One guy in particular, she says offhandedly, was “totally in love” with Nico.
“Oh,” I say, suddenly changing my mind, suddenly wishing I had my notebook, some notebook, something. “What guy?”
“Tick,” she says.
“Tick.” Strange looking. Nervous disposition. “Did she reciprocate?”
“Ugh. No.” Jean makes a face, breathes out a tiny gale of fluttery sorority-sister laughter. “No interest. He looked like a—a horse, really. Plus he was sort of with this other girl, Valentine. But he would always make these jokes about Nico.”
“Valentine?”
“That’s her code name. Whatever. She’s so pretty. Black girl, really tall.”
Atlee saw her. I know of her already, and now I can put a name on the description. It’s so odd, to start to feel like I know these people, this world, the last one my sister lived in before she died.
“What kind of jokes did Tick make?”
“Oh, my God. I mean. Adam and Eve? Like, you know. If the plan didn’t work. If we had to go under. He and Nico were going to be like Adam and Eve. It was—gross.”
“Gross,” I say. I squeeze my eyes shut to capture the information, keep everything on file. “Hey, here’s a question for you. Did Nico have one of these code names?”
“Oh,” says Jean, and laughs. “She didn’t use it much. She thought the whole thing was sort of stupid. But her code name was Isis.”
“Isis?” My eyes pop open. “Like the Bob Dylan song?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Is that where it’s from?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, that’s where it’s from.”
I savor this small pleasant factoid for a moment, half a moment, before we press on into the hard part of this. It’s going to get rough now, but it has to. Time is passing. There is nowhere else to go in this conversation but forward.
“So, Jean,” I say. “So Hans-Michael Parry never turned up. And a decision was made.” I look her in the eyes. “Astronaut made a decision.”
“I’m tired,” says Jean. She sets down her cup so fast that it tips over and the water rolls out. “I’m ready to stop.”
“No,” I say, and she flinches. “You just listen. Listen. Parry never showed up. And once everyone realizes it’s not happening, Astronaut makes the decision to relocate underground. To move everything downstairs. Jean?”
She opens her mouth to answer but the jackhammer abruptly roars down the hall, and her face constricts with fear and she closes her mouth just as the machine goes silent again.
“Jean? Was that his plan?”
“His plan,” she says, and then she shudders, violent but slow, like a theatrical enactment of a shudder: her face and then her neck and then her back and then her torso, a wave of revulsion rolling down the length of her body. “His plan.”
“Lily?”
“That’s not my name,” she says.
“Oh, God, Jean. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t want her to go. I told her not to.”
“What?”
“Nico. We’re going down, we’re making the last trips, and she goes, she goes, ‘I’m taking off.’ ”
“To go get Parry on her own.”
“Right,” says Jean. “Yes.”
“So this was what time?”
She looks up, confused. “What time?”
I know it’s after Nico and Astronaut have their argument in the hallway, and it’s before Atlee closes up the floor at 5:30. “Is this about five o’clock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s say it’s five o’clock. She tells you she’s leaving and you did what?”
“I mean, I told her it was insane.” She shakes her head, and for an instant I see reflected in her eyes this incredulous exasperation that I myself have felt a thousand times, trying to tell Nico anything she doesn’t want to hear. “Just—useless. I said, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we can all be together? At least that, you know? Be together.”
“But she went anyway.”
“She did. We brought everything down, and I didn’t think she would really go, but then everyone was like—she’s gone. She was gone.”
“And you followed her?”
“I—” She stops; her brow furrows; her eyes well up with confusion. “I—did.”
I stand up. “Jean? You followed her.”
“Yes. I had to, see? I had to. She’s my friend.”
I’m leading her as far out into this memory as she’ll go, I’m holding her hand and leading her out on the slippery rocks toward the dangerous water. “You had to stop her from leaving, but then there was someone else. Someone followed you. Jean?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do, Jean. Yes, you do.”
Her mouth drops open, and her eyes widen, and then she shakes her head again, she stares forward into the air between us. “I don’t remember.”