Shelter (52 page)

    Fred and Berta. Yes, of course. Nicholas was going to try to get help from Fred and Berta, if he hadn't already. Which might very well mean Preston too.

    "Do you think he'd be happier in another school?" she said, eyes still closed. She knew it wouldn't work; even if Kevin did agree to a change of schools, that would just delay the process, not stop it.

    The sound of Kevin's fist slamming on the countertop, for the second time that day, jolted her eyes open again. "No, Meredith. I think he likes the school he's in just fine, and I think the last thing we should do is take that away from him too!"

    "Okay," she said. "Okay." Aching, she remembered the little world she and Kevin had built when they first met: her dream house, and later, the dream that they would one day live in it. They were living in different universes now. She supposed they had been ever since Nicholas came home.

    "Merry, if I didn't know better, I'd think you hated him! You're trying to wreck everything he cares about."

    "No, I'm not," she said. "Really I'm not." But she couldn't tell him why, and it didn't matter. He'd already left the room.

    * * *

    "That was when everything really started falling apart," Meredith said quietly. "Although it already had, I guess." She turned her ruined, mutilated face back toward Roberta, although Roberta could hardly see it in the dimness. They were sitting in the low-tide reek of Zephyr's apartment; Roberta's butt was numb from the hard plastic chair. Meredith had given her a much fuller confession than she'd expected, as if she were some sort of priest. But then, she'd asked for it. Meredith had been talking for hours, with breaks only to stretch, to use the bathroom, for Roberta to call Sergei.

    "Well?" Meredith said. "You have the whole story now. Does it explain anything?"

    "Maybe," Roberta said. "But it doesn't excuse it."

    Meredith bent her head. "I know. Have you ever had a child?"

    "Biologically? No. Neither have you. Have I ever loved a child? Yes, of course. I loved the same child you did, remember?"

    Meredith, to her credit, winced. "I know. I know you did. Do you still think we're from different planets?"

    "I don't know, Meredith. We are and we aren't. People like you usually see people like me as charity cases, don't you? Only in my case, I'm the charity case you couldn't be bothered to visit. I'm your father's little project, some cross between a stray puppy and a servant girl."

    Meredith hunched her shoulders. "He got you the KinderkAIr job, didn't he?"

    "Well, I don't know how else I could have gotten it, do you? Yet another in Preston's string of efforts to get us to be friends."

    Meredith almost smiled. "That's why you looked at me so strangely the first day we met at school. I didn't have any idea who you were, then."

    "I know you didn't. Even then, I knew you probably didn't. You would have said something if you had. But my life was pretty weird in through there anyway. Your father was barging back into it—probably because you were shutting him out—and my relationship was falling apart. And then Nicholas showed up, and everything got really complicated."

    "Tell me about it." Meredith stood up and stretched. "I need to eat. You do too. And you need to call Sergei again. And then you can tell me your side of the story."

    Part Three The Land of Make-Believe

    Twenty

    ROBERTA had known that Nicholas was troubled long before the Hobbit was taken away. She thought about him a lot during her commute, which might as well have been a commute between countries, not simply between neighborhoods. She and her lover lived in a renovated industrial loft at Eleventh and Harrison, on a block that remained stubbornly scuzzy. KinderkAIr, in the lush elegance of Levi Plaza, didn't feel like it belonged in the same city. Roberta was always a little amazed that the people there spoke the same language she did.

    She couldn't even take one bus or train right to work, although it was only a few miles from home. She had to transfer, or take public transit to the Embarcadero and then walk up the waterfront to Levi Plaza, her preferred method. She and Doe had often talked about getting a car, but decided against the expense and danger. Their building didn't have a garage, which would have meant either paying through the nose for a space somewhere or parking on the street and risking vandalism. Simpler just to use MUNI.

    Nearly every morning and evening, as she crossed the border between one world and other, Roberta wondered if Nicholas was doing the same thing. Despite his family's wealth, she suspected that the contrast between his house and the inside of his head was even starker than the difference between green, gleaming Levi Plaza and the gritty gray of Eleventh and Harrison.

    She'd known people like Nicholas before, in her previous work with brainwipe clients. Like them, Nicholas hardly ever smiled or deliberately misbehaved. He always finished his lunch, always put away his toys, always took off his coat all by himself He brought to each task a concentration unnatural in a child so small, a tense, anxious perfectionism. Roberta's private name for him was Saint Nick, because he was so quiet and neat and obedient. As much as the other children annoyed her sometimes, at least they were doing what they were supposed to do: testing limits, learning new skills, being energetic little animals. Nicholas's outward perfection seemed more like some deep lack, like he'd lost his soul.

    She spent more time thinking about Nick than about any of the other kids, but she was glad there weren't others like him. She didn't like working with people who'd lost their souls. That gaping disconnection was what had driven her out of the brainwipe job.

    She and Doe had fought when she left that job. The two of them hadn't disconnected yet, not completely, but they'd been rushing toward it with a momentum Roberta had sensed only dimly at the time. "It's a good job," Doe had told her, exasperated. "Come on, Berta, you said you weren't going to do this again, keep switching positions every six months! Bookstore clerk, gallery attendant, short-order cook, brainwipe rehab tech–it's a shitty resume, and it doesn't exactly add up to a career. This is the first job you've had that even remotely uses your degree." Roberta had hauled her grades upward in high school and managed to get a partial scholarship to San Francisco University, where she majored in early childhood ed. Despite the misery of her own childhood—or perhaps because of it—she liked kids, empathized with kids. She knew what it felt like to live in a world so much bigger than you were. But she hadn't been able to find a teaching job after graduation, so she'd begun her long string of notquite-right jobs instead. "When are you going to pick something and stick with it?"

    "When I find something I like. Come on, Doe. I'm not going to stay in ajob that makes me miserable."

    What Roberta had loved in Doe when they first met, still loved when they had this particular fight, was her solidity, her security: four years working for the same downtown law firm; dinner every Saturday night with her family—dinners to which Roberta had been invited from the very beginning, dinners that immediately made her feel as if she too had a family; the same thing for breakfast every morning: coffee, juice, two pieces of toast. After the chaos of Roberta's early years, Doe's routines had been an oasis of comfort. Tonight, though, she merely seemed rigid. "Roberta, you can't leave a job until you have another job. I know you know that! You've always had more sense before."

    Was Doe worried about money? She made far more than Roberta did, and they'd never squabbled about expenses before, although it seemed recently as if they'd been squabbling about everything else: what to have for dinner, what to watch on TV. The money they made separately had always been their money together; was that going to change now too?

    "If it came to that," Roberta said patiently, "the insurance money from my parents would pay the rent for six months, and I'll find something by then; don't worry."

    Doe looked at her as if she'd sprouted a third eye. "What? Who's talking about spending the insurance money?"

    "I thought maybe you were. Look, Doe, I'm sick of being unhappy at work every day. Eight hours a day of being unhappy: no wonder we've been fighting lately. Don't you want me to be happy?"

    "Of course. But switching jobs never makes you happy, not for long. You always wind up leaving again. Lots of people don't like their jobs; you still have to work. Happiness is a luxury, not a right."

    Roberta had just stared at her. "Doe, do you want to change jobs? I thought you liked the firm."

    "I do like the firm! Don't change the subject!"

    ''I'll stay with the brainwipe clients if you want to look for something else."

    "No, no, Berta, I'm not the one who's dissatisfied. I have a good job. So do you, although you don't seem to realize it."

    "It's not a good job for me," Roberta said, wondering what in the world was going on. It couldn't be PMS: she and Doe weren't due for another two weeks. "If you want my job, you can have it. Look, Doe, I know there's no guarantee I'll find something perfect, but there's no guarantee an airplane won't crash through the living room window in the next five minutes and kill both of us, either. Breathing's a luxury too, if you look at it that way. Why are you trying to convince me to stay in a job I hate?"

    Doe just shook her head. "I'm trying to convince you to grow up and decide what you want to do with your life!"

    "Well, I'm working on it. I've figured out that I don't want to keep working with drooling wrecks who have to be retaught to tie their shoelaces and who cry at the drop of a hat because they know they've lost something and can't remember what it is."

    "When you took that job you thought you were going to use your training and get satisfaction from helping people."

    "I did. Really I did. I was very happy for them when they learned to tie their shoelaces and brush their teeth and cut their food by themselves. I was, really. But after a while it couldn't make up for all the stuff they weren't going to get back. Doe, give me six months. If I haven't found something by then, I'll go back to brainwipe clients. Okay? Deal?"

    In fact, it took her only six weeks to get the KinderkAIr job. She learned about it from their downstairs neighbor, Zephyr, the last person she would have expected to give her a job lead. Doe hated Zephyr, whose herd of bots tended to make screeching rackets, usually in the middle of the night. Because Doe refused even to talk to the woman, Roberta was always the one who went downstairs to request quiet. She and Zephyr had become friendly, after a fashion.

    So when Zephyr accosted Roberta at the mailboxes one afternoon and said, "You've sure been hanging around the building a lot lately. What happened to your job?" Roberta decided to interpret Zephyr's rudeness as a sign of concern.

    "Well, I'm looking for something else. I couldn't take brainwipe clients anymore. "

    "Too depressing," Zephyr said. The bots with her—there were only three today, about ten fewer than usual—squealed and squeaked like demented parrots. They only came halfway to Zephyr's knees, but made enough noise to qualify as a construction crew. "De-pressing-ing-ing." "DePRESSing!" "D eeeeeeeeeeeeee-pressssssssssssssss-inggggggg."

    "Yeah," Roberta said, trying to ignore the bots. She liked bots more than most people did; still, Zephyr's bots, like Zephyr herself, could be more than a little annoying. "Depressing and scary."

    Zephyr nodded eagerly, her spiked orange-and-pink hair bobbing. "Tell me about it! Anybody who's different—wipe 'em out. It's horrible. How do you feel about teaching other people, though? Kids?"

    The bots began hopping up and down; one turned a somersault. "Kid- ids-ids-ids-ids." "KIDS!" "Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiddddddddddsssssssss!"

    "Um—Zephyr? Could you ask them not to do that, please?"

    Zephyr sighed and snapped her fingers. "Kids, quiet!"

    "KIDS!" one said, but then they all settled down.

    "Good girls," Zephyr said, beaming at them. "So, Berta, you were saying? Or you were going to say? Have you considered a teaching job?"

    "Well, that's what I wanted to do, once," Roberta said with a shrug. "But I doubt anyone would hire me now. I don't have any work experience, and you need certification."

    "Not for private schools. Have you heard about MacroCorp's new kindergartens? AI-equipped: one educational AI, one teacher, five to seven kids. They're opening the first one in a few months, and if that works out they'll start a chain. You should check it out, try to get the teaching job. You'd like the children, probably, and the AI could use some grown-up company. "

    MacroCorp. Roberta felt a familiar pang. MacroCorp meant Preston, and Roberta hadn't had any contact with him in years. Doe had always made it very clear that she despised the idea of translation; as far as she was concerned, Friends of Preston were people who didn't have the social skills to maintain real friendships. Early in their relationship, Roberta had tried to defend him. He'd been consistently kind to her; he'd sent her the nightgown.

    "That was different," Doe said. "You were a kid. Kids have imaginary friends all the time, and you needed them more than most."

    "He's not imaginary, Doe. And the nightgown certainly wasn't. It was real."

    "So are ScoopNet giveaways, but that doesn't mean they're motivated by anything remotely resembling love. He was trying to ensure brand loyalty."

    "No, he wasn't! MacroCorp doesn't make nightgowns, and MacroCorp doesn't depend on my business. It's not like I can afford a rig or a house system. Preston was being nice."

    "If he'd really wanted to be nice," Doe had said, "he would have gotten you out of foster care somehow. He would have given you a family." She'd touched Roberta's cheek and said, "He can't do that. I can. Family and a lot of other things you won't get from disembodied Preston."