Solitaire, p.32
Solitaire, page 32
“What?”
“At least I got to hear some of those things you've been keeping locked up.”
“That stuff I said about us—”
“Was true,” Snow said quietly. “Of course we can live without each other if we have to. I didn't kill myself when I thought you would be in prison forever and I won't die if you send me home in two weeks and tell me never to come back. I'll just want to die. But they aren't the same.” She sighed. “It's hard to know that. It's hard to even think about it. It would be better if we could figure things out.”
They sat like that until Jane returned with a tray of tea and honey and shortbread. Jackal sniffed at the mug Jane handed her.
“It's only tea,” Jane said, with most of her usual aplomb recovered.
“Right. Sorry.” It was hot and bracing, and she began to feel less like falling down or throwing up.
“I found this in the kitchen.” Jane held up a prescription bottle. “Her amobarbital. She is supposed to take it every day, but sometimes she doesn't. She probably gave you her regular dose, you should be fine once it wears off.”
“She functions on that? She must have the metabolism of a hummingbird.”
“Will you press charges against her?”
Jackal blinked, then looked to Snow. “She hurt you. Whatever you want to do, I'll go along with it.”
Snow very carefully rotated her arm through a small circle. Her voice shook a little when she spoke. “She's a fucking menace. She can't be allowed to just go around doing this to people.”
Jackal bit her lip. It broke her heart to think of Estar in prison. She wished that Snow was the kind of person who could march into Estar's bedroom and break her nose while she slept, as a way of evening the score.
Snow continued, “I don't know. I have a pretty good idea that if we call the police tonight, she'll spend the rest of her life in a box somewhere. I'm not sure…”She shrugged with her good shoulder.
“The responsibility is partly mine,” Jane said. “It's my job to prevent this.”
“I wish I'd listened to Scully,” Jackal said. “He was trying to tell me this might happen. And I told him I could handle it. I am ten different kinds of idiot.”
“This wasn't even about me. It's you she was trying to hurt,” Snow said to Jackal. “She was just using me to do it, like I was your favorite toy that she was going to break. That almost makes it worse, you know? I'm not even real to her.” She put a hand to Jackal's face. “And she's your friend. You say you'll back me up if I press charges, but how will you feel when they lock her up for the next sixty years?”
Jackal rubbed her eyes and told the truth. “I'll feel bad. And I feel bad that she hurt you.” Then, to Jane, “Assuming we don't do anything, what happens now?”
Jane handed her a piece of shortbread. “She'll wake. She'll remember that she's wronged you. She'll play loud music and refuse to eat. Then she will lock herself in her studio and paint something beautiful and bring it to you for a present. And then it's over for her.”
“She did that with Scully, didn't she?” Jackal guessed, remembering the cathedral of trees.
Jane raised an eyebrow. “Yes.”
“Great,” said Snow. “I get my arm yanked off and you get a present.” She began to cry.
“You should put some honey in your tea,” Jane said. “It's good for shock.”
“I don't want any damned honey. And I sure don't want an art collection from Estar Borja. Is she going to try something like this again?”
No one answered. They all drank more tea. Snow said, “Could someone please turn that damned music off?”
20
JACKAL PAID FOR PRIVATE TRANSPORT TO SNOW'S HOTEL; a cold, slow walk would have helped clear her head, but Snow was still shocky and needed a quiet, safe place to lie down. And a quiet, safe person: Jackal came upstairs without any discussion, and the only thing they said was “good night.” They slept tumbled together like socks in drawer. Jackal woke in the small hours and watched Snow sleep, her body still and loose under the blanket, her smell a mix of freesia and old warm leather. I love her, Jackal thought. I'm scared.
The next morning, they both treated Snow's arm as if it were likely to disintegrate at any second, until Jackal lobbed a bottle of shampoo at her and Snow stretched to catch it.
“There,” Jackal said, “it didn't fall off, or anything.”
Snow humphed, but she smiled as she dressed.
“Are you okay, really?” Jackal asked.
Snow shrugged. “No. Yes. I don't know.” She sat down on the bed, one sock in her hand. “I didn't know that my body could come apart that easy. That probably sounds weird.… Some moments, I had no idea what was happening. And other moments I was right there, focused and thinking. I was trying to figure out how to get my fingernail out.” She held up her left little finger. “I was visualizing sticking it into her eye, all the way up to the knuckle.”
Jackal sat down next to her. “Would you have?”
“I don't know. Would you?”
“I don't know if I could do it for myself. I hope I would always stop somebody from hurting you.”
“Sometimes you can't,” Snow said. “Sometimes you can't even stop yourself.” She studied Jackal for a moment. “I'll be okay,” she said, and kissed Jackal's cheek and then went back to putting her sock on.
Jackal walked back to Shangri-La and decided that it was a beautiful day even though it was cold; the weather was on the spiral toward full winter, and today was perhaps one of the last of the blue-and-orange days before the corner turned toward gray and brown and white.
There was an e-mail from Scully:
I heard about it from Jane. Are you and Snow okay?
She replied:
We're fine. Thank you. We'll come in tonight and tell you all about it.
Then she poured an enormous glass of orange juice and made herself two slices of buttered toast, and curled up in her chair to mourn for Estar, and to think things through.
They decided that Scully should hear the whole story, including the truth about Jackal's last year in VC. “He's your friend,” Snow said.
“Not to mention that he's Estar's friend too,” Jackal said. “I'd rather he heard about this from me.”
It was not quite four o'clock. Snow had “worked like a demon,” she told Jackal, to get through her meetings and leave the plant with a palmtop full of data to analyze. “They won't expect to see me again for a few days,” she said. “Let's go get drunk.” So they had turned up early at Solitaire to give themselves some conversational privacy with Scully.
“Jesus Christ,” was his first comment. He leaned on the counter and peered at Snow. “Are you sure you're okay?”
“I'm fine. As Jackal has already pointed out, my arm didn't fall off.”
“You should still go to the clinic.”
“I'll have it looked at when I get back to Ko.”
Scully made a face. “You're going back?” It was obvious he was making an effort not to glare at Jackal.
“We're working on it,” Snow said.
“What are you going to do about Estar?”
“Nothing right now,” Jackal said, checking Snow's face to make sure she had read the signals right. “I'm still thinking about dragging her out into the street the next time I see her and throwing her under a truck, but other than that…”
“I may come back from Ko with a gun,” Snow said. “A gun beats a knife every time.”
He nodded. “Wouldn't blame you.”
“It's weird,” Snow said. “There's one part of me that is so outraged, I want to hit her and hit her until she screams. And the other part of me knows she's already screaming. And she's Jackal's friend, and yours. It's hard to know what to do.”
“Isn't that the truth,” Scully said.
“Scully,” Jackal ventured. He looked at her. “I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about VC.”
He looked down. “I don't blame you. There wasn't much point. If you can't tell anyone how to do it, why should you put up with everyone being jealous?”
“It's not just that. I don't…I can't let them draft me into the research program and suck my brains out through my nose.”
“They might not. Anyway, it's only a two-year commitment.”
“Oh, come on. The whole goal of the project is to be able to customize the environment. I should know. They won't care how long the contract term is, they'll keep me as long as it takes. They'll threaten me with finishing my sentence in prison. Or now that it's an EarthGov program, they'll find some legal loophole about the greater good or some other happy bullshit, and I won't have any choice. I'll be eighty-five years old and still living in that building under Crichton's nose. No thank you, very much. The only reason I'm telling you is because we're friends and I thought you should know why Estar came after me. But you can't tell anyone.”
Scully nodded, but he looked unhappy.
“We can talk more about it later, if you want.”
He nodded again, and then stretched to the refrigerator for a new bottle of the chardonnay he'd poured the previous night for Snow. “Here you go. Come back whenever you're ready for that grilled cheese.”
They went up to the solo level and pulled two tables together in a corner. Jackal set a screen around them, and liberated a handful of candles from around the room.
Snow opened the wine with her little finger, and for a moment Jackal was back on Terry's Cliff, talking about people growing up to be themselves. She waited for Snow to pour the wine. Then she said, “I want to tell you some things, but I don't know how.”
“I want to hear them.” Snow looked at her with compassion. “But I can't say them for you.”
Jackal nodded. Took a deep breath. Drank some wine. “I'm scared,” she said finally.
“I know. But you're brave.”
“I'm not brave at all. If I was brave I probably wouldn't be here right now.”
Snow waited.
I don't know if I can do this, Jackal thought. She bent her head over her wine. Perhaps she should say that she needed more time to think. They could talk tomorrow. You're a fucking coward, she told herself; then like a clear, distant bell she heard her internal voice say
Do better. The answer welled up within her immediate and urgent. “I will,” she said out loud, “I will do better.”
And without pause, before Snow could ask what it meant, she began.
“Halloween last year—” she did not say, “the day with Tiger,” but both of them nodded as if she had “—my mother and I had a fight, the worst one ever, about me being assigned to Garbo. It was supposed to be her project, but Neill gave it to me, and when she found out it was his idea…she's always been so competitive about him. When I first started his workshop, she would ask what I was learning, and she always had a story about what happened when she'd been in that part of the training. It was all about how she'd been there first.” She frowned. “I think she wanted me to do well, but another part of her really minded when I did. Do you think so? Or am I crazy?”
“No.” Snow said. “I think she minded a lot. Your mother isn't much of a grown-up.”
“Anyway, that day she…” Jackal waved her hands, trying to find the right words, sloshing wine on the table. “She just went berserk. She said that I got everything I wanted, I was spoiled, I was taking opportunities away from other people.” She drank some wine, remembering clearly as she told it to Snow: the two of them in the office, Donatella's face twisted, breath hitching as she shouted
they give you everything and you're no more a Hope than I am!
Snow gasped. Jackal said, “I went completely cold. I said, what do you mean, and she told me they induced me to have me on time, but I was too late, and so everyone had lied all my life to give me opportunities that I didn't even deserve.”
She stopped and waited. Snow did exactly the right thing: she blinked once, twice, and then her eyes filled and she put her hand on Jackal's, saying, “Oh, honey, that must have hurt all the way through.”
Jackal said quietly, “I do love you,” and went on with the story. The complex stew of feelings that brought her up the Needle at Mirabile; the horror of the last moments before the screens shattered into static and the web was gone. The arrest and the trial. When she came to the deal with Arsenault, Snow hissed fiercely, “I knew it. I knew it was something like that. Those bastards. But why—” She stopped herself. “Never mind, that's side trip. I'm sorry. Please keep going.”
VC. Having told the story to Scully, she found more coherence to it this time, and she could see its powerful impact on Snow. She traced the first disorienting days, her systems and rituals, and the gradual descent into the time of the crocodile; fighting against madness; and finally crawling back from the edge of someplace maybe not too far from where Estar lived now. Snow drank it all in, her eyes wide.
Then it was time to talk about erasing things.
“I don't know how to begin this part. I don't know how to tell you this.” She gulped her wine, poured some more, and then said, simply, “I had to protect myself. The crocodile scared me so much. And I had to admit that my old life was over. I was never going to be the Hope or part of the web or part of Ko. I could either fight it or accept it. So I decided that if I was going to survive, I would have to let go of it all. I made a list in my head of everything that could hurt me, and I erased everything on the list. Just like wiping a white board.”
Snow said softly, “I don't understand.”
Jackal was so frightened: she wanted to shout, You should understand, what's the matter with you? Why do I have to spell it out for you? But she reached through the fear for the right words. “I disconnected myself from everything I cared about. I couldn't allow those things, those people, to hurt me anymore. I thought if I rubbed everything out of me.… So I did. All of it. I cut all ties. I put it all away. I made myself stop caring about everything because it was all done, all gone, and I was never going to get any of it back. And I only understood a long time afterward that I had gutted myself. But I didn't know what else to do. It was like that old joke about surgery, where it's successful but the patient dies. I cut away the web and Ko and my parents and Neill and everyone else I could think of.”
She stopped. Her throat felt too thick to talk. She stared down at the table miserably, at her own stupid hand on the stem of the glass.
“And me,” Snow said gently.
Jackal nodded. Tears dripped down onto the table. All I ever do is cry anymore, she thought. Boring, stupid Jackal. “You were the hardest. You wouldn't go away. I had to scour you out.” She sighed. “And I did. That's the thing. I did it. I scrubbed you out. I made you disappear. I went into Ko and was so happy by myself, without any of you. Then I came back to the real world and suddenly things weren't so simple anymore. But I had already…”
Silence. More tears on the table.
“Already what, honey?”
“I betrayed you,” Jackal said. “You would never have abandoned me like that. You didn't. Look at what you did for me; you went to Neill and you came all the way here even after I sent you that message. You fought so hard for me, and I just wiped you out and left you behind. I didn't hold on. And I couldn't tell you because you had come all this way, you told yourself ‘I know she loves me’ and you came. You trusted me to be the same, but I'm not, and I did this terrible thing and I let you go. And I still love you but there's this distance and I don't know if I can heal it. I don't know if I can undo what I did. And I think that makes me bad. I'm bad, Snow. How can you trust me to love you now?”
Snow was crying too. “You aren't bad,” she said. She shoved the wine bottle and the glasses aside so she could reach for Jackal's hands and hold them while she said, “You listen to me, Jackal Segura. You are not bad.” Jackal tried to pull her hands away, but Snow held tight. “Listen to me, damn it! I will always want you to survive. You do whatever you have to do. You hear me? Whatever it takes. If it means you have to drop half of Ko off the cliffs, then you do it. You were brave enough and strong enough to survive your own fear. That's an amazing thing. Look at what happened to Estar, and then look at you. You did fine.”
“But what I did to you—”
“Oh, bullshit. I wasn't there. You didn't do anything to me. But that doesn't mean you have to keep doing it. You're not alone now, and you don't have to kill me to save yourself.”
Snow let go of Jackal's hands and repositioned the bottle and glasses carefully, precisely.
