? ? ?
Pace University is a utilitarian concrete box that looks more like an insurance company than a hallowed hall of learning. I would never have guessed it was a college if not for the weather-beaten metal letters on its central tower, several of which have come loose and are spinning crazily in the wind. The effect is oddly mesmerizing, like the building is struggling to decide what it is.
A desperate shout startles me back to attention. I see Abram sprinting toward the main entrance, where a few Axiom guards are loading a crowd of children into an old city bus. The bus is covered in faded decals from some old Discovery Channel promo, the doors made to look like the jaws of a shark. I see two familiar heads of hair disappearing into it: curly blond and straight blue-black. Then the jaws snap shut.
I run faster than I have since I ran to stop a disaster, to save my home and my friend from the madness I helped create. I wasn’t fast enough then. My cold, stiff joints resisted my efforts, and I arrived just in time to feel the explosion like a slap of rebuke. I am faster now, fast enough to overtake Abram, but will the result be any different?
I stop my sprint by slamming into the door. “Open it!” I shout at the driver.
“Hey,” one of the guards says, striding toward me with his rifle swinging at his hip. “This bus isn’t for citizens. Back up.”
“My kids are in there.”
“If they’re in that bus, they’re our kids.”
Abram slams into him from behind, sending him sprawling onto the pavement and his rifle spinning under the bus. The engine grumbles and the bus moves forward. I hear Abram wrestling with the guard but I can’t help him now. I hammer my elbow into the door until the Plexiglas panel pops out of its frame. I reach inside and fumble for the door-open lever, but the bus is accelerating. It’s either let go or be dragged.
I wriggle my arm free and fall to the pavement. I catch a glimpse of their faces pressed to the windows as the bus rolls past me, Joan and Alex and their new friend Sprout, and then they’re gone.
What must my children think of me? Since the day they were thrust into my care, I have abandoned them twice: first to go out into the world and follow my heart, to fall in love and learn how to live, and then because their needs overwhelmed me. Because I was too busy fighting myself to protect anyone else. And now that I’ve come back, now that I’m doing all I can to give them the life they deserve . . . nothing but terror and peril, again and again.
Is this the mind of every parent? This storm of guilt and uncertainty in spite of all good intentions? Did my own father feel this heartbreak as he sat in that chair sucking in smoke, feeling past generations of failure coursing through his veins? Wondering dimly what could break that heavy chain?
I hear Abram screaming obscenities as the bus disappears, as the guards back away with a gun pointed at each of us, as they climb into their Hummer and screech off after the bus. For a moment, all five of us stand motionless, trapped in the space between courage and suicide. Then I realize there are only four of us.
“Julie!”
I whirl around to find her running down a side street toward what must be the hospital. I should have expected this. She will run through the halls screaming her mother’s name until her bronchial tubes seize, until she collapses or the building does. The promise she made her mother is the very one her mother broke all those years ago, and I have no doubt she’ll throw her life away to keep it.
I run after her, my long legs eating up the distance. She sees me coming and looks ready to struggle, but then she notices I’m not stopping her. I’m not trying to talk sense into her or convince her to give up what I know she can’t. I’m just running alongside her, ready to catch her if she falls.
A hint of gratitude warms the panic in her face. Gratitude and more. Then a blur of white roars around the corner and we are underwater.
? ? ?
I’m spinning, rolling, battered by chunks of debris, then I’m scraping along the street like it’s a stony riverbed. The wave finally spreads itself thin enough for me to plant my feet and I stagger upright. The filthy froth boils against my thighs as I scan frantically for Julie.
I can’t find her.
I can’t find anyone. I have been washed into some unknown avenue in the shadow of some unknown high-rise, and I feel the weight of it pushing down on me, thousands of tons of concrete looming like a gravestone with no name. Here lies a body. Here lies nobody.
“Julie!”
We were side by side; how could we have drifted so far? Did she grab hold of something I missed or did she tumble far past me?
“Julie!” I call again but the wind stuffs it back in my mouth. I hear a crash behind me and I turn, and that’s when I see the wall.