6:45 AM CST
Monday, October 30, 2000
“HAPPY ANNIVERSARY,” said Leo when he was sure Sarah was really awake,
before he leaned further over the back of her seat to kiss her.
“Anniversary?”
“Three months since we got married.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess.” She kissed him back more seriously, taking
his head in one arm. Then she released him and bent over to check on
Charlie, strapped into the child seat beside her. The baby was sound
asleep. “Funny, he’s usually awake by now.”
“I guess he likes to take rides.”
“Where are we?”
“Almost in Missouri. That’s the Mississippi up ahead.” He bent
further over the back of her seat to kiss her again, and thereby lost
his balance for when the bus went over something with a loud BANG and
shuddered. He recovered, but worse than the almost-fall was the loud
voice of the sergeant in charge of the bus over the PA: “Beiderman! Get
back in your seat!” That stirred half the people on the bus, including
Wanda, and Charlie, who started to cry, loudly.
“Thank you so much for scaring my baby!” screamed Sarah, who was torn
between taking him out of his seat to hold, or leaving him safely
strapped in but miserable. That woke up everyone else, and the bus was
filled with babble, groans, and some laughter. The sergeant, wisely,
made no reply.
The convoy stopped at the bus depot in downtown St. Louis, and the army
people gave everyone meal vouchers for breakfast. Sarah spent a long
time cleaning up Charlie and putting him in a fresh outfit, so she and
her husband and Wanda were the very last in line at the cafeteria. When
they got to the beverage section, Sarah stopped a passing cafeteria
worker, and said, “Excuse me, do you have any more apple juice?”
“I don’t know,” replied the woman. “I mind the steam tables.”
“Could you find out? My baby likes apple juice.”
“We have orange drink.”
“No, he hates that,” said Leo.
The woman looked at him for a moment. “You’re Biederman, aren’t
you?”
“Yes.”
“They ran some tapes last night. And you’re Sarah? His
girlfriend?”
“I’m the famous Mrs. Beiderman now. Can you check for the apple
juice, please?”
The woman eventually brought some juice, along with a dozen friends
who wanted to meet the famous Beidermans.
Leo looked out at the passing scenery without any particular feeling.
Sarah and the baby were asleep, and he’d thought Wanda was too, until
she spoke up.
“We must be getting close.”
“Not that close. We have to get to Springfield first. I don’t
think it’s that far from there on the map, but the roads get twisty. I
don’t remember that much,” Leo answered, ending with a lie.
“Don’t remember?”
“Well, coming here, all I could think about was Sarah. Going back,
too.” That was a half-truth.
“Oh . . . Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Are your parents really okay with this?”
“Either they are or they will be.” He turned to face her. “Once
they get to know you, you’ll be fine.”
It was earlier in the day, but the light looked about the same to Leo
as they approached the entrance to C-Complex: The sun had about an hour
before it would set. Sarah was brushing her hair furiously, holding her
hairclips in her mouth. There wasn’t a crowd of desperate refugees
outside the gates now. But there was a knot of still and motion
photographers outside the gate.
A big flash startled Sarah and she dropped the hairclips, just as
they went through the gate. She muttered a curse and got down on all
fours to find them. The bus stopped and started unloading before she
could. When she noticed that Leo and Wanda were down on their hands and
knees looking too, and the people stumbling over them and cussing, like
they were doing to her, she announced, “Forget it, leave them. Let’s
get going.”
To her immense relief, there weren’t any reporters in sight as they
got off, although she did spot a cameraman in one of the gate towers.
She glared up at him, and he must have noticed, because he took the
camera off his shoulder. It was a heavy crush. She took Charlie out of
his carrier and said, “Wanda, would you take this?” Wanda took it
instantly, of course. Then Sarah followed Leo, and Wanda followed her,
into the crowd spilling out of the convoy. Most everybody in the crowd
seemed to be talking or shouting, and Loudspeakers were blaring over it
all.
“ALL ARRIVALS, IF YOU HAVE BEEN PRE-ASSIGNED, FOLLOW THE COLORED
STRIPE MATCHING YOUR SECTION COLOR TO YOUR ORIENTATION GALLERY AND
PROCESSING CENTER. IF YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PRE-ASSIGNED, FOLLOW THE RED
LINE. PLEASE PROCEED IMMEDIATELY INSIDE TO CLEAR THE ARRIVAL AREA.
REPEAT, ALL ARRIVALS, IF YOU . . .”
Without the clips, Sarah’s hair kept falling in front of her eyes, and
with both arms tight around Charlie to keep him safe from jostling, all
she could do was keep shaking her head. So, she usually saw only right
in front of her, and she was too busy making sure Leo and Wanda didn’t
get out of sight, and that she didn’t trip, that it took her completely
by surprise when Leo dropped the bags and embraced someone. A pair of
arms appeared around his back, and another, and then another.
She looked up and back at the tower. The cameraman was still there,
but his camera was still down. He was looking at them, though.
“Sarah!,” said Leo’s mother, as she put her arms around Sarah and
Charlie. “God, I thought you’d never get here. We’ve been waiting . .
. Here, let me take the baby.”
Sarah complied, but Charlie began crying immediately. “I’m sorry, he
doesn’t know you yet, Mrs. Beiderman.”
“Well, that will change. He’s got good lungs!” Charlie was
screaming.
“Can I hold him?” asked Wanda.
Leo’s mother looked at the girl and then at Sarah, who answered.
“Yes, for a little while.”
Leo’s mother handed Charlie over, who quieted. Leo’s mother looked
hurt.
Wanda said, “He’s used to me, Mrs. Beiderman. That’s all.”
After an uncomfortable moment, Leo’s mother said, “Well, that’s
good. Especially with you living with us from now on.” Leo’s mother
put on the best face she could and hugged Wanda. Then she embraced
Sarah closely and kissed her on her cheek. But she took a step back
suddenly.
Sarah was puzzled for a moment, and then figured it out. “You
didn’t know, did you? I guess the coat covers it up pretty good.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t want you to worry at first. And then when I wrote you
about it, we were in the camp where those bastards stopped our mail.
You didn’t see us with the Governor?”
“What are you talking about?” asked Leo’s father, coming up with
his sister Janey in hand.
Instead of shouting another answer over the racket, Sarah opened
her coat.
“WELCOME TO THE ARK,” said the dour man in the navy blue uniform from
the podium in the crowded briefing room. “I’m Section Leader
Mortenfield of Orange 254; this is Section Leader Klein from Orange 261,
and Section Leader Jackson from Orange 242. If you are not assigned to
any Section from 241 through 270, you are not where you are supposed to
be. Anyone? . . . Good.”
“It’s late, so we’re not going to give you the whole program
tonight; it takes about four hours. You should all have gotten one of
these, the handbook, and a bunch of handouts. The handbook comes in
thirteen languages besides English, as it says on these posters you’ll
see everywhere,” he said, as he darkened the room and put a slide on the
screen behind him. “Read the handbook as soon as you can, and read all
of it. You’ll save yourself, and your section leaders, a lot of trouble
that way.”
“The next thing you need to know is never drink water from a tap
unless it has one of these symbols,” he said, changing the slide from
the poster to a silhouette in blue of a man drinking from a glass.
“Most of the taps should have this symbol—” The same silhouette, but in
black, inside a red slashed circle—“which means don’t drink it. But if
you see a tap without a symbol, don’t drink from it; you’ll probably get
sick. We have a water shortage, so we use non-potable water whenever we
can. And we don’t even have enough of that, which is one reason it
smells so bad in here.”
“You can say that again!” someone called from the back of the room.
“It’s nice up here, compared to where you’ll be living. You’ll get
used to it. We did.”
“What if we don’t?” asked the same voice.
“Then you can leave. None of you has to stay here. Remember
that. There are a lot of rules to follow in the Ark, probably more than
in any of the camps you’ve been through. We need more rules to make
this place work. If you won’t follow these rules, if you won’t do your
part to make this place work, you leave.”
The briefing took a little less than an hour, but that was long
enough for Sarah to develop a great need to visit a rest room. But
outside the briefing room, a woman came up to her—followed by a tall man
with a video camera. Sarah stopped to look at the man, seeing that, by
his clothes, he was the one who’d been in the tower.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Beiderman?” the woman asked.
“I’m Sarah Beiderman, but I have to—” she was about to say she had
to go to the woman, whom she hadn’t really looked at, but looking into
the face of the cameraman—who had not brought up his camera—she
remembered. “You used to be with Jenny Lerner, weren’t you? You came
with her to Richmond a couple of years ago?”
“Yes, I was Jenny’s cameraman,” answered the man.
Hearing his voice, and his accent, Sarah was certain. “Your name is
Eric?”
“Yes. You’ve got a good memory.”
“Thank you for what you did.”
“Did what?” asked Leo as he caught up with her.
“I’ll explain later. Take Charlie for a minute, I really have to
go.” Sarah was off in seconds, pushing through the people who were
mostly going the other way.
When Sarah returned, Eric the cameraman and the reporter he’d been with
were gone; in fact, in the ten minutes, the crowd had moved on. Only
Leo and their family was waiting. Leo’s mother was holding Charlie, who
was fussing but was a lot better than the first time; Sarah thought the
crowd and the noise must have upset him. Still, he squirmed and
screamed when Sarah drew close, until Ellen Beiderman put him into
Sarah’s arms.
Mortenfield said, “Well, you’re the last one. Come on, let’s get to
my Section before Lights Out. It’s a long walk.”
It was.
Along the way, Leo recalled what Sarah had said to the cameraman,
and asked her, “What did you mean when you thanked Mr. Vennekor?”
“He was shooting us when we got off the bus. I gave him a dirty
look, and he stopped . . . what did you tell that reporter while I was
gone?”
“She asked me and my parents if we wanted to be interviewed now. I
told them I didn’t think you wanted to do it. She thanked us and left.”
“Who was she? Someone from a local station?”
Leo’s father answered that question. “That was Beth Stanley. She
does most of the news here. She pretty much runs the AIS now, from what
I hear in Administration.”
“AIS?”
“Ark Information Service.”
Neither the woman’s name nor the organization meant anything to
Sarah, so she asked more important questions. “When can we start school
again? And do you have any day care here?”
“HERE WERE ARE,” said Leo’s father, patting in turn each bunk in two
tiers of three.
“This is where you’ve been for three months?” asked Leo.
“No, we just moved here this morning, ” said Ellen Beiderman. “Mr.
Mortenfield helped us work out the swaps so we could all be together.
It’s closer to the nursery and the head, too.”
“Head?” asked Sarah.
“The bathroom. It’s what they call it in the Navy.”
“Mortenfield and most of the other section leaders in this complex
are ex-Navy or ex-Marines,” explained Don Beiderman. “They use Navy
jargon a lot. “Deck” instead of “floor”, “overhead” instead of
“ceiling”.
“It fits,” said Leo. “This is like being in a submarine.”
“That’s what Mortenfield says. He says it smells like one, too.”
“Well, I don’t think I want to go in the Navy.” Leo looked where
his watch should be, and then at his mother’s. “If the lights go out in
ten minutes, we’d better get ready.”
“Do I have to leave Charlie in the Nursery?” asked Sarah, urgently.
“No,” replied Leo’s mother. “I made sure there would be a portable
crib for him. We’ll have to get it from the nursery.”
“I’ll get it,” said Leo.
“You don’t know where it is yet, Leo. Come on,” said his father.
The rest weren’t left alone, of course; the tiers were two of many
in the bay. It was on the top deck within the circular tunnel section,
and there was a maze of pipes, ducts, and bundled cables overhead in the
highest part. The outer tiers were only two high, where the ceiling
curved down.
People were getting ready for bed or were already in their bunks. More
people were passing back and forth, many in robes, and many with just
towels wrapped around them. One such stopped at the next tier over from
Sarah, said “Evening,” took off the towel, and hung it up on a rod
running along the end of the bunk. He lifted up his bunk, took some
underwear out of the compartment underneath, let the bunk down again,
and put on the underwear. He didn’t look at the Beidermans until he was
finished with that., and he only gave them a not before getting into his
bunk and closing the privacy curtains. Sarah kept her eyes down and
away until that operation was completed. Ellen Beiderman watched her
closely, and noticed that she wasn’t blushing, or giggling—another way
she’d changed.
“Can we get a shower?” asked Wanda.
“Well, it’s supposed to be the men in the evening, but we have
stalls now. Do you have a robe?”
“I’ve got to clean up Charlie and get him ready for bed,” said
Sarah. “Show me where this ‘head’ is.”
“Follow me, girls.” Ellen made to pick up the baby’s bag, but
wasn’t fast enough; Wanda had picked it up. But the girl noticed that
she was noticed, and offered it wordlessly to Ellen. Ellen shook her
head slightly, and led them away.
Jane ran up in front of Sarah when she got a chance, and asked her,
“Why were you guys so late?”
“We left late.”
“How come?”
“Do you know about those bad men at the camp we were at?”
“She knows something about them,” interjected Ellen, a bit
nervously. “Janey, watch where you’re going. If you back up like that,
you’ll trip and fall.”
Sarah stopped, so that Janey did too. She spared a hand from
Charlie to put it on Janey’s shoulder. “The Army shot some of them
yesterday. We stayed to watch.”
Janey said, “Good!” turned, and walked on ahead, past her mother.
Ellen began to wonder what Jane had picked up on her own. Instead
of asking Jane about it, she said to Wanda, “You forgot to get your
robe.”
“I can go back after we take care of Charlie. Can’t I?”
“Maybe. But they don’t leave the showers on very long after lights
out.”
“I’ll be okay, Mrs. Beiderman.”
ELLEN BEIDERMAN woke up and found she needed to visit the head. She saw
through the gap she’d left in her privacy curtains by her head, even in
the dim red “night” lights that Leo was across from her, a yard away.
It hadn’t been a dream.
The girl Leo and Sarah had brought—Wanda—was in the bunk above Leo,
snoring remarkably loudly for a 12-year-old of no more than eighty
pounds. But the bunk below Leo was empty, and so was the portable crib
set up in the broad aisle next to its head.
Ellen got up and tended to her business, and then headed on to the
nursery where, as she expected, Sarah was with the baby. She was
playing with him, quietly; he was happy. But, when she approached, he
turned to Sarah and buried his head in her swollen belly.
“Are you two going to stay up all night?”
“Maybe . . . he just doesn’t want to go to sleep. He slept a lot
on the bus. I guess it could take a day or two before he get’s used to
sleeping at night . . . I slept a lot, too. Too much. I’m not sleepy
now.”
The baby turned halfway back around to peek back at Ellen.
Sarah turned him all the way around, took one of his arms, and said,
“Wave hello to Gran—what do you want him to call you?”
“He won’t be talking for months!”
“Hey, he’s my brother, so he’s smart. He could start talking
tomorrow!”
“I’m sure.”
“I’m really serious about knowing what do you want him to call you.
Grandma? Auntie Ellen? What?”
“What do you want him to call you?”
“Mama . . . Mama, until he’s old enough to understand.” Sarah
seemed to be looking past Ellen for a too-long moment.
“Yes . . . Then I guess ‘Grandma’ would be best.” Ellen Beiderman
decided she wanted to change the subject. But the first questions she
thought of asking were not likely to lead where she wanted Sarah to go,
not until she knew she was safe. But there was one—“I really don’t know
what to make of Wanda.”
“She doesn’t trust you yet. She doesn’t trust anyone until she’s
sure she really knows them. And she’s not sure you’ll really keep her,
you and Mr. Beiderman. She was in a lot of foster homes before her Dad
got her back.”
“Do you really know her that well?”
Sarah looked at Ellen in a way Ellen would never have suspected she
was capable of until she saw it. “All I need to know is that I owe
everything to Wanda and her father. She found Charlie’s bag so I could
feed him. Charlie wouldn’t have made it without that. And Wanda’s
father made Leo get on the helicopter. That soldier who stayed, I don’t
think he really believed he was going to die, but Mr. Walewski knew what
was going to happen. And he knew Leo was going to die soon. I knew
it.”
Ellen glanced at Mrs. Udall, who was supposed to be watching the
nursery from two to six; she was still asleep. In the few seconds she
had looked away, Sarah had dissolved into tears. “God forgive me, God
forgive me. It’s my fault.” Sarah held Charlie very close; he looked
puzzled, and then began to cry himself?”
“Your fault?”
“My fault! I was so stupid, so stubborn!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I almost killed everyone! Everyone!”
“Sarah, you’re not making sense! Here, let me take him for a
minute.” This did not settle Charlie down, but at least he didn’t cry
any louder after Sarah handed him over, and Sarah seemed to pull
together.
But Ellen didn’t think so for long.
Sarah seemed to be calm as she began speaking again. “I’m making
perfect sense. I promised to be with Leo for the rest of our lives, and
I broke that promise in less than a month. Dad told me to go, but I
didn’t go. I didn’t even think that I might be pregnant . . . No, I
just stood there, like if I held my breath long enough I’d get my way.”
“You did what you thought was right . . . we shouldn’t have dragged
Leo onto the bus.”
“He’s your son; of course you should!”
Ellen hugged Charlie to her bosom, and for a wonder, he quieted down
to a diminishing whimper. She scarcely noticed. “What’s done is done.
You thought, we all thought your parents were coming.”
Sarah shook her head. “You still don’t see it. I almost killed
your son because he got sick coming back to get me. I killed my parents
because with me, Dad could have taken Mom and Charlie on the
motorcycle. God, they could have been . . . I didn’t even think to just
grab Charlie and go with Leo. They would have let me do that.” Sarah
was looking past Ellen again. She kept on looking for a long time.
Ellen finally formed a thought worth saying. “If you had it to do
over. But you don’t . . . Sarah, you were too young.”
“That was less than three months ago.”
“That was a lifetime ago . . . Sarah, I saw a few minutes ago that
you’re older than me, in some ways. I never suspected you could be so
strong. So brave. What you did in that camp—they haven’t told us that
much yet and I don’t think they will but I’ve heard things—”
“More stupidity. I was lucky they didn’t catch me. They killed at
least a couple of people they thought might talk.”
“Did you know about it? I mean, before?”
“No. But I should have figured they could do something like that .
. . I did it because I wanted to get them for what they did to me.”
“Not only you.”
“My job is taking care of Charlie and Leo, not being some kind of
fucking cop! It was stupid and selfish . . . I don’t deserve Leo. I’d
have been with some stupid jock like Matt Shepherd or Pete Sandelli if
Leo hadn’t discovered the comet.”
“That’s not true. You started going with Leo as soon as we came
back from Mother Beiderman’s funeral. That was before the President
told everyone about the comet. Almost a month before.”
“No, that’s not—”
“Yes, it was . . . That’s exactly how it was.”
Sarah was looking at Ellen, no further. “Maybe . . . Okay, I guess
it was. But if he hadn’t been away for so long, I wouldn’t have known I
would miss him, the way I did . . . ” Sarah put her hands on her belly.
“That one, you got right. But you missed out on this . . . she has to
be from the first time, because the next day my Mom gave me condoms.”
“When?”
Richmond, Virginia
Thursday, June 8, 2000
Time to Impact: 9 weeks 6 days
SARAH HOTCHNER LOOKED UP from the book that wasn’t holding her
attention. She saw Leo Beiderman, her boyfriend, huddled over his own
homework at his desk, scratching notes in the margins as he read. It
was a sight that was familiar enough. Their dates had been mostly study
dates from the start. He hadn’t asked much more of her than to be with
her, and for her to acknowledge him.
She hadn’t really thought of him as even a potential boyfriend until
after that party she’d gone to with Matt Shepherd and seen how crushed
Leo was afterward. Leo would never try to drag her into a bedroom—of
course, he didn’t know about that, or he would have had it out with
Matt, no matter that Matt was a head taller. That was over two years
ago, now.
No, Leo still moved slowly, afraid to do anything that might push
her away. Even now. Even now, with the Comets coming, she was
absolutely safe stretched out on Leo’s bed.
Last year, Leo had gone away for most of the summer with his parents
to be with Leo’s grandmother in Philadelphia before she passed away,
which she’d finally done in the first week of September. That was when
Sarah discovered how much she missed having Leo around. She’d given him
the first real kisses when he returned. And she’d endured the razzing
from her friends at school about going with a nerd-boy.
Then Leo became the “famous” Leo Beiderman.
Strange how that happened: they’d been making the last observation of
their first year with the Astronomy club—over two years before, now.
Leo had asked her about going to that stupid party, trying to stop her,
and Mr. Peary had come down on them and started quizzing Leo. Maybe Leo
would have reported what he’d seen, but Sarah thought he wouldn’t have
thought about it enough to send the pictures to Dr. Wolf, at least,
right away. Leo had caught him off-balance, spotting something with
his sharp eyes and with his powerful new reflector—he’d spent six months
grinding the mirror, a very-old-fashioned thing for an amateur
astronomer to do in the nineties. Leo had seen the spot clearly enough
to see that it wasn’t a star. Certainly it wasn’t Megrez, Delta Ursae
Majoris, Sarah’s first guess—she’d known that as soon as she saw what it
was that he was looking at, though she couldn’t see as well, even
through Leo’s telescope; it was in the wrong position. But she ribbed
him about it, insisting that it was Megrez, until he eventually
explained in great detail why it wasn’t.
Leo had guessed it might be a comet, but heard nothing more of it until
the previous October, a little over a month after Sarah had really
started “going” with Leo. It was a comet, and they had named it
Wolf-Beiderman. They’d kept it a big secret because it looked like it
was going to hit the Earth.
But of course, they wouldn’t allow that to happen . . .
Sarah remembered how slowly Leo had taken her hand the night they
sat up with everyone else in the world waiting for news from the
Messiah. The huge Russian-American spacecraft had put a lander down on
the comet, and the crew was planting bombs inside it. Communication was
cut off by the coma, the cloud of material boiling off the sunlit side
of Leo’s comet.
They set the bombs and finally got off. One of the crew was killed;
one “injured” in some unspecified but obviously terrible way, because
command passed from him to the oldest astronaut on the mission. Then
they’d set off the bombs. And contact was lost again, this time
permanently.
And it hadn’t worked. The comet was split in two parts: a small one,
Beiderman; and a large one, Wolf. And both were still going to hit the
Earth.
The government had made other plans. They were going to fire off a
bunch of missiles the day before the comets arrived. But if that didn’t
work . . . they were building a big shelter in Missouri, underground,
called the National Ark. There would be room for a million people. Two
hundred thousand were picked for their skills or perhaps their fame;
eight hundred thousand would be picked in a lottery a six days before
Impact.
Leo’s family would be going. He was famous enough.
Sarah’s wouldn’t, unless they were lucky enough to win a place in
the lottery.
Lee High was supposed to have broken for the summer a week earlier, but,
as with many other high schools, there would be no summer vacation.
There were various justifications, but the real reason was pretty
obvious: they didn’t want a lot of kids running around with nothing to
do, adding to the growing chaos.
So, here they were, doing homework on a Thursday afternoon,
preparing for a future that did not seem very likely, now. Leo was at
his desk; Sarah stretched out on his bed.
Sarah set her book and notebook down on the floor. “Leo, what time
will your parents be back with Janey?”
“Oh, another couple hours, I guess. Maybe more; sometimes it takes
awhile to get through all the checkpoints.”
“Come over here.”
Vicky Hotchner couldn’t sleep, and she saw that her husband was still
awake. “Chuck?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think Sarah . . . ” She couldn’t quite finish the
question, but he would know what she meant.
After a moment of silence, he answered, “Yes.”
“What are you thinking of doing?”
Another moment of silence. “Nothing, I guess. What would be the
point?”
“They love each other, Chuck.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“No, of course not . . . I’m going to get Sarah some birth
control.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“We might live through this, Chuck.”
“Yeah. I guess we might. Go ahead, get her something. But don’t
tell her you told me.”
“Why?”
“I want to tell the Beiderman kid I know just before he leaves.
It’ll give me something to look forward to.”
“I don’t think Leo will leave without her, Chuck.”
“Maybe not . . . But would they let his family go without him?”
Nursery, Section Orange 254, C-Complex, The National Ark
3:35 AM CST
Tuesday, October 31, 2000
“I didn’t know,” said Ellen Beiderman. “I should have, but I didn’t
want to know. I’m not ashamed—”
“I’m ashamed I didn’t do it sooner,” said Sarah. “God, it was so
sweet. So right, so clean . . . That’s why I had to kill those
bastards, you know—all right, I don’t need to go there now . . . I
really didn’t know I was pregnant when Leo proposed. I wasn’t trying to
trap him . . . I’ve never had regular periods. If I’d known, no way I
wouldn’t have got on the bus. If only—”
“If only, if only. If only we hadn’t been hit by a comet. Stop
this, now, you’re only getting yourself upset.”
“No, that’s not true, I have to tell someone—I guess I should talk
to a shrink, but I’m afraid if I do they’ll take Charlie away from me.
I can’t tell Leo things like this; I have to be strong for him, or he’ll
spend all his time trying to take care of me.”
“Wouldn’t that be his job? Like it’s your job to take care of
him?”
Sarah smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was the first
since she’d put on the gorgon’s face. “Yes. But he doesn’t owe me
anything. I owe him everything.”
“You said you owed everything to Wanda when you started.”
“Yes, I did . . . and I do. I guess I owe Wanda more. Leo saved
me and Charlie. Wanda saved Leo and Charlie, her and her Dad. Leo and
Charlie are why I want to live, Mrs. Beiderman . . . In fact, after—Mrs.
Udall?”
Ellen turned toward the woman, who was wide awake. “How long have
you been awake? How much did you hear?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Not a word about this. If I hear one word, Karen, I’ll never
speak to you again.” Ellen got up. “Come, Sarah. If you can’t sleep,
at least lie down a couple of hours. He’s—my God, he’s fallen asleep.”
“That’s my Charlie. He never does quite what you expect.”
