Year Zero (29 page)

“Good morning, sunshine,” he rasped.

Her voice was hoarse, too. “A, b, c, d, e, f, g,” she sang to him.

He opened his arms. She climbed right into the embrace. “Let’s not leave you alone again,” he said.

But he was going to leave her. When the time came, he would ride off to find his own daughter. By then, Tara’s life would be full with other people, though. Already a support team from social services was mobilizing for her. After so much neglect, she was about to be treated like a real child.

They shared an orange. He peeled it with his teeth and nails, and pulled the wedges apart. They were both starving. More food arrived.

When the nurse came in with a tray of syringes, Tara clung to Nathan Lee. He motioned the nurse to wait, and he started reading. Tara’s eyes settled on the page. It was as if she had fallen into his storybook. She didn’t seem to notice the bee stings of the needles.

They made a game of cleaning Tara up. Her cell was like a septic pit. Nathan Lee carried her across the empty hallway to a clean cell. Someone had painted a rainbow on one stainless steel wall. An hour later, the speech language lady arrived bearing gifts of paper and crayons. Tara was allowed to keep a favorite doll.

Step by step, they began unearthing her from their wrongs.

A
UGUST 14

S
he was among her butterflies.

The sun was sinking behind the Jemez caldera, the collapsed crater of a once massive volcano. The mountains across the valley would stay lighted for another hour. But perched along a finger of ancient lava, Los Alamos lay in shadow. The air was getting cooler. The butterflies were flocking to her body heat.

The cage was an old dog run with chicken wire for walls and plywood for a roof. It sat on the edge of what passed for her backyard, a shelf of sandstone jutting above the sheer drop. From here, the cliff fell a hundred feet or more. This was her retreat. Sometimes she dreamed about their orange and black wings pouring out of the depths.

“Miranda?” his voice said.

She jerked her head around. Butterflies scattered in a burst, then settled back onto her bare arms and hair. “What are you doing here?” she snapped at him.

It was Nathan Lee out there. He looked like a jigsaw puzzle through the chicken wire.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

Break out the party hats,
she thought with annoyance. People didn’t come out here. She had little enough privacy in her days and nights. And she resented getting snuck up on. “You shouldn’t be wandering around,” she said. “Security could pick you up. Ochs has put the word out on you. I keep telling you, I only have control over my own little island.”

Then it occurred to her that he might be offering himself as bait, trying to draw Ochs out from South Sector or wherever he was hiding.

“I wanted to run something past you,” he said.

“In my backyard? I’m off duty.”

He didn’t take the hint. “Killer view,” he said.

She didn’t answer. Her silence didn’t discourage him. She’d noticed that. Stillness didn’t faze him. He and the Captain were like peas in a pod that way. You had to have a comfort level with yourself to be around them very much.

He came closer to the chicken wire. She couldn’t see if he was staring at her or the butterflies. After a few minutes, he asked, “Are those monarchs?”

“Part of an old experiment,” she said. “Memory.” Butterflies kept lighting on her mouth. It was the honey she’d put on some cold corn-bread when she got home.

“What about it?”

“Where does it come from?” she said. Did he really want to hear this, or was he just patronizing her? He was a cipher to her. She felt herself tensing up. What did he want? “How much does a memory weigh? Is it folded into a protein? A charge of electricity? How does it get stored?”

“How much does a memory weigh?” he said. He had come right up to the wire, but didn’t weave his fingers through the mesh. He didn’t touch the cage. His eyes were on her.

“The question’s mostly figurative. Then again,” she lifted one of the monarchs on her wrist. “Her brain weighs a gram, or less. But she holds the memory of thousands of generations of migration. Every year monarchs migrate to the northern U.S., and reproduce, and die. Somehow the next generation remembers its way home to the winter grounds in Mexico. There are other species with imprinted memory, memory that isn’t learned. Cuckoos are one, and eels. That’s all DNA is, a vast memory.”

“That’s different, though, you said so. Memory cells. Memory.”

“Yes and no,” she said, aggravated by her own contradictions. “Maybe.”

“Did the butterflies prove your theory?”

“The plague came,” she said.

He stood there another minute. “They suit you,” he said. “You look right with them.” It was hard to see his eyes through the wire and shadows.
Was he hitting on her?
She decided he wouldn’t dare. The privileges of her rank. Or something.

“Summer ends earlier up this high,” she said. “They’ll die soon.”

“You could let them go,” he observed.

“Too late.”

“Some might make it.”

“They wouldn’t,” she insisted.

He dropped it. He hunkered down on his heels. He waited.

Maybe it was selfish to keep them, but they were her comfort. Her mother had loved monarchs. It was that simple. Miranda remembered the meadow, and the high sun, and their picnic basket made of woven reeds. They had spread a red-and-white checkered blanket on the grass. Her mother sang
Greensleeves.
And out of nowhere, a cloud of monarchs had magically descended from the blue sky.

He didn’t leave. He was on a different clock. A different planet.

She pretended to adjust the hummingbird feeders and fix some edges of the fence. After a few minutes his head turned to the colors on the far range. She watched him from the corner of her eye. He looked so peaceful.

At last she ran out of pretenses. The shadows drove her out. The sun dress was no defense against the high desert chill. She had goosebumps. With a gentle wave to detach the butterflies, Miranda let herself through the gate.

Knees crackling, Nathan Lee stood up, and his face seemed to jump at her.

“Oh,” she said. He backed away. Three days had passed, and the swelling had gone down from his beating. But he still had stitches and two black eyes. A new pair of glasses—he had a preference for small wirerims—rested delicately on the crook of his broken nose.

“I know,” he said, prodding at his face. “It scares me in the morning.”

She recovered. He was the one with no manners. “It’s my dinner time,” she announced.

It was like an alarm bell. Incredibly, it hit him all at once. “Your dinner,” he said. He looked ready to bolt, as if he’d strayed into a sacred place. For the moment she felt at an advantage with him.

“You wanted to tell me something,” she said.

“I wasn’t looking at the time.”

That would have been a trick, she thought. He didn’t have a watch on either wrist.

“You said you had an idea.”

“Tomorrow.” Another step backward.

She changed her mind. “Have you eaten?”

“Look,” he turned grave. “Business. Dinner. Not a good combination. I picked a bad time.”

“Do you want some supper?” She enunciated it slowly.

He looked around. No escape.

“You’re kind of offending me.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good. Supper.”

“Fine,” she said.

He quit talking.

She led the way. At the back door, he automatically took off his shoes. “No need,” she said, and left hers on. He kept his off. He had clean white socks. His oxford shirt, two sizes too large from the warehouse, was clean and white, too. The black jeans were not his size either. He kept them cinched tight with an old leather belt.

It was getting dark inside. She flicked on the light. His eyes darted everywhere. He took it all in, and for a moment Miranda felt on display. The house was nothing more than a base camp for her office. There wasn’t a single piece of art anywhere, not even a calendar with flowers or puppies. Genome charts, science articles, and spreadsheets were push-pinned to the dry wall or fixed to the refrigerator. The kitchen table held two computers, side by side, both on. Taped to the window, a map of chromosome 16 blocked the spectacular view.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” she stated, and began hunting through her pantry and refrigerator. She was, by habit, a cafeteria rat. There was some powdered egg mix, a wedge of hard parmesan, a box of corn flakes, tomatoes from someone’s garden, an onion, and an unopened case of last year’s wine from one of the Taos vineyards. The wine had been Elise’s, part of her tiny Los Alamos inheritance that had passed on to Miranda.

“Woof,” she announced. “The cupboards are bare.”

“Look,” he started. Alarm bells, all over again. Food, she registered, was a major issue for him.

On an impulse, she pulled the case of wine from the closet. She handed him a corkscrew. “Open the box, pick a bottle,” she said. “We’re having breakfast for dinner. Omelettes Miranda.”

He uncorked a bottle. She set out two heavy glasses. “Sit,” she said.

While he perched on a stool at the peninsula, she tried to fake her way through the cooking. She’d never learned how to cut an onion properly, though, and the knife bit her knuckle while she wept. Soon Nathan Lee was on her side of the peninsula, and she was on the stool.

The wine was good for them. Their awkwardness melted. She teased him. “So how’s it feel to be famous?”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” he said.

“Come on, you’re a legend.”

The story of Tara’s resurrection had spread throughout Los Alamos. The redemption of a single castaway child in a castaway age seemed incidental, but to Miranda’s surprise it mattered a great deal to people.

“I’m not being modest,” he said. “It has nothing to do with me.”

“You’re the hero.”

“That’s my point,” he said.

“Interpret,” she said.

“Myth runs deep,” he said. “I did their penance. I robbed the grave of a Neandertal queen. I made my way here to serve her renewed being. Extrapolate. They got a hero who restores the dead to life.”

“Are you talking about the cloning?”

“It’s bigger than that, I think. They’re virus hunters. They want to save the world.”

“What’s the penance part?”

“The queen of the dead beat me to a pulp.”

He started to grin, but his lip split. A bead of blood started up. She handed him a square of toilet paper. Kleenex was a thing of the past.

“What about our little queen?” she said.

“I see her everyday. But I’m taking myself out of the food chain a little bit at a time. There are a lot of people stepping in. They’re good with her.”

Miranda didn’t ask why he was stepping out of the girl’s life. It was self-evident. He was in transit. “I hear the Captain’s wife visits,” she said.

“She’s there for hours. She brings the meals. I guess she used to teach grade school. Tara likes her. That’s putting it mildly.”

“The Enotes want to adopt her.”

Nathan Lee glanced up from the cutting board, surprised.

“I guess maybe that’s a secret,” Miranda said.

Nathan Lee nodded his head, getting used to the idea. “That might be good for her,” he decided.

“It might be good for the Enotes,” said Miranda. “They need something to help fill the hole in their life.”

“How do you mean?” he said. Nathan Lee kept his eyes on the tomato. But his knife slowed down.

“They haven’t told you about their daughter?”

His knife stopped.

“She was a pilot in the Navy. On one of those ships that never came home.”

“What ships?”

“You must have heard about them. The mapping and search expeditions. They went out to take stock of the planet, but no one made it home. The satellites pick them up here and there. Ghost ships circling in the ocean. Like the Lost Dutchman.”

Nathan Lee fell silent. Miranda thought it must have to do with his own loss. He looked haunted.

“He was very proud of her,” she quickly summarized.

Nathan Lee stayed quiet.

“Why don’t I grate the cheese?” she offered.

“Sure,” he said.

She changed the topic to the latest skirmishing. “The blood labs are at odds with the liver lab now. Which is crippled by its enzyme departments. Skin sabotaged Brain last week. Hippocampus is arguing with Neocortex. It’s a farce,” she said. “The corpus is devouring itself.”

Nathan Lee emerged from his thoughts. “I know,” he said. “I see it. I hear it. I was standing in line the other day. Two guys behind me. And they were admiring the virus. One of them wondered why it chose such a flimsy thing as man. They’ve fallen in love with it, you know.”

“What was that?”

“The virus,” he repeated. “People love it. Not like,” he wagged his finger back and forth from her to him, “between people. It’s more like reverence. They’ve subordinated themselves to it. The virus is like a deity. No one talks about it as an invader.” He took a big pinch of the Parmesan cheese from under her grater and sprinkled it across the omelette.

“That’s…wrong,” she said. It was an awful notion. Grotesque. “We haven’t even seen the thing yet. It’s an idea. Well, an expression. We see its signature.”

But he was right. She saw it in an instant.
They loved the thing that was killing them.

He didn’t argue. “That’s probably enough cheese,” he commented.

Miranda looked down, and she had furiously grated another small pile. She lay the grater aside, and went around to her stool and glass of wine.

“No one has seen what you’ve seen,” she said. “The plague is still unbelievable to us.”

“I haven’t seen it either,” he reminded her. “Only the shockwaves.”

“After you got here,” she said, “I pulled up some of the satellite feeds. I wanted to see what you came through. From space, the continents are dark. The lights are turned off. It looks like we lost.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Tell me about America.” Ever since his appearance out of nowhere, Miranda had wanted to ask him about the day-after world. The question had seemed too personal, but now she realized it was only too personal to her. She didn’t want to know what it was like in her own country. But part of her did. The nation still teemed with people, and though it was no longer really a nation, it was still America. Surely, she thought.