her at ease. “I woke up from a coma, and the life that used to be mine was gone.” She crossed her arms, hugging her chest. “After that, I basically had to own it since it’s the only one I have.”
Elliot could hear the defensiveness in her words, sensing the kind of restless energy that sought out opposition. If it wasn’t a law of physics, it ought to be: pain required an outlet. He knew it both from the streets and from his colleagues.
“That sounds like a terrible thing to have gone through.” He meant it.
Ed exhaled, shrugging. “There are worse things, I imagine.” The gaze she returned to him was suggestive, perhaps questioning what exactly he had seen in the line of duty. When he didn’t say anything, she pushed her hair back again, touching two fingers to her face mask where her lips were hidden. “So why are you here?”
“More tests.” He wasn’t sure exactly what Keisha had in mind. “Apparently, I’m resistant.”
“Dr. Delille thinks I might be resistant, too. Since I didn’t get sick immediately after that night at the restaurant.”
“But you caught it later.” Elliot remembered Keisha saying resistant wasn’t the same as immune, but he couldn’t sidestep his dismay. “Don’t all survivors test positive for antibodies of the virus?” It was a hopeful fact that the media had seized upon.
“That’s why Dr. Delille thinks it could be interesting.” All animus had gone out of her voice, leaving only a gentle intimacy to the way she pronounced Keisha’s name. “They have my hospital intake sample from Boston that she can compare to the samples we take today.”
“Ah.”
“That’s the new global research policy,” said Keisha, coming into the room. “If an ARAMIS patient survives, the hospital is supposed to keep their sample for testing.” Her head tilted towards him in a friendly nod. “Elliot, you got here faster than I thought.”
Ed stood up. “Dr. Delille.”
Keisha looked at Ed for a long moment. “I’m glad you came.” She went to the young woman and, extending her gloved hands, took Ed’s in her own in a sterile version of a once-normal greeting, now so scarce as to seem strange.
Elliot watched, a bit bewildered. He wondered if Ed knew that Keisha was the one who had released the photo and unintentionally created ARAMIS Girl in the first place.
As if reading his mind, Ed said, “Dr. Delille wrote to me and invited me here.” When Keisha let go of her hands, she retrieved a shoulder bag that had been stowed under her chair. “I don’t blame her for what happened.”
Keisha said, “We’re making the best of it.”
Elliot nodded. He didn’t need to understand everything.
“Any questions before we get started?” asked Keisha.
Ed raised a hand, but when they turned to her, she stayed silent. Finally, she blurted out, “I’m sorry for not coming forward sooner. People got hurt because of me. Maybe even sick.”
Keisha shook her head and with a slow, deliberate movement cupped a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. Like Elliot, she seemed to realize that Ed was as skittish as something hunted. “You did your best with the information you had once you had it.” Her voice was gentle. “There are a lot of people who used ARAMIS Girl as an excuse for the bad things they wanted to do anyway.”
The talk between the two women flowed on as they walked into Keisha’s office, and as Elliot lingered at the threshold he heard Keisha say something about sequencing their DNA. Ed was attentive, earnest, helpful. Keisha, through whatever pangs of her own conscience, had made things right there.
Keisha. Baffling to realize he’d first met her when she was around Ed’s age. They’d been boyfriend and girlfriend, nearly inseparable for a few months, which until recently seemed even more incomprehensible than the confounding progression of bodies through time—that once he had been just twenty years old, and before that eleven, and before that, five, but now he was not. His life had always made sense moving forward, but for a long time he thought looking back would be a runner’s mistake, the skewed over-the-shoulder glance that would set him stumbling off pace. But now he felt he understood that not all change was failure. The past couldn’t always be dragged into the present, but it was never really over, not while there was someone to remember it. And people did not belong to one another in the particular, only in the general. They were always being called upon in different