Charlie walked upstairs in the late afternoon and stopped short in the hallway, his hand still hovering near the railing. For a few seconds he only registered that something was wrong. The light was wrong, the whole hallway looked wrong, and then he realized why.
For the first time he could remember, the last door on the right stood open. Light spilled out of the doorway and into the hall, yellow and dim. Late sunlight, coming from the windows of that room.
Don's room.
Charlie stood and stared at the open door for a while, working it through logically as he forced himself to calm down (there was no threat here, there was nothing wrong, just an open door, just a patch of sunshine on the carpet). Someone had to have opened the door. The only other person in the house all day had been his father. His father must have opened the door.
It might be a test of some kind, or a hint, or an invitation. It might be nothing more than a door left open, a slip of the mind or the hand. Charlie couldn't remember his brother, but his father was still missing a son.
They didn't talk about Don; Charlie couldn't, and his father wouldn't try to tell him things he couldn't remember. But his father remembered, so maybe he'd come up here, to Don's room, to think. Maybe it had nothing to do with Charlie at all.
But the door was open, now, and the room was impossible to ignore. Charlie took one shaky step forward and then another, veering straight toward the doorway like the room beyond was some massive object with a gravitational pull he couldn't resist.
He closed his eyes at the threshold (the event horizon) and in his mind's eye he saw a sign marking the spot. Welcome to California. But Don had been beside him then, and Don had been lying to him then, and now Don was gone. Charlie stepped into the truth and opened his eyes.
The light from the windows was bright, and he had to look away, blinking as his eyes watered. He wiped the back of his hand across them impatiently, gazing around Don's room. It was just a room, as alien as his own had been when he first stepped inside. There was a bed and a nightstand, a desk and chair, a bookshelf with more photos and mementos than books. Beside the bookshelf was a dresser, with a folded shirt lying on top, and Charlie stepped inside to look at it.
It was a dress shirt, light blue, with a dark tie folded and tucked inside. It was freshly washed, neatly folded, waiting to be ironed and hung up. Waiting for Don to come home. Don had been an FBI agent; his brother must have worn shirts like this all the time, ties like this one, suits like Agent Henne's. Charlie couldn't picture it: Don wore tight jeans and battered boots and long-sleeved dark shirts under his shoulder holster and quilted jacket.
Charlie turned away from the shirt, looking around the room for something else. Anything else, as long as it would give him a hint. Anything that could connect the Don he remembered to the Don who had lived in this room, the Don who had been his brother.
There were little toys on top of the bookshelf, a few battered Lego constructions and Matchbox cars and an impossibly tiny baseball mitt, nearly worn to tatters. Charlie couldn't imagine Don being small enough to play with any of those things.
He was starting to remember being a child himself, the secret world of numbers that had transformed into a world of tests and tutors, playing with Rubik's Cubes and riding his bike. Don was five years older. He must have been already in school by the time Charlie could walk, but he would have been around.
Charlie must have come into this room sometimes--there must have been toys he wanted to play with, things he wanted to touch and wasn't allowed. He remembered playing video games downstairs, remembered going to his parents' room at night, but there was nothing of this room. Nothing of his brother, as if Don had never existed until a couple of months ago. As if Charlie had always been alone until Williamson brought the new guard into the basement.
Charlie closed his eyes and forced himself to imagine it: Don when he was younger, living in this room, sleeping in that tidy bed. Charlie would invent the memory if he had to, here where he must have had memories, just one image of who Don had been to him, before. But his mind's eye only showed him his own Don in that bed, stripped to his underwear for sleep--and Charlie could see himself creeping in here, looking for all the things he wasn't allowed to touch, crawling quietly over him to sleep beside the wall--
The phone rang downstairs and Charlie jumped, opening his eyes wide and shaking off the fantasy. He heard the low sound of his father's voice, the same as it had always sounded since Charlie had come back--patient and quiet and tired. Charlie felt a sickly surge of guilt at what he'd been thinking. Here where his father had come because he missed his son, missed Charlie's brother, Charlie was standing here missing... Don.
Charlie moved over to look at the bookshelf, forcing himself to look at the photos. He would learn his brother by rote, if he had to, the way he had learned the house. That other Don, his Don, had been a lie all along (I never wanted to hurt you, he'd said, and Charlie could still feel that kiss, still taste Don's blood, still, always).
The first picture Charlie saw was juxtaposed with a small, cheap baseball trophy. BEST TEAM SPIRIT. 1975. The photo showed an impossibly small child with a huge grin and wavy dark hair, holding that same trophy. He was bracketed by smiling parents, and them, Charlie recognized. He picked up the framed picture and looked closer, smiling down at his smiling mother. She had her hand on the little boy's (on Don's) head as he stood in front of her. For a moment Charlie didn't see it, and then he couldn't see anything else.
In the photograph, his mother was visibly pregnant.
Charlie picked up the trophy again in clumsy fingers and stared blankly at it. 1975. He'd been born that September; Don had turned five in July. Halfway through the T-ball season.
He'd begged his parents to let him play, and they'd begged the league to admit him, and he'd told Charlie that story when Charlie asked him what he'd been like as a little boy. Charlie had wished he'd had parents like that, and they'd been his parents. Their parents.
Charlie could actually feel the sudden burst of rage; it flowed through his veins, hotter than blood. The tips of his fingers turned white under the nails. His hand was shaking--his whole arm was shaking. The edges of the stupid little trophy digging into his fingers and his palm. Don had lied to him. Don had known this, had known Charlie was part of this story, part of this family--Don had known--
Charlie could hear himself breathing, feel his heart racing, muscles tense and ready to move. Some little part of him was holding him still, telling him he had to be quiet, had to keep his head down, and fuck that.
His arm swung back and he was panting and Don had lied to him, lied to him and drugged him and left him here, alone, not knowing anything, not knowing anyone. He put his shoulder into the throw and the stupid shining trophy flew in a beautiful flat trajectory from his hand, like a bullet, straight to the wall. It hit with a sharp crack of plastic, a hard thud from the plaster, and fell to the carpet with almost no sound at all.
Don had lied to him and Don had left and Don was his fucking brother and had fucked him and Charlie was angry--purely, exultantly furious. He crossed the room to pick up the trophy, snatching it up from the floor in a tight grip. He was swinging it toward the wall when the tiny plastic player's bat dropped right off.
Charlie stopped it short of contact with the wall, wrenching his shoulder against its momentum, and stared.
It was a trophy, a little kid's t-ball trophy, thirty years old and without a speck of dust on it. It was Don's, an emblem of the childhood memory he had shared when Charlie asked for one. And Charlie had thrown it at the wall and broken it.
His hands were shaking. He got down on his knees, holding the trophy pressed against his thigh, and it took him a couple of tries to pick up the little broken bat left-handed. He got back up to his feet unsteadily, and then he set the pieces of the trophy carefully beside the photo, turned and walked out of Don's room.
He closed the door firmly behind him.
Terry pulled the truck over a couple of houses away, eyeing the cars parked up and down this block of Hunter Street.
Beside her, David said, "The investigation is finished actively questioning Charlie, and we were never specifically told not to see him anyway. We're colleagues. It's perfectly reasonable to pay him a visit."
Terry concluded that none of the cars on the street were surveillance and turned to look at David. It wasn't the first time either of them had said pretty much those very same words today. It wasn't even the first time in the last half hour. Still she raised an eyebrow and said, "You punking out on me, Sinclair?"
Six months or a year ago, he'd have straightened his spine and said no, ma'am, but David just raised his eyebrow right back and said, "Are you?"
"Hell no," Terry muttered, flexing her hands on the steering wheel.
"Hell no," she repeated, turned off the car, and got out. David fell into step beside her as they walked down the sidewalk to the Eppes' house.
They were halfway up the driveway when Terry realized Charlie was sitting on the porch; she reached for David's arm, but he'd already stopped beside her. Terry stood still for a moment, just taking in the sight.
Charlie was scowling into some glossy math journal, off in his own little world. It had been common knowledge for more than a week now that Charlie was home, safe and sound, but it was something else entirely to see it. Terry felt herself smiling, a painful knot letting go in the pit of her stomach. Charlie was home. Don really had done it.
Terry started walking again, cataloging the differences as they became apparent: Charlie's hair was shorter, his posture more defensive than Terry had ever seen it. It wasn't quite the hypervigilance of that case of PTSD Henne's consulting shrink had forecasted, but he was a hell of a lot closer to it than Terry could wish.
Terry was on the top porch step, David one step behind, when she hesitated again. Charlie still hadn't looked up, and it wouldn't do to startle him at this point.
"Hey, Charlie," she said softly, smiling.
Charlie's head snapped up sharply, and he dropped the journal to the ground and scrambled off the swing and away, putting it between himself and them. His eyes were wide, totally lacking recognition. Terry held her own hands up placatingly, and glanced aside to see David easing backward a step and doing the same.
"Charlie," she repeated. "Charlie, it's just me. Terry."
Charlie didn't relax; his whole body was tensed, his eyes wide, and he was visibly close to hyperventilating. He didn't move away any further, and she could see his hands opening and closing; he seemed to be fighting all-out panic, and he didn't take his eyes off Terry. He seemed to be scared to death of her.
Terry felt her own answering surge of suspicion--nobody was that afraid of law enforcement without something to hide, and what had Charlie Eppes been doing for the last six months? Just where had he fit in with that bad crowd that had wrecked her partner?
But Don had been the man in the field, and Don had made the call: Don thought Charlie should be home, so that was that.
"Charlie," Terry said, stepping slowly sideways onto the porch, hands raised like Charlie was pointing a gun at her instead of that terrified stare. When she moved she could see a scar on his face, pink and new, beside his eye.
People who'd been knocked around by cops were scared of cops, too.
"Charlie, I'm just going to ring the doorbell."
Charlie nodded a little, dividing wide-eyed glances between her and David; she half expected him to vault the porch railing and bolt, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to restrain the urge to chase him down. Terry held her finger down on the bell until she heard footsteps approaching the door, and then she took a step back.
"What--?" Alan said, as he opened the door. "Oh."
Terry spared him a sideways glance; he looked even older and more weary than he had when Don disappeared. Clearly having Charlie back had not been the cure for what ailed him, and Terry thought she was beginning to see why.
"Mr. Eppes," she said.
"Terry," he replied, opening the screen door. "David. It's good to see you. Why don't you come inside?"
Terry looked back toward Charlie, but he'd turned his back on them and was standing rigidly, not even seeming to breathe. Terry nodded and waved David in, and he came through the door on her heels.
Alan hesitated at the door, glancing out at the porch one more time, then shut both doors firmly.
"Charlie has some amnesia," he said as he turned to face them, and David made a little choked sound.
Terry frowned. On the one hand, it was obviously true. On the other... there hadn't been a word about that in the shrink's report. Henne would have used Charlie's condition to protect him if he could; if he hadn't, it was because Henne didn't know. And if Henne didn't know, it could only be because Charlie was determined not to let him.
Terry glanced at David, but he was watching her, waiting for a lead to follow.
"Please tell me he's seen a doctor," Terry said finally. "One who he is willing to tell about his memory loss."
Alan nodded, and he seemed relieved by her answer. "He has. He's getting better all the time, but--some things are coming back more slowly than others, and FBI agents make him nervous."
Nervous. That was one way to put it.
"I'm glad to hear he's improving," Terry said. "Maybe we can come back another time, when he's more himself."
Alan nodded again, and David was already shifting toward the door.
"There are just a few things I think we need to talk about," Terry said, holding her gaze steady on Alan's.
In her peripheral vision, David took a decisive step toward the front door. "I'll just go introduce myself to Charlie. Tell him we're sorry we startled him. Nice to see you, Mr. Eppes."
"You too, David," Alan said, breaking his gaze briefly from Terry's.
When David had gone out, he said, "Can I get you a cup of coffee, Terry?"
"I'd love one," she said, and followed him back to the kitchen. He got down a mug and poured a cup, passing her the milk and sugar and a spoon. Terry bided her time, stirring her coffee, until Alan had poured his own and was leaning against the far side of the island, waiting.
Terry wrapped both hands around her mug and spoke in a brisk briefing-room tone. "Henne's been keeping me in the loop as much as he can, and I've been keeping an eye on things separate from what he's been passing along. As far as I can tell, you and Charlie aren't under any direct surveillance. No cameras, no bugs, no stakeouts, no tails."
Alan's hands tightened on his mug, but when she looked up to his face, he was only scowling, not looking shocked.
"Thank you," he finally said, glancing up at her. "You're sure."
"No," she admitted frankly. "Somebody somewhere could be invoking PATRIOT and classing Don as a threat to national security, kicking it up to Homeland Security. If they were really serious about wanting to find him, they'd almost have to--I mean, what are they going to do, send one of their own fugitive recovery teams after him? Billy Cooper?"
Alan was searching her face, with something like hope in his expression. "You think they're not serious about finding him?"
Terry sighed and squared her shoulders. "It's not in the Bureau's institutional self-interest for Don to ever be found. No one wants to prosecute an agent for doing something as universally understandable as rescuing his brother, and no one wants to draw attention to the fact that Don only went out on his own when the FBI had effectively given up on Charlie without ever nailing down a single serious lead on his disappearance."
The hope in Alan's eyes was becoming dangerously bright, and Terry had to shake her head.
"They can't let him get away with it, either. They can't just drop this. They'll check phone records from time to time. They'll watch where you travel, maybe even monitor your bank accounts. If you're openly in contact with him, they'll know it, and if you give them a lead on him they will have to track him down and bring him in for questioning."
And from there it would all be over fast--anyone halfway competent who got Don in custody would give him a straight choice between making an immediate confession and seeing Charlie arrested. Don wouldn't let himself be found unless he was ready to make that choice, and there was only one way he'd jump with Charlie on the line.
Alan looked like he was already getting the idea, though, so Terry didn't elaborate on that part.
"He'll be safe," Terry said firmly, and Alan looked back up at her. "As long as he stays gone, he'll stay safe. That's all that matters."
Alan's mouth went flat and grim, but he got it. "Terry," he said softly, looking down at his own coffee. "I know you--"
"Don't mention it," Terry said, quickly and sincerely. Even if they weren't under surveillance, there were things that didn't need to be said out loud.
She'd told the FBI she got a call that morning from one of her neighbors, who'd told her he'd seen someone leaving something on her porch. She'd kept the neighbor on the phone trying to get a better description for nearly two minutes before ending the call. Henne had reported, with a wry, frustrated expression, that Alan had told him he got a phone call in the middle of the night--also from a neighbor, and Alan couldn't remember which one exactly any more than Terry could, oddly enough. Whoever it was, they'd told Alan that they'd seen someone hanging around his garage and then leaving. Alan said he'd been woken from a sound sleep, so he'd had to stay on the line for a minute or two to get the gist of what his neighbor was telling him.
The numbers hadn't matched each other, and Henne couldn't demonstrate definitively that either of them was lying, but of course they were. Of course they would both lie a hell of a lot more if they had to, to protect Don.
Alan met her eyes and said, "Thank you, Terry."
She nodded, forced the best smile she could and tilted her coffee in his direction. "Thank you, Mr. Eppes."
Charlie sank down to sit on the cool concrete with his back to the porch railing. His view of the front door was a little obstructed by the swing, but then the swing would also obstruct anyone else's view of him as they came out the door. He would take what he could get.
His father had let them inside. His father had called them Terry and David and said It's good to see you. His father hadn't treated them with the same wariness he displayed in Henne's presence. Despite the guns and suits, they were different than Henne. People Don had worked with. People his father knew.
She'd said Charlie, it's just me. Terry.
People he knew, too, or should have known. Charlie let his chin rest on his knees--he couldn't quite take his eyes from the door--and laced his fingers over the back of his neck, where the sweat was going cold on his skin.
They were good guys. Friends. His father seemed to think so, anyway--but there was a chasm between what his father thought and what Charlie knew to be true.
The door opened, and Charlie flinched, lowering his hands in front of himself. The black guy--David, obviously--stepped back outside, looking around for Charlie. He smiled cautiously when he met Charlie's eyes, but he didn't come any closer. David just waved to the porch steps, a good ten feet from where Charlie was, and said, "You mind if I sit?"
Charlie shook his head, and David sat.
"I'm David Sinclair," he said, his hands clasped loosely between his knees, his gun out of sight on the other side of his body. He looked at Charlie and then away, out to the street. His voice was low and steady, and Charlie thought Don had used that same soothing tone sometimes. "I used to work with Don, before he left."
Before he left. To find Charlie.
Charlie and his father didn't talk about Don, and it struck Charlie suddenly, viscerally, that this had been Don's life: these co-workers, maybe friends. Wearing a suit like they did, carrying a gun and a badge and being somebody people respected. That had been real for Don before, even though Charlie still couldn't imagine it.
Don had been one of the good guys, someone important, and he'd thrown it all away to come after Charlie. He remembered thinking that Don didn't seem to have any more life on the outside than Charlie did, but he had. He'd just walked away from it.
Charlie had been dragged at gunpoint.
"My dad's mentioned you," Charlie said, because he knew he ought to be polite, even if he didn't think he could stand to be any closer to David than he was now. At least there was only one of him. Two had been way too much, and for all Terry was a woman and physically about Charlie's own size, she'd exuded every bit as much potential lethality as Don ever did. David, in contrast, had an easy demeanor that somehow detracted from his size and training and weapon, like sleight of hand with his whole body.
David just nodded. "I'm sorry we startled you," he said, which was a kind way to put it. "We didn't know."
Charlie tried to nod and shake his head at the same time, fighting down the echo of Don's words. I'm sorry if I hurt you. Now was not the time.
"You couldn't know," he muttered. "I'm getting better, anyway."
David shifted a little to sit facing Charlie. "That's good, Charlie. I'm glad to hear that."
Charlie looked away. He could feel the questions coming, even in that gentle tone of voice, even from ten feet away.
"Charlie," David said, but Charlie couldn't look up. They'd been Don's friends; that might be worse than being questioned by the people who wanted to arrest him.
"You don't have to tell me anything," David said softly. "It's all right. You don't have to talk. But if you can--if you know--I'd just like to know if Don's all right."
It had been weeks, and Charlie had been mostly successful in not thinking about where Don might be, whether he was still bumming around shitty motels, or whether he'd found himself a new job. Whether he was even still alive. For a second Charlie felt sick and terrified, but he had to push it away, he couldn't think about it now, either. Don knew what he was doing. Don had brought them both out of there.
Charlie flicked a glance toward David, and experienced a brief frustrating sense-memory. He should be peeking through his hair, it should give him a little cover, but his hair was short now. No help.
David was watching him intently. "Was he okay, the last time you saw him?"
Charlie felt his mouth twist into a smile. The last time he saw Don, Don was lowering him to the bed, telling him It's not your fault and you'll be safe. The wound on Don's leg had been nearly closed, the thin scar on his hand already fading, and Charlie had fucked him so hard the night before that he spent most of the day squirming in his seat. Charlie had said once I'm sorry if I hurt you, and he could still hear the echo of Don's sobs in the middle of the night, hiding in the bathroom. Hiding from Charlie. Don had always known who Charlie was.
"I have no idea," Charlie said, and his voice was almost steady.
Charlie was sitting at the dining room table, scowling into his laptop. He'd been there for a couple of hours, and Alan had run out of things to clean or rearrange--or to pretend to clean or rearrange--in his general vicinity. He was sitting at the other end of the table now, pretending to do a crossword puzzle, but in truth he was just watching Charlie work, or try to work.
Charlie had been getting steadily more frustrated the entire time he'd been sitting at the table, and Alan couldn't stop watching him--as if by watching Charlie he could change what was happening over there, like old Heisenberg said.
But Alan could only watch. Charlie didn't even seem aware that his father was there. Alan had tried to speak to him an hour ago, and when he finally responded he'd been brusque and impatient, and fell back into his work with a deeper frown than before.
His hands were in fists, now, whitened knuckles tapping on the table top. He was glaring at the computer like it was an enemy, and the silence in the house was oppressive. Waiting. When Charlie raised his hands and slammed the laptop shut with a snarl of "God damn it," Alan was almost relieved.
But Charlie burst to his feet in the same motion and then stood perfectly still--trembling with tension, his hands curling slowly into fists again. Alan could see the frustration and anger radiating off him like heat off pavement. The breathless frozen moment stretched and stretched until Alan thought he would have to move, do something, say something--and then Charlie whirled, shoving the chair back.
It hit the floor with a loud crack and Charlie was already running, not out of the house as Alan had expected but in, up the stairs. Alan took a deep breath, listening to the pounding of his feet down the upstairs hallway, and the sound--familiar from twelve straight years as the parent of at least one teenager--of a door being shoved open and slamming shut on the rebound.
Alan stood and walked over to right Charlie's chair. It was good, he thought, that Charlie ran to his bedroom, now--that he could feel safe in the house. That had to be some kind of progress, some kind of sign that Charlie was going to be all right.
Alan paused with his hands on the back of the chair, thinking about the psychologist they'd send out--Dr. Bloom. She'd asked him if he was worried about Charlie, if he thought Charlie might do something to hurt himself or someone else--like Alan didn't know exactly what she was getting at, like he hadn't lived through the Seventies and worked war protests with plenty of vets.
He'd known men who came back different, came back broken. They were good guys--hardly more than kids, some of them--just trying to get along. They were the best argument for peace, the ones for whose sake the war had to end--but you didn't leave your little boy or your wife alone with those men. There was no knowing--
Something crashed upstairs--not in Charlie's room, directly overhead. Don's room. Alan felt his heart stop and then he was running, every old parental terror rearing up in one choking mass. It seemed like a lifetime passed--another crash, three duller thuds--before he was pushing open the door to Don's bedroom.
Charlie whirled toward the door and froze, eyes dark and wide, and for a moment Alan could only stare at him, taking in the fact that he was all in one piece--except his eyes, glazed and staring. Alan knew that look. Charlie barely recognized him right now, and Charlie was scared.
"Charlie," Alan said, as gently as he could, "what are you doing?"
Charlie's eyes seemed to snap into focus at that, his mouth twisting into an ugly approximation of a smile, but Alan would take whatever kind of communication he could get right now. He glanced past Charlie to find the source of the sounds: there were broken Legos and Matchbox cars on the floor by the far wall, and Don's t-ball trophy and the photo that went with it tossed in the opposite direction. The lamp from the bedside table lay broken at Charlie's feet.
"These are Donnie's things," Alan said. It was the first time he'd said Don's name to Charlie in days, and this time it got a reaction: the bitter humor in Charlie's face flared straight into rage.
"No," Charlie said, fists clenching, voice low and furious. "This is my house. Don left, he left everything here, he left, and I'll--I'll do what I want."
There was an unsteady edge to the defiance in Charlie's voice, rising toward a shout; now was not the time to try to explain to Charlie that Don had left for good reasons, that Don could not come home.
Alan stepped inside and Charlie flinched violently backwards, throwing his arms up to shield his face. Alan froze, feeling sick. He'd never struck either of his sons, and he'd never once seen either of them cower. Charlie looked at him through the screen of his raised hands and lowered them slowly, while Alan did his best to control his face.
"Charlie," he said softly, raising his hands, palms out, in the same no-threat gesture Terry and David had been using a few days before. "You can do whatever you need to do in here. But a few of these pictures are important to me, so I'm going to take them outside. All right?"
Charlie gave him a jerky nod and turned away, and Alan focused on what he was doing, scooping up the t-ball picture and taking down the two on the right wall. He kept carefully clear of Charlie as he went back toward the door, rescuing one last photo from the bedside table before he stepped back into the hall, closing the door silently behind him.
He stayed there, just outside the door, until something struck the other side hard enough to rattle it, and then he moved to sit at the top of the stairs, cradling the framed pictures in his hands. He looked down at the last one he'd picked up as another flurry of bangs sounded from inside Don's room.
It was a picture of Don holding a newborn Charlie on his lap. Alan had taken the photo himself, the day they came home from the hospital; he remembered how they'd settled Don on the couch with pillows under his arms before they laid Charlie carefully in his arms. Don had been grinning with pride at the accomplishment of holding his baby brother all by himself, and Margaret had been hovering just out of the frame. Alan had snapped a handful of pictures, trying to catch both boys' faces and Donnie smiling, and only stopped when Charlie started to cry. Margaret had reached for the baby then, but Don held onto his brother, hugging him and telling him it was all right.
Inside Don's room, there was one last crash, and then everything went silent.
Alan had seen men come back from the war with their eyes as haunted as Charlie's. He'd protested for peace with his little boy on his shoulders, with a father's zeal. His own sons wouldn't grow up to be dragged off to war by their government.
But Don and Charlie's war had found them anyway, and taken them away to God knew where without the formality of a draft. They'd fought for their lives, and maybe you could say they'd won; but Charlie had come home in pieces and Don wouldn't be coming home at all.
Matthew Clyde Sassik (aka Danny Clyde, aka Joe Bradley, arraigned on two counts of vehicular manslaughter) towered over Don, and outweighed him by probably a hundred pounds--plenty of it fat, but not all. Don kept his gun trained on the bail jumper, working the zip strips left handed. Don's hands were cold, and Sassik's wrists were thick and sweaty.
"Hold still," he snarled, shoving his weapon against Sassik's arm, and he should have seen it coming.
Sassik whirled and threw a punch that Don only half-dodged, pain exploding through the right side of his head. Adrenaline followed in its wake, rushing through him like a riptide.
Don didn't lose his grip on the gun, and Sassik's arm was still swinging as Don popped back up and smashed the barrel across his face. Sassik fell back a step and Don pursued, hitting him again with the gun, metal cracking sharply on bone. That got Sassik doubled over, and Don kicked him hard just above the knee--and then, when he was down on his knees, in the gut--and when he was down on his side, in the chest--
Don was aiming a kick at his jaw when he saw Sassik looking up at him. Sassik had his arms up, shielding his head. His eyes were brown, filled with pain and terror. Don stumbled, getting both of his feet down and still, and stared back, his gun held tight in his hand. The man was a bail-jumper, a fugitive, but he was looking at Don with Charlie's eyes, and Don had just--just lost it, could have killed a man with another swing of his foot--like he'd killed how many lately with squeezes of his trigger finger?
He stood there a while, staring at the man and wondering how the fuck he was going to get them both out of this silent truck stop parking lot--but he had to. Backup wasn't coming.
Something was niggling at Charlie all through the hockey game he watched with his father on TV. The stats they kept flashing just seemed off somehow; it wasn't until halfway through the game when one of the analysts made a reference to the "New NHL" that Charlie got it. There had been rule changes this season, and the rule changes had affected scoring, and all of the statistics stored in some sheltered recess of Charlie's brain were now predictively worthless.
He pulled out his laptop and started looking for information, and found more of it than he knew what to do with, page after page of data to explore and organize and compare--with a computer at his disposal. His head and fingers ached just at the thought of how tedious the analysis would have been on a chalkboard, but his laptop seemed to take no time at all to disgorge colored charts and graphs.
Charlie barely noticed when his father went to bed, immersed in chasing down data; he got up once or twice, to get something to drink or stretch his legs. When he stepped away from the computer he was conscious of the silence of the house, more aware than ever that Don wasn't there, wasn't waiting for him to finish, wouldn't make him take a break.
But when he was working on it, it was like--it was like having a job. Time didn't matter, nothing mattered but the numbers and finding a way to understand them. As long as he only thought about the numbers he didn't have to think about the fact that he wasn't doing this for anyone, wasn't going to be saving anyone with these numbers, not himself and not Don. As long as he focused on the numbers he was working, and nothing else mattered.
Charlie did notice when his father woke up, mainly because his father stood beside him saying, "Charlie?" until Charlie raised his head. His back and shoulders protested, and he abruptly noticed the light from the windows, and his eyes felt gritty.
"Charlie, have you been up all night? What were you doing?"
"Hockey--" the word was barely audible, and Charlie had to clear his throat and try again. "Hockey statistics. I'm analyzing the effect of the new rules--smaller goalie pads, two-line passing--on scoring and--"
His father looked a little confused, and oddly tired--he was the one who'd gotten a full night's sleep, wasn't he? "The statistics aren't going anywhere, Charlie. You should have gone to bed."
Charlie looked down, frowning. He didn't have any real work to do--none he was making any appreciable headway on, anyway--and now his father was telling him not to pursue even the analysis he did for his own amusement. Charlie didn't think he could explain to his father that it was only while he worked that he could forget that he was here, forget that Don wasn't, forget that he wasn't back--
But it wasn't as if he wanted to be there, wanted to think he was there. He was home, this was his house, of course he could stop and sleep.
He summoned up a smile, trying to look sheepish. "I'll go crash now."
He did feel tired, not sleepy but like his whole body was weighted down. It was a familiar sensation. Before Don came there had been times when he worked continuously from one of Williamson's dinner visits to the next (to the next after that) without stopping at all to sleep. He'd had to, of course, but also it had been better to be working, better to be busy than thinking of--
Charlie shut his eyes and rubbed his hands over his face. He hadn't thought about before Don came in a while. He didn't want to think of it now, or how after could possibly feel the same as before--when he was safe in his own house. Williamson (face exploded in a spray of blood, but he was already bleeding from the bullet in his gut, Charlie's hand stinging with the kick of the gun) was gone.
"Charlie," his father said, and Charlie jerked upright, his knuckles brushing the laptop's keyboard.
"Yeah," Charlie said, pushing his chair back. "I'll go lie down. Sorry. Thanks. Um. Good night--good morning--"
His father touched his shoulder as Charlie stumbled past, but Charlie didn't look back. It wasn't the right touch, it didn't reach him, his father didn't understand what work meant and Charlie could never hope to explain it.
He lay in his bed in the broad daylight and stared at the ceiling, willing himself to sleep. He buried his face in the pillow, but he just felt smothered. He reached down into the space between the bed and nightstand and pulled out Don's coat, but it was just a coat. It didn't make lying in bed wide awake any less weird, and it didn't make him fall asleep.
It didn't make up for the fact that missing a night's sleep meant he'd missed his chance to wake up disoriented. He'd missed his one chance to spend a minute believing Don was somewhere nearby, that Don was coming back to him.
Late that night, tired but restless, Charlie was pacing around the house. He'd gone back to work on the hockey statistics when he gave up on sleeping, but their appeal had faded by mid-afternoon--he could understand the trends, but he couldn't do anything with them. It was meaningless. It wasn't work, not really, and after the first rush it was no longer a convincing facsimile.
He found himself standing in front of the blank, silent television, running his fingers thoughtlessly down the gentle convexity of the cool screen. He could watch television. There wouldn't be any hockey on this late, but he could find something. A movie, maybe.
When he turned on the TV, though, it was showing a woman standing in front of a map of the United States, covered in shades of green. Charlie stared for a moment and then stumbled backward to the couch.
The weather. He remembered seeing this before, in the motel room, right before--
Don't think about it.
The weather. He could watch the weather. It was all projections and predictions, complex analysis boiled down to colorful representations. The segments were short, overflowing with data, punctuated by the local forecast every ten minutes, and the same commercials for diet pills and gardening gadgets over and over. After the first hour, Charlie got up during a commercial and retrieved his laptop, itching to locate the raw data behind the graphs and charts.
If the hockey statistics were more than he knew what to do with, the weather data were simply overwhelming. Charlie tried again and again to narrow his focus, to pick out some single aspect to examine, but the reality was global and continuous through time, and data were constantly being updated and adjusted. Every pattern that he attempted to analyze turned out to have hidden complexities, every projection and prediction he could access was simplified in ways that concealed most of the information he actually wanted. Still, he kept picking the numbers apart, digging down and down through the sources, lost in his work, until the television abruptly recaptured his attention.
"Trapped by rising water..."
Charlie froze, hands silent on the keys, and stared at the television. The images showed people standing on rooftops and clinging to trees in the midst of a flood. As the narration went on there were images of a devastated city after the water had receded. Charlie stared helplessly at the bodies covered by sheets and bricks, people walking through empty streets, the tearful faces of survivors.
Numbly, Charlie navigated to the information on tropical storms, and there it was, the biggest story of the previous year: Hurricane Katrina.
He watched the radar loops first, read screen after screen of data on wind speeds and wave heights, but that didn't explain the people, the people trapped, people drowning. He backed out of the weather data sources and started looking for explanations of the logistics, and found himself reading story after story about the levees, the evacuations, about emergency shelters and looting and worse. There was no end to the stories, a deluge of words and photographs, and Charlie couldn't look away, couldn't stop searching for an explanation.
He was vaguely aware of his father turning the television off; he carried his laptop to the dining room table, he ate something, but Charlie couldn't stop searching, trying to understand. He kept going back to the numbers, the science, the data, kept trying to see how the crisis could have been averted. There had to be a way, something someone could have done, it had to have been preventable. If they'd just known more about what would happen, if the prediction had been better, if they'd used the data the right way...
But the stories kept pulling him back, the horror swallowing him up. People had been trapped, had gone hungry, had been hurt and neglected and drowned and everyone had known where they were and no one had rescued them, not until it was much too late.
He went out to the garage, flipping the boards to their blank sides and trying to make sense of it all, to analyze the decision-making process, the movement of people and the failure of help, the wind and water and politics and violence, but it defeated him again and again, his shaking hands covered in chalk, smearing on his laptop when he returned to it.
This job was bigger than he was, months overdue, and Charlie found his eyes blurring, his face wet. He wiped away tears impatiently and kept on, but it was futile, all his work just dust under his hands. He was alone on this, and there was no one left to save.
Charlie lay in bed, too tired to feel more than a kind of slow-motion despair as he stared into the darkness. It had been days since he slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch. He'd had to stop working on Katrina, his efforts to calculate devolving into gibberish, his brain too full of horrors to process.
Larry had come by to talk to him, watching without comment as Charlie flipped the boards back around to the supergravity work. They'd stood around in the garage, discussing the work and, as time went on, other topics Charlie had barely been able to follow. Hockey had come up, he thought, and Larry had talked a little about school, passed along messages of support from people whose names Charlie barely recognized.
Charlie had tried to go back to work after Larry left, but exhaustion dragged at him, and his brain felt as heavy and useless as the rest of his body. Around two in the morning he'd found himself climbing the stairs to his room and falling into bed without any memory of deciding to give up. And now he was lying wide awake, too exhausted to get up and go back downstairs, and as far from sleep as he'd ever been.
He couldn't work. He was losing ground on his work for Larry--he could no longer hold the math he'd already formulated in his head, and whatever insights or clarifications Larry had passed along today were a blank. Charlie might have been playing video games instead of standing at the chalkboard for all the headway he made.
He was getting worse at video games, too.
Caffeine was no help at all. Three cups of coffee in a row had made him sweat and his heart pound wildly, and he'd hidden in the bathroom until he was sure his father wouldn't notice and drag him to a doctor. After that he'd stayed away from it.
He'd even gone into Don's room, hoping for a jolt of that wild, electric anger--he'd rather be out of control than senseless. He'd walked in with his eyes shut, but when he opened them it was just a messy room. A child's broken toys and tattered books were scattered on the floor, just as he'd left them, and none of it meant anything to him.
Now Charlie was in bed, waiting for daylight or sleep or death from exhaustion, some kind of end to this. He barely had the energy to keep his eyes open, and he couldn't think in a straight line to save his life, but he still couldn't sleep. Time didn't seem to pass at all. Every breath was an effort, every heartbeat a squeezing ache in his chest.
His hands weren't bound, but his arms and legs were numb with cold and pressed down by the weight of the rising water. He thought vaguely that that wasn't right--no matter how tired he was, he should still be buoyant--but the water rose implacably, covering him. It crept up the back of his neck and into his hair, soaking it and weighing him down, so that he couldn't lift his head. Water flowed into his ears, a tickling, cold invasion, but he couldn't even shiver.
Williamson leaned over him, and blood poured down from his face and throat--it had to be blood that weighted the water, so viscous and inescapable as it flowed over him. Blood was thicker than water. Williamson asked him a question, but Charlie's ears were clogged, and the light was too dim for him to read Williamson's lips. His ruined face was just a blur.
Charlie couldn't answer the question if he didn't know what it was, and if he couldn't answer the question he'd be drowned, liquid filling his mouth and nose and lungs, choking him and stopping his breath forever. He tried to tell Williamson he couldn't hear, couldn't understand--but his mouth and throat wouldn't obey. He couldn't hear himself at all, not a sound escaped him. He tried to scream, but he could barely breathe.
He kept his eyes on Williamson's dark, impassive face, trying to answer, straining to hear, his whole body aching dully with cold. Even the tears streaking from his eyes were icy when they touched his skin.
The water started to rise again, blurring his eyes, lapping at his cheeks, and Charlie tried to struggle. His body didn't cooperate, already covered, already lost, and even though his mouth and nose were free he could hardly breathe or speak.
Then Williamson's hand caught his shoulder, pushing back the water enough for Charlie to hear what he said.
"Charlie."
Charlie felt and heard a wail escape him, effortlessly this time.
Williamson knew his name and all his secrets, and Charlie hadn't told him. Only one other person had known. Charlie had been betrayed. He twisted against the implacable grip on his shoulder, trying to plunge his face into the dark water, to let it end, but Williamson pulled him back.
"Charlie. Charlie."
He shook off his father's hand on his shoulder as he scrambled away, off the bed. He backed all the way to the window without taking his eyes from his father's face. His father. Waking him from a nightmare.
The surprise in his father's eyes faded to the sickeningly familiar weary anxiety. Charlie turned his back on that look, leaning his forehead against the cool glass of the window. He could still feel the cold blood creeping over his skin.
"Charlie," his father said softly, from the other side of the bed, too far to help him, too far to understand, too far to ever know--he couldn't tell his father about Williamson, about the water. He was alone with this, always alone.
Charlie shut his eyes and pressed his forehead harder against the glass. The adrenaline was already wearing off, the weight seeping back into his body.
"I really think you need to talk to someone," his father said, but Charlie was already shaking his head.
He could see it: sitting in a little room, some cool, calm face asking him questions he couldn't answer, watching him with eyes trained to catch his lies.
"It doesn't have to be me, or Larry, or Dr. Bloom, Charlie, but--"
"No," Charlie muttered against the glass, his breath steaming, clammy on his skin.
"Charlie, you need to tell someone--"
"No," Charlie repeated, the sharp sound echoing back to him from the glass as he slapped one hand flat against it. He had a brief image of it breaking, slicing his hand and wrist and letting the night air in, letting him out--but the glass held, and after the crack of impact his father was silent.
"I don't need to answer any questions," Charlie said to his dim, pale reflection, fighting to keep his voice steady. "I just... I need to get some sleep. I'm sorry I bothered you."
The silence stretched, and Charlie knew his father was still standing by the bed, waiting for him to turn around. Charlie kept his eyes on the glass, looking through the ghost of himself to the world outside. He could wait.
"I'll be just across the hall if you need anything."
Charlie nodded, and his father's footsteps finally retreated. The door closed after them. Charlie's shoulders slumped, and then he tensed all over again at the sound of water running--the bathroom taps on full blast.
The sound of water--thin and clear and fast--rushed the dream away, leaving just the steady shushing sound of water running safely down the drain. Charlie remembered when he'd used that tactic himself, filling the bathroom with steam and white noise before he asked Don...
Charlie hit the glass with his closed fist, once, twice, three times, but he didn't so much as rattle the window in its frame. The thumps sounded loud to him, but the rushing water would hide him from his father's ears as well as it hid his father from him, and he was alone in this room, no one close enough to hear. Charlie shut his eyes, and this time the tears ran hot.
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