Geddy stayed in touch with Aaron and Jenny more consistently than I did, and it was Geddy who had flagged the first signs of Aaron’s abuse. He had hinted at it back when I was in Vancouver, but it wasn’t until months later that he raised the subject in another phone call.
“He slaps her,” Geddy had said. “Punches her sometimes. Maybe worse things.”
“Really? You’ve seen this?”
“When I was staying with them. I mean, I didn’t see it happen. But some nights I could hear the yelling. And in the morning she might have a bruise. Or she might be walking a little carefully, like something hurt. So I knew. And she knew I knew. She tried to talk about it sometimes.”
Jenny had never been a complainer, but neither had she suffered fools gladly. I asked Geddy why she didn’t go to the police.
“She’s worried Aaron could pull strings and get a complaint shut down. And then it would be even worse for her. But she’s thinking about it.”
One thing I had learned from watching my tranchemates disentangle themselves from their tethers was that these things don’t get better all by themselves. “There are shelters,” I said. “There are people who can help her with legal problems. Geddy, if she wants to talk to me, I’m sure I can set up a secure line. Aaron wouldn’t have to know about it.”
“Okay,” Geddy said. “I’ll tell her that.”
But I didn’t hear from her. And a year later, Geddy said the trouble had been resolved.
“Resolved how? They’re still married, aren’t they?”
“That was part of the deal. Jenny decided she needed evidence, right? So she set up her tablet in the bedroom with the camera recording video. Night after night, until she had all the evidence she needed. Yelling, slapping, grabbing, hair-pulling—Aaron’s a hair-puller, did you know that? Including threats. What he’d do to her if she tried to tell anyone and how he’d bankrupt her if she left him. Because he’s afraid of a public scandal.”
And here was another aspect of Jenny’s personality I had failed to discern: this calculated stoicism, the ability to endure something terrible until she had devised a tool to end it. Twenty-five minutes of video recording, Geddy said, which she had wisely copied and stored in multiple locations. I pictured a thumb drive in a safety-deposit box in some DC bank, an insurance policy by any other name.
But still, she hadn’t divorced him.
“That’s part of the deal. She keeps the video to herself and goes on pretending they’re happily married. In return they lead totally separate lives, separate bedrooms, separate vacations, he pays her a monthly stipend and guarantees payments on her car, things like that. She hardly has to see him, except at public events.”
“Not as good as a clean separation.”
“It’s what she wants, Adam. She feels like it gives her some power over him. She’s saving all the money he gives her, in case he tries something. But he sees other women. What he calls discreet short-term relationships. Which Jenny says means high-priced hookers and bar pickups, basically.”
And that was how things had stood until a couple of months ago, when Jenny herself had called me. She used Geddy’s phone (he was in DC with his band), which meant she distrusted her own phone, which meant the situation with Aaron must have heated up again.
At first I didn’t recognize her voice. Jenny had been a social smoker almost as long as I had known her, but her years with Aaron had ramped it up into a full-blown pack-a-day habit, and her voice was a charcoal drawing of the voice I remembered. It had lost its tentativeness, too. “A while back you told Geddy you’d be willing to help me. Is that right?”
I felt blindsided. “Of course. But I’m not sure—I mean—”
“I know Geddy told you about Aaron and me. So I don’t have to rehash all that business, do I?”
I told her what I knew. “So you had an arrangement with Aaron—I guess something changed?”
“I want to go public,” she said. “I want the video to go viral. But I can’t just post it online. I need legal advice. And I need protection. I thought of you because I know Aaron has been cozy with the Het sodality, and I know Tau isn’t okay with that.”
This was when the Griggs-Haskell bill was being vetted in committee. Damian and other sodality leaders had been looking at how various congressmen were likely to cast votes. Aaron was one of the congressional reps who were firmly in the pocket of the Het lobby. He had benefited considerably from PAC funds we had traced to wealthy Het contributors. So yeah, Tau had an interest in seeing Aaron discredited, if it would affect his vote on Griggs-Haskell. Though I had a fleeting wish Jenny hadn’t pitched it quite so bluntly. Clearly, she wasn’t pinning her hopes on my own refined sense of moral duty.
“I can have a word with some people if you like. Can I ask what changed your mind?”
She paused, then said flatly, “Aaron’s in what I guess you would call a long-term extramarital relationship.”
“And you’re not okay with that?”
“I don’t give a rat’s asshole about Aaron’s affairs. Except … I’ve met this woman. She’s someone perfectly trivial, but she shows up now and then on the cocktail circuit. She’s reasonably good-looking but mousy and timid, which is how Aaron likes ’em. And lately I’ve noticed how she dresses. Long sleeves in summer. How she walks sometimes. I ran into her in a bathroom at the Blue Duck Tavern, putting makeup over what looked like a serious bruise. Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to add it up.”
“That’s what changed your mind?”
“Well, yeah. Because I thought I had solved a problem. But I had only solved my problem. The real problem is Aaron. He’s still out there, doing what he does. The only difference is that some other woman is feeling the pain.”
“And you want to stop him.”
“I want to paint the word abuser on his fucking forehead. Or as close as I can get.”
Okay: I promised to speak to someone, see whether Tau could help. Then I said, “How are things otherwise? Jesus, Jenny. I haven’t talked to you in a dozen years.”
“Thanks, Adam.” The intensity drained from her voice. “I’m pretty busy, actually. No time to chat. But you can reach me through Geddy when you need to.”
CHAPTER 17
The lights went out all over North America and across much of the rest of the world that evening, but from Schuyler it looked, at least at first, like any other power blackout.
So we did what everyone else does when the lights wink off. Geddy peeked outside and reported that the whole neighborhood was dark, so we knew it was more than a blown fuse. Mama Laura handed me a flashlight from a drawer in the kitchen and sent me to the basement to fetch the emergency candles she kept there. (A years-old box of yahrzeit candles, no doubt from the tiny kosher aisle in the local supermarket. I was sure Mama Laura didn’t know the use for which they were intended, though Rebecca winced when she started lighting them.) Jenny tried to call her mother but reported that her phone was also dead. Mama Laura went upstairs to see if my father was still awake (he was not) and to fetch the battery-operated radio they kept by the bedside.
We gathered in the living room. Geddy put the radio on the coffee table and cranked up the volume. The radio was an old analog model, and the only station we could tune in was a local one. The evening news-and-sports guy was struggling to keep up with the situation: he said the blackout appeared to be continent-wide and that wireless and internet service was disrupted and intermittent. There had been no official statement from the federal government, “that I know of.” He said people should shelter in their homes. He repeated something Aaron had suggested, and which the wire services must have announced shortly before the blackout became complete: telecom and utility problems were probably due to viral malware that had been released in India but had spread uncontrollably. There was still no reliable news from that part of the world, but the last social-media posts from the city of Surat showed “a bright cloud and column of smoke” from the direction of Mumbai more than a hundred miles
distant. “But of course that doesn’t prove anything,” the newscaster added.
“Isn’t this awful,” Mama Laura said.
Mumbai. Amanda had relatives there. There were Tau communities there, too, not to mention countless people who would have qualified as Taus had they ever taken the test. Relatives of a different kind.
I took a candle and navigated my way to the bathroom, where I tried to call Trev. But my phone was as dead as Jenny’s. Which meant I was out of touch with my team. Which created a whole new set of problems, and I needed to talk to Jenny about that.
* * *
Fortunately for our chances of having a private conversation, Jenny was a smoker. Mama Laura wouldn’t allow a cigarette to be lit in the house, so Jenny excused herself to step outside. Geddy and I followed her onto the back porch, but Geddy hurried back inside as soon as she took out her pack of Marlboros—he hated the smell of burning tobacco. I waited for the screen door to swing shut behind him.
Jenny gave me a careful look. The night was cool but windless, and her face was softened by the light of the rising moon. She could almost have been her younger self, Jenny Symanski and Adam Fisk, just hanging out. She said, “Okay, so what now?”
The plan had been admirably simple. What Jenny wanted from Tau was protection. Not just from Aaron but from the media shitstorm that would follow her release of the video. One official press conference, one official statement, a signed affidavit, then she wanted to disappear. Because, as she had said when we first discussed this, “It’s not just a career-killer for Aaron. It’s an embarrassment to me. I look at myself in those videos and all I see is someone—what’s the word? Cowed. Cringing. Like a whipped dog! It’s fucking humiliating. Not exactly what I want to show the world.”
“But you weren’t cowed,” I told her. “That’s why the video exists, because you weren’t cringing, you aren’t letting him get away with it.”
At the end of the weekend I was supposed to take Jenny to a Tau enclave in Buffalo, with Trev and his security detail for escort, and after a prearranged press conference we would drive her over the border into Canada. She wanted a clean break with her past life, and that was what we promised her: our own version of the Witness Protection Program. A new name with all ancillary credentials, a new home in a pleasant university town out west. A job, if she wanted one. The sodality had ways of quietly and invisibly ensuring the employment of fellow Taus—and fellow travelers, in this case. Once the video was public she might be recognized, but I doubted it; Jenny had the kind of pleasant but commonplace looks that could be rendered utterly anonymous by a bottle of L’Oréal and a change of clothes.
“We should proceed as if nothing’s changed,” I said, though much had changed. For one thing, the international crisis might cause the vote on Griggs-Haskell to be postponed. For another, we wouldn’t be releasing any videos or staging any press conferences until power was restored. “We leave here Monday morning and head for Buffalo. By then we might have a better idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. In the meantime I’m going to have to find a way to contact my friend Trevor out at the Holiday Inn.” I didn’t mention the contingent of Het enforcers Trev had spotted earlier. No need for Jenny to worry about that. “And we need our own copy of the video.”
“Okay,” she said softly. “Now?”
“As good a time as any.”
She looked into my eyes as if she were hunting for some kind of reassurance there. Then she rummaged in her purse until she came up with a cheap thumb drive, which she pressed into my hand.
She smoked her cigarette and we listened to the night. In neighboring houses, candles moved like restless ghosts behind darkened windows. The backyard opened onto a stretch of marshy, unimproved land where bullfrogs croaked out what Mama Laura used to call “that jug o’ rum noise.” Jenny and I had caught a huge bullfrog there, a year or so before puberty began to complicate our relationship. The frog was six inches snout to tail—I had held it still while she applied a tape measure from her mom’s sewing box. The frog had croaked all night in a box in Jenny’s garage, and in the morning her parents had made her turn it loose.
“Must be strange for you,” she said, “being back here.”
I shrugged.
“It is for me,” she said. “So many memories kind of overlapping, you know, like a multiple exposure. Things we did back in the day. I look at Geddy and I still see the chubby, awkward kid he used to be. All the crazy enthusiasm he couldn’t keep inside himself. You ever think about that stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
“About your family?”
“Sure. Sometimes.”
“Because I think it must be strange, coming back here, your father on his deathbed or close to it, and you and me about to hand Aaron a nasty ticket to obscurity.”
I almost wished I could tell her I had spent sleepless nights worrying about it.
“I have a different family now,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t sound callous, but whatever love I got in this house, I got mainly from Grammy Fisk, and she’s been gone a long time. I’m sorry for my father. I really am. But I was never much more to him than an afterthought and a distraction. He fed me and he tolerated me and he allowed me a place in his house. And I guess that’s worth thanking him for. But it’s nothing like love, and I can’t say I ever really loved him.”
Jenny looked at me as if from a great distance. “Actually,” she said, “yeah, that does sound a little callous.”
“The first people who took me into their home with genuine love were two old women with a big house in Toronto. I expect my father would call them a pair of rich old dykes. I still live in that house when I’m not on the road. I love everyone who lives in it with me. One of those women—Loretta—died a couple of years ago. Cancer, not very different from my dad’s. I cried when she passed, and I feel her absence every day, even now. I know what grief is, Jenny. I know where it comes from, and I know how people earn it.”
She sighed a plume of smoke to the starry sky. “Okay,” she said. “The funny thing is, that’s how I used to feel about this house, back when my folks were drunk or arguing or both. I came here because Grammy Fisk was nice to me, and Mama Laura never yelled, and I liked being with you, and Geddy was pretty entertaining. And if Aaron ignored me, that’s just because he was older and so good at everything. Some nights the only way I could get to sleep was by pretending this was my family, and that the only reason I had to go home was because I’d been born at the wrong address.”
It was a memorable phrase. Born at the wrong address.
“So maybe I think about those days more than you do,” Jenny finished.
“Maybe so.”
“But I doubt it, because some things you just don’t walk away from.”
“I walked away from here a long time ago.”
She smiled, a humorless compression of her lips. “Well, one thing hasn’t changed. You’re still a lousy liar.”
“I hope that’s not entirely true. The work I do these days, I’m a kind of diplomat. I help Tau negotiate deals with other Affinities. I need to lie from time to time. I’m one of the best liars we’ve got.”
She stubbed out her cigarette on the rim of one of Mama Laura’s big ceramic planters. “Then God help Tau, and God help us.”
* * *
I tried twice more to call Trevor Holst, without success. I needed to talk to him, but it looked like I wouldn’t be doing that before morning. It was late now. Mama Laura was tidying up the kitchen for the night, and the rest of us huddled around the radio, learning nothing. Geddy began to yawn.
Then there was a terse knock at the front door. “I’ll get it,” Mama Laura called from the kitchen. Twice tonight we had had visitors come to the door: neighbors who were running portable generators, offering to let us join them if we needed anything. Probably more of the same, I thought, until I heard Mama Laura’s stifled screech of alarm.
We all leaped up, but I was first to grab a flashlight and reach
the door. Mama Laura stood in the door frame with her hand to her mouth. I aimed the light outside and saw what had scared her: a huge dark-skinned man with elaborate facial tattoos and blood oozing from a gash above his right eye.
“Trevor, Jesus,” I managed.
“Sorry,” he said meekly. “I would have called first, but…”
“Adam,” Mama Laura said, “do you know this man?”
“Yes. He’s a friend. Mama Laura, this is Trevor Holst.”
She relaxed visibly and exhaled a pent-up breath. “Oh. Then come on in, Mr. Holst. You seem to be hurt—I’ll get the iodine and some washcloths.”
Trevor clearly needed to talk to me privately, but we were obliged to do introductions and explanations. I took him to the living room. The candlelight made him seem even more intimidating than usual: his kirituhi tats looked inky black, and drops of blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried on his cheeks like tears. He wedged himself into a chair and put on his biggest hey-I’m-harmless smile, but even that seemed somehow vulpine.
I introduced him as a Tau friend who had been traveling with me and who had taken a room at the Holiday Inn for the weekend. Trev blamed the cut on his head on the blackout: “Streetlights went dark and I walked into a lamppost. Back at the hotel there was a bunch of folks trying to get rooms—a bus broke down at the town line and the driver couldn’t contact anybody for help. So I gave up my room for an older couple from Tennessee. Figured I’d transfer to the Days Inn, but they’re full too. Which is why I came by here to tell you I’ve got no place to stay and maybe get a recommendation—one of those motels up the highway closer to the county line, I’m thinking.”