reached the tree line he looked back and saw Tommy’s Bronco and another car rolling out the front gate. There was no way he could beat them to Jo’s house, no way he could warn the girls. He wasn’t sure that he would’ve warned them if he could. Tommy was right: Their clade could protect them, and he couldn’t.
He walked into the shadow of the trees and started up the mountain.
The vintage was already dissipating from his bloodstream. A few months ago a dose of the size he’d taken would have knocked him unconscious. In August, a single taste of it had put him on the ground and left him gawking as if God were going to reach down and shake hands.
After fifteen minutes he reached the clearing. Sunlight splintered through the trees.
The bench was empty. Jo was long gone, evaporated with the vintage.
He walked across the long grass, then stopped. A figure stepped out of the trees ahead of him.
He took a step back. “There are people looking for you,” he said.
“We heard the cars coming up the drive,” Rainy said. “We ran.” Sandra stepped out of the trees behind her, the blanket still around her shoulders.
Sandra glanced at Rainy nervously.
“You really are pregnant?” Pax asked.
“We wanted to tell you,” Sandra said.
Rainy said, “We kept thinking you’d notice.”
Sandra let the blanket slip to the ground. The bulge beneath her dress was hardly noticeable, but then she ran a hand down her front, smoothing out the fabric, showing the swell of her belly.
“I’m only a few months along,” she said. “But I can feel her growing, every day. There may even be twins. Oh Paxton, my daughters are going to be the first children of the new generation. Do you want to feel them?”
Sandra took a step forward and he jerked back. Rainy watched him, her arms at her sides. He’d seen her use those arms to haul herself through the trees like a chimp, or carry him like a child. They could cinch shut a windpipe like a noose.
He said, “The pills weren’t for your mother.” He already knew the answer. He’d known it as soon as he heard that Sandra was pregnant. As soon as the reverend had looked at him, he’d understood what had happened that night-in this very spot.
“No,” Rainy said.
“The night she found out-”
“She was going to kill the baby,” Rainy said. “Sandra’s daughter. Her own granddaughter.” She shook her head. “I just couldn’t understand a person who would do that. Someone had to stop her.”
“But Rainy, she was your mother.”
“I know who she was.”
“Jesus, Rainy…”
“Don’t look at her like that!” Sandra said. Pax had never heard her speak so sharply. The girl stepped between Paxton and her sister. “You don’t know how torn up she’s been. She doesn’t feel
“You were awake,” Pax said.
“Mom wasn’t going to stop,” Sandra said. “You know how she was. Once she’d made up her mind, she wouldn’t quit. We couldn’t go to the Co-op, not with Hooke helping her. Rainy did what she had to do. She was protecting me. Protecting us.”
“Sandra, I know how it must feel to-”
“No you don’t,” Sandra said. “You’re not a beta. You don’t get to judge.”
They heard voices calling up the mountain. High tenors-beta voices. Rainy tensed as if she were about to run.
“They’re not going to harm you or your baby,” Pax said. “That’s the last thing they’d do.” He nodded toward the voices. “Tommy will protect you. And the reverend-that’s over now. I don’t think she understood who the pills were for.”
Rainy looked down the slope, then at Paxton. “We wanted you to know,” she said. “We wanted you to understand. Then maybe-”
“Maybe we could stay with you,” Sandra said. “You do kinda need us, Paxton.”
The voices grew louder. “You should go,” Pax said. “You’re worrying them.”
Sandra rushed to him. She threw her arms around him, pressed her belly into his. He tried to step away, but she hugged him harder. Finally he touched the top of her smooth head.
Rainy said, “Good-bye, Pax.”
“Take care of each other,” he said.
Sandra released him. Rainy put the blanket over her shoulders.
He watched them until they vanished into the trees. He turned away, but then his knees felt weak, so he sat down there in the wet grass. He looked at nothing for a long time, as the sun tracked across the blue roof of the clearing.
Chapter 23
HE’D ALMOST FORGOTTEN the ramp.
When the van arrived, Paxton was on his stomach in the front yard, drilling through the two-by-fours into the cement foundation of the house while Amos and Paul, two argos from Alpha Furniture, held the frame steady. He’d called them yesterday in a panic. They’d built the ramp in an afternoon and delivered it this morning.
Pax got up from the cold ground, shook the dirt from the front of his jacket. It was just under forty degrees, which in Chicago would have been balmy for a December day, but here in Switchcreek felt bitterly cold. The argos stooped with their nail guns to fasten the plywood to the frame.
Dr. Fraelich had gotten out of the van, and the side door was open. His father sat in his enormous wheelchair, looking down sternly while two charlie men fussed with the chair and the winch. Finally Barron got the electric motor started, and Mr. Teestall, Paxton’s old shop teacher, held the chair while it descended.
Pax said, “How you doing, Dad?”
“I told them, I can walk.”
“Let’s not risk it right now,” Dr. Fraelich said.
“Rhonda would kill us if you broke something,” Barron added.
The metal plates touched the ground. Mr. Teestall leaned into the chair and got it rolling across the yard. Barron eyed the ramp. “Will that hold him?”
Amos, the one-armed argo, said, “Of course it will. Both of us jumped on it in the shop.”
“I’m going to have a concrete ramp installed eventually,” Pax said.
They got Harlan through the door and across the living room. Pax had pulled up all the carpets and refinished the floors, which made the rolling a lot easier. Pax stayed back as Mr. Teestall helped Harlan move from the wheelchair to the new couch. Another Alpha creation: normal-looking on the outside, but with industrial-strength springs and a steel undercarriage cross-braced like a suspension bridge. The thing squeaked loudly as his father settled into it. He shifted his weight and it squeaked again.
“That’s going to drive me crazy,” Harlan said.
“I’ll oil it before I go,” Pax said.
“Just leave that to me,” Mr. Teestall said.
Pax helped Barron ferry in supplies from the van-bandages, creams, extraction packs, cleaning solution-as well as his father’s clothes and two boxes of Mr. Teestall’s personal items. They finished just as Dr. Fraelich concluded her checkup of Harlan.
“You can fasten your shirt now, Mr. Martin,” she said, and peeled one of the latex gloves from her hands. “As near as I can tell, you’re as fit as anyone of your age, sex, and clade.”
“That’s an awful lot of conditions,” Harlan said.
“It’s the best I can do.”
