From Black Rooms (24 page)

Natalie clicked her fingernails against the steering wheel, waiting for Calvin to turn toward her, but he didn't seem able to. "You want to go talk to her?" she asked, making no attempt to conceal her dislike for the idea.

"No." He rol ed up his window. "Drive." Natalie maneuvered the Volvo out of the driveway. As they rode away from the condo, neither of them could keep from watching Tranquil ity get into the red Mazda she'd parked across the street.

Natalie remembered the way Calvin had looked at her as they shared the sofa bed, the kiss they'd almost consummated. The sudden appearance of another

woman threw a penumbra of mistrust over al the

feelings of the previous night. Had Calvin simply been

"whoring around," to use Tranquil ity's choice phrase?

"So who was that?" she asked Calvin. Her tone cautioned him that his response would answer several unspoken questions, as wel .

"A mistake." Despite the green contact lenses he wore, she could see the genuine shame and fear shining in his eyes. "I swear."

"I don't doubt it," Natalie said, her voice warm with arch amusement. She could hardly hold his past

mistakes against him while they were stil running from one of hers, could she?

Tranquil ity had distracted Natalie so much that she'd forgotten to check whether Sanjay Prashad was tailing them. She was actual y relieved when she saw the black Mitsubishi framed in her rear-view mirror, for she needed to monitor him in order to lose him.

As planned, she and Calvin arrived at Downtown

Disney as the morning crowds awaited the opening of Disneyland. After parking the Volvo, they strol ed together through the open-air mal between a tropicalthemed restaurant styled as a fire-spewing stone temple and a four-colored cartoon edifice of specialty

boutiques and souvenir shops. Out of the corner of her eye, Natalie caught a glimpse of Prashad's diminutive figure darting through the throng of mil ing tourists to keep pace with them.

She hitched the handle of her canvas tote onto her shoulder to cue Calvin, who veered off into a store that vended Disney-character clothing. When forced to

choose whom to fol ow, Prashad stuck with Natalie, as she had hoped. She led him in and out of several

establishments, pretending to window-shop, tarrying long enough to give Calvin time to change clothes and transfer their luggage from the Volvo into her dad's car, which Wade had parked in a lot adjacent to theirs. Then she ducked into a women's restroom, where Prashad could not fol ow her, and changed out of her T-shirt and jeans and into the sundress she'd folded into the tote bag. She also swapped her short, black wig for a brown, shoulder-length one, traded her boots for flip-flops, and donned a pair of Minnie Mouse sunglasses--as unNatalie an outfit as she could cobble together. Prashad did not fol ow her when she emerged. Instead, he lingered outside the ladies' room and goosenecked his head to peer inside every time the door swung open, attracting any number of affronted scowls from the women who passed in and out.

Natalie looped back to the parking lot where her

father's Camry waited, employing her peripheral vision to make sure that she'd left the Corps Security agent behind. Calvin stood beside the car as she approached, but she would not have recognized him if she hadn't known whom to expect. He wore a pair of her dad's old Dockers, which were an inch too short for Cal, a

Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that he'd bought in the store where she'd left him, wraparound mirror shades, and, to cover his bandaged scalp, a cap with a pair of jumbosize Mouse Ears.

"Whaddaya think?" he asked, modeling the outfit for her.

She chuckled. "Your own mother wouldn't recognize you."

"She tries not to." He jerked his head toward the car.

"We should probably get moving. Your kid's already asking 'Are we there yet?' " He opened the front passenger door for her. Although he feigned

nonchalance, Natalie could hear the constant whisper from his moving lips.

"I
pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of
America, and to the Republic for which it stands...
Apparently, the Alphabet Mantra did not work as wel as it had at first, so Calvin was experimenting with others. The revelation made Natalie uneasy.

With Cal ie and Wade in the car, she didn't have a chance to chat further with Calvin about Tranquil ity. Indeed, little conversation of any kind occurred during the drive to LAX. Since Natalie stil worried about her nine-year-old being smothered by an exploding airbag, she made Cal ie sit in the backseat, next to Calvin, which only made the girl sulk even more. Calvin was too preoccupied to mind, though, for a new wave of knocking souls inundated him. The Pledge of

Al egiance failed him, so he switched to Beatles tunes, singing the lyrics to "Nowhere Man" and "Yesterday" in a baritone thin and reedy with desperation. Cal ie growled and covered her ears, while Wade ignored the proverbial elephant in the car by concentrating on his driving to the exclusion of al else. Al Natalie could do was cast an anxious glance over her shoulder and tel Calvin, "It's going to be okay." She began to wonder if that were true, however.

The situation did not improve when they got to the airport. The tension increased even before they got out of the car, when Natalie insisted that her daughter wear dark glasses to cover her violet irises while they traveled.

"Why do I need to put on these lame glasses?" Cal ie flailed the shades, which, like Natalie's, featured Minnie Mouse on their plastic rims. "I don't care if people know I'm a Violet."

Natalie exhaled to calm herself, wondering if she'd gone too far in cultivating her child's self-esteem. She was glad that she'd raised Cal ie to be proud of who and what she was...except when they needed to travel

incognito. "Honey, we don't want to attract attention."

"Why not? Violets are cool. Even he wants to be one." The girl glared at Calvin, who stil hummed Lennon and McCartney hits with frantic shril ness. Her patrician disdain would have made Simon McCord proud.

"T
hat's enough, young lady." Only later did it occur to
Natalie that this was the first time she hadn't cal ed Cal ie "baby girl." She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned over the seat back until her eyes were inches from her daughter's. "It's for your own safety. Now, you can either wear the glasses, or I can get you a pair of contacts like Calvin and I have. Would you like that better?"

"No." Cal ie pouted, but lost some of her nerve. She slid the shades on with a haughty air, as if it had been her idea to wear them al along.

Having subdued Cal ie for the moment, Natalie

redirected her concern toward Calvin. Facial tics tried to distend and reshape his expression, and his failed mantras fragmented into gibberish. Occasional y, an exclamation such as "Help" or "Don't" burst from his mouth in a pitch and inflection that did not belong to Calvin. These abortive inhabitations became so frequent as Natalie escorted him into the terminal that she might as wel have been taking him through a graveyard.

"Good thing we aren't attracting any attention," Cal ie murmured to her mother, as Calvin's mental-patient mumbling drew the stares of everyone they passed. Wearing a pair of black leather gloves that she'd dug out from among her old teen-rebel wear, Natalie kept a tight hold on Calvin's hand and prayed they wouldn't have trouble getting through the security checkpoint. In anticipation, she'd taken off his Mouse Ears so that the guards could see the gauze she'd wound around his scalp. She would have given him a pair of her Playtex gloves to wear, too, but she worried that his bizarre appearance already made him look like a fugitive from a sanitarium.

As she expected, the hidden layer of folded foil set off the metal detector when Calvin walked through it, causing the screener to stop him for a personal

inspection.

"It's a plate in his head," Natalie hastened to explain.

"He had a tumor removed."

"Uh-huh." The screener, a balding black man almost a foot shorter than her, grabbed his handheld metal detector. "Would you step over here, sir?" He waved the wand over Calvin's torso and up and

down his legs, but the detector only blared when the sensor swept over his scalp.

With impeccable timing, Calvin chose that moment to suffer another of his micro-inhabitations. He broke away from Natalie's side and gaped at her and the screener as if they'd materialized out of thin air. "Who
are you people? What are you doing to me?"
Hearing the commotion, other security personnel

tightened a circle around them. Calvin squeezed his eyes shut and wrapped his arms around his head.

Natalie lowered her voice to a confidential whisper.

"He has these episodes. Brain damage."

Dubious, the screener cal ed to Calvin. "Can you understand me, sir?"

Calvin's posture relaxed as he muttered to himself for a few seconds, then opened his eyes. "Yeah...sorry about that."

"You with this lady?"

Calvin returned to Natalie's side, took her hand. "Yes." The screener frowned at Natalie. "You sure he's gonna be okay?"

"Oh, yeah," she lied. "I'l give him a tranquilizer before we board."

The man evaluated both Calvin and the line of irate passengers building up behind him, and evidently

decided that Calvin wasn't worth the hassle. "Make sure you ask a staff member if you need assistance," he told Natalie. "If he has any more problems, they won't let him on the plane."

"Yes, sir."

The screener waved them on through the checkpoint. When they were out of his hearing, Natalie whispered in Calvin's ear. "You hear that? You've got to keep control."

"I'm trying, believe me." He kept his face bowed to the floor, mouthing the words to "Ticket to Ride" as they hurried to the gate.

If Calvin's ostensible il ness had a plus side, it enabled their party to board the plane first along with the handicapped passengers. To Natalie's relief, Calvin remained cocooned in a state of nearly catatonic

concentration while they awaited takeoff. Because she'd summoned air-crash victims for the National Travel Safety Board, Natalie had suffered a phobia of flying for most of her adult life, so it felt weirdly gratifying to be the calm one for a change, offering comfort to someone else during a plane trip. She slipped her gloved hand into Calvin's, entwining her fingers with his and squeezing, remembering how Dan had

eased her fear with the same gesture during their flights together.

Wade and Cal ie sat across the aisle from Natalie so they could share the window, for they actual y enjoyed the view from twenty thousand feet. Her father even talked like the whole trip was one big family vacation, although that may have been simply his attempt to brighten the mood.

"You know, Boston's where I met Grandma Nora," he remarked to Cal ie as the jet rose into the clouds. "She was fresh out of the School, working the Strangler case, and I was trying to sel a new heating system to the Boston Police. Grandma Nora always complained about the cold, so I think she helped me close the deal." Natalie couldn't help but eavesdrop, for she had never heard this story. Her father had seldom spoken of his first marriage after Nora went insane when Natalie was only five years old.

Cal ie favored Wade with her only smile of the day.

"Was it love at first sight?"

"Yeah, pretty much." He chuckled. "Like Romeo and Juliet, only worse. Al her Violet friends hated me, and my whole family thought I was throwing my life away."

"But you were happy, right?" Cal ie cast a sidelong glance at Calvin and her mother.

"For a while, yeah." The years seemed to settle upon Wade as he gazed into the blue abyss outside the

window. "It'l be good to get back to New England. I miss it."

"Me, too," Cal ie said, although she'd only visited the East Coast during a couple of summer vacations. She pul ed the plastic shopping sack of activity books she'd brought with her onto her lap. "I'm thinking about going to school in New Hampshire."

She wouldn't, Natalie thought, aghast.

But she did. From her bag, Cal ie pul ed out a ful color, glossy brochure, heavily creased in the middle, its cover dominated by a pil ared Victorian mansion that might have seemed majestic or stately to one who did not know what went on inside it.

The Iris Semple Conduit Academy: An Introduction,
declared the florid script beneath the picture.

"W
here did you get that?" Natalie snapped.

"From the trash, where you always throw it." Cal ie leafed through the pages with deliberate languor, admiring photos of happy Violet children sharing

hijinks in the dormitories, playing soccer among trees fiery with orange-and-red autumn leaves, and mastering arcane arts in classrooms overseen by shaven-headed Violet sages. "It doesn't look like such a bad place." Natalie cursed the Corps's direct-marketing program, whose slick propaganda littered her mailbox with

relentless regularity. She'd bet every dime she had that not a single actual Violet posed for those photos, only a bunch of pretty people rented from a modeling agency, the color of their eyes digital y shifted to purple with a photo-editing program.

Letting go of Calvin's hand, Natalie dodged a passing flight attendant to lean across the aisle and snatch the brochure from her daughter's grasp. She crumpled the booklet in her fist. "Don't you ever let me catch you with this again."

"That's not fair!" Cal ie shril ed. "I just wanted to look at it. I don't mess with your stupid decisions." Natalie understood which decisions Cal ie meant, and she might have shouted if the surrounding passengers hadn't already begun to glare at the two of them. "We'l talk about this later, young lady," she hissed. "You have no idea the trouble I've gone through to keep you from--"

"N
atalie."

She twisted around in her seat to find Calvin with his arms wrapped around his shoulders, shivering as if in a subzero chil . "He...he was sitting here," he stammered.

"In the seat pocket...somebody planted a gun for him...but an air marshal shot him...