River of Blue Fire

  Christabel loved her Daddy, but she knew that her mother was right. It was better than the PX or even the net. The Seawall Center was almost like an amusement park—in fact, there was an amusement park right inside it. And a round theater where you could see net shows made bigger than her whole house. And cartoon characters that walked or flew along next to you, telling jokes and singing songs, and fake people that appeared and disappeared, and exciting shows happening in the store windows, and all kinds of other things. And there were more stores in the Seawall Center than Christabel could ever have believed there were in the whole world. There were stores that only sold lipstick, and stores that only sold Nanoo Dresses like Ophelia Weiner had, and even one store that sold nothing but oldfashioned dolls. Those dolls didn’t move, or talk, or anything, but they were beautiful in a special way. In fact, the store with the dolls was Christabel’s favorite, although in a way it was kind of scary, too—all those eyes that watched you as you came in through the door, all those quiet faces. For her next birthday her mother had even told her she could pick out one of the old-fashioned dolls to be her very own, and even though it was still a long time until her birthday, just coming to Seawall Center to look and wonder which doll she should pick would normally have been the definite best part of the week, so good that she wouldn’t have been able to get to sleep last night. But today she was very unhappy, and Mister Sellars wouldn’t answer her, and she was really afraid of that strange boy, whom she had seen again last night outside her window.

  Christabel and her mother were in a store that sold nothing but things for barbecues when the Frog Prince stopped talking and Mister Sellars’ voice took his place. Mommy was looking for something for Daddy. Christabel walked a little way into the store, where her mother could still see her, and pretended to be looking at a big metal thing that looked more like a rocketship from a cartoon than a barbecue.

  “Christabel? Can you hear me?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m in a store.”

  “Can you talk to me now?”

  “Uh-uh. Kind of.”

  “Well, I see you’ve tried to reach me a couple of times. Is it important?”

  “Yes.” She wanted to tell him everything. The words felt like crawly ants in her mouth, and she wanted to spit them all out, about how the boy had watched her, about why she hadn’t told Mister Sellars, because it was her fault she couldn’t cut the fence by herslf. She wanted to tell him everything, but a man from the store was walking toward her. “Yes, important.”

  “Very well. Can it be tomorrow? I am very busy with something right now, little Christabel.”

  “Okay.”

  “How about 1500 hours? You can come after school. Is that a good time?”

  “Yeah. I have to go.” She pulled off the Storybook Sunglasses just as the Frog Prince got his voice back.

  The store man, who was pudgy and had a mustache, and looked like Daddy’s friend Captain Perkins except not so old, showed her a big smile. “Hello, little girl. That’s a pretty good-looking machine, isn’t it? The Magna-Jet Admiral, that’s state of the art. Food never touches the barbecue. Going to get that for your Daddy?”

  “I have to go,” she said, and turned and walked back toward her mother.

  “You have a nice day, now,” said the man.

  Christabel pedaled as fast as she could. She didn’t have much time, she knew. She had told her mother that she had to water her tree after school, and Mommy had said she could, but she had to be home by fifteen-thirty.

  All of Miss Karman’s class had planted trees in the China Friendship Garden. They weren’t trees really, not yet, just little green plants, but Miss Karman said that if they watered them, they would definitely be trees some day. Christabel had given hers extra water on the way to school today so that she could go see Mister Sellars.

  She pedaled so hard the tires of her bicycle hummed. She looked both ways at every corner, not because she was checking for cars, like her parents had taught her (although she did look for cars) but because she was making sure that the terrible boy wasn’t anywhere around. He had told her to bring him food, and she had brought some fruit or some cookies a couple of times and left it, and twice she had saved her lunch from school, but she couldn’t go all the way to the little cement houses every day without Mommy asking a lot of questions, so she was sure he was going to come through her window some night and hurt her. She even had nightmares about him rubbing dirt on her, and when he was done, Mommy and Daddy didn’t know who she was any more and wouldn’t let her in the house, and she had to live outside in the dark and the cold.

  When she reached the place where the little cement houses were, it was already three minutes after 15:00 on her Otterland watch. She parked her bike in a different place, by a wall far away from the little houses, then walked really quiet through the trees so she could come in on a different side. Even though Prince Pikapik was holding 15:09 between his paws when she looked at her watch again, she stopped every few steps to look around and listen. She hoped that since she hadn’t brought that Cho-Cho boy any food for three days, he would be somewhere else, trying to find something to eat, but she still looked everywhere in case he was hiding in the trees.

  Since she didn’t see him or hear anything except some birds, she went to the door of the eighth little cement house, counting carefully as she did every time. She unlocked the door and then pulled it closed behind her, although the dark was as scary as her dreams about the dirty boy. It took so long for her hands to find the other door that she was almost crying, then suddenly it pulled open and red light came out.

  “Christabel? There you are, my dear. You’re late—I was beginning to worry about you.”

  Mister Sellars was sitting in his chair at the bottom of the metal ladder, a small square red flashlight in his hand. He looked just the same as always, long thin neck, burned-up skin, big kind eyes. She started to cry.

  “Little Christabel, what’s this? Why are you crying, my dear? Here, come down and talk to me.” He reached up his trembly hands to help her down the ladder. She hugged him. Feeling his thin body like a skeleton under his clothes made her cry harder. He patted her head and said “Now then, now then,” over and over.

  When she could get her breath, she wiped her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s all my fault.”

  His voice was very soft. “What’s all your fault, my young friend? What could you possibly have done that should be worth such suffering?”

  “Oye, weenit, what you got here?”

  Christabel jumped and let out a little scream. She turned and saw the dirty boy kneeling at the top of the ladder, and it scared her so much she wet her pants like a baby.

  “Quien es, this old freak?” he asked. “Tell, mija—who this?”

  Christabel could not talk. Her bad dreams were happening in the real world. She felt pee running down her legs and began to cry again. The boy had a flashlight, too, and he shined it up and down Mister Sellars, who was staring back at him with his mouth hanging open and moving it up and down a little, but with no words coming out.”

  “Well, don’t matter, mu’chita,” the boy said. He had something in his other hand, something sharp. “No importa, seen? I got you now. I got you now.”

  “OF course I understand being careful,” said Mr. Fredericks. He held out his arms, staring at the green surgical scrubs he had been forced to don. “But I still think it’s all a bit much.” Jaleel Fredericks was a large man, and when a frown moved across his dark-skinned face it looked like a front of bad weather.

  Catur Ramsey put on a counterpoint expression of solicitude. The Frederickses were not his most important clients, but they were close to it, and young enough to be worth years of good business. “It’s not really that different from what we have to go through to visit Salome. The hospital’s just being careful.”

  Fredericks frowned aga
in, perhaps at the use of his daughter’s full name. Seeing the frown, his wife Enrica smiled and shook her head, as though someone’s wayward child had just spilled food. “Well,” she said, and then seemed to reach the end of her inspiration.

  “Where the hell are they, anyway?”

  “They phoned and said they’d be a few minutes late,” Ramsey said quickly, and wondered why he was acting as though he were mediating a summit. “I’m sure . . .”

  The door to the meeting room swung open, admitting two people, also dressed in hospital scrubs. “I’m sorry we’re late,” the woman said. Ramsey thought she was pretty, but he also thought that, with her dark-ringed eyes and hesitant manner, she looked like she’d been through hell. Her slight, bearded husband did not have the genetic good start his wife enjoyed; he just looked exhausted and miserable.

  “I’m Vivien Fennis,” the woman said, brushing her long hair back from her face before reaching a hand out to Mrs. Fredericks. “This is my husband, Conrad Gardiner. We really appreciate you coming.”

  After everyone, including Ramsey, had shaken hands, and the Gar-diners—as Vivien insisted they be called for the sake of brevity—had sat down, Jaleel Fredericks remained standing. “I’m still not sure why we’re actually here.” He waved an impatient hand at his wife before she could say anything. “I know your son and my daughter were friends, and I know that something similar has happened to him, to . . . Orlando. But what I don’t understand is why we’re here. What couldn’t we have accomplished over the net?”

  “We’ll get to that.” Conrad Gardiner spoke a little sharply, as though he felt a need to establish his own place in the hierarchy. Fredericks had that effect on people, Ramsey had noticed. “But not here. That’s part of why we wanted to see you in person. We’ll go outside somewhere.”

  “We’ll go to a restaurant. We don’t want to say anything about it here,” Vivien added.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Fredericks’ thunderhead frown had returned. “You have lost me completely.”

  Ramsey, who was practicing the silence that he generally found useful, was intrigued but also worried. The Gardiners had seemed quite level-headed in the few conversations he’d had with them, deadly serious in their desire to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Fredericks in person, but also secretive. He had trusted them on gut instinct. If they turned out to be conspiracy-mongers of some kind, UFO cultists or Social Harmonists, he would quickly begin to regret his own role in persuading his clients to fly out from Virginia.

  “I know we sound mad,” said Vivien, and laughed. “We wouldn’t blame you for thinking it. But just wait until we’ve all had a chance to talk, please. If you still think so, we’ll pay for your trip here.”

  Mr. Fredericks bristled. “Money is not the issue . . .”

  “Jaleel, honey,” his wife said. “Don’t be stuffy.”

  “But first,” Vivien continued as though the tiny sitcom had not happened, “we’d like you to come see Orlando.”

  “But . . .” Enrica Fredericks was taken aback. “But isn’t he . . . in a coma?”

  “If that’s what it is.” Conrad’s grin was bitter. “We’ve been . . .” He broke off to stare at something in the corner, where the coats had been piled in a heap on the one unused chair. The stare went on too long; the others turned, too. Ramsey couldn’t see anything there. Gardiner rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Sorry, I just thought . . .” He let out a long breath. “It’s a long story. I thought I saw a bug. A very particular bug. Don’t ask—it will take too much time, and I’d rather explain later. It’ll be easier if you just go on thinking we’re crazy for now.”

  Ramsey was amused. His clients exchanged a covert look between themselves, then Mrs. Fredericks stole a glance in Ramsey’s direction. He gave a little head-shake, silently saying don’t worry about it. In his not-inconsiderable experience with the deranged, the genuine loonies were not usually the ones who suggested that what they were doing must seem insane.

  “You don’t have to come with us when we go see Orlando,” said Vivien, rising. “But we’d like you to. We’ll only stay a minute—I’m going to be spending the evening with him after we’ve all finished.”

  As they moved out into the hospital corridor, the women fell in beside one another, the men paired up behind them, and Ramsey took up the rear, this shielded position enabling him to forget his dignity long enough to try a subtle skating motion on the paper hospital shoes.

  He hadn’t been getting out enough, there was no question about it. Ramsey knew that if he didn’t make a point of doing a little less work, he would wind up at the least shocking some client by bursting into inappropriate laughter in a serious meeting, as he’d almost done a few times in the last weeks, or at worst pitching over dead at his desk some day, as his father had done. Another decade—less, now—and he’d be in his fifties. Men still died from heart attacks in their fifties, no matter how many modern medications and cellular retrainers and cardiotherapies there might be.

  But that was the thing about work, wasn’t it? It always seemed like something you could just put down, or trim the excess from, or ignore if things got bad enough. But when you got up close to it, things were different. It wasn’t simply work, it was the tortuous mess of the DeClane Estate, which had become a dreadful gallows soap-opera that had paralyzed three generations. Or it was old Perlmutter trying to win back the company he had built and then lost in a boardroom mugging. Or Gentian Tsujimoto, a widow trying to win compensation for her husband’s poorly-treated illness. Or, as in the case of the Frederickses, it was an attempt to make some kind of legal sense out of their daughter’s stunningly mysterious illness, if only because some sense was better than no sense at all.

  So, when he told himself he had to cut back on work, which people was he going to say “I’m sorry” to? Which trust for which he had labored to be worthy all his working life, which important connection or fascinating puzzle or heart-rending challenge, would he give up?

  It was all very well to say it, and he certainly didn’t want to follow his father into the first-class section of the Coronary Express, but how did you start throwing away the most important parts of your life, even to save that life? It would be different if he had anything much outside the office worth saving himself for . . .

  Half of Decatur “please-call-me-’Catur-it’s-what-my-mom-called-me” Ramsey was hoping that the Gardiners’ portentous hints would lead to something as intriguing as the California couple had made it sound. A career case. The kind of thing that put you not just into the law books, but wove you into the fabric of popular culture like Kumelos or Darrow. But the part of him that had spent way too many nights staring at a wallscreen so cluttered with documents his eyes ached, dictating until he was hoarse while trying not to choke on the occasional hasty mouthful of take-out Burmese, could not help but hope that the Gardiners were in fact, and against his own estimation, complete and utter loons.

  When they had donned the head-coverings and stepped through the sonic disinfectant, Mr. Fredericks had another attack of irritation. “If your son is suffering from the same thing that’s affected Sam, why is all this necessary?”

  “Jaleel, don’t be difficult.” His wife was finding it hard to conceal her anxiousness. Ramsey had seen her at her daughter’s bedside, and knew that underneath the smart clothes and composed features she was clinging to normality like a shipwreck victim to a spar.

  “It’s okay,” Vivien said. “I don’t blame you for wondering. Your Salome is in a slightly different situation.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Mrs. Fredericks.

  “Sam, not Salome.” Her husband did not wait for her question to be answered. “I don’t know why I ever let Enrica talk me into that name. She was a bad woman. In the Bible, I mean. What kind of thing, to name a child?”

  “Oh, now, honey.” His wife smiled
brightly and rolled her eyes. “The Gardiners want to see their boy.”

  Fredericks allowed himself to be led through the air lock corridor and into the private room where Orlando Gardiner lay under a plastic oxygen tent like a long-dead pharaoh in a museum case.

  Enrica Fredericks gasped. “Oh! Oh, my God. What’s . . .” She put a hand to her mouth, eyes wide in horror. “Is that . . . going to happen to Sam?”

  Conrad, who had moved to stand at the foot of Orlando’s bed, shook his head, but said nothing.

  “Orlando has a disease,” his mother said. “He had it long before any of this happened. That’s why he’s here in the aseptic wing. He’s very susceptible to infection at the best of times.”

  Jaleel Fredericks’ frown now had a different character, that of someone watching a terrible wrong at one remove, a netfeed/news report of a famine or terrorist bombing. “An immune system problem?”

  “In part.” Vivien reached her hand into the glove built into the tent and caressed Orlando’s almost skeletally thin arm. His eyes were only white crescents between the lids. “He has progeria. It’s an aging disease. Someone slipped up in the genetic testing—they must have. But we could never prove it. We knew it had been in my side of the family a few generations back, but the chances were so small it would be in Conrad’s, too—well, when his tests came back negative, we never thought about it again.” Her eyes returned to her son. “If I had known, I would have had an abortion.” Her voice tightened. “And I love my son. I hope you understand that. But if I went back in time and had the choice again, I would have ended the pregnancy.”

  A long silence was broken by Jaleel Fredericks, his deep voice softer now. “We’re very sorry.”

  Orlando’s father actually laughed, short and harsh, a strangled sound that was clearly not meant to have come out. “Yeah, so are we?”.

  “We know you’ve been suffering, too,” Vivien said. “And we know how hard it must have been for you to leave Sam, even for a day, to come out here.” She removed her hand from the glove and straightened up. “But we wanted you to see Orlando before we all talked.”