He sighed and closed the fridge.
The girl seemed like she had something on her mind. Whatever it was, though, it didn’t have the wherewithal to crack the membrane of her self-conscience, so she kept it to herself.
Instead, Walter took the wheel.
“This lab up in Toronto. Do you know where it is?”
Rebecca nodded.
“My father told me the address before he died,” Rebecca said. “And they’re expecting us, even if our plane didn’t show up. They are at least expecting me.”
“Do you think they can be trusted?”
“More than not. They were close friends with my father. If there’s anyone who might be able to take the NaUs away, it’s them.”
Just ask her, Walter thought.
“How long do I have?”
Rebecca just frowned and shrugged.
“It’s hard to say,” she said. “The degradation of all of the other members of Matt’s gang didn’t start to fully come into effect until a few months later. However, having more than one NaU in our body seems to push the RNA and cell decay into overdrive. You might have a couple weeks or two.”
Not exactly the optimistic answer he was hoping for, but it was the only one he had at the moment. It’d work for the time being.
Seeing that talking wasn’t going to happen, and that Matt still wasn’t attacking them, Walter walked down the hall. Becca didn’t stop him, though he wished she would. He didn’t want to walk down the hall, to go to the room he hadn’t been in years.
But he did anyway.
He reached Jack and Annabelle’s room and placed his hand on the knob. For all he knew, the door would be locked. Maybe Beth, before she died, felt the need to open the door and see the room, the empty and lifeless room for one last time before the blood clot inside her head made darkness the new norm in her head. She could have locked it behind her, perhaps not wanting to ever go in again, or to allow Walter to go in—to protect him most likely.
But the knob turned easily, albeit a little rusty, and the door was opening to their room.
Their beds were how he remembered them, only not really. Jack and Annabelle were nice and good kids, but they were terrible at making their beds. No matter how many times he and Beth told them to make them, come every morning before they set out for school, their beds would be crinkled up messes, with a pillow or two on the ground, the comforter hanging from the ceiling fan, the winter blankets rolled up in a ball on the ground next to their pillows.
After a while, he and Beth stopped telling them to worry about it, that they’d take care of it. Of course, once the hormones and other aspects of teenage years took over, the kids would be responsible for making their own beds.
Their beds were made now. Beth, after their room was shut off forever, must’ve made their beds all those decades ago. A good amount of dust and cobwebs covered everything. It might have been a fire hazard, but no electrical outlets ran or worked in this room anyway.
They had floated the idea of having more kids for only about a minute or so a few years after the fateful accident. It would have cleaned their palate, more or less, allowed them to have a second chance. They would only need one, and statistically, Walter didn’t think that it’d be twins again.
Beth did get pregnant, and their plan went into motion. Neither one of them cleared out Jack or Annabelle’s things, though. It just didn’t feel right, and perhaps would only feel right when they would be forced to clean out that room, their wants and wishes be damned.
But then Beth miscarried, and the whole notion of having more kids was put to rest forever. They never cleaned out that room.
Time had done a number on it.
Their bedsheets were faded and covered with dust. The lamp, one that had different characters from Disney movies on them, was faded and covered with spider webs. It might have been better for Walter had he just left this room alone and not bothered to peek in. But time was on his heels, and nothing really puts your life in order and gives you perspective like being able to see the clicking tick-tock of your lifespan count down in front of you.
No wonder all of Matt and his gang were desperate. Walter had already resigned to his own impending death (you had to, once AARP learned your name and mailing address), but to actually see it coming made him nervous. He was shaking slightly. Peter’s NaU could heal him from any injury, but it would do nothing to quiet the thoughts rushing through his head. In fact, if what Rebecca had told him was true, then that meant that in fact, his mind would only dull over the next couple of weeks, turning him eventually into nothing more than Danni had been back at the rest stop.
He sat down on Jack’s bed.
He might have been a good father. If he had just given up the drink when Beth suggested it to him and took the wagon, he could either be on or off with the seriousness it deserved, then things would have been different. He would have grandkids at this point, and even if he wasn’t a good father, he would have been a good grandfather. That’s how it always worked anyway; when you’re a bad father, the grandkids provide you a chance at redemption, and Lord only knew how much Walter wanted some redemption.
He’d help Rebecca.
That’d be his redemption, but what could he really do at this point? He could drive her up north to the lab in Toronto, bring her out where she needed to go in order to get this NaU business figured out.
But what if they couldn’t do anything about it then? He’d just roll over and die,
