary to ours. We’re not antagonists.”
“Yeah, screw that,” said Kai. “She spent ten years pretending at revolution while she eff-you-see-kayed celebrities and spread memes. That’s the Left, Allen. It’s a Facebook page that occasionally sends its troops into the streets with cute signs before they hit the yoga studio.”
“Mama,” said Lali from the seat beside her. “I need a spoon. The fork doesn’t work.”
“She was the climate reality show du jour,” said Quinn. “But now she’s learning what all women learn: Don’t get crow’s-feet or they’ll recast your ass.”
“I still wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers,” said Murdock.
Shane slammed her fork down on the table. “Could we please give it a fucking rest?”
KAI It wasn’t like he didn’t share her disdain for the quasi-celebrities the climate non-movement kept spitting up. Hell, that was one of the first things he and Shane bonded over when they met in NOLA. This wasn’t about Morris, though. For her to snap at them like that, something else must be going on. He’d been worried about Shane all weekend. She had a nervous edge to her, and he’d catch her face twitching like she was gritting through some kind of chronic pain. The way she looked at Lali worried him especially.
Lali popped her head up, alarmed more by the tone than the F-word. They were all looking at her now.
“I’m just so sick of everything about that woman.”
There was a moment of quiet, and then Allen said, “Okay. New subject.” And they all moved on.
After dinner, Lali was riled up, jumping on the bed in her pajamas and giggling while Badman Kai swooped around the room using a blanket as a cape. It was only in this moment that Shane realized Lali was saying “Badman” when she meant “Batman.” This was another one of her malapropisms that actually made more sense, like how she called the shuttle bus that zipped around KU’s campus the “shuffle bus.” It did sort of shuffle, and Batman was a bad man, the spoiled son of a billionaire waging his own one-man paramilitary war. When she played Tracy Chapman, Lali would sing her favorite song loudly and enthusiastically, “Don’t you eat all the shiny apples / Don’t you taste all of my fruit.”
“Lali, time to settle down,” she said.
“I’m settling down!” Lali shrieked happily, then starfished backward onto the bed with a whoomph of the mattress and a giggle like the Joker. It took her and Kai another ten minutes and a mix of stern and sweet to cajole her under the covers. She worked herself into the crook of Kai’s arm as he began to read to her.
Ever since she made the decision to not drive two states over to find a clinic, it felt like seven years of failure. From forgetting to take folic acid to prevent spina bifida, to all the meconium they had to suction from Lali’s lungs so that Shane couldn’t hold her, and for an hour she thought her baby was dead. Lali didn’t have a “social smile” until well past eight weeks. She didn’t walk until twenty-one months, and she’d been nonverbal for nearly two years. At seven months, Shane had taught her to blink her little eyes hard whenever she heard “¡Ojitos!” But the ordeal of getting her fluent in one language destroyed any determination she had of raising her with two.
Kai turned a page, and Lali’s ojitos grew heavy. Then, of course, there were the things no one told you in any parenting class: like how despite having another human being with you all the time, you’d be unbearably lonely. You’d ache for touch in a way you’d never ached in your life. Shane had gone the clichéd route and started sleeping with her boss. Because Teddy, overweight and friendly with the staff, had so looked and sounded like a manager who would sexually harass her, she gave him too much credit when he didn’t. Still, he offered touch, and sometimes she needed that so badly.
“You okay with her?” she asked Kai.
He nodded. “We got this.”
“We got this,” Lali repeated sleepily.
“ ’Cause we’re what?” Shane asked her.
“ ’Cause we’re outlaws,” Lali replied on cue.
“Okay, mi amor. Duerme bien.” She kissed her on the forehead.
Downstairs, she found the living room empty and saw Allen alone outside by the firepit. He’d whipped up a real blaze.
“The little one’s asleep?” he asked.
She took a seat in the Adirondack chair and felt the heat from the flames on her legs. “Almost. Finally calmed down. She’s driving me a little crazy.”
“They’ll do that to you.”
Shane resisted pointing out that Allen’s wife, Emmy, had done most of the work raising their kids while he pursued a career in academia.
“Earlier, Lali kept throwing acorns in the air?” said Allen. “It was all she wanted to do.”
“Oh. She…” Shane laughed and shook her head. “She figured out this thing about bats.”