The Saffron Malformation (35 page)

             
The room filled with steam quickly as the shower sprayed down over him and he let it beat against his skin as he slowly worked the bar of soap over his body.  Long after he was clean he stood under the spray and enjoyed it.  There was no rush to get out as no one was waiting for him to finish so they could have their turn.

             
In this shower he was secluded.  There was nothing but him and the water and his soap.  Once the shower was over he was going to have things to do.  He had to activate Geo, which he should have done before check in, he regretted to himself, but he’d been too eager for these moments of solitude.

             
After the robot came the other thing.  The thing he wished he could just ignore.  The thing that would haunt him if he tried.

             
Quey pushed it out of his mind and focused on the spray of the water hammering lightly against his shoulders.  Finally, skin pruned in a room thick with steam, Quey washed his hair then turned the water off.

             
Dressed in fresh casual digs, a pair of jeans and a grey Pickens and Zaul tee, Quey left his room, hair still slicked back and damp, and headed toward the lobby.  He scanned the room and when he spotted the lovely woman who’d checked him in tidying a flower arrangement he strolled over to her and said, “Excuse me.”

             
The woman turned, did a slight double take, then asked, “Can I help you?”

             
He smiled, “I sure hope so.  I’m looking for an old friend of mine and I think she lives in this part of the world.  Names Natalie Vero?”

             
She turned toward him thoughtfully and repeated the name.  He nodded and she told him, “The name sounds familiar, but I don’t think…”

             
“Last I heard she was looking to be a teacher,” he added and her eyes jumped.

             
“Oh, yes!  She teaches at the high-school.  My daughter had her for biology last year.”

             
Quey thanked her and she gave him directions to the school.

             
Though Northshire was a small town it was spread out quite a bit and after pausing to start Geo’s cycle, he took the walk slowly.  He strolled in part because he still had a few hours before classes were scheduled to let out and in part because he didn’t want to get there.  In the end it was futile.  The walk that took an hour and some change seemed to be over in minutes and now he was standing in front of the building looking up at the letters running just below the roofline.

             
Green Leaf High School, home of the Wild WOLVERINES.

             
Quey chuckled with a smile at the painting below the words.  It was a wolverine, drawn the way a wolverine was supposed to look.  You could scour Saffron your entire life and you’d never find one that looked anything like it.  It was another illusion propagating the semblance of normalcy, sold by Blue Moon and the men in charge to the people, who bought it by the barrel.  In the end Quey feared it was going to cost them more than they’d ever care to hear.

             
For a brief moment he recalled the long white corridor the nurse had led him down when he was a boy.  It led past room after room containing one person after another, all dying of the same thing.  Finally the nurse stopped and he was at the room his parents were in.  Looking up at the wolverine painted on the side of this school he saw it as an emblem of what had killed them.  Complacent acceptance and an implicit denial of the way things are.

             
Putting that out of his mind, letting the anger he felt rumbling in his guts subside, Quey started toward the school and each step seemed to place a new and heavier weight on his shoulders.

             
Classes let out just after Quey made it to the main office where a large tan woman in black slacks and button down v-neck top sat at a desk behind a counter.

             
“Can I help you?” she asked over the loud chaos of teenagers exiting school after the days’ final bell.

             
“I’m looking for Natalie Vero,” he replied and she gave him a look.  “I’m an old friend and I was just passing though town and was hoping to surprise her.”

             
“Ex boyfriend?” the woman asked bluntly.

             
Quey chuckled, “No.”

             
She stared at him for a long moment before finally telling him, “She’s in room 212.  Usually be in there for another hour or so.”

             
“Thanks,” Quey smiled.

             
“Oh, and if you are an ex and you just lied to me,” she informed him briskly, “I will not hesitate to hurt you.”

             
Quey nodded to her and started for the door.

             
“Mean it,” she continued.  “I ain't afraid to use a tazer.”

             
“I don’t doubt it,” Quey agreed before heading out into the halls.

             
Moving through the crowd would be impossible so he stayed in the doorway until the halls cleared to a manageable number then headed toward the staircase and up to room 212.  Once again the trip was over much too quickly.  He was standing in the doorway, looking into the room at the dozen or so rectangular tables the students would sit at and the woman sitting at a shorter wood desk along the far wall.  She was spinning her hair, which was long and somewhere between light brown and blond, in her fingers while she looked over some papers on the desk in front of her.

             
Quey stood watching her for a moment longer when she must have felt a tingle on the back of her neck because she looked up and at him.  Her face was round but not fat and filled with the confusion that comes with recognizing something you can’t place.  “I know you,” she said thoughtfully, her large grey blue eyes squinting slightly.

             
Nodding, Quey stepped forward into the room.  It smelled of chemicals and sterilization.  It smelled a bit like a hospital but more like a morgue.  “We met a few times,” he began but she interrupted.

             
“Quey?” her eyebrows raised just a bit.

             
A smile touched half his mouth and he answered, “That’s me.”

             
Her expression melted into suspicion.  “What are you doing here?”

             
“Tell the truth I came to find you.”

             
She nodded, growing agitated.  “He send you?”

             
Quey sighed, “Yeah.”

             
“Well I don’t want to hear it,” she said stern.

             
“Natalie,” he began but was interrupted again.

             
“No,” she snapped.  “If he wants to tell me something he can do it himself.  My whole life,” she stopped, reconsidered, collected herself and started again.  “If he wants to talk to me, he knows how to find me.”

             
Quey nodded.  “He wanted to apologize.”

             
“Then he can do it himself,” she snapped briefly then calmed herself.  “I’ve never hidden from him.”

             
Like a band aid, Quey decided and before he could consider it any further he said, “He’s dead.”

             
Natalie stared at him, frozen, trembling slightly, eyes beginning to shimmer, disbelief or maybe denial shrouding her with its false protection.

             
Quey nodded.  “That’s why I’m here.  I don’t know if he’d have figured it out on his own but forced to reflect on his ways at the business end of a life and death situation he knew he’d done wrong by you.  He didn’t go into specifics but he wanted me to tell you he regretted the way he handled things and he wished he’d have been man enough to say so sooner.”

             
“How?” she asked, hollowly.

             
“In the raid on Fen Quada.”

             
“Raid?” she asked.  “I thought,” she got that far before it was her turn to be interrupted.

             
“I know what the news said,” he told her.  “Been seeing a lot of news these last few months that isn’t the truth.  The truth is the Angels of the Brood burned Fen Quada to the ground.  Truth is they burned a lot of places,” he went on then remembered why he was here and stopped.

             
Natalie looked down at her desk, her hands resting on a small stack of papers in front of her, trembling.

             
“I just assumed he’d collected his money and moved on,” she said dryly.

             
Quey crossed to the desk and sat in a chair opposite her.

             
“You’re sure…” she trailed off, looking up at him in a last desperate grasp for hope.

             
He nodded solemn.

             
She looked down at the desk for a moment then slammed her hand against it and blurted, “Fucking stubborn old man!”

             
Quey glanced over his shoulder at the opened door but there was no one in the hallway beyond.

             
“Why,” she sobbed.  “Why didn’t you just…” she got that far and then the tears came in a gush.  Quey stood and moved around the desk.  He stood beside her and laid a hand on her shoulder.  She buried her face against him and sobbed for a while and he ran a hand over her hair.

             
“He thought I was making a mistake,” she finally said in a soft voice.  “He never bothered to find out if it was true.”  Tears came again and she sobbed, “I should have told him I was happier this way.  That I wouldn’t change a thing even if I could.”

             
Quey stood quiet with Natalie pressed against his belly, holding her gently, when he spotted the picture on her desk of her and her daughter, a thirteen year old version of the woman he was consoling.

             
He remembered Railen talking about his daughter being a doctor some day.  Of course if you asked Natalie she always claimed she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.  She’d gotten into the medical program, however, and oh how Railen had celebrated.  He remembered too, years later, how he suddenly didn’t want to talk about it anymore until one drunken night when he went on a rant.  He’d said horrible things he’d never tell Natalie about.  She’d dropped out of school because she was pregnant and now she taught anatomy in high school.

             
“He knew,” Quey told her.  She pulled away and looked up at him.  “And I do believe he wished he could change the way he was about it.”

             
She collected herself in a single tick and wiped her eyes.  “Sorry,” she said between sniffles.

             
He smiled, “No need.”

             
She took a few moments, pulled a tissue from a box on the edge of her desk and wiped her eyes before saying, “Thanks.”

             
“Come on,” he offered with his hand extended.

             
“Where?” she asked.

             
“You could use a drink.”

             
She chuckled, “Probably, but I can’t.  I have to pick up Amber.  That’s my daughter,” she added pointing to the photo and Quey nodded.  “She’s at a friends’ house.  And then there’s dinner and…” she trailed off with a sigh.

             
“Listen, Reggie and Dusty and his fiancé Rachel are in town too.  I’m sure the three of them… well Rachel at least, should be able to keep Amber alive for a few hours.”

             
She smiled and nodded and let Quey lead her out of the school.

             
“I was halfway through my first year of my second tier of med school when I got pregnant,” Natalie offered over her second snifter of shine.  She and Quey were sitting at the table in her kitchen while Reggie cooked some burgers on the stove.  Rachel and Dusty had taken Amber and her friend Lauren out to eat.

             
“He was so proud when I took the aptitude test and the results came back.  He never understood.”

             
“Understood what?” Quey asked, taking a sip.  He’d broken out a bit of the blackberry shine, at Natalie’s request.

             
“I could be a doctor, sure.  I even enjoy the idea of it but the schedule,” she took a moment to sip.  “I knew even before I went into the program I wasn’t going to like it.  I wanted a life, you know.  Twelve or fourteen hour class days and then on call all the time, sometimes working seven days a week.”  She shook her head.  “Even at sixteen I knew that wasn’t for me.  When I took the test that came back saying I was knocked up it was almost a relief.  The part about being a doctor I really enjoyed, I found in being a teacher.”  She fell silent, allowing the sizzle of frying meat patties to take over the room.  Quey waited patiently as whatever memory had arrested her slowly released.  “I wanted my daughter more than I wanted to be a doctor.  Wanted her father too,” she added with a touch of bitterness, “or so I thought at the time.  Now I think it’s for the best he’s not around.”  She didn’t believe what she’d said and she took a heavy sip of shine to wash the lie back down.