She had never spoken of it, even to Matt.
She was going to visit Bobby.
Bobby lived in a room in the east wing of a long, low building in a pine grove near the sea. His window overlooked a broad green lawn and a portion of the lot where Annie parked her car. Of course, Bobby seldom looked out the window. But maybe that had changed. Maybe he was beginning to appreciate the view. Annie hoped so.
The sign at the front door of the building said:
Commonplace but very expensive. Since Bobby moved in, Annie had been paying Wellborne the equivalent of a Park Avenue monthly rental. She had cut a great many corners. The furniture in her apartment was fifteen years old. Her salad and tuna diet was not for cosmetic purposes. She rarely bought a hardcover book, which had been the most difficult economy of all.
Worth it, of course, to know that Bobby was decently looked after.
She checked in at the desk—Wellborne was still fully staffed, the effects of Contact slow to take hold among its patients—and walked down the east corridor to Bobby’s room, 114.
She’d noticed an improvement on her last visit. Usually Bobby retreated into a fetal curl when he saw her coming. Last time she visited, he had unbent and regarded her with a solemn expression on his face… an expression, however, that Annie could not decipher. Nor could Bobby explain it. He never spoke to her. He spoke to the staff sometimes, simple food and bathroom words. But never to Annie.
Today… her hopes were high.
She crossed her fingers and said a silent, wordless prayer before she knocked and opened the door.
“Annie!” he said.
Her heart did a startled double-beat. How long since she’d heard his voice?
Almost thirty years, she thought. She remembered quite distinctly, too distinctly, the last words Bobby had spoken to her. Annie, don’t.
He had been nine years old; she had been ten. Annie, he had said. Please don’t.
He looked good today. He was dressed in clean blue jeans and a white cotton T-shirt. The T-shirt said “I LOVE WELLBORNE,” except that “love” was a heart shape. He was still way too skinny. For the last couple of years, Bobby had been a problem eater. Just before Contact, he had bottomed out at 102 pounds. The staff doctor had called to discuss intravenous feeding as an option.
Now he was eating again, and although she could see the staves of his chest through the T-shirt, she could tell he was gaining weight.
His face was terribly thin. His smile was skeletal. But it was a smile, and that was miracle enough. His eyes, deep in their sockets, twinkled at her.
“Hi, Bobby,” she managed through the lump in her throat.
He climbed off the bed where he had been sitting cross-legged watching baseball on TV. “They said I could go out today. Annie! Go for a walk with me?”
“Sure, Bobby,” she said.
He looked painfully fragile as he hobbled down the front steps onto the lawn, but Annie supposed it really was all right for him to be outside. The medical staff at Wellborne knew what they were doing. And of course, since Contact, Bobby was immortal. Like everyone else. But it was hard to convince herself of that.
He walked like an old man. He was thirty-four years old. He talked like a nine-year-old, which was how old he had been when the accident happened.
Annie walked with him across the sunny lawn. She ventured a question: “Bobby, do you like it here?”
“It’s not bad,” he said. “The food is all right.”
“You want to stay?”
He shrugged. She recognized the gesture, a particular Bobby-shrug. The shrug meant: Don’t know. Don’t want to talk about it.
“Nice day,” she said, helplessly. After all these mute years! Discussing the weather!
Bobby just grinned.
She said, “What have you been doing?”
“Watching TV,” he said. “Remembering.”
“Remembering?”
“I remember a lot. Since they came.” He touched his head—the side of it that was not quite symmetrical—and pointed to the sky: the Travellers. “Annie… guess what I remember?”
She cringed at the thought of what he might remember.
“I remember lawn tag\” And he tapped her on the shoulder and went hobbling away.
She pretended to chase, smiling to herself. All that last summer, they had played lawn tag through the long evenings. Daddy was the town doctor in Bruce, a little Canadian prairie town, a one-road grain town; of all the lawns in Bruce, the Gates’s lawn was the biggest.
Lawn tag was a simpleminded chase: under the privet hedge, past the willow tree, mustn’t stray beyond the border of the sidewalk, around back, past the doghouse. Annie, a year older, could have caught Bobby anytime. But she liked the sound of his laughter when he dodged her hand. Some evenings she tagged him once, twice, played hard to get, then let him win. Some evenings she let him win from the start.
Now… she could scarcely believe he was running again. The sunlight was radiant on the big Wellborne lawn; the air was silky cool. He moved in a slip-jointed lope, his jeans threatening to fall off his bony hips. It would have been easy to catch him.
She pretended to chase. Bobby looked back and laughed out loud. Annie savored the sound.
Sometimes, of course, he made her mad.
The hardest part of Contact had been facing this memory. But it was a memory that had to be faced: Most of Annie had said yes to the Travellers, but this memory part of her had said Annie doesn’t deserve to live.
She was ten. Only ten. A child. Impulsive. Wasn’t every child?
Bobby and Annie were playing on the roof of the house on the hottest day of summer.
It was easy to get onto the roof. Bring the ladder from the old bunk beds in the basement, step onto the tiny balcony outside Annie’s room, up to the steep and baking slope of the shingles. You could lie there and see all the way out past the water tower, past the highway, past the granaries, past yellow quilts of wheat to the horizon.
Bobby was scared of the roof. Annie always helped him up, helped him down. But she sometimes took a shameful pleasure in his fear. Bobby, the younger, often got more attention than he deserved. Bobby was the baby of the family. Annie was expected to help with the dishes. Bobby never did.
Today—well, it was hot. Prairie-summer-itchy-sunburn-tight-clothes hot. Bobby had been whining about it. So she went up on the roof by herself, hoping he wouldn’t follow.
Of course, he did.
He pulled himself over the eavestrough and scuttled up the shingles behind her, clinging to her foot until he could safely lie down. Stay still, silly, and you won’t slip. But that’s not what Annie said.
If you get scared, she said, your hands get all sweaty.
Bobby’s frown deepened.
And if your hands get sweaty… you might slip. He looked at her aghast across a space of cedar shakes and hot air. Annie, don’t.
It’s a lo-o-ong way down, Bobby.
Panicking a little, he grabbed her left foot with both hands. Hey, let go, no fair!
But he hugged it tighter. She was wearing shorts and no shoes. In the hot air, his fingers felt sticky as tar… his touch was an intolerable itch. Bobby! Let go of me!