Chapter Thirty
Suella had to lean against her daughter for support when they both walked home later. They watched a silly superhero movie on the big screen but the alcohol and the day’s exertions lulled her into a deep sleep. In the small hours she woke up to find herself still sleeping on the couch, her body angled toward the television, and draped in a blanket Natalie had probably placed over her. She washed down a couple of aspirin and gulped down a glass of water to get rid of the pasty dryness in her mouth.
Afterward, she changed into her pajamas and climbed into bed.
Bright and early the next morning, Natalie greeted her with a wry smile. “So how are you feeling today?”
Suella was making smoothies in a blender and replied “Not bad. Thanks for looking after me.”
Right after breakfast, they tidied up the house, packed their things and slid down into Suella’s Mazda for a ride back to the real world. Nathan called just after they reached the interchange for the solar slot. She fed him through on the car’s speakers. “I miss you two,” he said. “Hows about coming home today, to keep an old man company?”
Natalie laughed. “We’re in the car now, daddy! Can’t you tell?”
Suella had always marveled that the trip back from a weekend was always so much quicker than the trip getting there. The next thing she knew, they’d arrived home to Nathan, who ran out of the house and down the front walk with his arms extended, hugging both of them as they emerged from the car. “You were watching from the window,” Suella said. “That’s so cute!”
Yes, it was Sunday, but Suella’s clients ran 24-7 and she found daunting reams of work in her virtual inboxes when she flashed in. Nathan was playing so much golf nowadays, she thought, as he kissed her on the forehead before leaving to play eighteen with his regular group. “Make sure you eat a good lunch,” he said. “Because you’ll need the energy later, when I show you how much I missed you.”
There hadn’t been much sex in the Worthy household of late, so while Suella worked, she smiled at the sensuous delights she could look forward to later.
During a break in the late afternoon, Natalie showed her a couple of webcasts from her sites. They just seemed like video diaries to her, where she just pointed the camera at herself and told how she was thinking and feeling. “Today’s a good day,” she said on one of them. “Nothing hurts!”
Suella remembered hearing her grandmother say that one time, back when she was a little girl and only saw her grandmother a couple of times a year.
True to his word, Nathan arrived home later that afternoon with the taste of a few cocktails from the Nineteenth Hole fresh on his breath. Suella had just been finishing an anti-Malware screen for a client when he reached down behind her, scooped her up from her task chair, and carried her into the bedroom.
They still fit together like a glove and when she opened herself to receive him, felt surprised to be so moist and inviting for him that he laughed with delight as he slid in. For hours they pleasured each other like teenagers until they wore themselves out and he fell asleep with his head on her chest. In the other room, her daughter was quietly working on her postings and networking.
Life is good, she reflected.
The next morning at the breakfast table, Suella found Natalie talking to David “through her head.” She hoped and prayed that the manufacturers of all those implantables had done serious testing on the long-term health effects. True, there hadn’t been any brain cancer device scares for decades, but as a mother, she always worried. On the way to the refrigerator, she tapped Natalie on her shoulder. “Tell him to come here later,” she said.
That afternoon, David came to the house. Suella greeted him at the door, touched by the boy’s polite shyness. He was tall and slightly stooped over, possibly because he was struggling to get used to his full-grown adult body. Her younger brother had gone through the same thing as a late teen. “Let’s relax on the patio, shall we?” Suella said, guiding them both out there.
They enjoyed fresh-squeezed juice in the warm sunshine of a late spring California day while Suella studied her daughter’s beau. The flawless, tawny skin came from his mother, she supposed, along with the glossy, lush dark hair that had been styled in the retro floppy bangs style that was in vogue now. Once they had all relaxed and settled into talking, he amazed her with his conversational abilities.
“When your body is supposed to age fast, you grow up fast,” he said, explaining how he was able to hold his own in a conversation about all the popular current authors. Not many other teens bothered to read anymore; Suella always wondered what some of them might do if someone plopped an old-fashioned, traditional book into their lap.
“Now about this living-together thing,” Suella began, trying to steer the conversation toward a more serious topic, “do you really know what you’re getting yourself into?”
David reached for Natalie’s hand and held it tenderly while he replied. “Yes I have, Mrs. Worthy. I love her. And I think she loves me. We want to make a life together.”
Natalie glowed, smiling brightly as she gazed at him with love in her eyes and leaned forward to kiss him lightly on his cheek. Suella thought of Nathan. She also thought of David’s mother, whom she’d seen several times in the waiting room during the yearly physicals. How difficult it must have been to live up to the memory of his parent’s other son. It was no wonder Natalie and David bonded together.
When Suella asked David about his plans for the future, she sat back and enjoyed his smile and enthusiasm as he explained how he’d always liked to build things and wanted to become an engineer. His hands fluttered in the air in front of him, as if he was trying to conjure up models of all the things he spoke about.
“But most of all,” he said, with joy in his eyes as he reached for Natalie’s hand “I want to have a family with Natalie.”
Suella could have said that as clones they would have been rendered sterile. She could also have said that no adopting agency would consider them suitable parents when both had shortened life spans due to their very natures. To do so would have been to dump a bucket of cold water over their youthful optimism. Besides, who knew what could happen?
As they all spoke, Suella studied David closely for signs of any infirmities rising from his shortened telomeres. With Natalie, there was her slightly perceptible limp and her morning sluggishness. While she had yet to see David walk for any distance to check whether he shared the same condition, she saw only one other possible malady. An area below his right eye would twitch slightly, once every couple of minutes or so. The effect was so subtle she almost missed it but after repeatedly gazing at him it became apparent, the way a wrinkle in a billboard reveals itself when one has looked at it long enough.
A couple of days later, when Suella had been working long and hard and her head ached, Natalie burst noisily through the front door. Her light footsteps padded through the house until she found her mother hunched over multiple screens, squinting, trying to rub the pain out of her temples. “We found the perfect place!” she announced. “Want to come see it?”
Suella decided that she needed a break and lowered herself down into the car with her daughter to view her possible apartment. They were slogging through an early season heat wave, which meant she had to crank the air and they both had to go sleeveless.
Thankfully, they didn’t have to go too far. It was a neighborhood Suella had driven through many times before, the artsy section where little Natalie had taken ballet lessons years before. The beach was only a mile away. Would she be able to afford it? Property around here went for a pretty penny.
“It’s right there,” Natalie said, pointing to a building that at first glance, looked like a warehouse, one that had been cleaned up extensively on the outside and re-bricked.
“There’s a lot in the back with a couple of guest places in it, for you to park.”
As she maneuve
red the car into the space, Suella said “This looks like it used to be a factory.”
“It probably was, mom, but that was then and this is now. You’ve got to see the inside!”
Once they emerged from the car into the bright, hot sun, Natalie hustled her toward the glass double door, set against a carved concrete archway. The management had given Natalie a key card, which she swiped against a glass sensor. “You mean they let you go in and out on your own?” Suella asked. “I assumed we were going to meet with some kind of an apartment manager.”
“The card only works between eight a.m. and six p.m.,” Natalie replied. “And I can only use it for one more day.”
The building lobby felt refreshingly cool and the air smelled clean and floral, causing Suella to notice all the potted plants populating the reception areas. When she looked around some more she saw that the building had been divided into two floors, accessible by spiral staircases at the end of the lobby. Natalie led them up the stairs to the second floor.
By the time they stopped at the door for the apartment Natalie was considering, she looked like a proud new parent, beaming at her mother while she swiped the key card against another sensor near the doorframe. “This is it,” she said, pushing the door open. “If and when I move in, I won’t even need the door anymore. David and I can just press our thumbs up to it.”
They walked into the whitest living space Suella had ever seen. White walls, white countertops, white cabinets and cream pile carpet glared at them while Natalie flitted about, showing her mother all the apartment’s features. Even the range top and oven, with its Hobbit-like hood were all white. Suella remembered that when she was a little girl and would watch a science fiction movie about the future, everything was white, even the clothes people wore.
The apartment had been arranged in four quadrants and partitioned with short walls into a sleeping area, a utility area, and a living/kitchen area. It would have been the perfect bachelorette apartment for a young neatnik girl, but then she remembered David. “This is really nice,” she said. “But do you think you and David might feel a little crowded in here? This is only a little bigger than a studio apartment I had when I was in college.”
“No, it’s cozy,” Natalie said, resting proudly against the kitchen countertop. And if you tiptoe when you look out that window over there, you can see the beach!”
Windows for the sleeping area and the living area brought a bright, cheery quality to the little apartment. Suella could already see her daughter and David curled up on a couch together, watching a movie. “Well, it is close to the house, it’s in a good neighborhood, and you really seem to like it. Can you afford it?”
“Yes, mom.”
“Then I think you should go for it.”
A few days later all the parents got together to help the young couple move into their first apartment. Suella and Nathan would meet up with them later. For now, she and her husband looked over the piles of boxes and corrugated wardrobe containers and shook their heads. “How in the world did you ever accumulate so much shit?” Nathan asked. “And didn’t we just do this last week, when we picked you up from school?”
Natalie laughed. “Dad, you always say that!”
Unless they wanted to make ten trips, they were going to need to rent a larger magnavan, so Suella arranged for one. The vehicle contained dollies and a little ramp, which made hauling Natalie’s things much easier. She was going to take all her white chests of drawers and her end table, but her bed was staying behind.
Her twin bed with the ornate four posters, the one she’d been sleeping on since she was a little girl was too small, she said.
One load, one trip, Suella thought, as she looked at the boxes stacked into the cargo area of the magnavan. She closed the doors. She and Natalie would ride over in the van while Nathan followed them in his car. When they arrived at the apartment building and Nathan met them in the parking lot, he surveyed the building, squinting against the early afternoon sun, making a grimace.
“What kind of a place are you going to be living in, doll?” he asked. “This looks like some kind of rubber factory.”
Suella laughed, remembering that with her husband, the subject was never too far from sex. “Wait until you see what it looks like inside.”
They all attacked the van full of boxes, loading them onto the dolly, wheeling them back and forth between the van and the front door of the building. Passers-by noticed them and either waved or said hello.
“Nice!” Nathan said, when they pushed the dolly through the door and he saw the atrium with all the glass and potted plants. It also pleased him that they could wheel the dolly directly onto an elevator.
Natalie ran ahead of them down the hall and opened the door to her new apartment just by using her thumbprint.
“I hope no one ever steals your thumb,” Nathan said as he wheeled the dolly past her. When he set the boxes down in the living area, as Natalie wanted he put his hands on his hips and paused for a moment to look everything over.
“It looks a little sterile, doesn’t it?” Suella offered, wondering what Nathan thought as he looked over the white cabinets and countertops and the hob-goblin looking range top.
“White, white, white,” Nathan murmured. “It looks like a place where a robot would live.”
After they’d gone back and forth with the dolly a couple of times and the little apartment gradually filled with boxes, David showed up, alone. Suella watched closely how Nathan interacted with David and she was pleased to see him shake his hand heartily and call him “Buddy.”
Suella was looking forward to seeing David’s parents again. “Honey, are your folks coming a little later?”
David, who had hugged Natalie when he saw her and kept an arm around her, shifted back and forth on his feet, scratched his head and looked down at the carpet after being asked the question. He lifted his head and announced “They don’t want to help. They said I’m on my own with this.”
Suddenly David seemed really sad, as the corners of his eyes dropped and his lip quivered. Suella reached forward to pat him on the arm reassuringly.
Nathan shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but that kind of sucks about your parents.”
Suella tried to send him a hot dagger of a look. “No, you shouldn’t have said that.”
Natalie just shrugged. “So they can’t come. We’ve got lots of work to do.”
Nathan clapped his hands together. “That’s absolutely right pumpkin. Hows about we try to make this place look like a real apartment.” For a couple of hours, they forged ahead, unloading boxes and cheerily, noisily setting up shelves and tables and arranging things. With five people working at it, before long all of the furniture had been set up and the knick-knacks placed on shelves. Natalie and David’s bed had been delivered the day before, and the two men set it up in the sleeping area.
Suella tested out the bed by laying herself down on it and she sighed at the way the mattress responded to her and cradled her. “Wow, I wish I’d had something this nice for my first apartment.”
With everything set up and arranged, there was not much need for Suella and Nathan to stay there much longer. They all sat in four chairs surrounding their tiny little dinette set while Natalie made tea. Nathan forced conversation with David about his engineering school plans, to be met with short or stilted answers blipping from David’s lips. Suella tried to flash him a sympathetic look.
“I wasn’t smart enough to be an engineer,” Nathan said, gazing off into the distance for a moment. “For one thing, I bit the big one in math. And I was never any good at building stuff. When I was three or four my mom and dad got me one of those big round tubes filled with Lincoln Logs. They had this big piece of paper showing exactly where to put the logs and shit. And I still couldn’t do it right. By the time I was finished, my log cabin looked like a pile of giant matchsticks someone threw
there.”
“We had Legos,” David said quietly.
When she’d finished her cup of tea, Suella thumped her palm down onto the table, causing it to shake. She said “Say Nathan, didn’t you say something about wanting to go to the store before they close?”
Her husband gave her a blank look and started to open his mouth as if to say “I don’t know what you’re talking about”, but Suella made sure that neither her daughter nor David could see her as she gnashed her teeth at him.
Instead, Nathan said “Oh yeah. That.”
Moments later they stood up and said their goodbyes. Suella hugged Natalie a little longer and harder than usual as they parted, because they were entering a whole new era in her life. As they left the apartment and walked down the stairs to the atrium, she felt a hard lump rise in her throat as her eyes misted up.
Nathan mumbled through a long patter while they walked out of the building and sought the van in the parking lot. “I guess they want to break in that brand new bed. It’s a good thing she’s sterile.”