Shelter (38 page)

    "Of course," Meredith said. "But it's not like we have that much stuff, Mom. A bed and some chairs and tables and Kevin's drafting table—"

    "You'll get more stuff. That's how it works. And if you have a child, lugging baby things up and down those steps, not to mention the baby itself, will be a nightmare. If somebody gets sick and has to go to the doctor—"

    "Mom, we've been over this. We'll be okay. I promise."

    Constance sighed. "Well, the renovation people did a nice job, and the new range in the kitchen is certainly more workable than what was in there before. I'm glad you decided to have the wedding at home, though."

    This is home now. Merry didn't say it; she didn't want to hurt her mother's feelings. "Me too, Mom."

    The wedding was small, only immediate family, Kevin's adviser, and Merry's old friends from Temple. Theo, decked out in a tiny set of tails, was the ring bearer, and Matt performed the brief ceremony. They had it outside, on the same terrace where Kevin had brought Meredith the finished blueprints three years earlier. ScoopNet ran a pleasant, low-key article, wishing the young couple all health and happiness, and again Meredith wondered who had called them off, and how. But maybe she was being too paranoid. Maybe she simply wasn't interesting to them anymore. Maybe she was safe, finally. Preston was no longer unique—he'd been joined by a handful of other translations, although none had as much personality as he did, because none had been rigged for as long before dying and the radical Luddite fringe seemed to have faded into oblivion. Bots had become fashionable again, although Kevin and Merry didn't plan on using any themselves.

    Meredith embarked on her married life with the serene certainty that everything would go smoothly from here on out. She'd paid her dues, endured her share of misery. She had a nice husband and a nice place to live and a decent job. In her spare time, she could work in her garden while looking out at the water. She and Kevin got a cat, a gray queen named Ashputtle, and a dog: a lively little mutt, vaguely terrior-esque, named Marzipan. She corudn't imagine needing anything else. She was going to be happy now. She'd certainly waited long enough.

    Fifteen

    SHE was happy for two years. She grew increasingly fond of Kevin, who was as devoted after their marriage as he had been before. She loved their house; she delighted in Ashputtle and Marzipan, frequently wondering how anyone could prefer bots to real animals, although Kevin often pointed out that animals made messes, whereas bots tidied them. She was doing well at work, and had been promoted into a junior-consultant position that gave her client contact and allowed her to exercise her own design sense. She was good at it. She liked her clients, and they liked her. They recommended her to their friends. Kevin had helped his firm win several design competitions. Life was as close to blissful as it had ever been. Merry had even started going to Temple again, although only for the high feast days, solstices, and equinoxes. Matt was still there, as was Anna; Gwyn and Dave had moved to Honduras to help build housing for the poor. Harold was in a senior-care home in Los Angeles, near his niece. Dana had entered a Mexican convent, and no one had heard from Johann or Fergus in years.

    Merry and Kevin entertained. They couldn't have Constance and Jack over because Constance was now allergic to animals, rather than merely disliking them. Nearly every weekend, though, someone else was at the house for dinner: Matt, or Kevin's uncle, or people from work, either coworkers or clients. For perhaps the first time, Merry felt like she had a true social life.

    Theo spent part of nearly every weekend with them, whenever he didn't have play dates with friends from school. He loved the cat and the dog, loved to play on the steps, loved to draw with Kevin and read with Merry. He was a bright, busy, energetic little boy, and while Merry was always a bit relieved when he left, the house always seemed a bit emptier, too. Kevin felt the same way. They had agreed that it would be nice to adopt a child in a few years, when both of their careers were more firmly established. They were still very young. Parenthood could wait. They needed more time to know each other first.

    Then, two years into their marriage, a CV orphan in Oakland began making headlines.

    * * *

    He was two months old. His father had died of CV six months into his gestation; his mother had died of it three weeks later, and had remained on a ventilator until the doctors considered it safe to deliver the baby by remote-control cesarean. Since leaving his mother's womb, he had lived in isolation. So far, amazingly enough, he seemed perfectly healthy. But he remained in isolation, because no one had ever treated a child with prenatal exposure, and the doctors were afraid to let him out.

    "This is horrible," Meredith said, reading the story from a Net printout over breakfast. She had finally relented and permitted a web-linkable terminal in the house, although it wasn't permanently online. There was just too much you missed, otherwise. She talked to her father once a week, somewhat less often than she talked to Constance, but more often than Kevin spoke to his uncle. "God, this poor kid. Kevin, there's this kid in iso, he's only eight weeks old. Putting a baby in a bubble like that—can you imagine? Isolation's hard enough to deal with when you've already been in the world for a while."

    Kevin looked up from his copy of Architectural Digest. "Ugh." He dropped a piece of bacon on the floor for Ashputtle, who was mewing imperiously and winding around their ankles. "That's got to warp him for life, being taken care of by people in spacesuits."

    "And bots," Meredith said. "Soft bots, covered in bright terry cloth, just like the ones who took care of me. Which means he'll be terrified of towels for the rest of his life."

    Kevin laughed. "I think you're exaggerating. You aren't terrified of towels."

    Merry shivered. "I was fourteen years old. He's two months."

    "Well, if he'd been born into a world without isolation units, he'd be dead now." Kevin fed his last piece of bacon to the cat, and then got up and kissed Meredith. "I have to get to work, sweetie."

    "Okay. Me too. See you later." On her way out the door, she tossed the printout in the recycling bin, glad to be rid of it.

    But she found herself thinking about the baby all day long, between a deluge of demands on her attention. One of her most important clients had decided that none of the custom paint colors Merry had concocted for him was worthy of his town house, and was demanding that she begin again with a new palette. A contractor redoing a series of bathrooms suddenly declared bankruptcy and fled to Chile, necessitating a new set of bids and endless apologies to irate homeowners who wanted to know when their toilets would be functional again. Already running late for an appointment in Berkeley, Merry became stalled in traffic on the Bay Bridge and then discovered that her cell phone was down. By the time she reached her destination, the client had left a note on the door. Where was she? He'd be back in an hour. Could she come back then?

    Which left her an hour to kill. She walked down to a coffeehouse on Shattuck Avenue and ordered some green tea. She needed something hot to drink; she'd been chilled all day, emotionally more than physically. That baby, the baby in the bubble: the fact that there was a baby in isolation was simply horrifying. She remembered the tiny rooms at the Maddie Center, from which she and Kevin had rescued Ashputtle and Marzipan; for some reason, she pictured this baby in one of those rooms. Was he ever going to get out? Would he ever be able to go home with anyone? What had the printout said? She must have read it, but she couldn't remember.

    The waiter, a bespectacled kid with blond dreadlocks and tribal scars down his bare torso, brought her tea. "Poor tyke," he said.

    "What?" But she already knew whom he meant.

    He gestured behind and above her, and she turned around to find herself looking at a ScoopNet vid of someone in a spacesuit, behind glass, holding up a tiny white bundle. A close-up revealed blinking blue eyes, and then the rosebud mouth opened in a howl. Meredith's stomach clenched, and she had to keep herself from reaching toward the screen. "I read about that baby this morning."

    "Yeah, he's all over the news," the waiter said. "No family left. They say he seems healthy and everything, but they don't know if he'll be okay, because there's never been a case like this. Exposure to CV in the womb. He could turn into, like, a viral time bomb."

    "I don't think that's possible," Merry said, her mouth dry. The waiter hadn't recognized her, but then again, she hadn't gotten significant media exposure for five years, and he'd probably barely been walking back then. He couldn't really be that much younger than she was, but he certainly looked it. "And they can't talk about the details of his condition on the news. Privacy laws."

    "Well, anyway. I heard the doctors are all, like, torn. Because they want to keep him in iso long enough to make sure he's okay medically, but the longer he stays, the crazier he'll get. Touch deprived. Stimulation too. You know, like those refugee babies, from Africa and all? The ones who live on bread and water in orphanages without any sheets, and then if you give them orange juice and wrap a nice blanket around them, they go insane? You want honey with that?"

    "What?" Merry said. The white bundle had faded into an ad for lowinterest rig loans. Meredith turned back around, and realized that the waiter's neo-retro spectacles were part of a rig. For all she knew, his dreadlocks and scars were really cleverly disguised silicon. He must have very wealthy parents.

    "Your tea. Would you like honey with that? Sugar's on the table, but I can bring you honey."

    "Oh, no. No thank you."

    He nodded and walked away, whistling. Meredith, knowing the monitor was still behind her, felt the flesh on the back of her neck crawl. She gulped down the tea, which scalded her tongue but didn't warm her, paid for it, and left, nearly running. She still had half an hour before her client got home, and she had to calm down. Why was this bothering her so much? There were sick babies everywhere; plenty of children had died of CV. Kevin was right: this little boy was lucky to be alive. And the doctors must be doing everything they could to stimulate him. But whenever she thought of the white bundle held aloft by that bulky spacesuit, acid rose in her throat.

    Well. It was her own post-CV trauma, that was all. She supposed she'd never get over it entirely. At least the client she was about to see didn't have bots. But she still had to calm down. She walked briskly up and down Shattuck, past trendy restaurants and antique stores, until it was time to go back to the client's house.

    The appointment went fine, and by the time she got into her car to go back to the city, she felt much better. Traffic on the bridge had cleared up too, for a wonder. But then it slowed again, just on the other side, and Merry looked up and saw the vid screen, the one on which Kevin had seen her coming out of iso, and there was the little white bundle, being tended by blue-and-red-and-yellow-terry bots.

    The unsweetened green tea, the tofu stir-fry she'd had for lunch, the toast she'd had for breakfast: everything came rushing back out of Merry's stomach, onto her windshield and dashboard and lap. She huddled over the steering wheel, heaving, while cars behind her honked. Someone was yelling. She sat up slightly, inhaling the stench of her own gut, and started driving again, her legs trembling.

    She went home and called in sick to the office. She cleaned up the car, took a shower, and changed into fresh clothing. Then she sat, Ashputtle on her lap—Kevin had been home at lunchtime to walk Marzipan—and looked out at the Bay. By the time Kevin got home, she knew what she needed to do.

    * * *

    "Of course the bots reminded you of Raji," Kevin said. "And the fact that the baby's in iso reminds you of yourself, and the fact that both of his parents died reminds you of me. And that's why you want to rescue him. It feels like rescuing everybody, even the ones who are past hope. And it fits with your position that people shouldn't have to be genetically related to kids to love them. And I agree with that; you know I do. But, Merry, I really don't think this is a good idea. This baby isn't Raji or you or me. He's somebody else. He's a complete unknown and a huge risk, and we agreed that we weren't going to think about kids for a few years, and there are probably do-gooders lined up from here to Ohio waiting to adopt him. Let someone else do it."

    "There aren't," Merry said. She'd cried for a while, and between that and the vomiting, she should have been exhausted, but she'd never felt more clearheaded. "I checked. I've read all the stories I could find on this kid."

    "No," Kevin said. "Merry, I love you, but this is just too big a risk. For you, for me, for our marriage. If we adopted him and something awful happened, you'd never get over it. Not after everything else. And even if it were a good idea for you to be doing this, I'm not ready. If you want to start talking about kids, that's great, but let's not rush into anything."

    "What if we adopt him and nothing awful happens? What if we give him a great life and—"

    "And everybody lives happily ever after? He's starting out with the deck stacked against him. I don't like the odds. We're not miracle workers. We need to wait."

    She shook her head. Why couldn't he see? "But he's here now. He needs a home now. If I were fertile and I had an unplanned pregnancy–"

    "Then we'd have nine months to get used to the idea."

    "It would probably take nearly that long for an adoption to go through."

    "Not with your family pulling strings, it wouldn't. Meredith, I thought you were happy. This baby's making you remember everything in your life that's made you miserable. Why are you rushing to embrace him? Don't you want to keep being happy?"

    "He's a person! That's why I'm rushing to embrace him! Because–" "Because you think you can save him and undo all the other bad stuff. No, it doesn't work that way. It never works that way. Ask Matt. Ask anybody."