Shelter (80 page)

    "What?" Roberta looked blank.

    "What would you have done? About Nicholas?" Meredith turned now, her gaze a challenge. "If you'd been his mother. Would you have turned him in right away?"

    Roberta shook her head. "Come on, Meredith. I was his teacher and I didn't turn him in, right? So what do you think?"

    "I mean," Meredith said, taking a deep breath, "what would you have done in my place? What would you have done about Patty and about the Hobbit and about—"

    "And about me?" Roberta poured coffee and handed a mug to Meredith. "When would I have started telling the truth, you mean? If I'd been in your shoes?"

    "Yes." Meredith took a cautious sip of the coffee. It was too bitter on an empty stomach and no sleep. She grimaced and put the mug back on the windowsill.

    "I don't know," Roberta said. "As soon as—as soon as it felt safe, I guess. As soon as I thought it wouldn't do him more harm than good."

    "And when," Meredith asked, her voice as bitter as the coffee, "would that have been?"

    "As long as there was brainwiping?"

    "Yes, exactly."

    "Okay," Roberta said. "As long as there was brainwiping, all right, okay, it never would have been safe, but, Meredith—that poor baggie, that Henry guy, he got wiped too. And I'm practically married to my probation officer. And none of it's all right."

    "I know that! I've already told you I know that! Do you think I think it's all right? I'm asking you what I should have done differently! I'm asking you what you would have done differently!"

    Roberta, frowning, traced the rim of her mug with a finger. "I don't know. I wouldn't have let them have Nicholas, either. I'd have run away, I think. Gone somewhere with him. I have no idea where. But that wouldn't have stopped it. He'd probably have wound up killing you too, eventually. You know that, don't you?"

    "The monsters wouldn't have been happy with mice for very long," Meredith said. "That's what the doctors told us."

    Roberta bent her head, breathing in the steam from the coffee. "Did they ever figure out what caused it?"

    She felt, rather than saw, Meredith's shrug. "Some combination of damage from in utero CV and infantile isolation trauma. That was the best guess they could come up with. It doesn't really matter, does it?"

    "Not to him," Roberta said. She'd only been up for twenty minutes, and already she wanted to go back to bed for the rest of the day. "It might to someone else's kid."

    "Ah. Altruistic Roberta."

    "You asked," Roberta said fiercely. "You wanted my opinion."

    "Not about that."

    "No, not about that. Okay, how's this: I wouldn't have called the cops on the baggie, Meredith. How's that for something to do differently?"

    "Yes," Meredith said. The life had gone out of her voice. "Yes, that's where it all started going bad. Really bad, I mean. Irrevocably bad." She raised a hand to her ruined face, traced scar tissue for a moment, as absentmindedly as someone else might have chewed a fingernail, and then folded her hands in front of her. "I wish I knew where he was. I wish I could do something for him." Roberta wasn't sure if she meant Nicholas or Henry. Then she sighed and shook herself "Well, I know where you are, and I know where Kevin is, and I'm pretty sure I know where my mother and Jack and Theo are, if they've stayed in the same house. Do you think it's late enough to call Kevin? The phones must be up again by now."

    Roberta closed her eyes. Now or never. She had to do it. Preston had told her to do it. It wasn't going to get any easier. "Meredith, I—no. You can't reach Kevin."

    "What? Why not? What—"

    "Your father told me to tell you. He—Meredith, I'm so sorry, I hate to have to tell you this, it isn't fair, it isn't any fairer than what happened to Raji or Nicholas or—"

    Meredith stood up, knocking over her chair, her eyes wild. "What happened? I talked to him two days ago. I talked to him. He was fine!"

    "Preston said—your father said—Meredith, he died in the storm. He, he went outside and something happened, something fell on his car, I think, he—Meredith, please sit down. Oh, Gaia, I shouldn't have told you, you're so tired, you can't—I'm sorry. Meredith? Please sit down."

    "He was coming to get me," Meredith said. She hadn't sat down. "That's why he's dead. He's dead because I called him."

    "It's not your fault," Roberta said, knowing how weak it sounded.

    How could Preston have done this to her? How could Preston have expected her to know what to say, how to say it? How could—

    And then, in a flash, she realized. Of course. Of course. How stupid could she be?

    She took a deep breath. "Meredith, listen—"

    "Kevin's dead because I called him."

    "People don't die because you love them," Roberta said, and saw Meredith shudder.

    "That's what my father told me when Raji died."

    "Well, he was right! Love doesn't kill people: other things do. Accidents, bad choices, diseases. Terrorists. Meredith, Kevin's not your fault. He isn't. It's his own fault he went out in the storm. He went out in the storm and the storm killed him. You had nothing to do with it."

    "He came because I called him."

    "You were sick," Roberta said. "You were feverish and you weren't in your right mind and you can't blame this on yourself. You can't. Meredith, a lot of things have been your fault, but a lot of things haven't been too, not Raji and not the fact that Nicholas was crazy and not this. Not Kevin. Kevin's not your fault." No more than her parents were hers. That was why Preston had chosen her to break the news.

    "He was out in the storm because I called him."

    "He didn't have to go," Roberta said. "Maybe you called him, but going was his choice. Preston tried to talk him out of it. His house system tried to talk him out of it. It was a bad choice, and he had lousy luck to go with it." Excessive altruism, she thought grimly. Sergei had always warned her that it could be a fatal condition. And yet it seemed to her, even now, that love without risk wasn't any kind of love at all. It seemed to her that the most hideous crimes were the ones committed by people trying to make the world entirely safe, as Meredith had tried to make the world safe for Nicholas.

    "He must have loved me after all," Meredith said bitterly. "That was the bad choice, wasn't it? There's nothing you can say to make me feel better about this, Roberta, so stop trying."

    "All right," Roberta said. "All right, I know." And now I know that we live on the same planet, although maybe I wish we didn't. "Meredith, would you call your mother, please? To let her know you're back?"

    "To let her know I killed Kevin?"

    "To let her know you're alive, Meredith. Please?"

    "She knows I'm alive. No one's found a body. She knows that Daddy would have told her if I'd died. But she still cries every night, Daddy says. That doesn't make sense." Meredith sat down, finally, staring glassily ahead. She hadn't cried yet. She might not cry for a long time. It had taken Roberta weeks to cry, when she learned that her parents were dead. "No body," she said. "Kevin doesn't have a body now, either. Roberta, did Daddy say if Kevin was rigged?"

    Roberta was startled. It hadn't even occurred to her. "No. He didn't say anything about that. You don't know?"

    "I know he wasn't rigged when I left. He didn't have a house system when I left, either, or hadn't activated it, anyway. If he got one—if he got a rig—it wouldn't—the records would be incomplete, you know. Less than five years of direct experience. Everything else would be memories of memories. Those ones, that kind of translated, they're—they're really thin. It doesn't work very well. Nobody ever thought it would. That's why MacroCorp's been pushing people to get rigged early. That's why my mother had Theo rigged when he was born."

    "You could ask your father."

    "He'd have told you if he wanted me to know," Meredith said. "It doesn't matter. No body—that's—Kevin loved his body. I loved his body. I—" She bent her head. Roberta thought the tears would come after all, but instead Meredith looked up, after a moment, and said, "I didn't love him yet, when I married him. I only realized how much I loved him after he left me. Isn't that stupid?"

    "No. It's sad, but it's not stupid. It's human. It happens all the time."

    "What do I do now? Did Daddy tell you?"

    "I'm supposed to take you back to the house."

    "Sergei will track you on the GPS," Meredith said. "It's going to blow my cover. It might get you in trouble."

    "You're right," Roberta said. "I hadn't thought of that." She'd forgotten how lucid people could be, in the first shock of grief She discovered that she couldn't worry about it. Preston would protect her, as he had promised, or not. After all, Sergei had all the information he needed already, if he chose to use it. "If you want to wait—"

    "No," Meredith said, and stood up again. "I've waited long enough. I want to go home now."

    Thirty-One

    How are you going to get in?" Roberta asked. "If Kevin didn't activate the full house system until after you guys split up, would you be one of the people allowed entry?"

    "I doubt it," Meredith said quietly. "But there's a key. Hidden in the garden. Very old-fashioned. I doubt very much that Kevin would have even remembered it was there, let alone moved it."

    "You don't think he changed the locks?"

    Meredith shrugged. "Maybe. But I can always break in through a window."

    "Great," Roberta said. "Then the security system would call the cops, wouldn't it? Unless—oh, I guess your father could override it." She couldn't think. She was supposed to be the rational one here; she was supposed to be comforting Meredith.

    "I'm not going to worry about it," Meredith said. "We'll get in somehow. The house is mine now, legally, whatever the house system says. I let Kevin stay here, but it's still my house. Call Sergei, Roberta. No, wait—let me call Sergei."

    "You? Why?" Roberta's head was spinning. "You want to talk to Sergei but not your mother?"

    "Right," Meredith said. "Because I'm a coward and I don't want to deal with my mother right now, but I don't want to get you in any more. trouble, either. I've gotten enough people in trouble." She stood and picked up her coffee mug. "Come on. Let's go back upstairs and call Sergei."

    They went back upstairs. They called Sergei. Roberta listened while Meredith informed Sergei very sweetly that she wasn't Zephyr Expanding Cosmos, that she was Meredith Walford, and that Roberta would be keeping her company while she went back to her house, and that if Sergei broke any of this to ScoopNet or anyone else, or punished Roberta for helping her, Meredith would personally see to it that he wound up in lawsuits up to his eyeballs.

    "There," she said when she put the phone down. "I think he'll behave."

    "I'm impressed." And I hope it works. "What did he say?"

    "He didn't say much. He spluttered a couple of times, and then he thanked me for keeping him informed and said that he certainly didn't want to make anything more difficult for anybody. If he makes trouble later, I'll offer him my autograph. Or tell him steamy stories about Zephyr coming to the door in her towel, or something."

    "What? Zephyr—what?"

    Meredith actually laughed. "Oh, I haven't told you my Mexican adventures yet. Never mind. Shall we go?"

    * * *

    "Henry," said the house, "Henry, wake up. I think Meredith and Roberta are coming up the walk."

    Henry, curled on the couch, stirred and snored and then sat bolt upright, scattering the two kittens, who had been curled behind his knees. "What, House?"

    "Hide, Henry. Two women just came up the front walk. I think they're Meredith and Roberta."

    Preston had told Henry and the house as much as he knew about Meredith and Roberta and Nicholas. Neither Henry nor the house had found the tale particularly reassuring. Meredith had hated both of them, and Meredith owned the house now. Roberta had wished both of them well, but had ultimately been helpless. And the house, hearing the story, found itself in precisely Henry's situation: Preston claimed to be telling the truth about a previous life it couldn't remember. It didn't know if Preston was really telling the truth or lying for some purpose of his own. It didn't remember Nicholas. It didn't remember being called Fred and working in a school with children and mice. It couldn't tell Preston what had happened during that final hour at KinderkAIr.

    "Are they going away?" Henry asked.

    "No. They're going around to the back. I don't think you have time to leave without them seeing you. Hide, Henry. Hide in Kevin's closet."

    "Meredith and Roberta will not hurt you," Preston said. He was still on the television. "I am sure."

    "Henry's not sure," Henry said flatly. "Henry's scared. Henry's going to hide now."

    "You told us you'd give us enough warning for Henry to leave if anyone came," said the house. "You lied, Preston. You can lie, because you're a person."

    "I did not lie; I erred. People make mistakes, as well as lying. I thought that Roberta and Meredith would talk to me before they came here. I do not have access to Roberta's tracking code, and Meredith is no longer trackable at all. I thought—"

    "We have no reason to trust you," said the house. "You lied about giving us enough time. You might lie about other things too."

    Henry, opening the door to Kevin's closet, said, "Henry's hiding now. You hide too, House, when they come in. Don't let them know you're too smart. Don't talk."

    "House systems talk, Henry."

    "Don't say anything a stupid house system wouldn't say," Henry said, secreting himself behind a rack of polo shirts. That wasn't much help. The house didn't know how stupid house systems talked. It decided that the best course of action would be to do what Kevin had always told it to do when anyone came to the house, and simply say nothing. It turned off all the televisions too, so that Preston couldn't tell the women that Henry was in Kevin's closet. It wasn't sure what to do about the bots. Stupid house systems had bots, but Meredith was afraid of bots. It decided to hide the bots, and sent them scuttling behind drapes and under furniture.