Dearly, Departed

  And so I stayed near. I laid beside him as he slept, stubbornly held onto his hands when he spoke. I would have clutched him to myself, save that there were always colleagues of his or doctors in the sickroom, and my aunt insisted on some level of decorum. Horatio Salvez, the man who assisted my father in his research and served as my informal tutor, was the only constant presence I did not detest.

  My father and I had lost my mother when I was nine. He had seen me safely through that, my first encounter with real grief. He let me weep, let me storm; he even permitted me my baby blasphemies, saying nothing as I cursed God and smashed my china dolls in an effort to force inanimate objects, representatives of the world outside myself, to share my pain.

  So I would see my father through this.

  It was always quiet in the sickroom. It had once been his study, but a bed was moved in for him when he could no longer scale the stairs to his bedchamber. It was a dark, masculine space, everything carved and gilded and stained. People moved within it like monks about the silent grounds of a monastery.

  That day I had tiptoed from the room to put on fresh clothes. On my return trip, Salvez found me and told me that my father was dying. Of course, it hadn’t been in so many words. Mr. Salvez was a skinny, bearded man with a tender face and a weary voice—wearier now than ever.

  “I think he will leave us in a few moments, Miss Dearly.”

  I ran to my father’s sickroom, my slippers slapping violently on the hallway floor. When I reached the door, his coworkers opened it. I hurried to his silk-draped bed and searched the shadows for his face. It was so dark, like a livid bruise. My love for him warred with common human horror at the sight of it.

  “Papa?”

  When he opened his jaundiced eyes, tears sprang to my own. I leaned down to kiss his cheek. He tried, limply, to push me back.

  “Please don’t,” I whispered, unable to keep myself from crying any longer. I had tried so hard not to trouble him with my tears. I had tried so hard to be strong, ever since he had returned from his last southern tour with some rare disease—but I no longer had the will to fight. “Stop it. Stop pulling away from me. You yourself said that it’s not contagious—and if it were, I wouldn’t care. I love you … I love you.”

  I kissed him again, and he let it happen. He wrapped me in his tube-studded arms afterward, though I could feel how weak he was.

  “I love you, too, NoNo,” he said, his voice raspy.

  I laughed without thinking about it, the sound distorted by my sobs. Only he called me NoNo. My first word as a child had been, “No.” My mother thought I was attempting to pronounce my name. Only my father understood that I was starting out on a long career of stubbornness.

  We were silent for a time, his hand heavy on my back, the buttons of his nightshirt pressing painfully into my cheek—a pain I welcomed, a pain that told me he was still there, beneath me.

  “Nora,” he said. “I have to tell you something.”

  “I have a thousand somethings to tell you.”

  He urged me to sit up. “No, child. You must understand … you are incredibly special.” His hand slid shakily up into my hair. “My body …”

  Before he could finish, it began. I watched it happen.

  He died in pain, his body contorting and twisting, as if he were attempting to free himself from the encircling chains of death. His mouth opened wide as he tried to pant out his last words, but only senseless sounds escaped his lips, and I knew that it was useless to try to understand. I cried for him as I had never cried before, until I thought my lungs must be bruised like his skin.

  His colleagues let me have only a moment with the body, once it was no longer my father, before trying to usher me out. When I realized they wanted me to leave the room, I became a catamount. I twisted in their arms, screamed, fought to gain another minute with him, another second, but they wouldn’t give it to me. For all of my struggling, they seemed to be gripped by an even fiercer sense of urgency. I was physically carried from the room by two of his doctors.

  They took the body to the mortician that very night, to await the burial. When I tried to follow it out the front door, Salvez wrapped me in his arms from behind and held me back. By then I was too weak with grief to fight.

  Aunt Gene, ever brusque, mourned my father’s passing by dealing with the florist, the priest, and the mason who would chisel the date on the stone. I never saw her cry. I knew it was her way of coping with the death of her brother, but it seemed so cold to me. I still haven’t forgiven her for it.

  As for me, I took to my bedroom, where I hid in the enormous dollhouse that had been my altar as a child, nestled amidst my stuffed animals and other toys. I don’t know how many hours I spent there, but I remained there until I could muster up a memory of my father other than the horrific spectacle of his death. I had to.

  It was the memories of his stories that helped.

  My father had been a skilled storyteller. The poems of the ancients had echoed so beautifully and with such vividness from his lips, the heavy tales of the First Victorians, the epics of the thousand-year gods. I had especially loved to hear stories of war and heroism—tales that filled my playtime, tales I’d wanted to live out myself one day.

  Over the following days, I ate with those memories. I dressed with them. I attended the funeral with them. I thought of the many times he had indulged my childish imagination, letting me be a fairy for a day, or a mermaid, or a soldier. Women were forbidden from joining the army, of course, but my father had told me stories about girls shaving their hair, strapping down their breasts, and enlisting as a John or a James. He joked that he would smuggle me in, when I played war with my teddies. He drilled me in the courtyard behind our first house and gave me my first shooting lessons. Me, petite and unsoldierlike as ever a girl could be.

  Not that it mattered now.

  The funeral of Dr. Victor Dearly was an affair of state. My father had been a hero, decorated and highly honored. He started his career in the military as a surgeon and infectious disease expert long before I was born, but by the time I was nine, he had distinguished himself as a man of valor. I knew the story well. The Prime Minister then, Lord Harvey Ayles, came to inspect the unit my father was traveling with as part of a morale-boosting tour, and the Punks had attacked. Ignoring the danger to his own life, my father ran directly through the fray to shield the PM with his body, taking five bullets in the process.

  Both survived the incursion. He’d been offered a position in the minister’s cabinet, as well as the office of Surgeon General. He didn’t accept either position, preferring to head up the Department of Military Health. My mother hated him for that. The world had been ready to offer him a position among the elite, and he rejected it. Bless her.

  Because she had passed away, it fell to me to pour the first handful of earth into my father’s grave. Lord Ayles himself was beside me as I did it. He was once a handsome, vibrant man, but time and illness had turned him into a respected recluse. The fact that he had insisted on attending the funeral told me, and everyone else, that he still greatly esteemed my father. He sat in a wheelchair surrounded by bodyguards, swaddled in a shawl, tinted glasses and a floppy hat hiding his face.

  Lord Ayles called me “Miss Nora.” He told me that my father was the best of men.

  The mason had yet to carve the date of his death on the stone. For some reason, I took comfort in that fact, even as the dirt struck his coffin.

  “Miss Dearly?”

  I jumped as Alencar’s voice rang out from the intercom, awakening me. He rapped on his side of the carriage’s dividing window before lowering it. Pamela stirred beside me.

  “There’s a problem, Miss Dearly.”

  I glanced to the window on my right as it became clear glass once more. We were idling in a line of carriages in the empty, hilly area between the mansion district and the west end of the city of New London. Some distance ahead sat the entrance to the Elysian Fields, a marble gatehouse set into the side o
f a low hill. The road before it was crammed with vehicles.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It must have something to do with the news,” Pam decided groggily.

  “They’re not letting vehicles in,” Alencar said, drumming his fingers rapidly on his simple black mobile phone. “Foot traffic only. They’re trying to salvage all the equipment they can from the lower level. Apparently the second level has become our new public inground pool.”

  I leaned forward and poked my head into Alencar’s half of the carriage. “Let me out here, and take Miss Roe home. It’s just a few minutes away. I’ll be at the house by the time you get back.”

  “Nora! Unescorted?” asked Pam. “It’s getting dark out.”

  I fought the desire to roll my eyes, but then Alencar had to go and back her up. “No, Miss Dearly. I can’t let you walk on your own!”

  “Mr. Alencar, darling Pamela … I will be walking home. In an underground housing complex filled with city workers. How much trouble could I possibly get into? Besides, Aunt Gene’s expecting me. I’m late.”

  Pam slowly opened her mouth. Noticing this in the rearview mirror, I withdrew my head and punched the button that would raise the partition between us and Alencar. “Give us one moment, would you?”

  “Nora, I don’t want to have to worry about you,” Pam said. “Let’s just do this the other way around. We can visit with my family, and you can drive back here in a few hours.”

  I took a breath once the divider was up. “Pamela, you really need to stop worrying about me.”

  She reached out to lay her hand over mine. “Nora, you, of all people, know that telling me not to worry about something makes me worry all the more.”

  I turned and wrapped my arms about her neck. She didn’t waste a moment, but embraced me in turn. “Go home and see your family. Say hello to your father for me. And I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” I gently extricated myself and looked into her eyes. “Okay?”

  It took her a moment, but I knew all was well when she let go of me long enough to capture one of my curls and gently tug it. It was an old salute of hers. “Okay.”

  I knocked on the partition, letting Alencar know that I was leaving. His door opened shortly after mine. The air was filled with shrill horns and beeping. “Are you sure this is a good idea, miss?”

  I pulled my gloves on. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the flashing lights. “Absolutely. I want to stretch my legs anyway.” I turned and waved with both hands as Pamela watched me, pensively, through the open door. “Good night, Pamma!”

  “Good night,” she said softly.

  I turned around before Alencar could stop me and set off, walking quickly across the small bridge that led to the tunnel entrance. A constable at the gate ran his scanner over my wrist. He nodded when the computer approved me as a resident, and I folded my glove back down.

  “Welcome home, Miss Dearly.”

  The gate was unlocked, and I headed into the Elysian Fields.

  I followed a concrete tunnel choked with vehicles for a few hundred yards, before exiting directly onto the main street of the first level. It took me a moment to get my bearings as the vast liquid crystal sky screen came into view, providing me with an artificial version of the same fading evening I’d just left outside. Each of the EF’s levels was to have the same luxury. The plan was to dig as deep as possible into the earth, level after level, in order to provide the city both with housing and improved emergency shelters.

  I lived in the neighborhood of Violet Hill, on the western side of the Fields. I decided to follow the side streets rather than the main avenue to avoid the march of machinery and men in red hard hats. They were clustered about the new gate that led deeper underground and were currently using thick chains to drag a drill-nosed mole machine up the ramp.

  Aunt Gene dreamed of living in a mansion on the surface again, but I liked it down here. Two main streets formed a cross in the center of the level, and these held shops and businesses; the side streets spiraled out from there. Every four houses shared a courtyard garden with a small fountain in the middle, save for the houses on the edge, which were styled with more privacy in mind. Ours was one of these. It had a wide lawn out front and one in back, which met the wall—although, virtually, it was designed to look as if it ran out to the horizon. They even gave us holographic trees that moved in the nonexistent breeze.

  After I got beyond the workers, I found that the streets were largely empty. I encountered a few servants out walking their mistresses’ yippy little dogs, and spared a nod for each. At one point I ran into a pair of constables who didn’t bother to size me up before tipping their caps. But no one approached me or tried to speak to me. I found it refreshing. I felt like I had room to breathe.

  Once the constables passed, I saw no one until I came upon the man in black.

  Living in my head, as I was, I didn’t even really comprehend that it was a man I was coming upon. I saw only a shadow lurking beneath the flickering gas lamp at the last turn before my house. As I drew nearer, I saw that it was a tall figure, draped in a full black-hooded cloak. It was difficult to see his face in the murky light.

  I steadied my shoulders and kept walking. Ours was a safe neighborhood, and it was only common sense that gave me any pause. I had never been accosted in my life, truth be told.

  The hooded figure turned my way. “Miss Dearly?”

  I stopped.

  Politeness and wariness warred in my head, but school-bred politeness found itself winning out. “Yes?” I replied.

  The man came closer, with a shuffling gait. If he was planning to jump me, he wasn’t going to do very well at it. “I apologize for my boldness, but if I could beg a moment of your time, I promise not to abuse it.” His voice was slow and dry, but something in it was surprisingly lovely. Calming. Like the autumn wind blowing through leaves.

  I pressed my lips together and shook my head. “I think perhaps you should call at my home and ask to speak with me. Our meeting would be improper any other way.” I began to walk again, faster this time.

  “Please,” the man pleaded. He made no move to chase me. “It’s about your father.”

  I jerked to a stop and turned around. “My father?” My voice came out harder than I had meant it to. I tried to shake off the ghost of my dream, an uneasy feeling wriggling in my chest.

  The man gestured with a gloved hand. “I … was in the army with him. He saved my life.”

  I studied him for a moment before deciding to humor him. I dredged up a small smile. “I am glad for that. He was a noble man.”

  The man nodded with reverence. “He … was … a noble man. A loving man.” He took a step forward. “And I know he’d be happy to see that you’re safe.”

  And with that he was upon me.

  He moved like lightning, grasping my wrist. I twisted my arm as my father had taught me, trying to yank my wrist out through the place where his hand had to close over his fingers, but to no avail. I kicked out at his shins, aiming for the area where the flesh was thinnest over the bone, but he evaded me.

  “Let me go!” I screamed. I struck him with my free hand, and he grabbed that arm, too.

  “Miss Dearly, please understand! You’re in danger! I’m here to help you … your father would want me to help you!”

  This was such a ridiculous statement that I unthinkingly ceased my efforts to free myself, if only for a second. “My father is dead! Unless you’ve come from the hereafter, I’m pretty sure you’ve no idea what he wants!”

  The man also stopped struggling, and with what sounded like grim amusement said, “Well, about that—”

  “Halt!”

  It was the two constables I’d passed before, their feet pounding against the concrete. They were already drawing their electrified billy clubs from their belts. One blew on his silver whistle, summoning his comrades and causing a beacon in a station somewhere to announce his location.

  The cloaked man dropped my arms. “You
might think that this is some kind of sick joke or that I’m crazy, but it’s the truth. I swear to you, you’re in danger—you have to come with me!”

  I stared up into his hood, at the place where his face should be—and for an instant, as the flames flared in the street lamps, I saw his eyes.

  They were opal white, cloudy, the eyes of the blind.

  I fled to the constables, my heart hammering in my chest. Realizing that he would be leaving alone, the cloaked man ran in the opposite direction. One of the constables stayed with me as the second gave chase. I heard sirens coming from far off.

  “Do you know that man, miss?”

  “No.” I caught my breath. “He must be a veteran … he said he knew my father, Dr. Victor Dearly. I don’t think he wanted to hurt me, not really. He acted like he was trying to save me from something.” Poor man was probably driven mad by war—“departed,” as they called it.

  The constable relayed my story into the speaker clipped to his lapel. He then escorted me to my house, which was only about a block away. I scanned the streets we passed, suddenly frightened of every shadow, every motion of the fake trees, the whoosh of the recycled air. In my anxiety, I wondered how I was going to explain this to Aunt Gene, showing up with the police in tow. She wasn’t exactly a paragon of sympathy. She’d gut me for walking alone, to begin with, never mind speaking even one syllable to a strange man. Somehow, the whole affair would be my fault.

  I knew the constable would want to ring the bell, so I didn’t even try to convince him that I could just enter the house. When I heard the familiar pa-ping! I curled my toes in my squeaky new boots, trying to think of what I had on the butler, Matilda, that I could use to keep her from singing. I was coming up with a whole lot of nothing. I’d used her tryst with the valet next door last time.

  Matilda, a stately ebony-skinned woman, answered the door.

  “Nora?” she asked, her jaw dropping when she saw the cop.

  I made my move.

  “Oh, Auntie! You won’t believe what happened!” I rushed into the house and wrapped my arms about her slender waist. That’s when I realized that she was wearing a poppy-colored ball gown, of all things.