The Perfect Wife(27)
Below you, beyond the house and the cliff edge, the ocean is an endless, restless presence, silvery black as a piece of split coal.
“Wow,” you say, amazed. “It’s beautiful.”
He nods. “When I found this place, there was a decrepit old ranch house here. The architects knocked it down and constructed this in record time. I waited until they were three months from completion before I proposed to you.” He gestures toward the cliff. “And that was where we got married. Right there, with the ocean behind us and the house in front. That day was the first time you’d seen it…You should have seen the look on your face.”
Just for an instant, you can picture it—you, in your wedding dress, staring openmouthed at what he’d done for you.
“I’d like to remember that,” you say wistfully. “Our wedding, I mean.”
“Of course. We can upload the footage tonight.”
Inside, the house is just as beautiful as it is outside. There’s even more art here than in the city house—street art, vibrant and cartoonlike. It gives the interior, which might so easily have seemed soulless and grand, a youthful, art-student feel.
“What an incredible life we had,” you say, marveling. “Everything was so perfect for us, wasn’t it?”
Tim picks up a small sculpture—a child’s doll, cast in glass, with a lightbulb for a head—and gives it a half turn before replacing it on its plinth. “Perfect,” he repeats. “Because you made it that way. Which is another reason I had to bring you back. And don’t think, by the way, that just because we had a good life we didn’t engage with the world. You always used our wealth to try to make a difference. You never stopped caring about gender politics, the arts, the homeless…And special education for children like Danny.”
“Yes,” you say, nodding. “That was the one part of our life that wasn’t perfect, was it? Danny.”
“It was a shock, of course. And yes, it meant we had to reassess a few things. But you took it in your stride. Things happened for a reason, you said. If we’d been given Danny, it was because we were the best people to take care of him. Which we did.” He hesitates. “You did. We were lucky—we could afford help—but it was you who talked to every doctor on the West Coast, you who researched all the different therapies. You were amazing. Not that I was surprised. But what happened, and how you responded to it, just made me love you even more.”
“Thank you…But don’t underestimate what you’ve done, either. All those years bringing him up alone.”
“I love him,” Tim says simply. “Just as I love you. His problems will never change that.”
“I love you, too.” It’s the first time you’ve said those words to him properly since all this began, you realize. “Tim, I love you.”
You look around at this place where you got married, and imagine what you felt then—the optimism of two young people stepping out together on a journey, an adventure. You can almost remember it—how excited you were, how certain that, whatever problems you faced in life, you would overcome them together.
And you feel it now, too: a sense of possibility, an eagerness for the future. The journalists, the lingering self-disgust, the physical limitations—none of those really matter, not if you have each other.
I can do this, you think. I can live this life. So long as I have Tim’s love, we can make this work.
SEVEN
Abbie begged and borrowed from all of us. From Hamilton she got the frame of an old shopbot, the Mk II. From Rajesh she got a couple of Mk III arms. Kathryn gave her some wiring, and Darren—developer Darren, who worshipped her rather too obviously since she’d put herself between him and Tim’s tongue-lashing—wrote some code. We all wanted to know what it was for, of course, but Darren wasn’t telling.
“I promised her I’d keep it a secret,” he insisted. “You have to wait and see.”
The gas burners, pneumatic tubing, and welding tools were Abbie’s own, lugged from the back of her beat-up old Volvo.
This was another Abbie entirely, this slim, lanky figure in dark-blue overalls and even darker welding goggles who knelt in a corner of the parking lot, day after day, spraying sparks. And when she was finally done, it was to the parking lot she summoned us. Of course, we all went—even Tim and Mike. Nobody would have missed this.
“I made something for y’all,” she announced. The trace of the South in y’all told us how excited she was. “I call it Electra Dancing.”
We noticed she had a fire extinguisher standing by. “You should probably give her some room,” she added.
She pulled a sheet off the thing that stood next to her. It was a kind of sculpture, we saw instantly, not dissimilar to the shopbots we were all familiar with. Some of the shopbot parts, though, had been replaced with junk—the head was an old motorcycle headlight, the fingers were bicycle chains, and there were bits of old telephones and typewriters incorporated into the design. It was wearing a pretty vintage dress in bright-yellow cotton.
As we watched, the bot abruptly raised both arms. Flames shot from its wrists—one forward, one back, like a Catherine wheel. It started to spin; or at least, its body did. The head remained motionless. And suddenly flames started shooting from its head and that started spinning, too, the opposite way to the rest of it. It was a dancing dervish, a pirouetting top, a whirligig of flame.