“I like you when you fight,” he whispered.
She struggled for several more minutes, her rage mingling with horror. The explosion faded from the sky but the image of the plane bursting apart was still burned to the undersides of her eyelids. When she closed her eyes she saw the flames. She saw the pain in Jim’s eyes as he turned away, cut to the heart by her cold dismissal.
Nicholas kept shushing her until she lay quiet, her heart pounding, her lips crusted with sand. When she was too exhausted to fight anymore, he relaxed his grip on her wrists. He was straddling her, his weight too much for her to throw him off.
“What was in that backpack?” she howled. “What did you give him?”
He snorted. “Well, it wasn’t Twinkies and documents, I’ll tell you that much. It’s amazing, you know, the chemicals you can find in the average laboratory. Put them together in just the right way, toss in an alarm clock . . . Kapow! It was supposed to go in the Vitro building. I had it timed beautifully too. It would’ve been the perfect distraction while we took the chopper—but oh, Jim. Stupid Jim had to run off with you— well, I couldn’t have that, could I? And now I don’t have my lovely little bomb anymore. Still, it was worth it.” He looked up at the sky, at the dissipating cloud of smoke that was all that remained of Jim Julien and his plane. Turning back to her, he sighed, then smiled. “Well. I can always come up with something.”
“Why?” she asked, her voice a low croak. “What is wrong with you?”
“Don’t you know?” he asked. “I thought surely you’d have figured it out by now. I all but told you myself.”
“What? What are you talking about? You’re one of them, a Vitro, except . . . except something went wrong . . .” She couldn’t focus on him, could barely comprehend what he had done. Her mind was filled with Jim, seven-year-old Jim and eighteen-year-old Jim blurring together until her mind was filled with a red miasma of pain and shock.
“Something went wrong for Corpus, all right. Though from my perspective, something went terribly, terribly right. I never imprinted, Sophie, remember? The chip damaged the part of my brain responsible for forming that kind of bond. Or any kind of bond.”
“You’re a psychopath,” she whispered. “Like Mary. Like the others.”
“Yes . . .” He leaned down as if they were lovers entwined in one another’s embrace, making her shiver, and whispered in her ear, “Yes—I am a certifiable psychopath, Sophie. So you remember what I said about Mary, Jay, Wyatt? I was a little untruthful with you, sweetheart. I might have forgotten to include myself in that list. We’re all psychopaths. We’re the experiments that went bad.” He chuckled and kissed her, briefly and cruelly, before she could turn her head away. “They just never knew how bad.”
TWENTY SIX JIM
The worst part was, she never apologized.
He never understood why it bothered him so much. She’d never been the apologizing sort. She was proud and stubborn, and had to always, always be right. She never said she was sorry, and that was the part that hurt the most.
“Son,” she’d said, her patience infuriating him, “sometimes people fall apart.”
Sometimes people fall apart.
What kind of a lame excuse was that? As if her cheating on his dad was some kind of accident, some kind of unfortunate twist of nature, as if their “falling apart” was no different than rain at a picnic.
If people could fall apart, why couldn’t they fall back together?
But he didn’t ask, he just nodded. His fury was the numbing kind, the kind that froze rather than burned. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t argue with her. He just nodded, like a useless idiot, and let her excuses wash over him.
“You can come with me,” she’d said. Come with her to the mainland—well, with her and Lance, the Navy guy she’d been sleeping with for two years behind his dad’s back.
But going with her meant leaving Dad. Meant cheating on him the way she had. He wasn’t a cheater. He couldn’t betray the only parent who hadn’t betrayed him. She didn’t like it when he refused. That was the moment she cut him off. He saw it in her eyes, a kind of closing door, a burning bridge. “Fine,” she snapped, and suddenly she stopped caring. He never understood how she did it, how she could turn people off, cut the ties between them as effectively as if she’d slammed a coffin shut over their dead body. She’d done it before, to his uncle, to his grandfather, to her friend Bettina when Bettina finally confessed to Jim’s dad that his wife was cheating on him. And she’d done it to her husband years before, only Jim had been too stupid to see it at the time.
Once she cut someone loose, she never looked back.
You say people fall apart, Jim thought, but it’s you who does all the falling.
He remembered it was the shouting that woke him that morning. His dad, his dreamer of a dad, still hoping, never giving up on her, chasing her down the hallway and trying to take her bag from her hand. She’d wrenched it away, and the keychain on it—the one with the beads with the Chamorrita poem engraved on them—had come loose in his hand, breaking off its metal ring. He was shouting, pleading, begging her not to go, and she yelled at him to lay off, and that was what woke Jim. He stood in the doorway of his room in a pair of sweatpants and an Atari T-shirt, confused and disoriented as she swept past him. She paused, just a half step, just long enough to glance at him and say, “The lemon tree needs watering twice a week.”
Not “I’m sorry.” Not “goodbye.” Not even “I love you.” The last thing his mother had said to him was about the stupid lemon tree. She’d raised it from a seedling; she didn’t have any way to transport it to California when she left.
He’d watered the lemon tree twice a week, never missing a day, until exactly one year later on the anniversary of her infamous departure. That day, he calmly carried the tree into the yard, set it on the driveway, and lit it on fire. It had two small lemons on it. He never forgot the way they smelled, those burning lemons.
Jim’s eyes shot open, and he stopped himself from inhaling just in time. He was underwater, and if he breathed in then his lungs would fill and he would drown.
He couldn’t tell how deep he was. It was too dark. There were no lights in any direction, just inky water, as if he’d fallen into a sea of black paint. For a moment, he couldn’t even tell which way was up. What if he swam in the wrong direction? What if instead of going toward the surface he only went deeper, deeper to a watery death?
After a few seconds he oriented himself and began swimming what he was fairly sure was upward. When he broke out of the water, it was on his last stroke, his head screaming with pain and his lungs flaming. He gasped in air and then fell back underwater, thrashing and struggling. For several minutes his life hung by a thread, balancing on the outcome of his battle with the sea. Every time he found the air a wave pushed him down again, as if the ocean was determined to have him. But he fought back with all his strength until at last he found a length of aluminum bobbing on the water and he threw himself over it. Then, exhausted and panting, he drifted aimlessly for a long while as the stars grew brighter and the moon rose higher. It felt like hours, but barely thirty minutes had passed when he finally lifted his head and looked around. He was extremely disoriented, having no idea where he was or what had happened, and the memories trickled slowly through his thoughts.
The aluminum.
He looked down, then pulled away as if he’d found himself clutching a dead body. It was a piece of the wing of his plane. Bile surged in his throat, and he had to grab the wing to hold himself up when he retched, half from horror, half from being tossed by the waves.