Always (62 page)

She stepped back, and all I could see was the top of her head, and it moved slightly, as though she had nodded to herself, and then she ran, and leapt, up and out, and—

“Oh!” everyone moaned, as she faltered, then crumpled as though shot, and fell like a dead thing.

Gravity seemed to triple for a moment, then adrenaline burned through my system and kicked me into hyperdrive. Kick fell in slow motion. Sound fell away. I started to draw breath before leaping—to do what, I don’t know—when my automatic processing of images caught up with my brain and I realized she was smiling. And then she thumped neatly into the exact center of the bag, and swung herself to the ground like a pro. Her grin was big enough to split the world.

Noise swelled around me: applause. She bowed, laughed.

Dornan was there, patting her on the back, saying, “Jesus, God in heaven,” and Rusen pumped her hand like a maniac. I stayed where I was. My muscles trembled with unspent power.

Then she was standing in front of me.

“Well?”

Her skin looked perfectly elastic, blooming and alive. I touched her cheek. "You were good,” I said. "I believed it. I thought you were going to die.”

“Yep,” she said. “Pretty much perfect.”

“And you used to do that every day?”

“Only higher.” She grinned. “Still want to learn? When Buddy’s done the jump I’ll pack away the Model Seventy and we’ll get out that old Forty and give it a try. Hey,” she said, as Dornan ambled over with two cups. He gave one to her, held another out to me.

“I remembered no cream,” he said. “But I put sugar in it. You looked as though you could do with it.”

I accepted the cup.

“I can also recommend the sandwiches,” he said. “Tuna or jerk chicken.”

Kick sipped at her paper cup. It smelled strange. She saw my look. “Red tea. Don’t need caffeine after that. But I could eat. Aud?” I shook my head. She nodded, then gave me a one-armed hug. She squeezed hard, then kissed me. “I’m glad you were here.”

She headed back to the air bag, swaggering slightly. Dornan said, “She’s different, isn’t she, when she jumps.”

“Yes.” Hearty and careless, unfragile, unneeding. “I think I’ll take my coffee outside. Join me?”

We sat outside on the hood of my car and watched clouds sweep in two different directions, as though the sky were being torn apart.

IF KICK
was a quarter horse, Buddy was an old steer, sinewy and raw-boned, grazed on arid land all his life. His skin was leathery and tightly stretched, and when he shook hands with the crew, I saw a scar twisting up his left forearm like a brand. He walked around the air bag with Kick and listened attentively as she talked about the testing and her own fall. His limbs were lanky, and next to Kick he seemed uncoordinated, but there was a kinship, a live-free-or-die lift of the head, a risk-calculating twist of the mouth. I looked at him, nodding and listening, unbuttoning the cheap flannel shirt, looking over the harness Kick handed him, and understood they shared a world I couldn’t. I wondered if her stunt rigger brother looked like that.

I left them talking to Rusen and the camera operators.

Finkel was in his trailer. “That was some jump of Kuiper’s,” he said. “We should’ve been rolling for that, saved the cost of this Buddy guy.”

“Mmmn,” I said. Had Kick not told anyone about her diagnosis apart from me and Dornan? I sat down. “We need to talk about OSHA and EPA. And Sîan Branwell’s PR value. Let me see her contract.”

We were both on the phone an hour later when Rusen came in, glowing. “We got it!” he said. “In one—Oh, sorry.” He made a production out of putting his finger to his lips and sitting with conspicuous quietness in a chair in the corner while Finkel and I wound up our calls.

We finished at about the same time. I nodded to Finkel and he crossed two more names off an already heavily striped list.

“What’s that?” Rusen said.

Finkel handed him the list. “We’re inviting everyone and his goddamn dog to the set on Tuesday to hang with Sîan Branwell. Well, not with her, exactly, just around her. See her from a distance. Watch a real movie being made.”

“Dornan’s idea,” I said. “The regional manager from OSHA is bringing her two children. The woman from EPA might come with her mother. Apparently her mother is a big fan.”

“Are we allowed to do that?” Rusen said to Finkel, who nodded to me.

“We all agreed that this in no way affects the official business of their respective offices,” I said. "That the public good must be considered, we must be shown no undue favoritism, and so on. What it will do is ease the pressure these higher-ups might have brought to bear on the case officers handling our paperwork because of the newspaper article. Now we’ll go back to waiting our turn in the queue; it will take time to get to us. And time is all we need.” And without Corning paying Mackie to call in every single violation, we would be in only one queue. “Also, the fire department has agreed to expedite the pyrotechnic permit, and the reporter who wrote that
Times
piece will show up with a photographer.”

“What do we have in the way of publicity stills?” Finkel said.

Rusen looked blank.

“Maybe we could strike a side deal with the photographer,” Finkel said. “So, Stan, I’m sorry, you had some news?”

“We got the shot. The fall. Perfect. All three cameras the first time. They’re already packing away that huge bag thing. We’re in good shape. Great shape. I was thinking it might be good to give folks a break.”

“It is a holiday weekend,” I said. “And we could cut some checks.”

“Bad idea,” said Finkel. “You give these people a couple days off and who knows if they’ll come back, ’specially if they have money burning a hole in their pockets. You know what these creative types are like.”

I wondered how Rusen and Finkel had met and started working together; they seemed to be from different continuums.

“What is there still to do?” I asked Rusen.

“On set? Not a lot. Rigging the pyrotechnics, which Kick says is eight hours’ work, max, even including testing. The rest has to wait for Sîan on Tuesday. We could give them Saturday and Sunday, get everyone back first thing Monday, and still have a pretty good margin for error.”

“And off set?”

“Editing.”

“Lining up product placement,” Finkel said.

“But you don’t need the crew for that,” I said. “And they’ve been working hard, and you’ve some money in the bank.”

“We sure do. Boy, Anton, I really think we should do it.”

THE CLOUDS
had slowed from scudding to drifting. One layer, moving from the southwest, looked like an indigo veil. Kick’s van was gone. I’d helped her and Buddy wrestle the Model Seventy into the back. She and Buddy would drive it back to the storage unit.

“And then we’ll maybe go out for a beer . . .”

I imagined them at a rickety table in a smoky bar, with beer and shooters, pausing in their conversation for a moment to watch some pretty woman walk by before going back to agreeing that all directors were ass-holes who didn’t know nothing about nothing.

“. . . and then I have to spend a couple of days breaking the news to the rest of the family.” On her own.

"AUD, ”
Eric said in surprise when he answered the phone. "Your mother was just about to call you. We were hoping you could have dinner with us tonight.”

“Yes. Yes, that would be fine.”

Pause. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“No more . . . episodes?”

“I’m fine.”

“Taste?”

“About the same. Perhaps a little better.”

“Good. That’s good. I spoke to my colleague the other day and he admits that they’re no nearer to determining a couple of the mystery ingredients. His guess is that it came from some illegal basement lab. It’s astonishing just how—Hold on one moment.” Muffled conversation. “Your mother would like a word. We’ll see you tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Aud, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You called Eric’s phone. Did you have a medical question?”

“I did. I wanted his opinion on MS research. But it can wait until we have dinner. He didn’t say where.”

“Rover’s. Eight o’clock. A special occasion. My negotiations are over. One last dinner together, and then we leave tomorrow.”

ROVER’S WAS
the kind of place that provoked conversations about love and art and philosophy, so while it was clear from my mother’s particularly erect spine that she wanted to talk about something specific, we kept to small talk over the first of our eight-course
grand menu dégustation:
an egg, lightly scrambled with lime crème fraîche, returned to its shell and topped with white sturgeon caviar. The tiny beads were dark olive and tasted nutty, perfect over the creamy egg.

“Were the negotiations satisfactory?”

“They were very useful. However, it became clear that the needs of the software company and the Norwegian government were very different, and would remain so, so I concluded the talks.”

“You don’t seem too dismayed,” I said.

“In any circumstances, it would be hard to be dismayed while drinking this marvelous Pauillac.”

I sipped the 1990 Haut-Batailley. It bloomed in my mouth like an origami rose, structured, geometric, and precise. “Your attitude to negotiations wasn’t always so relaxed. Was it?”

She sat up straighter. “When I was young it was all about winning, about making the other do what I wanted. But sometime in the last ten years . . . Well, I changed.” She didn’t look at Eric, but I got the impression their feet were touching under the table. “Now instead of charging at people, sword drawn, I find it much more enjoyable and productive to run alongside them, learn their stride and rhythm, whether or not we could run together in the long term. In the course of my discussions with the software company, I found that our basic philosophies were radically different, and although I could have found a way to negotiate an agreement, it would have been temporary and unsatisfactory to everyone. The government would have ended up wasting years of various departments’ time trying to enforce an openness that the company simply wasn’t capable of offering. My recommendation will be that all contracts be terminated and the state move to adoption of open source code. In the long term, it will save time and money.”

After the egg came oxtail soup, which reminded me of the lentil-and-chicken -liver soup I’d eaten with Dornan.

“In the long term, one needs true partnership for a relationship to endure. Common interests, common goals, common expectations.”

It was clearly a prepared statement, a preamble to her main point.

“Your little girl, Luz. You would risk a great deal on her behalf.”

“I would.”

“You might even risk sacrificing her goodwill in the short term in order to discuss the prospects for her long-term happiness.”

“I’m prepared, Mor. Just speak.”

“This is very difficult.”

Eric leaned forward. “Your friend has recently been diagnosed—”

“Her name is Kick.”

“Kick has recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.”

“Yes.”

“It is a very unpredictable disease.”

“Yes, it is.”

“What do you know of it?”

I put my spoon down and looked directly at my mother. “Perhaps you should tell me what it is you think I should know.”

“Like any mother, I am only concerned for my daughter’s happiness.”

“I am happy.”

“Yes, but for how long?”

“How long will you and Eric be happy?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and now I was certain they were touching feet beneath the table. “But neither of us has an incurable disease. I . . . please, Aud, I feel the need to speak.”

I could take one last sip of the lovely wine, remove my napkin, drop it on the table, say good-bye, and walk away. But there were tears in my mother’s eyes. She was not managing me, not negotiating. She was pleading.

“. . . know that you’ve heard my concerns. And after that, no matter what you choose, you are my daughter, and I love you. I will respect your choices.”

“Good. Because they’re my choices. And MS might be incurable, but it’s treatable.” Silence. “Wouldn’t you agree? Eric?”

Eric looked troubled. “The efficacy of most treatments is as variable as the disease course.”

“There’s a lot of research. You should know that. You’ve been working with those biotech companies.”

“Research is . . . well, I wouldn’t say this to anyone that wasn’t family but, frankly, there are a lot of lies.”

“I’ve read the studies. Someone at Kick’s stage can be helped.”

“The most optimistic information we have is that thirty or forty percent of people with the very early stages of MS can achieve a thirty or forty percent reduction in the deterioration of their disease.”

After a long pause, I said, “That’s not what I understood from my reading.”

“That’s not what the drug companies want you to understand. The drug companies want you to hope. Forty percent sounds wonderful—it sounds as though everyone who injects themselves with these rather far-ranging immunomodulators will get forty percent better, which is worth all the money, and the side effects, and the pain, and the inconvenience. But I wouldn’t play those odds at a craps table.”

“I didn’t know you played craps.”

My mother made a rare gesture of impatience. “Dice games are not the issue.”

“Fine. What is the issue?”

“Money,” Eric said. “Money and the lies and false hope it breeds. The pharmaceutical companies cast a rosy tint over their research pipeline and their products and their clinical trials. Consider this. All of the current recommended treatments for MS were developed under the orphan disease umbrella. It means there are tax advantages, government grants, and non-competition clauses. An orphan disease, strictly speaking, is one which fewer than two hundred thousand Americans suffer from. Most medical authorities would acknowledge that there are closer to half a million people in this country with MS. There is some evidence to support the opinion that there are very many more than that. Yet the drug companies have found their way around legislation. Preying on the hopes of ill people and their loved ones is easy in comparison.”