The Perfect Wife(95)

That visit was Jenny’s quiet rebalancing of the books, you realized. Payback for all those years of having to sit at her desk and suck it up.

Even so, you’d sensed there was something more, something she still wasn’t telling you. Something that made all this personal—

And then you’d guessed.

“Did Tim ever try it on with you?”

Jenny held your gaze for a moment. “Just once.” She paused. “After Mike first told him we were dating. And that it was serious.”

You stared at her.

“When I told him to get lost, he just laughed. Claimed he’d only been joking. That he wasn’t into little boys, anyway.”

Jesus.



* * *



—

Danny has been remarkably good all day, but next morning he has more energy and wants to know when you’re going home. When you say you aren’t, you’re going to find Mommy, he starts to stress. You can’t blame him. To him, it’s as if you said you’re going to find yourself. When the restaurant of the no-name budget motel you ended up at can only offer him own-label Cheerios instead of the real thing, he has a meltdown. All you can do for him is to let him howl himself out without getting cross or impatient with him. It takes twenty minutes, but he eventually brightens up when you tell him you’re catching a bus at exactly ten twenty-eight. And once you’re on the bus—a tiny minibus, little more than a van, with REDWOOD COAST TRANSPORT emblazoned across the side—he’s almost cheerful. Motion and timetables: two of his favorite things.

The 101 runs along the coast for a while, then veers inland through towering, shadowing redwoods. Tourist season is over, and the road is nearly empty. You notice how, when people here board the bus, they say hi to those already on it. No one seems to notice you’re not like them. You wonder if that’s because you’ve gotten better at fitting in, or whether people are simply more polite here, away from the big cities. Hardly anyone stares at Danny, either.

It makes you think about the nature of being human. It seems to you that you’ve met many people over the last few weeks who weren’t, not fully. It would be easy to single out Judy Hersch, with her plastic smile and botoxed face, parroting her autocue, or Sian and the therapists at Meadowbank, shocking their students whenever they flapped their arms, but actually it goes much wider than that. To the judge, mechanically applying the rule of law to every situation that comes before him. To Tim’s employees, diligently turning his wishes into lines of code while ignoring the toxic, misogynistic environment he created. And to Tim himself, believing that every problem of the heart must have an engineering solution.

The bus driver interrupts your reverie. “Your boy ever drive right through a redwood?” he calls over his shoulder.

“Not yet.”

So the man makes a left, turning into the forest, where the road passes through the middle of a growing tree. The redwood is evidently a local celebrity: the other passengers applaud as you go through it. “That’s something, huh?” he calls cheerfully.

“Sure is,” you call back. Danny hadn’t looked up from his toy train. You don’t have the heart to tell the driver that.

And Danny? Is he more or less human than others? Some might see his rigidity of thought, his love of schedules, and his lack of imagination as robotic. When people talk about their “humanity,” after all, they generally mean their empathy, their compassion, their moral code. But of course Danny isn’t any less human just because he doesn’t have those things. He’s just differently human: someone with an unusual ratio of rigidity to empathy.

Perhaps the real test of someone’s humanity, you think, is how tenderly they treat those like Danny. Whether they blindly try to fix them and make them more like everyone else, or whether they can accept their differentness and adapt the world to it.





77


You get off at the last stop, Smith River, a tiny town a few miles inland that seems utterly deserted. When you inquire about catching the next bus north, which you already know from Danny’s schedule checking is called the Coastal Express, you find the service is suspended for twenty-four hours because of a breakdown. This is devastating for Danny. He loves schedules precisely because they seem to offer order in a chaotic world, and now here they are, letting him down.

To add to the misery, it’s started to rain. You check into another no-chain motel, where Danny stares dully at the TV. He doesn’t even blink when a picture of himself appears on the screen. ROGUE ROBOT ABDUCTS CHILD WITH AUTISM is the caption. There’s the old clip of you striking Judy Hersch, along with a new one of you knocking aside the TV camera outside the courtroom. You didn’t hurt anyone on that occasion, but the way you bang into the camera makes it feel like you did, so they play it over and over. Then there’s footage of Sian, her chin bandaged, gesticulating as she recounts how she bravely fought you off as she tried to save Danny from your clutches. Finally there’s an interview with someone who claims to be a “cyber-psychologist.” His gist seems to be that you’ve formed some strange robotic attachment to Danny because you think the same way he does.

Actually, he may have a point there. Ever since Nathan jailbroke you, you’ve been feeling off-color—a nagging headache that sometimes shoots into something more. It’s as if your mind’s turning to concrete, the once nimble neurons becoming bloated and slow, like a computer that shows the hourglass symbol with every simple task. Even thinking is an effort. It’s as if you can glimpse the algorithms behind everything—not just waves, but the wind in the trees, the wheels of a truck, the way water drips from a tap. Like that poet who saw the skull beneath the skin. What was his name? You wait, but of course nothing comes.