Concord, Chapter 3
Muscle memory
He threaded his way through the evening crowd on its passeggiata: strolling couples licking ice cream cones or slurping cups of boba. On the corner a barbershop quartet in full vaudeville regalia harmonized its way through “God Only Knows.” Young people in their school uniforms streamed into the drugstore on John Galt Street. He stopped to watch them piling into booths with what seemed a carefully moderated boisterousness—shooting drinking straw wrappers across the room, hazing a first-year by forcing him to carry all the older boys’ letter jackets in a heap in his arms. Their spirits were precisely elevated, prescribed, an imitation of an imitation of his own wild teen years. About to move on, Saul spotted Lila alone at the counter, the stools on either side of her unaccountably unoccupied. Saul caught his breath. It was one thing to see her in his classroom, when he was prepared. It was another to catch an unexpected glimpse like this, when the way she held herself, the dark flame of her hair, reminded him painfully of her mother.
She sat with her head propped up on one hand in front of a milkshake, her other hand pressed against her belly, as though she had a cramp. Her expression was abstracted, unreadable. He thought about what she’d shown him, and why. He thought about the Headmaster and the Headmaster’s wife. Lila’s gaze flickered out in his direction and he turned hastily away. There was a ripple, a disturbance in the crowd around him. He saw the head and shoulders of masked deputy on his stroller rolling slowly toward him and tensed. He had been reckless. The edges of Concord were closely surveilled, with motion and heat sensors—that’s why the Constable and his men had been able to react to the refugees’ “incursion” so quickly. But were there cameras, too? He tried to remember the security protocols. Had he been seen? Was he about to be arrested, dragged off to Sunrise House before his time—or worse?
Instead the crowd parted and he saw the reason for its disruption. An old woman walked heavily down the middle of the street and the people around her were moving away quickly, as though they were water and she a drop of oil. He recognized her, of course. She was a large woman in a long yellow raincoat, despite the warmth and dryness of the day the navigators had arranged, with a black cloche hat jammed down over the overripe tomato of her head, holding her arms at odd angles to one another like a broken clock. The deputy followed her at a discreet distance, head cocked slightly like a robin considering a worm. She was heading straight for him. Saul plastered a smile to his face like someone welcoming a ponderous guest. Even a village as well-maintained as this one was incapable of keeping all its walking wounded under wraps.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Moody,” he said with forced heartiness.
“Good afternoon, young man.”
Dr. Moody’s unruly body spilled grotesquely from the split banana peel of her coat. Her eyes were blue and bloodshot behind round horn-rimmed spectacles. She wore several thick sweaters underneath the raincoat, no matter the weather, and clutched a huge black handbag big enough to conceal a bomb or a baby. It took a while for her eyes to find his. She smiled vaguely, but the eyes were full of panic.
He cast about for an innocent topic. “Have you come from watching practice?” Some afternoons he saw her snoring in the bleachers or staring out over the heads of the football players running drills. Sometimes she knitted, a dark shapeless garment with no end to it spilling over her lap. Sometimes she just sat there, staring at the sky, lips moving, hands searching for each other like spiders in her lap.
She said nothing, just stood there gawping at him, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Are you finished with my sweater?” Saul said, trying for jocularity. “You said you’d knit me a sweater.”
She smiled for the first time with her eyes. “Not yet! Not yet,” she cackled. “I must take your measurements.” She spread out her hands to take him in. “You’ll be as handsome as Hemingway.” Her face clouded. “My daughter was reading Hemingway, wasn’t she? Didn’t she read him in your class?”
Now he was well and truly trapped. “She did.”
She touched the ugly hat crammed on top of her head. “I knitted this hat for her, you know. She did well in your class, didn’t she, Mr. Klein? Wasn’t she a good student? Wasn’t she bright?”
“Very bright.”
“She loved reading,” Dr. Moody said, pulling meditatively at her lower lip. “She took after me. Not like James, my husband. You remember James?
“I knew Dr. Moody well, Dr. Moody.”
She laughed crookedly, showing the black crowns of her teeth. “Ah ha. Ah ha. So you did!” She crowded in closer to him, smelling of camphor and rot. The deputy on his stroller rolled a few feet closer.
Her face was close to his. Her breath was terrible. “You mustn’t keep her from me, Mr. Klein,” she said, shaping her lips around the vowels widely like a woman screaming. “Why won’t you let me see her?”
“She isn’t in the Archive, Dr. Moody,” he said as gently as he could. “She wasn’t a shareholder, and in any case…”
“Shareholder!” Dr. Moody folded her arms contemptuously. “We decide who is a shareholder and who isn’t! We do! Me and my husband.”
They’d been known as the Doctors Moody, a married pair geneticists charged with the task, as Marco once joked, of unnatural selection. They were tasked with calculating a genetic mix of shareholders sufficient to perpetuate Concord to the nth generation without too much inbreeding. Those who didn’t make the grade were given the option of an immediate journey to Sunrise House, where their brains would be archived, preserved until the day came when Concord would return in triumph to the mainland to recolonize the world. A few accepted the bargain; others sold their shares to pre-approved prospects; still others dithered until it was too late. The Doctors Moody had judged themselves fit, of course, had begotten and raised a daughter of their own, a girl with long, wheat-colored hair she swept like a shield over frightened blue eyes. A girl with a stutter, hungry for the friendship that never found her. Her disappearance broke her parents utterly. James Moody had followed her into Concord’s wake, vanishing without a trace. His wife had been forced into an ambiguous retirement, her mental instability disqualifying her from being an archival candidate. So she remained topside, the last surviving Moody, an irritating bit of flotsam, a living ghost, a warning.
Saul felt, as he always did in her presence, a volatile mixture of exasperation and shame. “I must go,” he said. But like the ancient mariner she was, she had fixed him with her terrible eyes, and he could not move.
“Nobody knows the truth,” she whispered. “Nobody understands what we’ve done.” She looked into his face, lips trembling. “Yes. Yes. That’s my comfort.” Her face shadowed. “Do you still see him, Saul? That boy. That… that awful boy.”
He glanced involuntarily over his shoulder but saw no sign of the boy she referred to, a young man now. Nikolai. He saw again the lanky body and cruel ferret-like face, trapping Dawn Moody in a hallway of the Lyceum, one arm pinning her in place, his mouth at her ear whispering obscenely as her face mottled red. Saul, like the rest of his colleagues, had seen and said nothing. They knew full well who Nikolai’s father was.
“He can’t hurt her anymore,” Saul said softly. The deputy rolled a bit closer.
“He isn’t good for her,” she spat. “I’ve told her and told her. She doesn’t listen to me. Nobody listens to me!”
“Dr. Moody,” he said. He touched her shoulder. “Elizabeth. Please.”
Her haggard expression vanished abruptly. She reached out and patted Saul tenderly on the cheek.
“Saul hath slain his thousands,” she said dreamily. “Poor Saul.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a knitted flower, which she threaded through his buttonhole. “That’s a daisy.” She patted his cheek.
Without another word she turned and walked away from him, swinging her arms like a soldier on parade.
Saul’s gaze met that of the deputy. He shrugged. The deputy shrugged too, and wheeled his stroller to follow wherever Dr. Moody had gone.
Saul turned back to look into the drugstore window, but Lila was gone, too.
He slouched home in the settling gloom, through the curving residential streets past immaculate cottages with blue light filtering through their windows. When he got to his cul-de-sac, he saw Jean sitting on the porch swing of his rooming house, legs tucked underneath her, waiting for him. Why, Saul asked himself, am I being besieged by female lunatics? Is it some kind of punishment? If so, he thought grimly, it was no more than he deserved.
“You don’t seem very happy to see me,” said Jean.
“Of course I am.” He set down his briefcase on the lowest porch step. “Do you want to come inside?”
“You don’t,” she said archly.
“Very funny.”
“I’d rather not try and talk with you with that battle-axe Mrs. Dodge listening. Do you think she’s behind the door right now?”
“She’s probably in the kitchen. You want dinner?”
She looked up at him expressionlessly. “I want a child.”
“Christ. Not this again.”
“Yes, this again. Sit down, won’t you? You’re making me nervous standing there like that.”
He climbed the steps and eased himself down onto the swing, feeling the chains tighten. The houses of his neighbors, their windows lit like eyes, extended in meticulous rows back toward the center of town. The pines whispered in the steady breeze of evening.
“How was your meeting with Frank?” she asked.
“Nothing unusual.”
“I bet.” She studied the vape pen between her fingers. “Aren’t you ever tired of it, Saul?”
“Sneaking around?”
“Not that. It. Concord. This place.”
“If a man is tired of Concord, he’s tired of life.”
“I’m a woman, Saul, and I’m fucking tired of it. When you men made this world you certainly didn’t have women in mind.”
“It’s Marco’s world,” he said. “We’re just living in it.”
“He could never have done it without you.” An owl hooted in the dusk; projected, of course. “I wish you would be honest with me for once. Or at least with yourself.”
He said nothing.
“I just wish it would stop,” she said. “Or that I could, I don’t know, go.”
“Where would you go? Home?”
“Home.” She laughed bitterly. “Where’s that? Not here, not this goddamn Bedford Falls you and Marco designed. I’ve got to be honest with you, Saul: I always preferred Pottersville. There are places to dance in Pottersville.”
“It’s a wonderful life.”
“Isn’t it.” She offered him the vape. “I’m in trouble, Saul.”
“Not on my account.”
“Precisely on your account. Getting close to my sell-by date.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“I have to talk like that. Frank’s a good man, but he’s shooting blanks. Whereas you, old friend, won’t even aim at the target.”
She was nearing forty, childless. Frank was a shareholder, but his wife was not. Saul glanced at the darkened living room window, half expecting to see Mrs. Dodge peering out at them—her, or one of his neighbors. But there was no one there.
“If I ever want to be a first-class citizen of this fucked-up society,” she said grimly, “I have to produce. Otherwise I have to remain the consort of that oaf for the rest of my life.” She turned to him suddenly, searched his face, touched his cheek. “If the two of us had a child we could finally be together.”
“Is that what you want?” he said hoarsely.
“Don’t look so scared.” She pulled back from him, eyes burning. “And don’t be stupid. You’re like every other man on this floating prison. Damaged goods. Don’t worry, Saul. I don’t want to be Mrs. Second Founder. If Concord is all there is, I want my own share in it, that’s all.”
He made himself look at her steadily. “I’m sorry, Jean. I can’t be any part of that.”
“Of course you can. Just don’t pull out next time.”
“There isn’t going to be a next time,” he said, getting to his feet. “I can’t be anyone’s father. It just isn’t in me.”
“Isn’t it? What did you say Frank wanted to talk to you about, again?”
“Lila Vespucci,” he said after a brief pause. “She’s having problems.”
“I feel mighty sorry for her if she’s expecting you to solve them.” She got to her feet, put her hand on his chest, and looked up at him. “Don’t worry, honey. You’re not the only swinging dick around here.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
She gave him a quick, hard little peck and was gone.
Saul picked up his briefcase. He was trembling slightly. He glanced up and saw the curtains of the living room window swinging slightly. Someone had been watching.
“Fuck me,” he said.
And then he thought: Let them watch.
Saul was in his room with the duffel bag open on his lap when there was a sharp rap on his door. “What?” he almost screamed. Cursing himself, in a more normal tone he added, “What is it?”
He felt more than he heard the pressure of Mrs. Dodge’s body leaning against the door. “You have a visitor,” she said. “He’s downstairs.”
Shit.
“I’ll be right down,” he said.
The contents of Ali’s bag were spread out on the bedspread before him. An old-model satellite phone, perfectly preserved, with its battery half-charged. A stack of defunct smartphones, duct-taped together in a glass brick. A large ziplock bag stuffed with wads of paper currency: leones, Euros, CFA francs, dollars. A smaller bag that had failed to protect the wirebound notebook inside from a soaking. A Senegalese passport in the name of Ali Méyé, long expired, with a photograph of the man he’d seen that morning looking twenty years younger. Staring at the camera unsmiling he looked rather like Yann, if Yann had been prematurely bald. Then there was the gun: a Glock in what appeared to be perfect working order. The magazine was full and there was a bullet in the chamber. Why hadn’t Ali chosen to use it? He might have tried to hold Saul hostage, or forced him to fetch a doctor; he might have defended himself against the assault that Saul had warned was coming. Instead he’d handed it over to a total stranger, along with every precious document in his life, without a single explanatory word.
“This is fucked up,” Saul muttered.
But now he had a visitor, and he was pretty sure he knew who it was. Hastily he refilled the duffel bag with its contents, zipped it up, and then knelt at his bedside and rolled back the hooked rug. Underneath was a loose floorboard where he stashed, not contraband exactly, but certain private articles, mementoes and trinkets he intended no other eyes to see. He seized the letter opener from his writing desk and pried the board up, hoping that no one was listening at the door to hear the creak.
“He’s in the library,” said Mrs. Dodge when he came downstairs. Her eyes questioned him but his face was neutral. “I’ll make sure you aren’t disturbed.”
The library was Saul’s domain. Hank rarely made use of it, and he’d never seen the Painter there. He and Mrs. Dodge spent occasional winter evenings in the comfortable room, she knitting by the fireplace while he read aloud to her from a novel by Austen or Trollope. There was a wooden globe that opened into a bar, leather armchairs—the bachelor library of his dreams. The books on the shelves were practically all he’d retained from his old life on the mainland—worn paperbacks mostly, incongruously scatttered between the leather-bound gilt-edged volumes with which Marco had gifted him. Over the mantelpiece was the only artwork he’d ever requested from the circulating treasures of the Concord gallery, the “Three Seascapes” of J.M.W. Turner.
Standing in front of the empty fireplace contemplating the painting with a dram of Saul’s whisky in his hand was the Constable. He glanced at Saul and indicated the painting with his glass. “I don’t know what it is I am looking at, here. Are you sure the right side is up?”
“It’s just a sketch, really,” said Saul. “Three views of the sea, one of them upside-down so you can place it the other way if you want.”
“Kind of morbid, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t.” Saul moved to the bar, where the decanter stood open, and poured himself a finger of scotch.
“I’m hardly an expert on art,” Sergei admitted, making himself comfortable in Saul’s favorite armchair. “But I know what I like, and what most other people like. And you’re the only person I know with a picture of the ocean. I'm surprised Mrs. Dodge puts up with it. Most of our residents would prefer to forget that this place floats.”
“If it didn’t float, it would sink,” Saul pointed out.
“Fair point.” Sergei lifted his glass. “Cheers.” He snapped his fingers at the fireplace, but nothing happened. “What’s wrong with your projector?”
“It’s not projected, it burns real wood. You cold?”
“My love of Concord keeps me warm. What about upstairs? Your room? Any projectors in there?”
“There are no projectors in this house. That’s the way Mrs. Dodge wanted it. She has a taste for the real. So do I.” He took a sip of malt to prove his point.
“No projectors, no screens,” the Constable mused. “How do you keep up with the times?”
Saul grinned at him. “Somebody generally comes knocking if there’s anything important going on. Mind telling me what you’re doing here?”
“Just passing the time, old friend.” Sergei looked meditatively into the empty fireplace. “There was an incident this morning,” he said. “Did you hear about it?”
“No.”
Sergei drank some scotch. “Nothing significant, nothing to worry about. Hygiene stepped in. It’s like it never happened.”
“So why are you telling me about it?”
Sergei stroked his mustache. “How long have we been out here, Saul?”
“On Concord? About sixteen years.”
“Sixteen years.” Sergei held out his empty glass and Saul moved to fill it. “Long time. Lot of water under the bridge, so to speak. Time enough for old wounds to heal.”
Or to fester, Saul thought. “Forgive me, Sergei, but it’s been a long day. Was there something you wanted?”
“Due diligence, Mr. Second Founder. You know something about that, I believe.” With a sigh, like a man confronting an unpleasant task, he got to his feet and put down his glass. He stood facing Saul with legs apart, thumbs through his belt loops. “Mind if I have a look around? Unofficially, of course.”
“It’s Mrs. Dodge’s house,” Saul said. “Ask her.”
Sergei ignored this. “We would appreciate the courtesy.”
We again. Saul waved at the bookshelves. “My life is an open book,” he said steadily.
The Constable’s eyes were cold. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. He moved away, his cowboy boots like iron pilings thudding on the floor.
Saul sat down in the armchair Sergei had vacated and waited, squeezing his empty glass in both hands. Somewhere over his head a floorboard creaked. He thought about what would happen when the Constable returned, Ali’s gun in his hand. Would Saul be given the option to sunrise—to cultivate the future? Would Sergei shoot him? Or would Saul simply disappear, like Dawn and James Moody?
The dull scrape of furniture being moved overhead. He saw Mrs. Dodge standing in the doorway with her arms folded and raised his glass of whisky to her. She mouthed the words Be careful to him, shook her head and walked away.
Another scraping sound, and the jingling of bedsprings. A long silence. At last he heard his door close, and the Constable’s heavy tread on the stairs. Saul’s pulse pounded with every step.
Sergei came back into view, hands behind his back, sorrowfully shaking his head. “Saul, Saul, Saul. I’m disappointed in you, old friend.”
Saul tried to speak but his throat was dry. He wondered if any of his fellow tenants were upstairs. What would they do when they heard the shot? Would they rush to his aid? Or would they look away, as he had looked away when the Constable’s son, Nikolai, was harassing Dawn?
The Constable brought his hands out from behind his back. He was holding the photograph of Suzanne from Saul’s room. Saul exhaled, forcing himself to relax his grip on the tumbler in his hands.
“Does Marco know that you have this?” Sergei demanded.
“I doubt he’d care,” Saul said steadily. “He knows that we were friends.”
“Friends.” The Constable snorted. “Is that what you’re calling it now?”
“Just because you’ve never had any yourself doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“Marco is your friend,” Sergei said. He set the photograph down on a nearby table. “Your friend and comrade. But this woman?” He shook his head, not hiding his disgust. “She nearly destroyed him, Saul. She nearly destroyed your partner, and the dream of Concord with him.”
“But that was in another country,” Saul said, “and besides, the wench is dead.”
“What?”
Saul pointed at the bookshelves. “If you’d just read a book once in a while, Sergei, you might understand what the hell I was talking about.”
“I doubt that very much. I’m still waiting for an explanation.”
“My private life is none of Marco’s concern. Or yours, I might add.” When the Constable didn’t move, he said, “Was there anything else?”
Sergei considered for a while. “Not tonight. If anything comes up, I know where to find you.”
“Yes, you do.”
The Constable was suddenly all affability. “Thanks for the drink. You have excellent taste in whiskey, even if your taste in art is questionable.” He set Suzanne’s photograph on the mantelpiece, underneath the Turner painting, then offered Saul a salute. “Be seeing you.”
“And you.”
The front door banged and he was gone. Saul discovered that he was sweating. The glass tumbler was cracked in his hands.
He awoke in a cold sweat, the edges of his vision fringed with dangerous light. This time he could almost remember the word or words that Suzanne had whispered into his ear. He moved his lips, willed them to come. But nothing did.
It would be wiser to forego his morning run, now that he was sure he was being watched. On the other hand, a break in his routine might appear even more suspicious. He knelt by the side of the bed, as though in prayer, studying the rug, which appeared to be in the same place he’d left it. The floorboard, on the other hand—was it looser than it had been? You’re getting paranoid, he told himself. You’re losing it. You’ve been losing it for a long time.
He took the satphone out of the duffel and held it in his hand for a while: a black, blunt instrument. His finger hovered over the power button. No. Not here.
On the street he saw his breath in the lamplight. Overhead the sky was saturating pixel by pixel from black to purple to red. He weighed the satphone in his hand; if anyone saw him with it he’d have a lot of explaining to do. He jogged off, this time heading straight into the line of trees that surrounded the cul-de-sac.
The migraine aura pulsed at his temples almost painlessly as he ran. His course was sternward, avoiding the overgrown path, picking his way with care so as not to take another tumble. When first planted the ring forest had had an eerie, orchard-like regularity to it, but sixteen years had tangled the orderly gaps with unruly roots and brush. Saul was not the only one drawn to the illusion of wildness; in his wanderings he sometimes spotted other residents, alone or in pairs, taking shelter beneath the whispering conifers. Once he had nearly stumbled over Dr. Moody kneeling in a miniature clearing, her head uncharacteristically bare, weeping in a shaft of sunlight. It would have been impossible not to have noticed Saul’s blundering presence, but she paid him no mind, and he loped as hastily as he could in the opposite direction, trying to erase the image of her blind, streaming face. Another time he had surprised a couple making furtive love on a bed of pine needles; and one summery evening had encountered a lone deputy who unmasked his mouth to offer Saul a blowjob, which he had politely declined. Since then he had restricted himself to these predawn runs, when he could be sure of seeing nothing in the woods beyond the occasional projected forest creature. So he’d believed until the encounter with Ali.
He broke through the treeline, panting up the little ridge that declined to the edge of the massive disc upon which the village was perched. The black horizon of water brushed imperceptibly into the bruise-colored sky. To the right and the left he could make out the dim outlines of the sterns of the two pontoon-like carriers that bore up the massive superstructure; repurposed nuclear aircraft carriers acquired at fire-sale prices from the insolvent navies of China and France, respectively. Below him bellied the Amphitheater, a bowl carved out from a vast steel tongue outthrust over the sea. This was the oldest structure in Concord, a holdover from the beta design, unequipped with the microcameras and projectors that saturated the rest of the overstructure. Ironically, for a site designed for public gatherings, it was the most private place on Concord. He took the satphone out of his waistband and switched it on, holding it over his head as he descended stone steps to the stage.
The Amphitheater had the desolate air of an unmaintained city park. It had been conceived it as a place for public celebrations and other such civic ephemera, with enough seating for the entire population. But the stage was exposed to the wind and rain; the landscaping had gone feral. In any case the appetite of Concord’s residents for exposure to the blank seascape had proven to be nonexistent, and the place was all but abandoned. Still, he was taking an awful risk. The relative proximity to the reactor cores might prevent the security network from picking up the signal right away, but then again it might not. He held the satphone skyward, feeling faintly absurd, waiting to see if its signal was being received. The satellites were still up there; he had seen them tracing their way through the wilderness of the night sky. To whom they might be still broadcasting he didn’t know. It seemed all too possible there was no one left listening in the dark.
“Who you gonna call, Mr. Klein?”
He whirled. A figure was crouched on one of the lower benches with a dark green hoodie over their face, sitting so still he hadn’t noticed them. The voice was intimately familiar. He took a step toward the figure. “Lila?”
She pulled the hood down and shook her hair free, offering him a small, sheepish wave.
“What are you doing here?” He realized he had thrust the satphone idiotically behind his back. He held it in front of him.
“I come here sometimes, to think. It’s a good place to be alone. No one ever comes here. They suffer from thalassaphobia.”
“Fear of the sea,” Saul agreed.
She gazed out at the water. “I think it’s beautiful. It’s everything. It’s real.”
He walked over and sat down beside her.
“Is that a satellite phone?” Lila asked with interest. “Can I see it?” She saw his hesitation and held up her hand. “I promise not to press any of the buttons.” He handed it to her. “Kind of chunky, isn’t it? Who were you going to call?”
“Honestly? I don’t even know.”
“Where did you get it? Is it some kind of keepsake?” He shrugged, watching her turn the phone over in her hands. “I thought we were alone in the world.”
Saul looked at her. “What do you come here to think about?”
“My mother.”
He turned his head to hide his feeling, but she was looking at the phone. “I wish I could call her.”
“Me too,” he said, hoping his voice was steady. But now he could feel her eyes on his face.
“You knew her, didn’t you, Mr. Klein?”
“I knew her very well. We were close. We were friends.”
“Papa told me, when I was younger,” she said. “He told me all three of you were friends. That you built this place, together.”
“More or less.” He held out his hand and she gave the phone back to him. “Lila. You wanted me to see that you’ve been cutting yourself. Why?”
Her face went rigid and she shook her head. He put out his hand. “Show me.”
She rolled back her sleeve to show him her arm. The sky was brightening. He laid her arm gently across his lap to examine the cuts. So far as he could tell, they were superficial.
“I wanted to feel something,” she said bitterly. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?”
“Is that really the reason?”
She shrugged, lifted her chin. “This place is strange.”
“The Amphitheater?”
“No.” She made a sweeping gesture. “This. It’s all I’ve ever known, all I can remember. Concord. But then how do I know that it’s strange? That people aren’t supposed to live this way?”
He saw again Suzanne’s face in hers, an angry face, shouting at him, blaming him. Why couldn’t he see Lila in his dreams? Hadn’t she had been there with her parents, in the security van, in those last chaotic moments before leaving the mainland forever? And Suzanne with it?
“We built this place to protect you,” he said roughly. “There was too much wrong with the world. It was past saving.”
“But it still exists,” she said, gesturing at the waves. “Look at it.”
“Water, water everywhere,” Saul said grimly. He showed her the phone: No signal. “There’s no one out there. There’s nothing.”
“You don’t know that.”
He was suddenly unaccountably weary. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe not.” He got up, nodding at the increasing light. “Sun’s coming up. We’d better head back.”
He extended his free hand to her, and after a moment, she took it. They began to climb the steps. Behind them the brightening sky was enameling the waves.
“What was she like?”
He searched for the words. “Beautiful, of course. Terribly smart. Fierce, like you.” He saw her quick smile. “Determined. A fighter.”
“You sound like you loved her.”
Saul let go of her hand, glanced away. “You couldn’t know her and not love her.”
His voice stripped him bare, but the girl was caught up in her own thoughts. “I wish I’d known her,” said Lila. “Papa never talks about her. He gets so angry when I bring her up. He doesn’t look angry or say anything vicious, but I can tell.”
She moved ahead of him. “How is Marco?” Saul asked awkwardly. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“He doesn’t see anybody anymore. That includes me. He hardly ever leaves his room.” She looked down at him from the top of the rows of seats. “I dream about her sometimes. She seems so present, so real. I can see her face. Sometimes I even hear her voice.”
“What does she say?” he asked, his voice catching.
“There aren’t words. Just the sound, the vibration. I feel it here.” She touched herself on the chest with one hand, while the other strayed to her belly.
He joined her at the top. For a moment the two of them looked out in silence over the stern, watching the sky turn pink. The froth of Concord’s twin wake was the color of cream. “Lila,” Saul said. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” But even as he said the words, he knew the answer.
“I’m pregnant.”
He wanted to shout. He wanted to tell her the truth: I’m going to be a grandfather. But he didn’t dare. He knew only that he had to do whatever he could to protect Lila and her child. Whatever its ultimate fate, it must not be born in this place, this unplace, this purgatory. Lila brushed tears impatiently away, looking into his face. “Will you help me, Mr. Klein?”
The word Suzanne had whispered to him was born again in his ear, a word or words he couldn’t understand. It sounded like waldentree, His lips formed it and let it go. Lila was waiting for his answer. He took her hand and squeezed it.
“I will.”
