leaves them closed.
So this is how you pay for leaving me alone; you save me when I don’t want to be saved, she thinks, and that’s exactly right, that’s full circle. He left her falling for a long time, but when she really needed him, he was there to catch her. He caught her. He’s catching her right now.
“I don’t know his name,” she lies, and her mother believes her. So does her father, when he comes, because Dodger Cheswich is a very good liar; because her story is better than the truth, at least this time. At least right now. Maybe forever. The police don’t believe her completely, but they write down her statement, and they say they’ll keep an eye open. She’s going to live. Their job is done.
It takes a week for her to be released from the hospital. She goes home with stitches running up the inside of both arms like equations she’ll never solve, and when they come out, the scars they leave behind will be minimal, at least to the naked eye. She’ll always know that they’re there, but maybe that’s all right. Maybe that’s the reminder she needs that she can’t jump, because someone will always catch her, whether or not she wants them to.
She hears Roger’s voice, off and on, for almost a year. She never answers. The police are looking for the boy from New England, and she knows exactly where he is, and she never answers him. Eventually he stops calling. That, too, is exactly right; that, too, is full circle.
It will be five years before they meet again.
It won’t be nearly long enough.
Zib hugged her knees to her chest, watching Avery pace back and forth along the rainbow sheen of the improbable road, his hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face.
“Are you done being angry with me yet?” she called.
“No,” he replied, voice sullen. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“We needed to give something to the Bumble Bear if we wanted it to let us pass. It couldn’t be my slingshot, and it couldn’t be your ruler. The shine from your shoes was something we could lose. It didn’t hurt us.”
“It hurt me,” said Avery. He finally stopped pacing and turned to look at her.
Without their shine, his shoes were ordinary brown leather, like any kid might wear out on the playground. His shirt seemed just a little less starched without them reflecting it; his hair seemed just a little less combed. He looked like an ordinary boy.
Zib felt fear tickle her ribs. If they had to lose themselves to walk this road, would it ever really be able to lead them home?
—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker
Book III
Graduate
Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.
—Edward Lorenz
There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.
—Homer, The Odyssey
FAMILIAL VISITATION
Timeline: 0:00 PST, September 6th, 2003 (midnight).
The man in the purple coat walks through the hospital by candlelight, and no one stops him, or asks him where he’s going. No one even looks in his direction. He is invisible, or close enough as to make no difference, and all thanks to the wax-dipped hand he carries. Wicks sprout from beneath the fingernails, burning with a steady blue light.
Darren would be pleased to know that every part of him has been put to good use, or so Reed supposes. It was always difficult to tell, with that boy.
He walks on, heels clicking against the polished floor, until he reaches a private room. The door is closed. Good. He wants to see her. He hasn’t seen any of them since they were born, and they came so close to losing this pair today.
Reed opens the door with a twist of his hand and slips inside, into the room where Dodger sleeps.
She looks so small, lost in the tangle of sheets, connected to the machines which monitor her fate. He thinks this may be the best way to see her: a hospital is much like a lab, after all, sterile and polished and perfect. She is perfect. With her eyes closed, red lashes resting against pale cheeks, she looks so much like Asphodel that even his wizened, hardened heart feels a pang of regret for what might have been, had he not killed his master and taken everything she’d ever loved.
Heredity is not only in blood. It is in the sympathetic vibration of the universe,