“I see you’ve been eating well,” she remarked. The chart showed he’d been exercising, too. That was very good. It would help keep his borrowed body in condition.
“They feed good here. The booze isn’t great.”
“I’ve often noticed that myself.” He must not be much of a cook, she thought, placing the chart on the end of the bed. “Any other problems? Can I get you anything?”
He looked up at her and smiled lazily. “What did you have in mind?”
If he flexes his pecs at me, Verbeena promised herself, I’m going to show the tape at the medical section’s Christmas party. I’ll save it for when we get Sam back and torture him with it. See what happens when you’re not in your right body, Dr. Beckett? Serves you right for not being in your right mind either. Oh please, please flex ’em.
He didn’t. But he did grin, a slow, lazy grin, and lay still, enjoying the survey. Verbeena hoped he couldn’t tell she was blushing.
“Can’t help you with the booze, hon,” she said at last. “I just wanted to see how you were doing. We’re still working on things. If you don’t have any questions, I’ll check back with you later.”
She turned around briskly and marched up the steps to the observation deck, closed the door behind herself and reached for the window blanker. “Dave, what’s the story?”
The nurse on duty, a burly Hispanic with tightly curled hair, shook his head. “He doesn’t show any signs of disassociation, anomie, stress, or tummy upset, but when he shaves he still stops to look at his face. Touch it. He still looks down at himself. Usual pattern. But he just doesn’t react. Seems to be perfectly comfortable where he is.”
“Weird. Really weird.” Not exactly a professional diagnosis, but it would do.
“Yeah.” Dave was starting work on a dissertation in abnormal psychology. Ziggy did the lit searches for him; he read the articles. He wanted to study multiples. Since he couldn’t use the patient in the Waiting Room, he’d have to leave the Project in a few weeks to continue his studies under one of Verbeena’s former professors at Cornell. Verbeena wasn’t looking forward to losing him.
“So what do you think?”
Dave shrugged. “Ziggy ran old TV sports programs for him for a while—he’s especially interested in the karate championships. He’s been looking at some of the books. His profile shows a lack of self-esteem, a lot of insecurity, he’s a good kid. Too bad it isn’t something in his life
that will change.”
"Isn’t it, though,” Verbeena muttered, looking at the monitor. Wickie was lying staring at the ceiling, doing nothing. “What a waste.”
Can’t we do anything about it?” Dave asked hesitantly. He was itching to apply his new knowledge.
Verbeena had a few theories of her own. The two of them looked at each other, then at the Visitor in the Waiting Room below.
"He hasn’t asked for therapy,” Verbeena mused. “I wonder if an Ethics Board would consider this an experimental intervention.”
"Just teaching? Counseling?” Dave asked.
She’d become a doctor to help people, Verbeena reminded herself. To make a difference. Abruptly, she grinned. “Why, Mr. Medina, I do believe you’re right.”
Elsewhere in the Project, a shadowy branch of possibilities began to take shape, as yet unconnected to anything at all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was so obvious. How could he have missed it? All the physical signs were there, all the behaviors. He’d thought Davey was just challenged, the way Jimmy La Matta had been; whether it was retardation or autism, it would have been due to some genetic damage. Tragic, but hardly anyone's fault. The sensation of one of the holes in his memory abruptly filling in was almost physical.
He had to give a lot of credit to Rimae Hoffman. FAS symptoms ranged from imperceptible to incapacitating, but one of the most common was a short attention span. It couldn’t have been easy, raising Davey. And if she’d taken in her niece as well, she must have a truly generous soul, no matter how incongruous her relationship with a bartender young enough to be her son might be.
He couldn’t remember how much had been known about FAS in 1975, or more to the point, in the middle fifties, when Davey’s mother had been pregnant with him. But it didn’t matter. It was too late now. Nothing he could do could change things for Davey now.
Nothing. Not on this Leap.
Once again, frustration expressed itself in action.
He found himself walking, then jogging, then running along the sidewalk, his shoes slapping the concrete hard. He didn’t know if Wickie was a runner. At the moment he
didn’t care. He had to get rid of the anger, the despair, the helplessness of finally figuring out what was wrong with a kid who wanted to fly and never would, and at the same time knowing there was nothing he could do to fix it.
His path took him down the main street of Snow Owl, around minor street repairs, up and down sidewalks, into the street when the sidewalks disappeared. He caught the green light at the intersection of Main and Ski Line Drive and kept going; even the red wouldn’t have stopped him by then. Besides, there wasn’t much traffic down by the auto dealership and pawnshop and pizza parlors, the delis and ski repair shops and boutiques so late on a Sunday evening, with the sun beginning to disappear and shadows slanting long and narrow in front of him, and he could push himself as far and as fast as he wanted, the mile through downtown disappearing under his feet.
Stabbing pains in his side weren’t worthy of his attention, and after a while they went away. He kept on going, driving himself past a runner’s wall and on into a new neighborhood and a second wind, Wickie’s body answering his will, Wickie’s lungs filling and contracting, Wickie’s heart pounding in rhythm with Wickie’s legs, running, running, uphill now, to the residential section of the town. No
