His lights are fading, though, and she can’t imagine the water without them. She grabs the record player arm and drops the needle—
—and a saxophone solo wiggles atop the orchestra’s snappy chugging. This time she’s got her eyes on the creature, and his light doesn’t only brighten this water, it electrifies it, imbues it with a turquoise glow that shines off the lab walls like liquid fire. The physical objects of table and records slide from Elisa’s awareness as she is reeled toward the pool, her skin blue by reflection, her blood blue, too, she just knows it. Wherever the creature has come from, he’s never heard music like this, a multitude of separate songs so meshed in joyful unison. The water directly around him begins changing—yellow, pink, green, purple. He’s looking into the air, habituated to sounds having a source, reaching up with a hand as if to cradle one of the invisible instruments into his hand and inspect it, sniff it for magic, taste it for miracles, before tossing it back into the sky to fly again.
28
THE BOY ARRIVES at the table. He’s not like his sister. He doesn’t sneak up on you. He dumps himself onto a chair, coughs without covering his mouth, clashes his silverware. Stares right at you like a man. Between throbs of pain, Strickland feels pride. Raising kids, that’s a mother’s job. Being a model of behavior, though, that’s something he can do. He smiles at Timmy. It’s the smallest movement of muscle, but one that tightens his face, which tightens his neck, which tightens his arm, which tightens his hand, which tightens his fingers. His smile flounders.
“Does it hurt, Dad?” Timmy asks.
The boy’s hands are soapy. He wouldn’t wash up unless Lainie forced him. That means Timmy was up to something his mother found repugnant. That’s good. Testing limits is important. He’s given up trying to explain this to Lainie. She’ll never understand that germs are the same as injuries. Both are required to build scar tissue.
“A little.” The pills are starting to dull the blades of pain.
Lainie joins them. Instead of food, she lights a cigarette. Strickland gives her a cursory review. He’s always liked her hair. A beehive, she calls it, a gravity-defying pod of swoops and tucks that must take some skill to maintain. But recently, coming home late from Occam tired or drugged and seeing the hairdo upon Lainie’s bed pillow, it looks like something from the jungle. A spider’s egg sac, bulging to expel a whorling fury of spiderlings. They had a solution for this in the Amazon. Gasoline and a match, unless you wanted infestation. It’s a horrific image. He loves his wife. Right now is a hard time. These visions will fade.
Strickland picks up his knife and fork, but keeps his eyes on Lainie as she mulls her insurgent son. Will she show her fear at what the boy is becoming? Or will she try to take control over him? He finds the struggle interesting the same way he finds the asset’s survival under laboratory conditions interesting. In other words, both are futile. In the case of boy versus mother, the boy eventually will win. Boys always do.
Lainie blows smoke from the side of her mouth and selects a tactic Strickland knows from interrogation procedure as “sidestepping.”
“Why don’t you tell your father what you told me?”
“Oh yeah,” Timmy says. “Guess what? We’re making a time capsule! Miss Waters says we have to put in guesses for the future.”
“Time capsule,” Strickland repeats. “That’s a box, right? You bury it. Then dig it up.”
“Timmy,” Lainie prods. “Ask your father what you asked me.”
“Mom said you do future stuff at work so I should ask you what to put in there. PJ says we’ll have rocket packs. I told him we’ll have octopus boats. But I don’t want PJ to be right and me to be wrong. What do you think, Dad? You think we’ll have rocket packs or octopus boats?”
Strickland feels all six eyes upon him. Any army man worth his bars knows the feeling. He suspends Operation Omelet, sighs through his nostrils, and looks from face, to face, to face. Timmy’s antsy expectation. Tammy’s pie-faced slackness. Lainie’s restless lip-chewing. He moves to fold his hands, thinks of the pain that will cause, and instead sets them flat on the table.
“There will be jet packs. Yes, there will. It’s only a matter of engineering. How to maximize the propulsion. Keep the heat down. Ten years, fifteen tops. By the time you’re my age, you’ll have one. A better one than PJ has, I’ll see to it. Now, an octopus boat, I’m not sure what that is. If you mean a submersible we can explore the ocean floor with, then yes to that as well. We’re making big strides in pressure resistance and water mobility. Right now, at work, we’re doing experiments on amphibious survival.”
“Really, Dad? Wait till I tell PJ.”
It might be the drugs. Warm tendrils rope around his muscles, scrunching the pain like snakes scrunch field mice. It feels good to see this look of veneration on the boy’s face. To see blind admiration in the face of his little girl. Even Lainie suddenly looks good to him. She still has a fine figure. Wrapped so tightly in that apron, so crisply ironed with that expensive Westinghouse iron. He pictures the garment’s straps, knotted into a hard, tight ball at the small of her back. She deciphers his look, and he worries that her lips will twist, repulsed at him the same as she’d been at Timmy. But she doesn’t. She half-closes her eyes, what she used to do when she was feeling sexy. He takes a deep, satisfied breath and, for once, there is no retaliatory shot of pain.
“You betcha, son. This isn’t some Communist rat hole you live in. This is America and that’s what Americans do. We do what we have to to keep our country great. That’s what your daddy does at the office. It’s what you’ll do, too, someday. Believe in the future, son, and it’ll come. Just wait and see.”
29
LAINIE REFUSES TO keep track of how often she’s returned to the Fells Point ports. She goes when life becomes too heavy to haul and thinks about tossing herself after it, but the water level is low from lack of rain and she’d probably just break her neck. Then where would she be? In a wheelchair, stuck in front of the television for good, shoving the Spray ’N Steam until she could stand it no longer and melted Richard’s shirt, melted the ironing board, melted herself until the whole mess was a pastel-colored puddle Richard would have to get steam-cleaned by a pro.
She believes the lizard Timmy was torturing is called a skink. If she saw a skink on the porch, she’d broom that icky crawler into the shrubbery. If she saw one inside the house, well, she’d stomp it dead. She tries to convince herself what Timmy did is the same thing. But it’s not. Most kids are curious about death, but most kids also feel reflex shame when adults catch them poking carcasses. Timmy, though, had looked at her in irritation, like Richard does when she presses him about work. She’d had to collect her courage, and quick, before insisting that he flush that thing down the toilet, scrub his hands, and get to breakfast.
After he’d finished, she stepped into the bathroom to make sure the skink wasn’t clawing its way back up the bowl. Then she took a minute to appraise her mirror reflection. She patted down springy hair. Pinkied her lipstick. Pulled her pearls so the largest ones rested in the hollow of her throat. Richard didn’t look closely at her these days, but if he did, would he see the secret she kept? Even Timmy, she thought, had gotten close.