urine come out when he realized that he was going to be electrocuted to death.
Charlie got up.
She stumbled, then she walked, then she jogged and eventually, finally, she saw the light on the porch outside the second farmhouse.
7
Sam Quinn alternated her arms, left, then right, then left again, as she cut a narrow channel through the cool waters of the swimming pool. She turned her head every third stroke and drew in a long breath. Her feet fluttered. She waited for the next breath.
Left-right-left-breathe.
She had always loved the calmness, the simplicity, of the freestyle stroke; that she had to concentrate just enough on swimming so that all extraneous thoughts cleared her mind. No telephones rang under the water. No laptops pinged with urgent meetings. There was no reading emails in the pool.
She saw the two-meter line, the indication that the lane was about to end, and coasted until her fingers touched the wall.
Sam kneeled on the floor of the pool, breathing heavily, checking her swimmer’s watch: 2.4 kilometers at 150 seconds per 100 meters, so 37.5 seconds per 25-meter length.
She felt a pang of disappointment when she saw the numbers, which were within seconds of yesterday’s, because her competitive streak glowed in white-hot opposition to her physical capabilities. Sam glanced down the length of the pool, wondering if she had another short burst inside of her.
No.
Today was Sam’s birthday. She was not going to tire herself out so much that she had to use her cane to walk to the office.
She pushed herself up onto the edge of the pool. She quickly showered off the salt water. The tips of her fingers were furrowed and rough against the Egyptian cotton towel. Somewhere in the back of Sam’s mind, her mother’s voice told her that the body’s response to being submerged so long was to wrinkle the pads of the fingers and toes in order to improve grip.
Gamma had been forty-four when she’d died, the same age that Sam was now.
Or at least would be in another three and a half hours.
Sam kept on her prescription goggles while she rode the elevator up to her apartment. The chrome on the back of the doors showed her wavy reflection. Slim build. Black one-piece suit. Sam ran her fingers through her hair to help it dry. Twenty-eight years ago, she had walked into the woods behind the farmhouse with hair the color of a raven’s feather. Almost a month later, she’d awakened in the hospital to find a shock of white stubble growing from her shaved head.
Sam had gotten used to the double-takes, the surprised looks when strangers realized that the gray-haired old woman in the back of the classroom, buying wine at the supermarket, walking through the park, was actually a young girl.
Though admittedly, that wasn’t happening nearly as much lately. Sam’s husband had warned her that one day, her face would finally catch up to her hair.
The elevator doors slid open.
The sun was winking through the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined her apartment. Down below, the Financial District was wide awake, car horns and cranes and the usual din of activity muffled behind the triple-paned glazing.
Sam walked to the kitchen, turning off lights as she went. She exchanged her goggles for her glasses. She put out food for the cat. She filled the kettle. She prepared her tea infuser, mug and spoon, but before boiling the water, she went to the yoga mat in her living room.
She took off her glasses. She ran through a series of stretches to keep her muscles limber. She ended up on the mat, legs crossed. She rested the backs of her hands on her knees. She touched her middle fingers to her thumbs in a light pinch. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and considered her brain.
Several years after she had been shot, a psychiatrist had shown Sam a homunculus of the motor areas of her brain. The man had wanted her to see the path the bullet had traveled so that Sam could understand the structures that had been damaged. He wanted her to think about those structures at least once a day, to spend as much time as she could muster in contemplating the individual folds and crevices, and to visualize her brain and body working in perfect tandem as they had before.
Sam had resisted. The exercise seemed some part wishful thinking, most part voodoo.
Now, it was the only thing that kept her headaches at bay, her equilibrium in check.
Sam had consequently done more