Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (19 page)

It’s so much more than a
vague, nagging feeling of dread; it’s a distinct sense that a bomb is going to
go off at any second, and I’m going to be standing at Ground Zero when it does.
My hands tingle fiercely, which I tell myself is nothing but nerves, or maybe I
didn’t sleep as well as I thought I did and exhaustion is putting me on-edge,
but I’m not buying my own story.

I head downstairs. Mom is in
the kitchen, sipping coffee and munching on toast. She says good morning to me,
I say good morning to her. I fill a travel mug with coffee and grab a couple of
strawberry Pop-Tarts to take on the road. Mom says goodbye, have a good day, I
return the platitude, and off I go.

The Pop-Tarts are gone by
the time I reach Sara’s place. I knock on the door and Sara’s dad answers. He
greets me pleasantly enough, invites me in, calls out to Sara to let her know
I’m here. Sara trots downstairs, exchanges bland pleasantries, throws on her
coat and announces she’s ready to go.

We’re halfway out the door
when Mr. Danvers stops us, and my stress levels skyrocket when he asks, “Sara,
where are you going after school?”

“I don’t know. Coffee shop,
probably,” she says. Mr. Danvers gives her an exasperated sigh. “What? It’s a
public place, Dad, what kind of trouble could we possible get into?”

Boy, there’s a loaded
question.

“Where are you going for
homework tonight?” Mr. Danvers says.

“Missy’s place,” Sara
replies immediately, even though we technically haven’t made any such decision.
Nevertheless, this mollifies Mr. Danvers and he lets us go without any further
interrogation.

I wonder if we’re going to
see Matt today or if he’s hiding out at Coffee E again. I get my answer right
away: We cross paths with Matt outside the school’s main entrance, although he
doesn’t notice us until we call out to him.

Matt stops and grunts in
greeting. He looks like crap on a stick, like he hasn’t slept at all. Or he’s
been crying a lot. Or both. Eyes don’t get that bloodshot without help.

“Please tell me you didn’t
stay out all night,” I say.

“No. I went home,” he says.
“Mom and I spent most of the night talking. Well, I did the talking. She mostly
cried.”

I hug Matt. He hisses in
pain and pushes me away. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Sorry. I bumped into Natalie
last night. She took me to a gym to do some ‘ragework,’” he says, air-quoting
the last word. “Apparently, ragework involves driving one’s knee into my
ribcage. A dozen times. In as many seconds.”

“Huh?”

“We sparred,” Matt
clarifies. “I lost. A lot.”

“Oh,” I say, and that’s when
Gerry Yannick appears, inserting himself into our little circle like he belongs
there. He practically body-checks me out of the way, the big jerk.

“Hey, Matt,” he says. “Your
mom called Dad last night. I kind of overheard what’s going on...”

“Don’t you dare,” I say,
grabbing Gerry’s arm and spinning him around to face me. “I swear to God,
Gerry, if you give Matt any crap about what’s going on with his parents, I’ll
—!”

“What? No! I wouldn’t —
Matt, man,” Gerry says, turning away from me, “I wouldn’t do that. You know I’m
the last person in the world to give you a hard time about
that
.”

I feel like I’m missing
something
,
I say to Sara over the brainphone.

You are
, she says.
When we were
little, we were friends with Gerry
.

I do a double-take.
You
were?

Yeah, we were pretty tight
once, us and our families.

What happened?

I don’t know. When we were
in, like, seventh grade, Gerry’s mom had an affair and ran out on the family.
After that, Gerry got all distant, started hanging out with the jock crowd.

A picture comes together in
my head. Gerry’s dad, devastated by his wife’s infidelity, latches onto the
only family he has left. Gerry spends more and more time bonding with his old
man, at the cost of spending time with his friends. The dutiful son, Gerry does
whatever he can to bring a little happiness back into his sad, angry father’s
life — maybe up to and including joining the high school football team, where
he bonds with a new set of friends. The rift between his old and new lives
grows over time, but not so much that he can ignore his childhood friend when
he’s dealing with a familiar tragedy.

Sadly, it’s not enough to
remove the wedge between them. Gerry offers to lend a sympathetic ear but Matt
rebuffs the offer. “I don’t want to talk to you, Gerry,” he says. “Ever. Shove
off.”

To his credit, Gerry
withdraws gracefully. It’s almost enough to make me respect the guy. A little.

The gnawing feeling that
something big and bad is about to go down stays with me throughout the day, and
I’m too nervous to breathe a sigh of relief when the day ends without incident.
We meet up at my locker, where Matt informs us he won’t be joining the nightly
homework jam tonight.

“I’m going to stay home and
keep Mom company,” he says, and I certainly can’t fault him for wanting to be
there for his mother.

After-school coffee is a
mirthless affair; we spend the afternoon sitting in the corner, drinking coffee
and not talking about much of consequence.

I arrive home for dinner and
find Ben’s car in the driveway. “Oh, joy,” I mutter.

“First time seeing Ben after
your little falling out?” Sara says.

“It was hardly a little
falling out, but yeah,” I say. “Might as well get this over with. Maybe I’ll finally
shake this stupid Sword of Damocles feeling I’ve had all day.”

“Good luck. Give me a shout
if you need to vent.”

Oh, there will be shouting,
I’m sure, but it won’t involve Sara.

The house smells super-yummy
tonight — manicotti, if I know my dinnertime aromas, but my stomach is in such
a knot I doubt I’ll be able to choke down a single bite.

“Is that you, Carrie?” Mom
calls out from the kitchen.

“It’s me,” I reply. A couple
seconds later, Ben steps into the living room.

“Hi, Carrie,” he says.

“Ben,” I say, as cordially
as I can.

An awkward pause follows,
then Ben says, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Here we go. “Sure.”

Ben narrows his eyes
thoughtfully, a
How do I say this?
look. “Carrie, I owe you an apology.”

What the what?

“I had no right to tell you
you couldn’t spend your birthday with your father,” he says. “That was between
you, your father, and your mother, and I was wrong to get involved in a family
matter. My parental instincts kicked in, and I got carried away, and I’m
sorry.”

The apology alone stuns me
into momentary silence, but the remark about parental instincts completely
floors me.

“You have a kid?” I say.

“A daughter — about your
age, but that’s where the similarities end; Lisa’s more of a typical teenage
girl than you are,” Ben says, not unkindly. “Her mother got custody and moved
to Florida as soon as the divorce went through, so I don’t get to see her too
often.”

Ben’s situation hits way too
close to home, and I retroactively feel like crap for losing my temper at him —
although my newfound remorse makes what comes next a little easier.

“I’m sorry I flipped out at
you,” I say. “I should have handled that whole thing a lot better.”

“Thank you. What do you say
we chalk it up to miscommunication and forget about it?”

No, not good enough. “What
do you say we don’t forget about it and both try to do better next time?”

Ben smiles and extends a
conciliatory hand. “Deal.”

Another bullet successfully
dodged, Ben and I sit down with Mom for what I must say is a very pleasant
dinner — maybe the first sincerely pleasant dinner the three of us have had
together.

So why can’t I shake this
paranoia?

“Hello, you’ve reached Dr.
Bart Connors. Leave a message and I’ll call you right back.”

Right back
, Edison grumbles to
himself. Four unreturned calls over a half-hour...

“Bart, call me,” he says.
Edison waits a full five minutes before he makes his next attempt.

“Jeez, Edison,” the real,
live Bart says, “what part of ‘I’ll call you right back’ don’t you understand?”

“If you’d actually called me
right back...”

“I was with a patient. I
have a real job, you know.”

“The Protectorate is your
real job.”

“No, the Protectorate is my
other
job, my
real
job is — never mind. What do you want?”

“You near your laptop?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Fire up your secure connection.
You need to see something.”

“Give me a minute.”

Edison uses the time to lock
his office door. Trina isn’t one to burst in unannounced, but better safe than
sorry. He returns to his laptop and clicks on a desktop icon labeled PROSERV. A
small black window bearing a single word, IDENT, appears.

CONCORDE, he types, followed
by his password, and a video chat window appears in the corner of the screen.

“Connection secure,” Edison
says.

“Connection secure,” Bart
replies.

“I’m sending you the
security footage from Byrne. It contains all of Archimedes’ conferences with
his attorney.”

An icon, a tiny image of a
file folder, appears on Bart’s desktop. He clicks the folder and a half dozen
new icons appear: stylized film frames, each labeled with the tag SEMLER A and
dates ranging from December through the day before Archimedes’ aborted court
date.

“Okay,” Bart says, “what am
I looking for?”

“Watch the first recording.”

Bart clicks the icon dated
December 18. A new window pops up, its frame filled by an awkwardly tilted
overhead view of a white room — one of Byrne’s small conference rooms, as seen
from a corner security camera. The room sits empty for the first several
seconds, empty save for a table and a trio of chairs. The door slides open and
a guard enters, followed by a man in a suit.

“The prisoner will be with
you shortly, sir,” the guard says, addressing the man in the suit. The guard
withdraws. Bart watches three minutes tick by on the video’s timestamp — dated
October of last year, he notes. Archimedes arrives, a perplexed scowl on his
lips.

“Oh,” he says.

“Pardon?” the man in the
suit says.

“I thought you...never
mind,” Archimedes says, shaking his head.

“I understand your
irritation, Mr. Semler, and I apologize for the mix-up. These things unfortunately
happen, but I want to assure you that I will be your representation from here
on out.”

Bart pauses the playback.
“What am I missing here?”

“The suit’s a man named
Fresch. He’s the public defender assigned to Archimedes’ case.”

“Hm. I vaguely remember him.
He was there when the Byrne detail picked Archimedes up from HQ,” Bart says,
and that’s when the missing piece falls into place. “Wait. That was in
October,” he says, checking the video file tags again. “Where’s the video of
his initial conference?”

“Missing,” Edison says.
“Archimedes arrived at Byrne on October 28. Byrne visitor logs indicated Fresch
visited his client on October 29, but I spoke to Fresch and he said he wasn’t
there that day. There was some sort of administrative screw-up and he was removed
from the case.”

“So someone else, passing
himself off as Fresch, visits Archimedes, who later that same day walks out of
Byrne and vanishes,” Bart continues.

“Along with any video record
of their meeting,” Edison finishes.

What was it Natalie said?
Bart thinks.
Too much
coincidence to be coincidence.

“So you and Ben are good
now?” Sara asks.

“I don’t know if I’d go so
far as to say we’re good, but we’re better than we were,” I say, “so, hooray
progress.”

“Gerry acts like a human
being, Ben turns out to be a decent guy...what next, Concorde pulls a
one-eighty and inducts us into the Protectorate?”

“One can dream,” I say as we
reach the end of Missy’s driveway, a long, slightly winding path of crushed
gravel, and from the end of the driveway I can hear the thrum of music blaring
from within the house. I recognize the tune: the Foo Fighters’
Times Like
These
.

“Someone’s rocking out
big-time,” Sara says.

Sara and I reach the front
yard and, standing on our tip-toes, peer through the bow window. I’d expected
to see Missy jumping around the living room Tom Cruise/
Risky Business
style, and she is — but the music isn’t coming from a stereo; it’s coming from
an electric guitar hanging from Missy’s shoulders. She cranks away at the
instrument with wild abandon, hair flying as she headbangs in time to the
music.