Prototype

with me later this weekend.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But no touching. I don’t really like being touched. No touch therapy.”

“All right.” Adrienne nodded. Interesting: could indicate a past history of abuse, emotional withdrawal. “I think we can work around that.”

He raised his hips and torso, pushing up off his shoulders until his body surged against the restraints. The twin casts lay along his sides, chunky anchors of white plaster. “Can you do something about getting these straps off me?”

She would first have to get an authorization from Ferris Mendenhall, the psychiatrist who oversaw all Ward Five treatment, but her own recommendation would be that Clay no longer needed to be restrained, for his own protection or anyone else’s.

Still, not to forget: He had broken his own hands and used the ends of snapped bones to lacerate three faces. What damage might he be capable of inflicting with those casts, if he set his mind to it?

It was nearing eight o’clock, and Mendenhall should be in by now. It was his call.

“I’ll look into it immediately,” she said.

Sometimes it was a relief to defer responsibility.

Two

Adrienne was back in her own driveway by nine o’clock that morning, sitting behind the wheel for several moments after killing the engine. On the dry wind rode the creeping burn of the day. An all-nighter — sleep in her office notwithstanding — and still she found something decadent about dragging wearily in at this hour. Only the motivations had changed over time. Fifteen years ago it would have been the inevitable final surrender after a binge. Now, just more overtime devoted to a classic type-A personality’s drive to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. By fifty, her lock on sainthood should be clinched.

She left the car, started for the front door.

Adrienne called it home, but after two years it still took some adjustment. Two floors of stucco topped with red-tile roofing, on a lot whose lawn was suitably sparse, as per desert climes, and at least one palm tree visible from nearly every window. Each time she came rolling down the street she expected to see a burro tied up out front.

Adrienne’s own tastes ran more toward colonial and Victorian, but upon first setting foot inside when they’d looked at it, Sarah had loved it, and felt instantaneously at home here in that impulsive, predestined way she had about her sometimes. Adrienne figured, in her heart, that her own love would grow.

Still waiting. By now, she was probably up to at least an amiable affection for the place.

Sarah was in the front room when Adrienne came through the door, looked up from her book and brightened immediately. Uncurled from her cross-legged perch in the cushioned rattan chair that hung in one corner.

“Hiya,” she said, and met Adrienne halfway to kiss hello, good morning, whatever they had skipped the night before. “Guess who missed you last night.”

“You got my message, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I got your message. I was just feeling needy.” Sarah gripped her by the shoulders and steered her gently toward the sofa. “C’mon. Sit, sit, sit, sit.”

Adrienne shut her eyes and smiled and let fatigue overwhelm her, began to feel tired all over again. Let Sarah take charge — some indulgent pampering now and then was good for body and soul. Sarah stayed behind her, reaching across the back of the sofa and down to the shoulders that felt cramped and unnatural after sleeping on the office couch, and maybe from all that residual tension from her first encounter with Clay Palmer. With this one she wanted very much to tread wisely.

“Let it out, let it out,” Sarah said, then nipped her on the ear. “Can you come out and play tomorrow? I think it’s in your own best interests, you’re looking too serious this week.”

“Tomorrow being, what… Saturday?”

“Gasp — she’s in touch with modern timekeeping after all.”

Adrienne made a show of inner debate, but a day out on her day off sounded like a tonic she would be wise to self-prescribe. “Since it’s you, and since you asked,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

Sarah was digging with strong and nimble fingers for each and every muscle at the base of Adrienne’s neck. “I was thinking Swiss coffee and a French film and Greek food. It’ll be very multicultural and don’t you dare say no.”

“Multicultural? You know you’re showing a definite centrism toward Western Europe.”

“Shut up. Who’s the anthropologist here?”

Sarah wrapped up her ministrations and slapped each of Adrienne’s shoulders simultaneously, as if swatting the bottoms of newborns. Her shoulders sang, they hummed, they throbbed with vitality restored, and Sarah crawled over the back of the sofa to drop beside her.

Sarah was so physical sometimes, she came close to being overpowering — not by intimidation, more that to be around her was to risk either exhaustion by proxy or feelings of inadequacy. She had entirely too much life-force to contain; would throw herself into anything and everything that drew her interest and contend with the bruises or broken heart later.

Sarah was slim and straight above the waist, with lushly curved hips below. She had a round face almost too small for her eyes, and mismatched lips that somehow went with her body: the top one thin, the lower, heavy and ripe and delicious, the both of them bracketed by smile lines that inscribed her mouth like soft little parentheses. Her full black hair she brushed irregularly, and she scuffed around on wide peasant feet, a legacy from a barefoot childhood. At twenty-nine, Sarah still distrusted shoes.

They molded together well, Adrienne four inches taller, and when they embraced, every gentle swell in one seemed to meet with a corresponding hollow in the other. Side-by-side they looked to be complementary opposites, Sarah very much the child of a fecund earth, while there was something mildly Teutonic about Adrienne…  in the fine blond hair, so very straight, and the murky blue eyes; in the height that once caused her to slouch until the boys caught up, then began to surpass her. But it worked; together they worked, and Adrienne had recently decided she loved Sarah enough that it ached.

She supposed that was a good thing. To gauge the quality of life, there often seemed no better barometer than the measure of its pain. I’ve seen the highs, I’ve seen the lows, now how about I linger upon the middle plateaus awhile and sort it out?

“I came up with another maybe for my thesis this morning.” Sarah beamed with the enthusiasm that inevitably came when something dawned upon her, its avenues of possibility yet to be explored. “Want to hear it?”

Adrienne laughed. “How many will this make, anyway?”

“Five. Want to hear it?”

“I’d rather hear that you’ve made up your mind.”

Sarah jabbed out and pinched her along the ribs. “Do you want to hear it or not?”

Adrienne slid down onto the sofa and flung off both shoes. “Dazzle me.”

“Retention in American society of old world customs by Asian immigrants.” She frowned. “That’s still too simplistic for the final approach. But I think it’s something I could really devour. Plus it’s something that feels contemporaneously relevant, you know… not just something I can get eggheaded about that doesn’t address anything going on right now in our own backyard.”

“Asian immigrants,” said Adrienne. Nit-picking, but sometimes that’s what Sarah needed; she tended to view panoramas at the expense of details. “You know Fishbine will make you narrow your focus.” Her faculty adviser in the doctoral program at Arizona State University; generally easygoing but he tolerated no shotgun approaches and had no patience with indecision. At least he was not prone to imposing his own research needs on the agendas of his students; Sarah was fortunate in that respect.

“I know he will. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai… I have no idea which one I’d end up preferring.”