John Gone (38 page)

Why can’t I think of something? Why can’t I
save him? This is all that I’m good at, and I can’t even stop
it.

“You should tell him how you feel,” Kala’s
voice said quietly from across the still room. Ronika turned and
saw the small blue hologram standing calmly on top of the watch
that had caused everything.

“What, that I failed him?” she asked,
approaching the bed.

“Failed him?” Kala replied. “You saved him
more than once by my count.”

“Not when it mattered,” she said coldly. “Not
from the death of his mother, not from losing his hand, and worst
of all, not from
you.
”

“You don’t need to save him from me,” Kala
protested. “I’m not the one who’s done this.”

“You could still save him, but you won’t,”
she said angrily, keeping her voice quiet for John.

“At the expense of myself!” Kala argued. “I
don’t know either of you! Even if I did, that’s quite a bit to ask
from someone. Look, when I get out, there’s a chance I can save him
later, perhaps in a few years. If I let him go now, I’ll never see
the sun again. Never. You can’t ask me to do that.”

“Yes I can,” Ronika said. “You’re the one who
built this thing. You’re the one who put yourself in that lab. No
one had a gun to your head. These are your consequences, not
his!”

“You aren’t thinking about this practically,”
he replied. “You’re letting your emotions overrun the scientist
within you. This is a decision made for the greater good. It has
the highest probability for successful resolution for all parties.
I know you’re smart enough to see that.”

“This isn’t about science and logic,” Ronika
said. “This is about my friend, and I think he’s been through
enough on account of you already.”

“What would you do in my situation?” Kala
asked. “And don’t just say you’d help John. Imagine if my
girlfriend and I, two people you’d never met, appeared on the other
end of a walkie-talkie one day and asked you to give up your entire
life for them. Could you?”

“My answer to that question is irrelevant.
Your actions and decisions are independent of my personal opinions
and scruples,” she said, spitting the words at him.

“That’s exactly right,” Kala rebutted. “They
are. I chose my own freedom over a stranger’s, and I’m not going to
feel guilty about it! This is happening whether or not you can deal
with it, so instead of raging at the inevitable, why don’t you wake
him up and enjoy your last minutes together.”

“I don’t even have Mouse anymore,” Ronika
cried. “He’s going to be completely alone.”

“And it will be difficult for him,” Kala said
as soothingly as he could. “But remember, unlike me, he’ll have
hope. I’ll go back for him. I just can’t guarantee when that will
be possible.”

“What do you even eat down there?” Ronika
asked.

“MREs mostly,” Kala replied. “Bottled water,
multi-vitamins. There’s an astounding supply here. He won’t even
have to worry much about rationing himself.”

Ronika sat on the bed’s edge and lifted her
legs on top of the mattress. She inched her body toward John’s and
whispered to Kala’s hologram.

“I’m turning you off,” she said.

“Don’t,” Kala replied.

“Don’t worry, he’ll go. He already switched
the hands of the watch to your numbers,” Ronika told him, putting
her fingers around the small knob on the side of John’s watch.

“Ronika, forgive me,” Kala said as his
hologram fizzled.

Ronika moved her body in close against
John’s. Her touch woke him.

“Is it time?” he asked groggily.

“Not quite yet,” she answered.

John stretched his limbs even farther than
they’d been lying and retracted them back in toward his body.

“It’s freezing in here,” he said, eyes still
closed.

“Lift your legs,” Ronika said.

John curled his body into a ball as she
leaned forward and lifted the edge of her white comforter. She
brought it over their bodies and let it fall around them, pillowed
by the air.

John slid his legs through the sheets below
the comforter and rolled onto his side as Ronika pushed her body
close against his. She took his hand. His fingers wrapped lightly
around her palm as she touched it. She led his arm around her body.
Secure beneath the weight of his arm, she hugged onto his hand
while he embraced her from behind.

“Can we just lie here, just like this?” she
asked.

“Yes,” he said, rubbing her hand lightly with
his own.

“I don’t want you to go,” she told him.

“I don’t want to go either,” he said. “You’re
all I have now.”

“You’re all I have, too,” she said.

“I’m sorry I never came here and saw you
again after that first time a few years ago,” John said. “I don’t
know what it was. The mainland felt so far away, and you felt so
different than everything on Longboard. I always said I wanted to
leave, but it’s harder to change things than it is to talk about
changing them.”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,
John,” she said.

The current in the room blew a few loose
strands of Ronika’s bright orange hair to John’s face, tickling his
cheeks. He inhaled through his nose and smelled the girlish scent
of red berries rise from her long, soft hair. The aroma relaxed
him, and soon he thought he’d finally found what he’d been looking
for outside of Longboard Key. The idea arrived bittersweet; the
injustice of their parting now veiled and tinted each word and
movement between him and the girl lying warmly against him.

“What will you do while I’m gone?” he
asked.

“I don’t know,” Ronika said. “I’d like to say
that your adventures have inspired me to finally leave my apartment
and go outside into the world, but honestly they’ve made me even
more scared than I was before.” She giggled, and John laughed
alongside her.

“We’re going to figure out a way to talk to
one another,” John said. “When I meet him, I’ll ask Felix if he can
make you some sort of hologram display like the one on the watch.
All that technology should already be waiting there on my end in
the lab, right?”

“Felix?” Ronika asked. “Is that his first
name?”

“Yeah,” John replied. “Funny, huh?”

“I always wanted to know Dr. Claw’s first
name,” she said.

John laughed. “That’s what I said!” he
exclaimed.

Ronika spun her body so its front met John’s.
She looked into his eyes, now open and separated from hers by just
inches. She peered at him with a recognizable sadness that tore
through John like an arrow.

Though he’d hoped his departure simple and
unburdened, he couldn’t begrudge Ronika what he knew she was
feeling. No matter how much he tried to calmly accept the events
that awaited him, he couldn’t deny experiencing that identical
sadness within himself. He wondered if his eyes were reading the
same as Ronika gazed back into them.

“I want to come with you,” Ronika said
quietly, breaking the silence.

“Mouse is broken,” John answered.

“I don’t mean Mouse,” she replied. “You can
hold onto a bag and bring it with you, so what’s the difference in
holding me?”

“I think if that was possible, then Kala
would simply hold my hand and let both of us escape the lab when I
go down there,” he said.

“Unless he’s been lying,” Ronika pointed out,
“and he doesn’t want you to escape. Maybe he wants you trapped down
there where you can’t tell anyone about him or what you’ve
learned.”

“I don’t see why he--” John began.

“John, we have to try!”

“Even if that would work, I don’t like the
idea of trapping anyone else down there with me,” John said.

“Just ... damn it, John!” Ronika turned away
from him and put her face down into the pooling blankets beneath
her. “It’s all unfair,” she said, her voice muffled by the cotton.
“We need to fight it, solve it.”

John turned onto his back and stared up at
the ceiling. “That’s what we
have
been doing,” he said. “You
and me both; we’ve been fighting. And it may not look like a
victory, but it is one. Things could have been worse in a hundred
different ways. I’m just trying to be thankful that they
didn’t.”

Ronika opened her eyes and saw nothing but
the darkness of the blanket’s folds around her. She realized then
that, as hard as this was on her, it was infinitely harder for
John.

Like usual
, she thought,
John’s the
one actually going through it. All I can do is sit to the side and
be sad. He’s lying there trying not to feel bad about it, and all I
can do is make it worse.

Ronika felt the urge to cry again, but held
her breath and fought it. She lifted her head from the blanket.

“When my father died, there wasn’t anything I
could do. I sat in a chair by a blinded window and waited for
someone to tell me that I’d never see him again,” she said. “I
don’t want you to leave, John, but at least we’re here together
now, talking with each other, and at least there’s a good chance
you’ll be back some day. And you’re right. That’s much better than
the alternative.”

John turned his neck and looked at
Ronika.

“Do you really think that’s true? That I have
a good chance at getting back?” he asked.

Ronika smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
John rested his head back down on the bed.

“How much longer before you go?” she
asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve been scared to look,” he
answered.

“Me, too,” she said.

“But I think it’s getting close. I feel a
buzzing in my arm.”

“It’s not shaking or anything,” Ronika
replied, looking at it.

“Kala said that, since we actually programmed
in its next destination, it won’t have to overcompensate by pulling
in as much energy as possible, which, I guess, causes the spasms
and such,” John explained.

“That makes sense.”

“So, I don’t know what to expect this time,
other than it’ll be a bit smoother. That’s what he said,
anyway.”

Ronika rolled back toward John. “I’m going to
really miss you,” she said.

“I’ll miss you, too.”

“And there’s something I want to do before
you go,” she said shyly.

“Yeah?” John asked.

“It’s something I’ve never done with anyone,
actually.”

“What is it?”

Ronika closed her eyes and leaned forward
toward John’s face. She pursed her lips slightly outward, as she’d
seen girls do in so many movies. As she drew her lips closer to
his, she felt an energy surround her.
Fireworks,
she
thought.
These are the fireworks I’ve heard about.
Her lips
began to tingle, and her mind became slow with a tired, contented
haze. Her eyes were closed, but she could almost see an electric
blue light beyond their veil.
Chemistry
, she heard herself
think.

As she continued to lean down toward his
lips, Ronika never noticed missing them completely, as she passed
straight through where his body had been, and onto the soft bed
below, fast asleep.

It was late September, and Felix was trying
to throw an acorn as high as he could before catching it. A
powerful, chilled breeze running through the woods behind his new
home made the task difficult, blowing the small acorn far left or
right of him with each throw. Felix giggled merrily as he chased it
from underneath, often missing the catch and finding another acorn
from the ground to throw in its place. The sun had begun to set
behind the tree; that was the time he was supposed to go home. He
didn’t want to.

Felix threw another acorn high into the air
and watched its small form disappear against the backdrop of orange
and brown branches and leaves. He watched it as best as he could
and started to run to where he thought the wind would sail it. Not
watching his feet, Felix slipped on the loose leaves beneath him.
Like the acorns he’d thrown, his small body turned in the wind
before falling down into the soft bed of leaves below him with a
crunch
. He laughed heartily at his tumble and rolled round
in the pile, just happy to be outdoors.

The sun, the breeze, and the colorful flora
were so different from the big, funny-looking houses he’d been
trapped in most of his life. Felix remembered each of them the same
way, dimly lit buildings with bad wallpaper patterned across their
walls and large rooms with twenty beds stacked upon one another
like building bricks. It had been difficult for him and the other
children who also stayed there to comprehend why exactly they were
in those houses, but most understood enough to know what to
expect.

Felix refused to make friends with other
children he shared the bunks with, but also with the people who
were periodically allowed to take him to different houses where
he’d find himself alone in a room with only one bed. Sometimes the
other kids he met at the big houses were fun to play with, but he
knew it was only a matter of time before he’d never see them again.
It’s why he stayed distant. Within weeks of meeting anyone, either
they or Felix would be taken away. The people who took him loved to
call themselves Mom and Dad, but were always replaced months later
by another pair claiming the same, meaningless titles.

“Felix,” a woman’s voice called. It carried
on the wind from the line of trees closer to the house. Felix
buried himself in the leaves he’d fallen into. The woman approached
the clearing where Felix lay hidden and pretended not to notice the
small lump beneath the leaves, whose large glasses glinted brightly
in the sun.

She walked around behind the lump and slowly
leaned down.

“Boo!” she called, reaching her hands into
the pile and tickling the sides of his belly.

Felix sat up immediately and moved away from
her. “Stop it,” he said.