this. Sandra’s mother, when she was home, labored to create an impression of normalcy. And because neither Sandra nor Kyle dared to contradict her, the illusion was surprisingly easy to sustain. Her father was often ill. He spent a lot of time upstairs, resting. That wasn’t difficult to understand, was it? Of course not. It was sad; it was inconvenient; but life went on. It did, at least, until the day Sandra came home from school and found her father and her brother in the garage.
Sandra was three weeks away from her eleventh birthday when it happened. She had been surprised to find the house empty. Kyle, home from school with a cold, had left his computer unfolded on the kitchen table. It was playing a movie, something noisy with airplanes and explosions, the sort of thing he liked. She switched it off. And that was when she heard the car motor growling. Not the car her mother drove to work but the family’s second car, the one parked in the garage, the one her father used to drive before he hid himself in the upstairs dimness.
She understood suicide, or at any rate the idea of it. She even knew that some people committed suicide by locking themselves in a closed space with an idling engine. Carbon monoxide poisoning. She supposed—it was a thought she harbored mainly in the bitter months that followed—that she even understood her father’s wish to die. People could get that way. It was like a sickness. No one should be blamed for it. But why had her father taken Kyle into the garage with him, and why had Kyle agreed to go?
She opened the door that connected the garage to the kitchen. The exhaust fumes made her dizzy, so she turned back and went outside and lifted up the big garage door to allow clean air to flow in to flush out the poison. The door slid open easily even though her father had stuffed rags into the gaps to keep the fumes from leaking away. It wasn’t even locked. Then she opened the car door on the driver’s side and managed to lean across her father’s lap and turn the engine off. Her father’s head had lolled onto his shoulders and his skin had turned a delicate, uncanny shade of blue. There was a crust of dried spittle on his lips. She tried unsuccessfully to wake him. Kyle was up front beside his father, wearing a seat belt. Had he been expecting to go somewhere? Neither of them stirred when she shook them, when she shouted.
She called 911 and waited in front of the house for the ambulance. Minutes passed like hours. She thought about calling her mother but her mother was at a trade show in Sri Lanka and Sandra didn’t know how to reach her. It was a sunny afternoon in May, beginning to feel like summer in the Boston suburb where Sandra lived. There was no one else on the street. It was as if the houses had gone to sleep. As if all the neighbors had been sealed indoors, like dreams the houses were dreaming.
The medics who arrived took Sandra to the hospital with them and found a place for her to sleep. Sandra’s mother arrived back from Colombo the following morning. Sandra’s father, it turned out, had been dead long before Sandra discovered him. There was nothing she could have done. Kyle’s young body had put up a fiercer resistance to the poison he was breathing, a doctor explained. He was alive, but his brain was irreversibly damaged and he would never recover his higher functions.
Sandra’s mother had died seven years after her father, of a pancreatic cancer that had been diagnosed too late for meaningful treatment. Her will had stipulated a sum of money to be held in trust for Sandra’s education and a far more substantial amount to pay for Kyle’s continuing needs. When Sandra moved to Houston she had asked the estate’s lawyers to find Kyle a residence nearby, if there was an acceptable one, where she could visit him regularly. The Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex was what they had chosen. Live Oaks was devoted to caring for severely disabled patients and was rated as one of the best such facilities in the country. It was expensive, but no matter; the estate could afford it.
Kyle had been sedated for the flight west. Sandra had arranged to be present when he woke up. But if waking up in a strange bed in a strange room had caused him any distress or anxiety, Kyle had shown no sign of it.
He sat in the midday warmth as if waiting for her to speak. Today, unusually, Sandra wasn’t sure where to begin.
She started by telling him about Jefferson Bose. Who he was and how much she liked him. “I think you’d like him, too. He’s a policeman.” She paused. “But he’s something else, too.”
She lowered her voice, though there was no one else in the mott to hear her.
“You always liked stories about Mars from the Spin days. How the human colonies turned into whole civilizations while Earth was wrapped up in the Spin barrier. How they had a fourth stage of life, where people could live longer if they took on certain obligations and duties. Remember that? The stories Wun Ngo Wen told the world, before he was killed?
“Well, Mars doesn’t talk to us anymore, and some pretty unscrupulous people have turned those Martian pharmaceuticals into something uglier, something they can sell for profit on the black market. But there were people around Wun Ngo Wen, people like Jason Lawton and his friends, who took Martian ethics seriously. I used to hear rumors, and there were always stories online, about that. About clandestine groups who took the longevity treatment the way the Martians did. Keeping it pure and not selling it, but sharing it, the way it was made to be shared, all strings attached. Using it wisely.”
She was nearly whispering now. Kyle’s eyes still followed the motion of her lips.
“I didn’t used to believe those stories. But now I think they’re true.”
This morning Bose had told her he wasn’t just a cop. He told her he had connections with people who followed the Martian customs. His friends hated the black market trade, he said. The police could be bribed, but Bose’s friends couldn’t, because they already had taken the longevity treatment—the original version. And what he was doing, he was doing in their interests.
She said this, very quietly, to Kyle.
“Now, the question you probably want to ask,” the question, as an older brother, he surely
Kyle blinked, meaninglessly.
“I do,” she said, and she felt better for confirming it aloud. “It’s what I don’t know that worries me.”
Like the meaning, if any, of Orrin Mather’s sci-fi story. Like the bandage on Jack Geddes’s arm, and what it might imply about Orrin’s capacity for violence. Like the scar Bose had tried to conceal from her, and which he had still not explained.
Time passed. Eventually a nurse came down the pathway to the grove of live oaks, moving slowly in the heat. “Time to get this fella back to bed,” she announced. Kyle’s hat had fallen off, though that didn’t matter so much in the shade of the trees. His hair was thinning prematurely. Sandra could see his scalp, pink as a baby’s skin, through wisps of pale blond hair. She picked up the Astros cap and put it on him, gently.
“Okay,” she said. “Rest easy, Kyle. See you soon,” she told him.
Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend. There were more and better antidepressant medications now than when her father had endured his long decline, and that was a good thing, but despair itself remained mysterious, clinically and personally, as much a visitation as a disease.
The long drive back to Houston took her past a State Care internment facility, one of the places her patients went after they were assigned custodial status. Passing the State camp inevitably tweaked her conscience. Usually Sandra avoided looking at it—it was comfortingly easy to overlook. The entrance was marked only with a small and dignified sign; the facility itself was hidden beyond a grassy ridge (yellow and sere); very little of it showed from the highway, though she glimpsed the tops of the guard towers. But she had been up that road a couple of times and knew what lay beyond it: a huge two-story cinderblock residence surrounded by makeshift expansion housing, mostly sheet-metal trailers donated by FEMA from surplus stock, encircled by wire fencing. It was a community of men (mostly men) and women (a few), carefully segregated from one another and endlessly waiting. Because that was what you did in such a place: you waited. Waited for your turn in an occupational rehab program, waited for
