Shelter (79 page)

    She opened her eyes. There was a bright lighting grid far above her. In the middle distance, Sarita looked down at her, and there were other faces around the bed too: a doctor, another nurse she recognized from before, Zephyr. "You're back in the hospital," Zephyr said. "You won't be getting away this time. Don't try to answer, dear; you'll rip your stitches open."

    She tried to tell them all to go away, but it hurt too much when she tried to form the words. Instead she closed her eyes again. "If she'd been serious about this," Zephyr said conversationally, "she wouldn't have worked so carefully around her eyes, don't you think?"

    "She could have died," the doctor said sharply. This was a new doctor, with excellent English. "If that fisherman hadn't found her—"

    Sarita said something soothing in Spanish and put her hand on Meredith's arm; the doctor broke off with a sigh, and Meredith heard retreating footsteps. Zephyr's? The doctor's? Silence then, and the warm hand went away, and Meredith slept: woke and slept and woke again, swallowed as soft food was spooned into her mouth—carrots, ground beef, peaches, as if she were a baby—swallowed a pill because she didn't have the energy to hide it or spit it out. She slept again, and when she woke she found Sarita gazing down at her.

    "You asked me once," the young woman said quietly, "why I do this job. I will tell you now. I do this job because my brother slit his wrists ten years ago, and I was the one who found him in the bathtub, and if I had gotten there half an hour earlier I could have saved him. Do you understand, Edith?"

    Meredith nodded. It still hurt too much to talk.

    "Good. If you need reasons not to hurt yourself again, you can use me as one of them. Do you understand?"

    Meredith nodded. "Good," Sarita said again. "Because I will tell you this, although the doctor disagrees: I also do not think you truly want to die. You ran away when you realized there were ghosts here—forgive me for using the slang for them, the blank-brains—and I think you ran away because you did not want to become one too. I think you ran away because you wanted to stay yourself, and you were afraid that we would turn you into a ghost. Am I right, Edith?"

    Meredith shook her head. No. No, you're wrong, I ran away because the ghost who haunts me, my son, is someone I couldn't help any more than I can help the people here. I ran away because I'm afraid that the creatures I saw in the dayroom, those pathetic wrecks, are what my son is now. I ran away because you wouldn't let me kill myself, and because I don't deserve to live, if he's a ghost.

    She remembered seeing Patty's flayed corpse, and found herself trying to imagine what it must have been like for Sarita to find her brother's body, or to see Meredith herself brought in, her face a mass of cuts. She thought briefly, with terror, about the fisherman who had found her, what he must have thought, how he must have felt. I don't want this, she said to the pictures in her head. Make them go away. My own pain is more than I can bear; make these others go away!

    "No?" Sarita said. "I'm wrong, then. Well. So maybe you wish us to make you a ghost, and you thought that if you carved your face open, we would? That if you did not die, at least we would erase your brain? We will not, Edith. The doctor thinks you can get better, and so do I, and your friend Zephyr, she knows it. She swears to it."

    Meredith shook her head, and felt tears coming, oozing onto the bandages encasing most of her face. "Ah," Sarita said softly. "You do not think: so. But I do. What we need now is to find a reason for you to want to live."

    Meredith stared at her. Horrible woman. Hateful woman. Meredith had wanted to die to atone for all the harm she'd caused others. But if she died now, she'd be betraying Sarita too, making herself another weight in the burden this woman had to carry. Meredith knew about burdens like that. If her death made someone else's life worse, it wouldn't atone for anything at all.

    She heard Zephyr's voice again. Do you think this is what Raji would have wanted you to do? Do you think it's what your kid would want for you if he could still want anything? How do you think your parents would feel? How do you think I'd feel?

    They'd feel the way she felt now. She closed her eyes to shut out the light. She was trapped, trapped.

    * * *

    The next day a bot came clicking across the floor and climbed up onto the covers, arm over arm, until it was perched at the foot of the bed. It was an unremarkable bot, gunmetal gray, without any special attachments that Meredith could see. It was the first bot she'd seen in the hospital. She wondered if the staff thought she was well enough to deal with bots now. She didn't see how they could think that. Her face hurt horribly, much more than the cosmetic surgery ever had. Sarita had refused to give her extra painkillers; she said the doctors were concerned about dependency, but it seemed to Meredith that she was being punished.

    "Hello, Meredith," said the bot. "Zephyr told me you were here. She did not feel that she could keep it from me any longer."

    Meredith turned her face away. She didn't want to talk to her father. She'd have told him to go away, if moving her mouth hadn't been so excruciating.

    "No one else knows where you are," the bot said. "Not your mother, not Kevin. I will tell them only if you wish it."

    "No," she said to the wall. It was a clean wall, whitewashed and soothing, glowing in the sunlight. "They don't care, anyway."

    "Of course they care." The bot's voice was as even as ever. "Just as I do."

    "No one looked for me," Meredith said petulantly, painfully. She knew it was a silly thing to say: she'd run as far from them as she could.

    "We did look for you. We could not find you. You did not want to be found. Had you died, your corpse would have been identified beyond all doubt. Because there was no corpse, Kevin and your mother knew that you were still alive."

    There'd almost been a corpse. Meredith, still staring at the wall, said, "You must have known where I was, Daddy. I was hacking—I was looking for—you must have seen that. You see everything. Nobody can run away from you."

    "But you did. And if I had revealed myself, you would have run further. Is that not so?"

    Meredith turned irritably back to face him and said, through the agonizing pain, "Did you know where I was, or not? You couldn't have looked for me and not found me!"

    "We could not find you until you wanted to be found," said the bot. Meredith's nose had begun to itch underneath the bandages, where she couldn't scratch it. She wondered if that meant she was beginning to heal. Her entire face would itch: it was going to be horrible. It was going to be worse than the pain she felt now. "Did you know where I was?" she asked, trying again.

    "Sometimes I did. Sometimes I did not."

    "You knew," Meredith said. "You didn't tell Mommy and Kevin because they would have come to get me. Mommy would have, anyway. You didn't want them to know that you knew where I was and hadn't told them. You didn't want to admit that you lied to them." She marveled that she could talk so much; she felt a perverse pride, as if she'd just benchpressed ten times her own weight.

    "I did not lie," said the bot.

    "You just didn't tell the entire truth," Meredith said bitterly.

    "I did not know the entire truth," Preston said. "There were gaps. There were times when I lost sight of you. Zephyr tells me you were on the beach. I did not know where you were then, although I knew you must still be in Mexico."

    "I talked to bots. They knew I was there. You must have known."

    "I do not talk to every bot in the world, Meredith. They are independent entities. They do not report to me."

    She was tired. She couldn't make sense of anything. Her face was a mask of misery. Talking so much hadn't been a good idea, after all. She said with infinite difficulty, "Why reveal yourself now, then?"

    "Because you wanted to be found. That is Zephyr's interpretation, and mine. As when you were a child, playing hide-and-seek, and crouched under a table where you were clearly visible. Your mother and I would walk around the table. We would say, 'Where is Meredith?' and you would giggle. And when you were tired of the game, when you were ready to be found, you would crawl out from under the table and we would discover you and cry out and wave our arms in amazement, and you would be glad."

    "I'm not glad now," Meredith said. She didn't remember playing hide-and-seek with her father when she was a child. She didn't remember her father ever being home.

    "I hope," said the bot, "that one day you will be. No one questions that you have suffered, Meredith. But if you had died on the beach, joy would have ended as well."

    Meredith turned her face to the wall again. Her father couldn't possibly understand joy, if he ever had. He was just a program.

    "If you had died on the beach," the bot said implacably, "the world would never have been the same. Not for me, and not for anyone who has ever known you, Meredith."

    I've done nothing good. I've only hurt people. But she couldn't summon the energy to say it.

    He visited her every day after that. He told her things she would rather not have known: that Kevin hadn't dated anyone since she had been gone; that Constance and Theo went to the Gaia Temple every year on her birthday to do a remembrance ritual; that Constance wept every evening before she fell asleep, while Jack tried to comfort her. Meredith found herself, reluctantly, feeling sorry for Jack and sorrier for Theo, the perfect child who could never fill the daughter-shaped hole in Constance's life. Feeling sorry for them hurt, like the renewed flow of blood to a numb limb. She didn't want to hurt anymore. She didn't want to feel anything.

    "People still love you," Preston told her.

    "They shouldn't," she said fiercely. Talking was somewhat easier now. "I don't want them to."

    "They do. I do, but that does not count because you do not consider me a person."

    She shuddered. "People hate me. Roberta. Zephyr. The baggie. Maybe he doesn't remember me, but he'd hate me if he could."

    "Yes," Preston said. "That is probably true. You have done harm, to others and yourself. What will you do now?"

    She didn't know. She asked herself the same thing, ceaselessly. She was trapped, trapped. She knew she had to stay alive, but she didn't yet know how.

    Zephyr was the one who told her. "You can go back," she said, spooning tomato soup rather roughly into Meredith's still-tender mouth. "You can go back and make your goddamn amends properly, get it? That's your job now, Meredith. You go back home and do whatever you can to fix the mess you made. Never mind if you can fmd your kid or not. Find the others and tell them you're sorry. That's the only thing in the world that will get this thing off your back."

    I have to do my own dirty work, Meredith thought bleakly.

    They had been back in Zephyr's house, then. Meredith had been released into Zephyr's custody. Zephyr fed her, deputized a small herd of bots to guard her, and put her to work in the garden when she was strong enough. And when she was well enough to go home, Zephyr gave her clothing and a wad of American currency she'd saved—"That'll keep you from credit-chip problems, as long as it lasts"—and the key to her condo in the Soma District, and said, "Here. So at least you'll have a place to stay while you screw your courage up. You find any cops poking around, tell them you're a friend of mine. Make up a name and keep your fingers crossed they don't voiceprint you."

    "Thank you," Meredith had said stiffly, taking the key. It hurt to have to thank someone who hated her. Everything hurt. "Thank you for everything."

    Zephyr had laughed, her old cackle. "Don't thank me. I'm not being as nice as you think I am. This is my way of honoring Raji, all right? My reasons are entirely selfish. And Roberta Danton's going to be right over your head, you know, still doing time. When she finds out who you are, you just may wind up dead."

    "I'll tell her you sent me."

    Zephyr snorted. "You do that. And tell Mr. Clean I miss him."

    * * *

    She stood now with her forehead pressed against the cool glass of Roberta's living room window. It was dawn. She hadn't slept. She was too tired to sleep, too tired to clean. She gazed out at the aftermath of the storm, worrying about Kevin. It was too early to call him. She'd go downstairs again in a few hours. Right now she was too tired to move.

    That was where Roberta found her, when she woke up an hour later.

    Meredith heard the bedroom door creak open and turned, blankly, to see Roberta emerge, yawning. Roberta raised an eyebrow and looked pointedly at Meredith, and then at the couch, and then back to Meredith again. She traced a question mark in the air with her finger. Meredith shook her head no. No, I didn't sleep.

    Roberta shrugged and went into the kitchen. Meredith heard running water, the whir of the coffee grinder. She turned back to the window, and came out of her trance only when she felt Roberta's hand on her arm, tugging.

    Meredith in one hand and the coffeepot in the other, Roberta made her way downstairs, into Zephyr's beslimed apartment. Mr. Clean followed them, carrying two coffee mugs raised carefully above the muck. "Okay," Roberta said, putting the coffeepot down on Zephyr's windowsill and pushing Meredith down into a chair, "so what's eating you?"

    "What's eating me? You can't figure that out for yourself? I thought you were tired of talking to me."

    "I don't need you going psychotic on me from sleep deprivation, Meredith."

    "No. I guess you don't. I've gone psychotic on too many people already, haven't I?" It occurred to her that Roberta still didn't know what had happened in Mexico, that she hadn't heard that part of the story.

    "Yeah, you have."

    "Yeah. I know I have. So what would you have done?" She realized, suddenly, that this was the right question to ask, the question she'd wanted to ask for years, the question she'd have asked if she'd been able to speak to Roberta openly during Nicholas's illness. What should I do? What would you do?