Shelter (59 page)

    "Thank you, Fred. And thanks for letting me in here last night. I can't tell you how much that helped."

    "It was my pleasure, Roberta. Any time."

    If only. She found herself entertaining a wistful fantasy of living here all the time. She could leave every day after all the kids were gone, as if she were going home, and then sneak back later. Fred would let her in and sing her songs and tell her stories; she'd drink warm milk and eat graham crackers and sleep on the napmats, hugging one or another stuffed animal. She'd be warm and cozy and safe, and Fred would keep it a secret, except possibly from Preston. For all Roberta knew, there were already people who lived here after hours. For all she knew, Fred took baggies in off the street and fed them graham crackers and told them they were special. She suspected Fred would like that, although the parents certainly wouldn't.

    No. She had to be a grown-up. She had to take care of the bank account and buy new sheets and pillows, and replacement snacks for school. It would probably help to buy herself a new comforter too, and maybe some new posters. She could fill the apartment up with her own colors, since Doe had taken the old ones away. She'd rather have stayed here, with the bright yellow and blue and red nap mats , the clean white tables, the happy stuffed animals. Everything here was warm and simple, a womb.

    She had to be a grown-up. She went home, logged onto their bank account, and discovered that Doe had removed herself from the account earlier that day, although she'd left Roberta all the money in it. Well, that was decent of her. More money to buy pillows and posters. And towels. And dishes and silverware. You couldn't buy family; Mitzi and Hugh were irreplaceable.

    Roberta found herself crying again. This was no good. She'd go shopping. She'd buy stuff she needed. One of the big housewares stores was having a sale; she'd seen the ads on the train.

    But when she got there, she found herself overwhelmed by all the people, all the colors and noises, the sheer dizzying amount of stuff. It was too much to sort out. She felt as if she could barely put one foot in front of the other, let alone choose between eighteen different remaindered sheet sets. She managed to grab an inexpensive pillow and a bright fleecy blanket—it reminded her of the ones at work—and then went home.

    Silence. Utter silence. As much as Doe's music had driven her nuts sometimes, she'd have given anything to hear it now. Then Mr. Clean, whining very faintly, came out of the kitchen.

    "Well, hello," Roberta said. "And how was your day?"

    The bot didn't answer, of course. It stopped and turned to face her, waited for a few moments, and then moved on when she didn't say anything else. It had probably been waiting for a command. I have to thank Zephyr, Roberta thought, but she couldn't deal with that, not right now. Instead, she went into the kitchen and ran her hand over the cabinet doors. The grease was gone.

    Mr. Clean had been busy. She imagined him laboriously hauling himself up off the floor, dragging his weight up onto the countertops and then up the vertical surface of the cabinets. He must have hung on to the tops of the cabinet doors with those arms while he cleaned. Just thinking about it exhausted Roberta; it was too apt a metaphor for what her life looked like now, a slow, painful process of clinging to any available support and doing what was necessary, fighting gravity all the way.

    She wondered if Mr. Clean was some sort of spy device for Preston. She found she couldn't care. She should log on and confront Preston, she knew, find out exactly what he knew and what he didn't, find out why he was asking Fred to keep secrets. But she didn't have the energy, and it was probably a bad idea. She needed to be careful of herself right now. She wasn't thinking clearly.

    She opened the refrigerator and found that Doe had taken a lot of the food, including the black bean soup. She'd left the milk and eggs Roberta had just bought, as well as some yogurt, half a loaf of bread, and a casserole of unidentifiable leftovers. The pantry yielded canned vegetables, ramen noodles, peanut butter. She'd bring the peanut butter to school tomorrow, and on the way, she'd pick up graham crackers. Roberta made herself a peanut butter sandwich and some noodles, and then, her vision grainy with fatigue, made up the bed with her old sheets and the new pillow and blanket. The blanket was wonderful, soft and warm, with the new-clothing smell Roberta had always associated, as a child, with the beginning of school, with new adventures and tantalizing possibilities and the bountiful luxury of new books and jumpers and shoes. Before her mother died, they'd always gone clothing shopping the week before school started.

    She loved the blanket. She curled up in it and went immediately, gratefully, to sleep. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she discovered, to her mortification, that she was sucking her thumb.

    * * *

    She began a slow, grim process of recovery. Every day she tried to buy one new thing for the apartment, something cheap but cheerful. She found an oversize coffee mug painted with balloons, a cotton comforter printed to look like a quilt, some bright red plates. She became a regular at the thrift stores and the ten-dollar stores, which featured truly amazing amounts of surplus junk it seemed incredible that anyone could ever have wanted: hideous plastic flowerpots, boxes of pungently scented fruit-shaped candles, entire shelves of kitschy ceramic figurines of the Goddess—who wore lipstick and eyeliner, in this incarnation—cradling the earth. There were aisles full of cheap toys, and others full of cheaper costume jewelry. Roberta concentrated on housewares.

    It all seemed bright and comforting in the stores, but simply gaudy, desperately overstated, when she got it back home. She kept trying, anyway, buying things to fill the void Doe had left. She hadn't heard from Doe since that terrible night. She'd thought Doe might call to ask for some of the furniture; a lot of it was rightfully hers, after all. But her silence continued unbroken. Roberta knew this for a kind of honor, but hoped it felt like shame.

    Work was quiet, blessedly peaceful. On Nicholas's fifth birthday, the other children sang to him and drew pictures for him. He seemed pleased, almost like a normal child.

    One afternoon Roberta came home to find a note from Zephyr, on that same mauve, cinnamon-scented paper, stuck under her door. I hope you're doing okay. Dinner sometime?

    Roberta's heart sank. Was Zephyr asking for a date? She'd never seen Zephyr with anyone but her bots; she didn't know if the woman had human lovers, and if she did, which flavor she preferred. She'd had that boyfriend in college, supposedly, the one who got killed—the one who'd been friends with Meredith the Unavoidable—but who knew what had changed since then? And anyway, Roberta remembered Doe pooh-poohing that element of Zephyr's modest fame. "Oh, that's a bunch of compost. I saw it on ScoopNet. She went out with him twice, if that, and they never even slept together. She just makes a big deal out of it because it's good PR for her performances. ScoopNet said she's never slept with anybody, as far as they can tell. What do you think she does with all those bots?"

    They'd laughed about it at the time, and Roberta almost laughed aloud now too, before the loneliness of Zephyr's situation, and her own, turned the laughter to tears. She and Zephyr would be just perfect for each other, wouldn't they? Zephyr thought her bots were her children, and Roberta had fantasies about living in a day-care center with a puerile AI.

    No, she didn't need an entanglement with anybody right now, let alone with Zephyr.

    With a sigh, she grabbed a pencil and scribbled on the bottom of the note, Thanks for Mr. Clean. You were right, he's a big help. I'll stop by when I don't feel so much like something that just crawled out from under a rock. Then she snuck downstairs and stuck the note under Zephyr's door, hoping guiltily that it would buy her some time. If you see Zephyr, she told herself sternly, you're going to start grilling her on what she saw Doe and Iuna doing, what they were saying, if they said anything about you. You don't need that. Neither does Zephyr.

    Mitzi's birthday was hell, especially because it fell on the first weekend after Doe left. Roberta had planned in advance, as grimly as if she were preparing for a military siege. She slept as late as she could, took herself out to brunch with a new book—an intricate, neo-Victorian thing—and then went swimming at a city pool, lap after lap for an hour, until her legs were rubber and her mind was blank. She lay in the pool sauna and tried unsuccessfully to meditate, and then took a long, hot shower, and then did her circuit of the thrift stores. She bought two new pairs of jeans and a fleece cardigan, bought a wooden salad bowl, bought three more books. She got her hair cut. She went to some other stores, full-price ones this time, and bought herself a teddy bear and some flowers and a vase to put the flowers in. Then she carted everything back home and rearranged all the furniture, aiming for maximum cheer and good taste, while Mr. Clean roved about studying the new layout. Then she went for a walk. Then she came back home, consulted a movie timetable, and hauled herself off to see an action-adventure flick, starring stupid men with big muscles, that would occupy the hours of the Saturday dinner, the dinner Roberta kept trying to forget.

    She couldn't concentrate during the movie. She felt hemmed in by couples and families; she seemed to be the only person in the theater who was by herself, although she couldn't have been. She didn't want to be here; she wanted to be at the dinner. Barring that, she wanted to go visit Fred and drink warm milk and be told she was special, but she knew that would be unwise; that situation was already compromised enough.

    On the movie screen, cars were exploding as bloody body parts flew into the air. Roberta hunched down into her seat, wishing she hadn't come. Weekends were hell when you were single; she'd been able to forget that for the past four years. She found herself wondering what Fred did on weekends. It would be fun to take Fred home for the weekend sometime. She could show him pictures of her parents and get advice on decorating—she knew he had a good eye from hearing him coach the kids on their drawings—and introduce him to Mr. Clean. A lonely woman, an AI, and a bot: now there was the perfect family.

    You, Roberta told herself, are one sick cookie. Desperate, that's what you are. You wouldn't be able to take Fred home even if it weren't an insane idea: he's hardwired into KinderkAIr, dummy. You can't just unplug Fred, walk away with him, plug him into your food processor, and expect him to be able to function. He needs cameras and microphones, and anyway, he's just a machine.

    Sick. Very sick. But not as sick as this ridiculous movie she'd paid good money to see, where the exploding cars had segued into the two stars beating the living crap out of each other.

    Roberta looked at her watch. It was eleven-thirty. The dinner was over; Mitzi and Hugh and the others had gone home by now, and so could she. So she got up and returned to her new pictures and her new vase and her flowers, and to Mr. Clean, who was sweeping old spiderwebs from the corners of the ceiling. None of it cheered her up, but fortunately, she was too tired to care. One Saturday down. It would be seven days before she had to face another, and four months before she had to face the next family birthday.

    She hadn't been able to bring herself to call Mitzi and wish her a happy birthday, or even send a card. She knew it wasn't fair to shun Mitzi just because of Doe and Iuna, but the situation was too painful. She wondered if Mitzi had thought of her. She had no voicemail messages; an obscure impulse made her turn on her laptop, which she hadn't touched since checking the bank account.

    She had one e-mail. It was from Preston, from several days back. "I know you are lonely, and I am sorry," it said. "Please come visit so we can talk."

    You're not my surrogate daddy anymore, she thought grimly. You're my boss, and whatever's going on with your daughter's kid, I don't want to know any more than I have to. And why did Fred tell you I was lonely? He said he'd keep it secret!

    But maybe Fred hadn't said anything. Maybe Zephyr had. Maybe Doe or Iuna or Hugh or Mitzi had mentioned something to a FOP acquaintance. Maybe Roberta's trust in everyone around her was shattered, or maybe she was assigning herself entirely too much importance.

    She turned off the laptop and went to bed.

    Twenty- Three

    ROBERTA had been dreading Meredith and Kevin's appearance at the parent-teacher conferences scheduled for the following week, but to her relief, it all went smoothly enough. Meredith looked startled, almost crazed, when she saw the mice, but when Roberta asked her about it, she said she'd just forgotten something at the store, and maybe it was even true. Roberta gathered the courage to ask directly how Bluebell was, and Meredith said, "Oh, just fine," putting Roberta's lingering worries to rest. Whatever was going on in that department, she'd discharged her own responsibility. Kevin was charmed by the children's artwork; both Kevin and Meredith were properly attentive to Roberta's cautious description of Nicholas's adjustment problems. At Fred's urging, she'd stopped just short of recommending outside help, but she had a feeling they could tell she considered it necessary.

    She went home feeling relieved and cheerful. She'd done her job. She hadn't lied. She'd done her best to keep everybody happy without any outright whitewashing. Under the circumstances, it was an award-winning performance.

    Her self-congratulation dissolved two mornings later, when Nicholas carne to school with clenched fists and eyes reddened from weeping. "Fred," he called the minute he got into the room, "Fred, the Hobbit's gone!"

    Roberta, putting out art supplies at the other end of the room, looked up in alarm. Nicholas never sounded that upset about anything. Most of the other kids weren't there yet, but Zillinth, lying on her stomach reading The Velveteen Rabbit in the book corner, sat up. "The Hobbit's a story," she said. "How can a story be gone?"