Rainy said, “Good-bye, Pax.”
“Take care of each other,” he said.
Sandra released him. Rainy put the blanket over her shoulders.
He watched them until they vanished into the trees. He turned away, but then his knees felt weak, so he sat down there in the wet grass. He looked at nothing for a long time, as the sun tracked across the blue roof of the clearing.
Chapter 23
HE’D ALMOST FORGOTTEN the ramp.
When the van arrived, Paxton was on his stomach in the front yard, drilling through the two-by-fours into the cement foundation of the house while Amos and Paul, two argos from Alpha Furniture, held the frame steady. He’d called them yesterday in a panic. They’d built the ramp in an afternoon and delivered it this morning.
Pax got up from the cold ground, shook the dirt from the front of his jacket. It was just under forty degrees, which in Chicago would have been balmy for a December day, but here in Switchcreek felt bitterly cold. The argos stooped with their nail guns to fasten the plywood to the frame.
Dr. Fraelich had gotten out of the van, and the side door was open. His father sat in his enormous wheelchair, looking down sternly while two charlie men fussed with the chair and the winch. Finally Barron got the electric motor started, and Mr. Teestall, Paxton’s old shop teacher, held the chair while it descended.
Pax said, “How you doing, Dad?”
“I told them, I can walk.”
“Let’s not risk it right now,” Dr. Fraelich said.
“Rhonda would kill us if you broke something,” Barron added.
The metal plates touched the ground. Mr. Teestall leaned into the chair and got it rolling across the yard. Barron eyed the ramp. “Will that hold him?”
Amos, the one-armed argo, said, “Of course it will. Both of us jumped on it in the shop.”
“I’m going to have a concrete ramp installed eventually,” Pax said.
They got Harlan through the door and across the living room. Pax had pulled up all the carpets and refinished the floors, which made the rolling a lot easier. Pax stayed back as Mr. Teestall helped Harlan move from the wheelchair to the new couch. Another Alpha creation: normal-looking on the outside, but with industrial-strength springs and a steel undercarriage cross-braced like a suspension bridge. The thing squeaked loudly as his father settled into it. He shifted his weight and it squeaked again.
“That’s going to drive me crazy,” Harlan said.
“I’ll oil it before I go,” Pax said.
“Just leave that to me,” Mr. Teestall said.
Pax helped Barron ferry in supplies from the van-bandages, creams, extraction packs, cleaning solution-as well as his father’s clothes and two boxes of Mr. Teestall’s personal items. They finished just as Dr. Fraelich concluded her checkup of Harlan.
“You can fasten your shirt now, Mr. Martin,” she said, and peeled one of the latex gloves from her hands. “As near as I can tell, you’re as fit as anyone of your age, sex, and clade.”
“That’s an awful lot of conditions,” Harlan said.
“It’s the best I can do.”
Pax walked the doctor out to the van, and they waited as Barron tried to cajole the winch into lifting the platform back into place.
“Your paperwork is all signed?” the doctor asked Paxton.
“It’s in my suitcase.” He’d been officially cleared of atypical plasmids. He’d still be required to spend two weeks in a facility in Kentucky, isolated from anyone with TDS. But after that, he’d be free to roam the world.
“Let me know if you run into any problems,” she said.
“Sure, sure.”
After a moment she said, “So.”
He looked at her.
She pitched her voice so that Barron couldn’t hear it. “How the hell did you do it?”
“Hmm?”
“You not only got Aunt Rhonda to agree to home care, but pay for it too. Not to mention biweekly visits from yours truly.”
“You’re not going to like it,” he said.
“Indulge me.”
“I traded for it,” he said. He shrugged. “I gave Rhonda a gigabyte or two of data, and she gave my father the only thing he wanted-to be back in his own house.” He smiled at her expression. “I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
“You found Jo’s laptop.” He didn’t deny it. “And then you just gave it to her?”
“Well, I did keep copies-I’m not a complete idiot.” The doctor still looked shocked. “Listen, I know why Jo never pulled the trigger on Rhonda. Your name’s on half the documents.”
The doctor flushed-it was astounding to watch the blood rush so quickly to infuse her pale skin. “I didn’t know what she was doing!” she said. “Ninety percent of what I signed I thought that-” She stopped abruptly as Barron shut the van door and turned to them.
“Ready to go?” Barron asked. He saw that something unpleasant was going on.
“Just a second,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Really.”
Barron nodded, then walked around to the other side of the van.
Pax said, “It’s okay. I don’t care what you did or didn’t do-everybody does business with Rhonda. Even Jo. She wasn’t about to ruin your career by publishing that stuff. She was your friend.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Nothing, hopefully. Unless I’m forced to, and even then… I’m not sure. I’ll let Rhonda worry about that.”
“And me.”
“I’m sorry about that. I really am. But this is the only shot I had to make Harlan happy. What choice did I have? He’s my father.”
“So you’re doing this out of love,” she said skeptically.
“Or something like it.”
Barron had started the van. Pax followed her to the passenger door, and she said, “Oh, almost forgot.” She reached in and handed him a manila folder. “Your DNA sample was already stored in Atlanta-everybody in Switchcreek was sampled during the Changes. I asked a friend of mine to run it through some tests.”
“I thought all your friends there were fired.”
“Resigned. And I still have a few left there. A couple, anyway.”
He opened the folder. There were several pages. The first listed many long words he couldn’t pronounce, and many long numbers he didn’t understand the significance of.
He took a breath. “So, am I…?”
“Bad news,” Dr. Fraelich said. “For the gene sequences studied, and for the range of proteins sampled, your genetic material falls within the statistical range of only one known clade.”
He stared at her.
“My condolences, Paxton. You’re human.”
He didn’t trust himself to spend the night in the same house as his father. After supper with Harlan and Mr. Teestall he used some of his precious allotment of gasoline to drive up to Jo’s house. The doors were still unlocked, the interior undisturbed. Even the heat was on. Among other things he’d learned from Jo’s files was the fact that Rhonda had quietly purchased this house and many of the others left empty after the Changes. The banks had foreclosed and she’d bought them for a song. Disturbing, but not illegal-unlike many of the frankly criminal things he’d found in the files. And in a way, the real estate finagling spoke well of Rhonda. She was betting on the future of Switchcreek when almost nobody else was.
He walked around the house, looking at the things the girls had left behind, the books on Jo’s shelves. He opened the Dawkins book, the thick beige one on evolution: The Ancestor’s Tale. Jo had been looking for some trace of herself in the diagrams, some branch that ended in the betas and her daughters.
But the betas and argos and charlies weren’t here. They were intrusions, pages torn from some other book and stuffed between the covers of this world. This was his family tree. It should have been reassuring, to be so well documented, to have a map that told him where he’d come from, with a big red dot for You Are Here.
The tree explained nothing. For years he’d been hoping for a different answer. A diagnosis that would tell him why he felt like an alien in his own skin, an outsider, an imposter. But he’d been skipped again.