After Mind (18 page)

“I said go. Now! Cessini. Leave,” Daniel said.

“That’s right, you tell me what happened to your robot,” the man yelled after him. “You tell me how it all burned.”

Cessini was mortified. He had never seen such wrath.

“Get out of here. The both of you,” Daniel raged. He jumped up from his bench.

Robin picked up the ScrollFlex and stood. She spoke directly to the screen. “Ruined is a data center taken down by a twelve-year-old boy. You want a test and repair lab? You just got it. You want the world to know all of your facilities, everyone’s memories, everyone’s dreams can all be destroyed by one boy?”

Cessini slipped his arm from Meg’s pull. Robin locked him into her narrow gaze as she held the screen beneath her tensed face. “You think your obsolete facilities will last? You don’t think I’ll sue you for negligence? That boy, whose name is Cessini by the way, and everyone who worked there, could have died in that preventable fire.”

Meg pulled Cessini away from the tent into the middle of the walkway.

“What didn’t you do to protect all of them?” Robin backtracked into the tent. “What was in the floor, the walls? What did you know about that building that you did nothing to fix, and you let it all burn?”

Daniel stood. His eyes found Robin’s as she sat before him, straddling the bench.

“DigiSci is your largest lease tenant,” she said. “I work for DigiSci Corporate. Dr. Luegner is a close friend of mine.”

Daniel’s boss paused. “They’re going to file a massive claim against us,” he said.

Cessini followed Meg away in the relative calm of the backwash after the first wave. She smiled as he accepted the pull of his arm. The prize fowl barn was only ten yards away. She seemed to know it was the best time to leave. The massive tide was about to return.

“I can speak directly with Dr. Luegner,” Robin said. “I can tell you he won’t.”

“Come on, Ceeme,” Meg said. “Let’s go see something nice. The birds always made us laugh.”

Back in the opening of the acoustic U, the ScrollFlex was silent, its bezel paused. “I’ll get back to you,” Daniel’s boss said, then was gone.

Robin’s hands shook. She snapped the screen back into its case and held it up for Daniel. He refused it. “Dr. Luegner wouldn’t want to see me and Meg broken,” she said as if that were all there was to it.

Meg stopped.

“Now is the time, Robin. If there’s something you’ve never told me,” Daniel said.

“Go on,” Meg said to Cessini. “I’ll be right there. See the birds. You go. I’ll stay.” Her few steps ahead couldn’t hide what she wanted to hear. She hooked around to the left of the prize schedule board and onto the trampled grass by the plywood fence.

Cessini let her go and entered the barn’s doorway.

She slipped down the outside of the fence, squatted onto her heels, and rested the back of her head on the plywood. She looked toward the barn.

He rolled back from the door into a shadow. He could still hear if Robin and Daniel spoke up, but he could no longer be seen. The soft and fluffy silkies were the quietest birds caged at his end of the barn. The loud ducks and geese were at the far end of the two long shelves. A low table of incubated chicks was tucked away beyond the shadow of the entranceway for children to see, but not touch.

The familiarity of Daniel’s voice was easier to read by watching his lips. “Is he Meg’s father? Is that her secret?” he asked, unsure.

Robin gazed from the tent. She didn’t look over the fence. “No. I told you before. Her father was Michael Longshore. She knew him. She met him. He was a foreman. He died trying to save someone at work. That’s it. There’s nothing more.” Her hand trembled the ScrollFlex back into her purse.

Meg rolled the back of her head against the wood fence. She glanced across to the barn, but couldn’t see. Cessini was in the dark. So maybe that was it, Cessini thought, she wanted to be strong, to be like her father, to watch over him like her father did selflessly for someone else. That had to be it. It was her secret revealed. Cessini was flattered, accepting of her. But he kept listening and then realized as Robin kept trembling and looked away from Daniel that, no, that wasn’t all, there was more.

“Then what could Luegner possibly owe you so much that he would turn his back on all this without a fight?” Daniel asked.

“Nothing,” Robin said, then she slammed her purse on the bench. “I owe him.”

“You owe him? For what? Tell me. What in the world could you be so indebted to him for?”

“For Meg,” she said, relenting. “He’ll do it for Meg.”

Meg cupped her hands over her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut as fairgoers passed.

“What about Meg?” Daniel paced, looked toward the barn but saw nothing.

Cessini forced himself to hear. He came an inch out of the shadow and stared across the walkway.

“Luegner saved her once and he’ll do it again,” Robin said. “But swear you’ll never ask me what he gets in return.”

“How can I swear—I don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

“Nothing. Just swear it! I’m the one who has to live with what I did,” Robin said. She shot up from the bench. “Just me, so swear it.”

Meg tightened her fists over her ears and buried her elbows between her knees.

“I swear I won’t ask,” he said. “But what do you mean, he saved her once?”

“Her heart,” Robin said at the light of the entrance. “It’s her heart. Or, no heart.”

Cessini zeroed in on Meg. She was rocking in a seated fetal position.

“She was born without a heart.”

Cessini looked up at Robin. What he thought he heard or read on her lips was impossible. Meg rocked in pain, her knees drawn tight up into her chest. Her pose was familiar, but she was never further from the sweet little girl of three curling her knees up on a doctor’s waiting room chair. If he went out there to her, Robin would see him, stop talking, and he had to hear on his own.

The top mesh door of the incubated chick cage popped open with a pang. Cessini’s bully tormentor, now grown, had flipped it open. In defiance of a “Look but don’t touch” sign, the boy reached in past his elbow for a sleeping yellow chick. Then he stopped and looked up into the darkened frame of the entranceway.

“Oh, hi, Cessini,” the boy said, stilled. “I heard about what you did at the data center. That was really tough. Stay strong, big man. Stay strong.”

Cessini’s eyes were still shocked from the sunlight outside, but he knew through the shadow the sound of his once-bully’s voice. The boy stroked the back of the chick’s head with his knuckle, and then returned it gently to its lamp.

Cessini turned back to the sun.

“You couldn’t tell from looking at her,” Robin said. “But when she was born, she looked so beautiful to me. She breathed. But blood flowed directly into her lungs. She was drowning as soon as she started breathing. They grabbed her away for an ECG, but they didn’t come back for hours. I knew something was wrong. They told me what she had was so incredibly rare.”

Cessini squinted. Did he hear right? Could she have? The bully was quiet and moved on down the line of the shelves. “Goodbye, Cessini. Take care.”

Cessini ignored him, and edged out into the sunlight.

Meg butted the back of her head against the fence.

“The doctors just stood there,” Robin said. “‘Just tell me what’s wrong?’ I asked. She had a complete antrioventricular septal defect with a double inlet left ventricle.”

Meg bit onto her crossed arms to muffle her cry.

“All I could say was, ‘What?’ Her lips were blue. She was so small. They told me to take her home and let her die in my arms. I begged them. I said, ‘I can’t do that, I can’t. Do something. Anything, but don’t let my sweet baby girl die in my arms.’”

Daniel said nothing.

Robin opened her soul. “I swore an oath,” she said, smiling a bit. “And Dr. Luegner approved an experimental surgery. DigiSci had developed a valve. It was small and round, made of organic material that would grow with the patient, with Meg. It had particles infused that would glow blue when oxygenated, or warn red on a scan if it failed.”

Cessini clung along the outside wall of the barn. He approached the mouth of the arena. All they had to do was look up and out. Meg was hidden from view behind the schedule board and side of the fence.

“To her, on her earliest scans,” Robin said, “she said it looked like four round grapefruits glowing blue inside her chest. And so she used to tell everybody that when she was a little, little baby, she had eaten four grapefruits. I never dared to correct her. It was just so beautiful to hear her voice alive and able to say anything like that at all.” Her fingers shook uncontrollably as she wiped a tear from her eye. “Now Luegner monitors her heart remotely. Controls it.”

Cessini came forward through the waves of the crowd like driftwood finding its shore.

“Why didn’t she tell Cessini?” Daniel asked. “She could have told him. What was she thinking?”

Robin laughed and slapped Daniel’s shoulder. “She was thinking the same as she always does. Sea Turtle Rescue. She thinks she’s the turtle; she’s trying to rescue herself, make herself feel better. She’s conditioned herself to play every day, thanks to you and that old, beat-up tickle tablet, or whatever you want to call what you made. She thinks if she stopped playing, her heart would, too. We should take that thing away from her already. It’s not healthy.”

“Cessini, out of anybody, would understand.”

“She doesn’t want him to know. She says she doesn’t want him to think that ‘Only a defective girl could love him.’ Her words, not mine. So, please, for her sake and mine, don’t you tell him. Okay?”

Meg rose up at the edge of the fence, horror-stricken with both hands clenched into fists against her chest. “Don’t you tell him!” she yelled. “Don’t you ever tell him!”

Cessini walked out from the drift of the passing crowd. His narrowed eyes locked with hers that were frozen wide in panic. He broke her stare with the swiftness of a calmed and controlled omission. “Tell me what?” he asked.

And on the electric tram ride through a field back to their car in a faraway lot, not another word was spoken. They drove away under a gray swirled sky that passed into night. Cessini closed his eyes in prayer that no more ill would come over their home. Daniel opened their front door with his rattle of keys that broke the silence.

Cessini, standing alone in the bathroom, brushed his teeth with dry baking soda, and spit.

He adjusted his bearing in the dark of his room. His pupils swelled and moonlight broke through his vertical blinds. He felt his way toward his bed. A small shadow formed along the edge of the water pond in the glass tank on his shelf.

He clicked on the stem of his penlight with his thumb and shined a local moon spot of light. His mangrove rivulus lay on its side in the sand, a fin angled up into the air. Its eyes stared long, but still moved and saw him. Its mouth opened and closed in shallow gasps that became thinner and further between.

Cessini lifted a small oral syringe from the shelf, and with the top removed from the glass tank, reached in past both elbows. He drew up two teaspoons of water into the syringe from the pool at the base of the log and dribbled a few drops onto the back of his fish. It seemed to look his way, its breath seemed to relax, and as it aged in its final wetted moments on its shore, it somehow seemed to be happier in the company of water after all.

Cessini left his little creature to its own silent peace and sat down on the edge of his bed. He mourned a moment that would soon come for his friend. Their time together dripped away as the mantle-breath of his bellows lamp counted down by threes. In the quiet, he heard Meg fall to weeping in her bed next door through the wall. What he overheard must have been true. Maybe she was the more pained of them all. He lowered his penlight away from the tank and returned his rivulus to its shadow.

He pulled his cover up to his chin in the absence of breath, rested his temple to his pillow, and let the weight of his head sink in. If anything good had come of that fair, it was that he knew that Meg, in her silence, was more like him than he had ever believed. They were different, but equals. And though muffled by a wall, he could still hear her cry. What pain worse than no heart could Robin have possibly sworn away in her oath to a doctor named Luegner?

Five years before at Cessini and Meg’s first fair together, Meg had taken his elbow and walked him away from his tears. The shadows of younger memories shifted across his mind as he heard her weep herself to sleep, then fall deeper into the night’s silence. If he breathed his last breath, he would tell her the truth. He had heard. And she didn’t have to be alone anymore. He could take care of her, too, and with that, he knew, it was time for him to grow up.

ELEVEN

SHE WAS HERSELF

A
BLUE, SETTLED haze made visibility poor as Cessini’s nighttime victor, Ceeborn, came into focus and searched out over a darkened, wet expanse below him. He was stronger, more determined; braver, not at all fearful of the water rushing beneath the platform of the gondola he was riding. Waves covered by a membranous skin rushed by below as he traversed a cavernous tank. The gondola’s platform was hung by fibrous tendons that spanned the inside of the tank from one fleshy wall to another. He grasped the frame of the platform in his fists and leaned his body farther out over the waves. Light from the gondola’s four corner posts helped with spots through the darkness as he searched for the source of the cry of his name.

“Ceeborn! Over here, help! Can you help me?” Daniel called as he struggled to stay afloat at the surface.

Ceeborn let go of the gondola’s post and dove headfirst, breaking through the skin that covered the water.

The water in the tank was warm and divine, and beneath its quiet turbulence it was serene. But Daniel’s legs treaded high above, so Ceeborn swam up from underwater and surfaced beside him.

“You’re here,” Daniel said as he grappled for life, dragging them down together, and locked in a struggling embrace. An undertow pulled them into a deeper current, and as Daniel drowned, the contortion of his face was awful, his mouth gasping. Ceeborn let go and watched Daniel’s last glimmer of life drown away into a deeper funnel of water and through the aperture of a valve in the wall.