All the Birds in the Sky(97)
Color returned to the world, cone time replaced rod time. Patricia thought about what it would be like to suffer Priya’s fate forever. She tried not to feel sorry for Theodolphus. She thought about Dorothea, getting her brains blown out. Her mouth tasted foul.
Her bag vibrated, then rattled and shrilled. The Caddy had turned back on somehow and was, you guessed it, trying to get her to listen to an old dead message.
“What is up with you?” she said to the device.
“You’re going to want to listen to this,” it said aloud, in its directions-to-the-airport voice.
She deleted the message again.
It came back again, with the same obnoxious noise.
She’d saved some childhood pictures on this Caddy, or else she would have lobbed it off the hillside. And anyway, whatever, it was a voicemail, how bad could it be? She pressed “listen.”
At first, she just felt disconcerted, listening to the Laurence of another time line talking about a future that had been erased. Poor dumb alternate Laurence. But then he talked about her dead parents, as if they’d only just died—whereas Patricia had been thinking of her parents as having died many, many years ago. First there had been no time to grieve for her parents, and then she had decided that she’d already grieved enough. In fact, her parents had died recently, not years ago, and she had given them short shrift except for a pang here and there, and one messed-up dream talk with Roberta. She’d buried the grief, the way she buried everything. Now her head was full of decapitated sandwiches and sandpaper shirts, and her father’s kisses on the bridge of her nose, and the canary-yellow frosting on the seventh-birthday cake her mom had baked her, and the way the “o” in “disown” became a diphthong under severe strain, and her mother’s broken arm.…
She was never going to see her parents again, or tell them she loved them, or tell them they ruined her childhood. They were gone, and she had never even known them, and Roberta had insisted they’d really loved her best in spite of all their cruelty, and Patricia would never, ever understand. The not-understanding was worse than anything else, it was like a mystery and a wound that couldn’t heal and an unforgivable failure.
Patricia broke down. She fell on her hands and knees in the dirt at the road shoulder, facing the blinding sunrise, and she started shaking and scrabbling in the ground and her eyes blurred from the overflow. She wiped her eyes clear as her vision fell on a single yellow flower beyond the metal fence, and just as Ghost Laurence said the words “emotional phototropism” the sunlight hit the flower and it actually raised its motherf*cking head to greet the sun, and Patricia lost her shit all over again, the tears just cascading out of her as she clawed at the ground she was salting.
The message ended and vanished forever and Patricia kept weeping and digging the stony dirt with both hands, until the sun was upon her.
When she could see again, still dry-heaving and bawling a little, she looked at the Caddy, which was perched in the grass looking innocent, and she had a pretty shrewd idea who this was but that was the least of her worries. “Fuck,” she said, “you.”
“I thought you needed to hear that,” the Caddy said.
“The trap that cannot be ignored,” she said, “is f*cking bullshit.”
She sat, head on dirty knees, looking out at the city. She felt like there was nobody in the world she could talk to about how she was feeling, as sure as if a plague had killed every other human. This thought led her back to the Unraveling, the way every thought eventually did.
She banged on Laurence’s door, not knocking and pausing and then knocking again, but rather a steady pummeling that says “I’m going to break this door down.” Her hand bruised up and she kept going.
This time, Laurence had probably been asleep. He looked even more disheveled than before, and way more disoriented. He had one sock on and an arm through one T-shirt sleeve. “Hey.” He squinted.
“You promised you would never run away from me again,” she said.
“I did promise that,” he said. “And I don’t remember you promising not to destroy my life’s work. So you have me there.”
Patricia almost turned away, because she could not deal with any more blame. But she still had dirt under her fingernails.
“I’m sorry,” she said. And then she couldn’t get any more words out. She couldn’t find words, any more than she could feel her extremities. “I’m sorry,” she said again, because she needed to make this totally unconditional. “I feel like I owed you more trust than I gave you. I shouldn’t have destroyed what I didn’t understand, and I shouldn’t have done that to you.”
Laurence kept looking at her with a dull expression, like he was just waiting for her to shut up and go away so he could go back to sleep. She probably looked like a mess, sweating and covered with dirt and tears.
Patricia made herself keep talking, because this was another situation where there was no way but forward: “I think part of me knew all along that you were working on something that could be dangerous, and I thought that being a good friend meant not judging or asking too many questions. And that was messed up, and I should have tried to find out sooner, and when I saw the machine in Denver and realized that it was yours I should have found a way to talk to you about it instead of just finishing the mission. I screwed up. I’m sorry.”