contact, no counseling, no intervention… just statistical analysis of what happens to them down the road. It all goes into a central database at MacNealy Biotech in Boston. The parents aren’t even informed when a baby’s found to have the extra chromosome.”
“So they’ve already located more, then?”
“Oh yes,” he said, a fatalistic grumble of a laugh.
Her stomach tightened. “How many?”
“After two years, as of last week… six hundred and eighty-three. With a sixteen percent birth increase from year one to year two. Now, that may only be a statistical blip. A big blip, but…”
Adrienne sat, just sat. Holding the phone and listening to its soft electronic silence swallow her whole. Fill her empty hollows. Six hundred and eighty-three. And counting. In two years.
And these were just the known births. Someone who loved to crunch numbers would have compared that birth rate with national averages, maybe that of all industrialized nations, even globally. They would have estimates, how many were really out there. Unfound and unnamed, on no rosters. But out there.
The ones already studied? The adults? The Clay Palmers, the Mark Alan Nances, the Timothy Van der Leuns? They seemed like such rarities because they had been discovered by accident; oh, but what an informed and directed effort could pinpoint.
And in that gulf between the first adults who had been found to carry their rogue chromosome, and these infants, how many resided? How many teenagers, how many grade-schoolers had found themselves maladapted to a world not made for them? How long before they began to make that world over, in their own image?
They were filling cribs, and soon enough would fill streets. Perhaps that turbulent makeover had already begun.
“Adrienne? You still with me?”
“Yeah.” Always functioning.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Although it’s nothing you weren’t expecting eventually.” Mendenhall cleared his throat. “AAL informed me this afternoon that they’ll be cutting your funding at the end of the year. Which gives you another week to wrap things up with Clay Palmer.”
“Wrap things up?” she said. “The kind of issues we’re dealing with can’t just be
“You knew this was coming, Adrienne.” Mendenhall’s voice had gone flatter, sterner. “Therapy never led the priority list. You knew that when you agreed to this.”
She drew a strong breath through her nose, let it out the same way, right into the mouthpiece. “Thank you for giving me the news, Ferris. You’re a good administrator… and that’s about it.”
She hung up, and wouldn’t it have felt better to rip the phone from its wall plug, hurl it across the room? Of course it would. Clay would have done so.
She left her desk and drifted along in subconscious circles, slow and lazy, mildly dazed. After a few moments of staring out over the deck, Adrienne shoved open the sliding door and stepped across the redwood and the snow.
It was still coming down out here, clinging to her sweater and melting cold upon her skin, while the pines looked choked with it. She walked to one side of the deck, where the peculiarities of wind had sculpted days’ worth of snow into a low, rounded drift. She sank into it as she might into a sagging throne.
Her legs and behind soon began to feel the creeping chill; maybe would go numb before long. She could stay here until Sarah came home and forced her in, brushed away the caked snow and asked what she was trying to do, catch pneumonia and ruin Christmas?
God rest ye merry lesbians, let nothing you dismay.
Adrienne tilted her head back upon the icy pillow and looked straight into the milky gray depths of the sky. No color, no warmth, no fury, nothing up there at all. Just snowflakes coming down to brush her cheeks, soft as angels’ tears.
Six hundred and eighty-three.
And did the heavens think to grieve?
Twenty-Seven
Patrick Valentine picked him up at Logan Airport two days after Christmas. A Monday — he was hoping to avoid the crush of too many holiday travelers, but by the looks of the crowded gates and terminal, a lot of people were stretching out a long weekend. Lots of shopping bags in hand, clutched as proudly and carefully as if they contained gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Oh, it was touching.
He had yesterday, among their kind, played the game once more, the game devised a month ago. The Colt Python in the pocket; one bullet, one spin, one disciplined squeeze of the trigger. He had come to think of the game as snake-in-the-grass. Yesterday’s flood of gift refunds and exchanges supplied a bounty of backs from which to choose. It had taken two hours of department store roaming before finding the one that screamed to be taken.
Another click. In the end, another reprieve.
Another month of sweet anticipation.
Next time he would ruin someone’s Super Bowl, maybe.
As the late-afternoon flight from Seattle began to disgorge its passengers through the gate, Valentine scanned faces. Fifty or more he discarded until experiencing a frisson that went deeper than mere recognition. A face familiar because it was his own, twenty years younger and half-concealed behind heavy round shades of metal and amber glass, almost like blast lenses for a nuclear test site: Daniel Ironwood.
Valentine took several steps forward while other passengers split around him, like a swift stream encountering a rock, and he barred Daniel Ironwood’s path. Face-to-face, they stared.
Strangers who liked to people-watch in airports would think them relatives. Naturally, the resemblance was there, if no warmth upon first meeting. Those same curious sleek faces and contoured skulls. They could be father and son, and anyone who stared, impolite or compelled by the sight of such fine-boned peculiarity, might believe them estranged. Years gone by since they last embraced, perhaps, while the younger grew to manhood on an opposite coast, turning into more of his jaded elder than he would ever have dreamt possible.
How deceiving looks could be.
Daniel dug into a coat pocket for a crumpled pack of Salems, popped one into the corner of his mouth, and lit up. “Fucking airline regs, that must be the longest I’ve been without a smoke since I was twelve.”
“Let’s get your luggage,” said Valentine, and led the way.
“Is she with you? She didn’t come with you? What’s her name — Ellie?”
Valentine glanced back over his shoulder, saw Daniel quicken his pace to keep up. “No, Ellie’s not with me.” Laughing then, “What’s the matter, turbulence up there give you a hard-on?”
Daniel said nothing, might have glared with embarrassment or offense, but the dark glasses contained it well. No doubt he found them a survival tool, never betraying a thought if he could help it. Blank faces go unnoticed, unchallenged. Blank is a little bit like dead, and in dead there is a certain strength, for dead means nothing left to lose. Daniel would know this, had done his time as a juvenile offender; teen-age burglaries and robberies, a rape.
“This is weird, I don’t mind telling you,” he said. “This feels really really weird.”
“I don’t care how it feels, as long as it doesn’t cause you any problems.” And Valentine remembered the one from Indianapolis, that colossal disappointment back in late summer; the shame and impotence that seemed to have even embarrassed Ellie, who had until then seemed shockproof.
“And how’s it make
Valentine laughed, clapped a hand down on Daniel’s shoulder, drew them closer as they walked until he could feel the young man’s body stiffen against him, resistant. Lean, hard… the same body he’d once had until growing into a thicker muscularity with stubborn traces of fat around the middle. The cancer rooted in his groin had changed him in all ways — metabolically, intellectually, even his inner essence.
