Just pick and go, dammit.
Lily grabbed a set of pine-green towels she’d always hated, a wedding gift from Greg’s aunt. When she returned, she found that Jonathan and the doctor had moved the sofa into the direct sunlight beneath the windowsill. The doctor had removed the woman’s oversize sweater to reveal a discolored man’s undershirt beneath, and now he was cutting the undershirt off with some scissors he’d produced from his little bag. Lily bent down to deposit the towels beside him.
“That’ll do, miss.”
“Lily.”
“No names.”
That phrase again. Feeling rebuked, Lily turned to Jonathan and found that he’d taken out his gun, a gleaming black thing that never failed to make Lily uneasy, and was fiddling with it, taking out the bullets and putting them in again.
“I need you to hold her down,” the doctor said. Lily didn’t know who he was talking to, but both of them moved forward, Lily toward the woman’s arms and Jonathan, tucking the gun away, toward her feet. Looking down, Lily saw a glint of panic in the woman’s eyes, and she placed a hand on her forehead, feeling like the world’s biggest fraud as she murmured, “It’ll be all right.”
The next half hour would stay with Lily in clear, sickening detail for the rest of her life. The doctor had a laser probe, at least, but when he began to poke around with it, the woman’s arms strained until Lily’s face and neck were slicked with sweat in the effort to hold her down. Every few minutes the doctor would mutter, “Buried deep, little bastard,” and these mutterings were Lily’s only way to mark the passage of time.
She spent much of the operation staring at Jonathan, trying to puzzle him out. He was a good bodyguard and a gifted driver, but he was also a former Marine and—Lily had always thought—a loyalist. How on earth did he know an off-the-grid doctor? How would either of them be able to keep this from Greg?
The doctor finally found the bullet, then began to work a small set of tongs into the hole. The woman passed out again somewhere in the middle of this process, her arms going mercifully slack against Lily’s hands. The temperature in the nursery felt as though it had climbed sharply, though the wall panel only read 74 degrees. Lily was dizzy, as though she’d lost all the blood in her head. Jonathan, no surprise, was steady as ever, his face immobile as he watched the doctor work. He’d probably killed men in Saudi Arabia with the same stone face.
At last the doctor held up the tongs to display a deformed piece of scarlet-dripping plastic. Jonathan held out a towel and the doctor dropped the bullet into it, making the cotton bloom red, then began to seal the wound.
“Was she successful?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t know,” Jonathan replied.
“One of us should let him know she’s here.”
“I’ll do it. How long will she have to stay?”
“Ideally, she needs a few days’ rest. She’s lost a lot of blood. There’s no way to get her out anyway, not until she can walk; I would think there are roadblocks up by now.” The doctor gave Lily a doubtful look. “But can she stay here?”
“Yes, she can,” Lily replied, trying to sound firm. But the rest of the conversation had mystified her. What kind of doctor patched wounds and asked no questions? The doctor wiped his hands on one of Lily’s bath sheets, then threw it on her armchair. “She’ll need fairly constant care.”
“I’ll do it,” Lily volunteered. “During the day, I can be in here all the time. At night, maybe every few hours.”
“What does a woman like you want with something like this?”
Lily flushed at the judgment she saw in his eyes. Her nursery was bigger than most people’s homes. She wished she could tell this neat little man about Maddy, but she didn’t know where to begin. “I just do. She’ll be safe here.”
The doctor considered her for another moment, then opened his bag and dumped a pile of medical paraphernalia onto the sofa: bandages, syringes, pill bottles. “You need to change the bandage at least once a day. If she becomes feverish, give her this. Have you ever given someone an injection?”
“Yes.” Lily nodded vigorously, feeling more confident now. The new syringes had guides to pinpoint veins, but even if the doctor’s syringes were the older kind, Maddy had been a diabetic. Lily knew how to give a shot.
The doctor held up a green-wrapped syringe. “Antibiotics. Give her an injection every evening at the same time. The vein in her forearm.”
He turned back to Jonathan. “She can stay here for a few days, but she could easily develop infection. The sooner he gets her out, the better.”
He who? Lily wondered now. The doctor’s voice was so reverent that for a moment Lily thought he was talking about God.
“I need to take the doctor back, Mrs. M., then run some errands. I might be gone until late.”
Lily nodded slowly. “I’ll tell Greg you went to pick up my new dress in the city.”
This wasn’t precisely a lie. Lily had ordered a new dress from Chanel several weeks ago: fifteen thousand dollars, amethyst silk with hand-sewn sequins. Now, looking down at the unconscious woman on the sofa, she felt sick.
“We need to go. Her husband will be home soon.”
The doctor gathered up his instruments, wiped them down with the bloody towel, and stuck them inside his bag. “These towels need to be burned. You can’t just throw them away.”
“I know that,” Lily snapped, glaring at him. Then she looked down in bewilderment. The floor tiles had begun to tremble beneath her feet.
A giant thunderclap echoed outside, an explosion of noise that made Lily cover her ears. Dimly, from the other end of the house, she heard glass shatter. The doctor had covered his ears as well, but Jonathan merely stood staring out the window, a faint smile on his face. For a few seconds the walls and doors continued to rattle, and then they were still. The Security alarm went off downtown, its distinctive bray loud enough to penetrate even the unconscious brain of the woman on the couch; she rolled and murmured in her sleep.
The doctor reached out to clasp Jonathan’s hand. “The better world.”
“The better world,” Jonathan repeated.
Lily stared at him with wide eyes, a hundred tiny things coming together in her mind. Jonathan’s encyclopedic knowledge of the public roadways. His inexplicable decision to keep Lily’s secrets. His mysterious nighttime errands. Now Lily understood why the injured woman had rolled over the wall into this particular garden: because Jonathan was here. Jonathan, a separatist.
“I’ll be back later, Mrs. M.”
She nodded, watching him go. Deep down, she secretly hoped that the doctor would shake her hand as well, but he didn’t, only gave her another distrustful look as he went. Lily was left staring at the woman on the couch, her mind already categorizing the various types of trouble she was in. If she were caught harboring a fugitive, she would be arrested, taken into custody. But even the dangers of arrest paled against what would happen if Greg found out. Greg called the separatists filth. He crowed whenever one of them was caught and watched with a grim but smug pleasure as they were executed on the government site.
I need to be smart now, Lily thought, staring at the woman on the couch. She wondered how it was possible to be terrified and, at the same time, deeply excited. She had gone to a party one weekend in high school, years before she had met Greg . . . she had been drunk, yes, but not so drunk that she didn’t know what she was doing, and at the end of the night she had followed a boy into a darkened room and given up her virginity, just like that. Lily had never learned the boy’s name, not even in the morning, but he had been shy and kind, and she had never regretted the incident, a moment of wild abandon that had seemed, in that time and place, to define her.
I’m here, she thought now, terrified but buoyant, as though she were floating in midair at a great height. Really and truly here.
It had been a long time.
When Greg walked through the door, Lily could already tell that it was going to be a bad night. His hea
d was lowered like a bull’s, and there were sweat stains under his arms. Although he’d never said so, Lily was fairly sure he was scared of flying. She could smell him all the way across the living room, a mixture of bitter fear-sweat and the sandalwood cologne he wore every day. The cologne smelled like a dead animal.
If he’d only been wearing it when I met him, Lily thought, biting her cheek against a sudden peal of awful laughter, maybe I would have told him to get lost.
She had taken a shower, straightened her hair, and put on her best dress, knowing that Greg would come home angry. The news sites had begun to carry the story almost immediately: three East Coast Security bases, one only six miles from New Canaan, had suffered some sort of cataclysmic chemical explosions in their jet proving grounds. The casualties had been low; the terrorists had clearly been aiming for equipment, not men, and they had succeeded. More than one hundred jets had been destroyed. Two civilian contractors from Lockheed had died as well, but they hadn’t been workers, only management.
Only management. That sounded like something Lily’s father would have said. Dad had been a chemical engineer, and by the end of his life he’d been management himself, making upward of five million a year. But his sympathies had always been with the workers. When Lily was very young, Dad even tried to organize a union at Dow, but that attempt had died with Frewell’s Labor Facilitation Act. When quality control went to complete automation a few years later, there weren’t even any workers to unionize anymore. Dad was well off, yes, but Lily knew he was unhappy. He had died two years ago, and even in those last hours, sitting beside his bed in the hospital, Lily could sense him longing, still dreaming of his more equitable world. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she was the wrong daughter to be there, that it was Maddy he really wanted.
Greg dumped his coat on the sofa and went straight for the bar. Another bad sign. Lily noted the hunch of Greg’s thick shoulders beneath his suit, the way his dark brows had knitted together over his fraternity-handsome face, the clench of his jaw as he dumped gin into a glass. Liquid sloshed over the rim onto the bar, but Greg didn’t wipe it away. That would be her job, Lily thought, and was surprised to feel a dim throb of anger trying to break through her anxiety. The anger struggled briefly, then drowned.
Security sirens had been sounding in and out of their neighborhood all afternoon. They hadn’t come to Lily’s door, but they had gone to see Andrea Torres down the block. On the rare occasions when something happened in New Canaan, Andrea was always the first one questioned, because her husband was half Mexican and had once been arrested on suspicion of helping illegal immigrants cross state lines. But Andrea was a tiny, shy woman who could barely gather the courage to go down and get her own mail at the foot of her lawn. Lily always invited her to parties as a matter of form, since they lived in the same neighborhood, but Andrea never came.
Security was looking for an eighteen-year-old woman, five foot six, with blonde hair and green eyes. She had been hired as a civilian cleaner at Pryor Security Base three months ago, and today, somehow, she had made her way onto the jet fields and planted a bomb. She had taken gunfire as she fled from the scene, and they believed she was wounded. Her name was Angela West.
No names, Lily had thought, almost reflexively. The woman in the nursery was not an Angela. Lily decided that she must have been mistaken about the scar on the woman’s shoulder; no one would have been able to get Security clearance on a military base without a tag. The news sites said that the woman had known affiliations with the Blue Horizon, but no one seemed able to explain what domestic terrorists wanted with jets designed for transcontinental flight. The sites postulated that the separatists were mad dogs, simply going after the nearest military installation; everyone knew they were headquartered in New England somewhere, although neither Security nor private bounty hunters had been able to find a trace. The news said that naval bases were a convenient target.
Even to Lily, this explanation didn’t ring quite true. Every few months Greg would invite a Security lieutenant named Arnie Welch over to dinner, and the last time, after a few drinks, Arnie had admitted mournfully that the Blue Horizon were efficient, well-organized terrorists; they targeted carefully selected goals and usually succeeded. Lily watched the online news because there was nothing else, but she knew the news sites were heavily censored. Security was determined to keep the size of the problem under wraps, but Arnie could always be persuaded to talk on his third glass, and according to Arnie, the Blue Horizon was a much bigger problem than most civilians knew.
“You haven’t asked me about my day.”
Lily looked up and found Greg staring at her, a hint of petulance in his protruding lower lip. She got up from the armchair, taking a deep breath, and went and kissed him. He tasted like salami and olives. He’d already been drinking martinis on the plane.
“I’m sorry.”
“I had a bad day,” he told her, pouring himself a scotch.
Lily nodded with what she hoped looked like sympathy. Every day was a bad day for Greg. “Did the trip go all right?”
“It did, right until terrorists blew up every jet on the East Coast.”
“I saw it on the news.”
Greg looked down at her, irritated, and Lily realized that he had wanted to tell her about it himself. “I didn’t know it was terrorists. I thought they were just accidents. Explosions.”
“They weren’t. Three saboteurs got Security clearances. One of them was even a woman! I don’t know what the hell has happened to this country.” Greg took a swig of whisky. “I have to go down to Washington in a couple of hours. The Pentagon will need more jets in a hurry, and they’re going to want me to take care of it.”
“That’s good,” Lily replied tentatively.
“No, it isn’t!” he snapped. “The fucking separatists have bombed damn near every jet production facility on the East Coast over the past two years. Only two of them are still up and running; the rest are still being repaired. There’s no way for us to come up with even a fraction of the jets the Pentagon is going to ask for. Every time we build something, the Blue Horizon blows it up!”
Lily wanted to ask questions about the woman, to see if Greg had more information, but she knew better. She’d seen Greg like this several times in the past year, and they always came with injuries: two black eyes and a night in the emergency room with a broken arm. The last time had been the worst; Greg had wanted to have sex almost as soon as he came in the door, and when Lily pushed him away, he’d slapped her. While he was fucking her, he had bitten her shoulder hard enough to draw blood. Lily shook off the memory, a quick, reflexive mental movement almost akin to a shiver. Greg always said he was sorry afterward, and there was usually a present of some kind attached, earrings or a dress. There was nothing to do but forget these things . . . until they happened again.
“Now I’ll have to go down to Washington, stand in front of ten three-star and higher generals, and explain that what they want can’t be done.”
Lily tried for empathy, but none was forthcoming. In fact, she realized in astonishment, she almost wished Greg would hit her, as he plainly meant to at some point, and leave. She wanted to be back in the nursery. It had been nearly an hour, and the woman would be thirsty.
“What was her name?” Lily asked.
“Huh?” Greg had begun stroking the crack of her ass, something she hated. She willed herself to be still, not to brush his hand away.
“The terrorist, the woman. What was her real name? Did they find out?”
“Dorian Rice. She escaped from the Bronx Women’s Correctional a year ago! You believe that?”
Lily did.
“I have just enough time for dinner before I leave.”
Lily knew her role now: she was supposed to serve dinner, then ask if he wanted anything, if there was anything she could do for him. She sensed Greg waiting for her to ask; he knew this routine as well as she did. And yet Lily found herself unable to act.
If he deci
des he wants to screw, I’ll go out of my fucking mind.
Greg’s hand had stopped stroking her crack, a small favor that suddenly seemed worth whatever might happen next. Lily slipped out of his arms. “I’ll go get you some food.”
He grabbed her arm before she’d taken two steps toward the kitchen, his hand clamping hard. “What are you thinking about?”
“You.” Lily wondered if Dorian Rice would be hungry, if she could eat solid food. She should have asked the doctor.
“No, you’re not,” Greg replied, his voice petulant. “You’re thinking about something else. I don’t like it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“I don’t like it when you go somewhere else in your head. You’re supposed to be here with me.”
You fucking candyass. Lily bit down on the words, bit down hard. Candyass . . . it was Maddy’s favorite insult; she’d applied it to at least half the people in Media by the time she was fourteen.
“Why don’t you say you love me? I’ve had a lousy day.”
Lily opened her mouth, even found her lips edging into an oval to shape the words.
I can’t say it.
But what if he hits you?
Well, what if he fucking well does?
That was Maddy again. She and her perennially foul mouth seemed to have taken up residence in Lily’s head. Greg’s hand had coiled in her hair, and he yanked her head backward, not hard enough to be truly painful, but enough for a warning. Lily felt a muscle pop in her neck.
“Everything I do for you, Lil . . . don’t you love me?”
She looked up into his eyes (brown, with just a hint of green) and gritted her teeth. It was going to be one of those nights; it had gone too far now for it not to be. But she might reduce the oncoming damage by playing her part.
At what price, Lil? Maddy asked. Lily could almost see her now, smirking, her blonde hair tied up into the Goth-girl pigtails she’d favored since she was about nine. Maddy had never met Greg; she’d disappeared two years before Lily first brought Greg home. And yet, even in the beginning, the good days, Lily had always known deep down what Maddy would have thought.