indecision and the crush of tall cut grass in the slosh of standing rainwater.
She stopped at the edge of McGovern Lake, and stared across the green. She pretended that could see the lofts on the far side of the park, and imagined what she would do. First she’d make the call, and clear a path. His house wasn’t secure; he didn’t have enough money for a high-security place. Next she’d open the door with her key, stored in the back of the S6 mobile for security. If he’d been so proactive as to change the locks, she’d just break in. It wouldn’t be the first time; she just took a new key the last time.
If he was still working, he’d have plenty for her to get a new start with. She’d take a few minutes to start up the new mobile, and swap out some of the modules with parts from his workstation. When she’d swiped her last mobile from him, he’d assembled a fine collection of parts from various manufacturers. It would all come down to what was on his desk at the time.
Times like these, when she’d fallen behind in her practice, Alyson was thankful that her father was so predictable.
Alyson sat down on a stone bench, and pulled the S6 mobile from her pocket. She snapped the rubber band off, and pulled it around her wrist. It had been a long time since it had been turned on. She counted months while opening the battery door and removing the key from the recess in the plastic panel. Thirteen months; it’d been over a year since she last called her dad.
She reassembled the device, and turned it on. It took a minute to connect to the S6 network, and even then, the connection was shaky. She opened the contacts, and started the call to her father, hesitating to push the button.
“Hello?” he answered. Her spine trembled for a moment, and she started walking around towards the lofts, where she knew he’d be departing from at any moment.
“Hey…Dad. How’s everything?”
“Alyson? Where are you? What’s going on?”
“I’m in town, but only for the night. I was wondering if you could come pick me up. I just got off of a bus from Austin. I don’t have enough cash left for a taxi.”
“Why were you in Austin? Where the hell have you been?”
“I’ll tell you all about it in the morning. Can you hurry up? I think someone is following me.”
There was a pause. “Okay. Where should I pick you up?”
“I’ll be at the bus station.”
“I’ll be there shortly.”
“Please,” she whispered.
The line died at Alyson’s hand.
She knew that it was a thirty minute walk from McGovern Lake to her father’s loft. She took patient strides across the ocean of grass, between reefs of floral patterns.
“Alright, I’ll be there soon,” Martin said. He stuck his mobile back into his pocket, and pulled his new laptop into his pocket. He watched his trace die, and drew a line from where the call had started, dragging his finger towards where Patrick Reid lived. He started the car, a grin growing on his face, and sped across town.
Alyson jammed the key into the door knob, and twisted it. The door opened, and she released a sigh.
“Home, sweet…” she said. “Well, you’re not really all that sweet, are you?”
She still questioned why he hadn’t moved out as she entered the kitchen. The dining table was gone, replaced by a desk with a pair of shelves hanging over them. Some dishes sat on the counter, unwashed, and the drying basket empty. A bottle of wine was next to the stove, sealed at the top. She turned on the strip lighting over the desk, and pulled the chair out far enough to look beneath. No boxes of fresh supplies were waiting for her to plunder. She searched the drawers, and fished out some of the parts she wanted to swap onto an unmodified mobile, but couldn’t find a body.
“What the hell,” she muttered. She stood up, and continued into the den.
She flipped the light switch, illuminating the same tattered and worn black suede couch from her youth, and the scratched square coffee table that sat in front of it. Alyson guessed he did more of his work in front of the television these days, based on the cracked open laptop, precision screwdrivers, technical documentation, and partially crushed soda cans littering the surface of the table. A blanket was crumpled up and hanging over the far edge of the couch. Alyson sat down, and flipped through the mess, and eventually found a mobile body, stripped of half of its modules. The brand was COMSTAR, to her dismay. She’d grown so used to the P&V line.
She shook her head, and thought that she was lucky enough to have this, and resettled the mess to a similar shape as before. “It’ll work,” she said. “It’s more than I’ve had all day, at the very least.”
The stairs leading up to her old bedroom were dark, untouched by the light emanating from the table lamp in the corner. She wanted to go look, to see if he’d settled in upstairs. She didn’t look the last time, and before that, after several years, he still slept on that couch. She was surprised that it still held up.
Alyson returned to her father’s desk, and ripped through his tool box, and gathered a collection of parts that the COMSTAR body was missing. She couldn’t find a camera in the fray, but let it pass by the wayside. She knew that she could survive without the ability to scan for a little while, and she could buy a new notepad with little trouble.
She would be back on track soon. She could shake the ghosts that she’d summoned, and move on. Damn Alex Kascak’s logic and terror.
“The camera parts are on the shelf,” Patrick Reid called from behind her.
She froze, and let the screwdriver slip from her hand. A tiny screw bounced on the floor, lost beneath the desk. “I don’t need it,” she said.
“No, I would say you don’t,” he said. Alyson could hear the sadness in his voice, and wondered where it came from. Was it a heart that never learned to live after her mother died, or was it his daughter’s life, so filled with deception?
“Hi, Dad,” she said, turning to face him. “You’re home sooner than I thought.”
“I can imagine,” he said. He stepped through the door frame and sat down at the counter. “You look like you’ve seen better days, Alyson. What’s going on?”
He’s as concerned as always, she thought. “You know; nasty weather, cramped bus seats. I’ve been through worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” she responded. “So long as I wake up in the morning, you know.”
He nodded, and leaned against the counter, rubbing his head. She could see the gray in his hair, seeping through from below a mess of mixed brown and black hair. His brow was wrinkled. Age and stress were strangling him. “That’s a very mature way to look at it. I’m proud of you.”
“For what, just getting by?”
“It’s more than a lot of people do,” he said. “But then again, surviving wasn’t ever a big deal for you. You just let things roll right off like they never happened, and damn everyone else, right?”
“No,” Alyson said. “Not damn everyone else. I can’t fucking…”
“Watch you language.”
“Fuck no I won’t.”
“In my house you will,” he said.
“I didn’t come here to fight with you,” she said. “I came to regroup, and I can’t even do that now.”
“And by regroup, you mean you were going to steal my work materials like you did last year around this time? Like you’ve done, I don’t know, at least every two years since you abandoned me?” he said.
“Don’t think I didn’t notice. I had to pay for almost every one of those mobiles you walked out of here with.”
“Cry me a river,” she said. “It’s not like you don’t make enough money to pay for them. And it’s not like you spend the money on yourself. The least you could do is get out of this apartment, and into a proper house.”
“I don’t need anything bigger,” he said.
“Tell me, if I was to go up to my old bedroom, would it still be my bedroom? Or have you gone in and redecorated like you actually live here? When you bring a date back h
ere, do you just take her to the couch?”
“I don’t date, and that’s all beside the point,” he complained.
“No, it’s not,” Alyson cried, slamming her fist against the desk. She struggled to regain her composure, the past scratching the backs of her eyes. “You still don’t get it. You don’t even try to understand.”
A tear rose and shined on Patrick’s eyelid. “I don’t understand why you left, Alyson. I don’t know what I did wrong. I thought that if I gave you enough space, and did for you what I could that you’d be happy. But I guess I didn’t do enough.”
“You did too much,” Alyson said. “And I appreciated every damned bit of it. But there was one thing that you could have done, and you never did. You still haven’t.”
“Enlighten me,” he said.
“You could have moved on after Mom died. You could have grieved and gotten over it.”
His cheek trembled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Alyson. It’s not that easy, just to forget someone, to completely shake off twenty years of being with them. I pray that you don’t have to go through what I did.”
“I never said you needed to forget. I said you needed to heal, and you never did. You don’t know what it was like trying to get over her being gone, and having someone reminding you every fucking second that there was a hole in their life that they couldn’t possibly fill.”
“Then you know how much it hurts that you left me too. You just ran away from me, and left me here to rot in this house alone,” he yelled. He was