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His mother stared at him for a time. “Twenty-seven,” she finally said.
“Yes, that’s right. I’m twenty-seven today. You had me twenty-seven years ago, nine in the evening on the ninth of September. That’s the date today. You had me here, at this very place, back when it was a regular hospital.”
She leaned close and licked her lips. “Hide.”
Alex wiped a hand across his face. “From who, Mom?” He was tired of the pointless, circular conversation.
His mother rose from where she sat on the edge of the bed and went to a small wardrobe. She pawed through the items folded on the shelf. After a brief search she came up with a shawl. At first, Alex thought that she was cold. But she didn’t put the shawl around her shoulders.
She stood before the small dresser and draped the shawl over the polished metal square, bolted to the wall, that served as a mirror.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
His mother turned back with fire in her eyes. “They look at me. I told you. They look at me through the windows in the walls.”
Alex was starting to feel creepy.
“Mom, come sit down.”
His mother sat on the edge of the bed, closer, and took one of his hands in both of hers. It was an act of affection that unexpectedly brought a tear to Alex’s eye. She had never done such a thing before. Alex thought that it was the best birthday present he could have gotten, better even than fifty thousand acres of land.
“Alex,” she whispered. “You must run and hide before they get you.”
It was startling to hear his name from her lips for the second time in the same day. It took a great effort to summon his voice.
“And who is it that I should hide from, Mom?”
She glanced around and then leaned closer so he could hear her whisper.
“A different kind of human.”
He stared at her a moment. It made no sense, but something about it sounded serious, sounded sincere.
Just then something on the TV caught his eye. He looked up and saw that it was the local news. A police spokesman was standing before a cluster of microphones.
A news crawler moving across the bottom of the screen said “Two Metro officers found dead.”
Alex reached over for the remote and turned up the sound.
“Do you know why they were there, in behind the warehouses?” a reporter asked through the clamor.
“The Center and Ninetieth Street section was within their patrol area,” the official said. “Alleys throughout there provide access to loading docks. We check them often, so there was nothing unusual about them being there in that location.”
Alex remembered when Ninetieth Street, about ten or twelve miles from his house, used to be the outskirts of town.
Another reporter shouted the others down. “There are reports that both officers were found with their necks broken. Is that true?”
“I can’t comment on such stories. As I’ve said, we will have to wait for the coroner’s report. When we have it we will release the findings.”
“Have the families been notified?”
The man at the microphone paused, obviously having trouble getting words out. Anguish shaped his features. He kept swallowing back his emotion.
“Yes. Our prayers and sympathy go out to their families at this difficult time.”
“Can you release their names, then?” a woman waving her pen for attention asked.
The official stared out at the tight knot of reporters. His gaze finally dropped away. “Officer John Tinney, and Officer Peter Slawinski.” He started spelling the names.
Alex’s whole body flashed as cold as ice.
“They break people’s necks,” his mother said in a dead tone as she stared at the TV. He thought that she must be repeating what she’d just heard. “They want the gate.”
Her eyes went out of focus. He knew; she was going back into that dark place. Once her eyes went out of focus like that she wouldn’t speak again for weeks.
He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. Another text message from Bethany. He ignored it as he put an arm tenderly around his mother’s shoulders.
7.
ALEX SAT FOR A WHILE just holding his mother, trying to imagine what madness haunted her. She no longer seemed to know that he was there.
The worst part was that he had no hope. The doctors had said that she would never get better, never be her old self again, and that he needed to understand that. They said there was brain damage that couldn’t be reversed. While they weren’t exactly sure what had caused the damage to her brain, they said that, among other things, it caused her to sometimes become violent. They said that such damage was not reversible. They’d said that she was a danger to herself and others and always would be.
After a while Alex gently laid her back on her bed. She was as limp as a doll—just a bundle of bone and muscle, blood and organs, existing often without conscious awareness, without anything other than a vestigial intellect. He fluffed up the pillow under her head. Her empty eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. As far as Alex knew, she didn’t know where she was, or that there was anyone there with her. She was for the most part dead to the world; her body just hadn’t fully caught up with that fact.
He pulled her shawl off the mirror, folded it, and replaced it in the wardrobe before sitting again on the edge of the bed.
When his phone rang he pulled it out and answered.
“Hey, birthday boy,” Bethany said, “I have a big surprise for you.”
Alex made an effort to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “Well, I’m afraid that—”
“I’m sitting outside your house.”
He paused a moment. “My house.”
Her voice turned flirtatious and lilting. “That’s right.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Well,” she said in an airy, intimate whisper, “I’m waiting for you. I want to give you your birthday present.”
“Thanks for the thought, Bethany, but I really don’t need anything, honest. Save your money.”
“No money involved,” she said. “Just get your tail home, birthday boy. Tonight you’re going to get yourself laid.”
Now Alex was really getting annoyed with her. He thought it easiest not to say so, though. He didn’t want to have a fight wit
h a woman he hardly knew. There was no point to it.
“Look, Bethany, I’m really not in the mood.”
“You just leave that to me. I’ll get you in the mood. I think you ought to get lucky on your birthday, and I’m just the girl to make it special.”
Bethany was an attractive woman—in fact she bordered on being voluptuous—but the more he got to know her the less and less attractive Alex found her to be. She had nothing more than a superficial allure. He couldn’t talk to her about anything meaningful, not because she wasn’t intelligent enough, but because she didn’t care about anything meaningful. In a way, that was worse. She was a living, breathing example of superficial, and willfully so. She seemed to have no interests other than that she had a kind of odd, narrow focus on him and the two of them having a good time—or, at least, what was a good time by her definition.
“I can’t, right now,” he said, trying not to sound angry, even though he was getting angry.
She let out a low, breathy chuckle. “Oh, I’ll make sure you can, Alex. Don’t you worry about that. You just get yourself home and let Beth take care of everything.”
“I’m visiting my mother.”
“I think I can throw a better party. Promise. Just come give me a chance to make your birthday something you’ll never forget.”
“My mother is in the hospital. She’s ill and not doing well. I’m going to be sitting with her.”
That finally threw Bethany into silence for a moment.
“Oh,” she finally said, the sexiness gone from her voice. “I didn’t know.”
“I’ll call you later,” Alex said. “Maybe in a few days.”
“Well,” she said, sounding uncertain and reluctant to end the conversation so quickly, “I’m sure your mother is going to need to get her rest. Why don’t you call me later today, after your visit?”
