The man slowly eased backward and then turned to walk away.
I scrambled to spin my wheelchair and barreled toward the blue door. I jerked at the knob. It was locked. “Dad!” I called, rapping at the glass. He retreated in a languid, bow-legged stride and vanished around a corner. I rapped harder. “Dad!”
“He doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Jónína said.
“But that’s my father!” I said. “Dad! Come back!”
“He’s not your dad. That’s Orson Toomey.”
She was wrong. She had to be. He had just been looking at me and watching me. He knew me, too.
“What’s he doing here?” I demanded. “How long has he been here?”
“Since forever, I guess,” Jónína said. “Mom says Orson’s a genius. He doesn’t talk much. We leave him alone. He told me he likes my marmoset, though.”
I gave the doorknob another frantic tug. “You have to let me in there!” I said.
Jónína shook her head. “I don’t have a key. It’s private.”
“Does he live back there?” I asked.
“Usually, yes, unless he’s on a trip like my dad,” she said. “Some men like to live by themselves and be left alone. It’s just how they are.”
I spun to look at her, frowning at her maddening superiority. At that moment, a car pulled up audibly outside, and Jónína stepped to the window.
“People are coming,” she said, peering out. “Quick. This way. Out the back.” She seized my wheelchair and rattled me rapidly through the larger lab to a back exit.
“Take me out of your notebook,” I said. “Take me out, or your mom will find out you let me in here. You’ll get in trouble.”
“I can’t take things out. That would be lying to myself.”
I gripped her shirt and yanked her close to me. Her eyes bulged in startled fear.
“Then lie,” I said fiercely. “Grow up.”
I pushed her away and wheeled rapidly outside. I raced my chair along the cliffside path, expecting any second to hear a voice call after me, but none came, and I wheeled up the wooden ramp to the terrace of the main clinic. There I paused, out of breath, and pressed a hand to my face.
My father. Could it really be him? But he was dead. He’d gone missing in action a dozen years before. The military had declared him presumed dead back when I turned six. I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. That man, Orson Toomey, looked exactly like I remembered my father, only older. Hope soared in me, then crashed in confusion. My father couldn’t be alive. He certainly wouldn’t have any reason to be here.
Yet Orson had looked at me with open deliberation, as if he knew me. But I looked like Althea now. Even if Orson was somehow my father, he couldn’t know the girl in this body was his daughter Rosie.
Unless he did know.
Unless he’d been involved with putting me in this new body.
It was too much to take in. Too utterly crazy-making. I suddenly recalled the nights here at the clinic when I’d sensed someone hovering outside my bedroom door. That was Orson, too. I knew it was. He’d been checking on me. My hope careened and dive-bombed again. If Orson truly was my dad, he had years of absence to account for. Any decent man who’d survived the war and turned up alive would have contacted me and my mother long ago. He would have come home to Doli to find us and be with us.
But he hadn’t. Like he didn’t care.
It didn’t fit. My dad used to walk with me on the old train tracks near our home, hand in hand. He helped me balance my bare feet on the rusty, sun-warmed metal of the rail. We would stop to pick blue cornflowers and practice whistling, and when I grew tired, he’d carry me home on his shoulders. I had missed my dad for so long that I didn’t believe it was possible to ache for him again in a new way, but the little kid in me broke apart all over again.
“Really, Dad?” I whispered to the gray sky.
Loss spilled out of my heart. It used to be that my sweet, lovable dad was dead—terribly, honorably dead. Now, instead, he was alive, but he’d abandoned Ma and me. Worst of all, he worked with Dr. Fallon, and by extension, with Dean Berg.
Any way I looked at it, my dad was my enemy.
14
THEA
SEEDS
WITHIN A FEW HOURS, the jar I stole went black inside. The tiny lights vanished, and the murky substance congealed into a thick, putrid mess. I’d killed it. Chagrined, I wrapped the jar in a paper towel, concealed it in a box of tissues, and hid the box in the back of my closet. There it festered, the black heart of my anxiety, while I tried to pretend everything was normal.
All that day, I tried to figure out the best way to confront Orson. I had to hear him admit he was my father. Every instinct told me I had to get to him on the sly, but my hours were full, and it was impossible to sneak away in my wheelchair. My parents lingered in my room after dinner, gossiping amiably about whatever while I silently plotted.
“Don’t you think, Althea?” Madeline said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I was just saying we could add an elevator off the library back home,” Madeline said. “It would make it easier for you to get around once we go back.”
“An elevator?” I asked. What kind of house had an elevator? A big one.
She reached to pat my hand. “You seem a little testy,” she said. “Is there something we should know? Are you feeling all right?”
“Of course I am,” I snapped. “I’m just ready to get out of this place.”
Madeline set her lips in a line, then nodded. “We should probably let you rest.”
She led a prayer, and then they kissed me good night. After they left, Chimera settled into its night routine. I was curled in my bed, conserving strength, waiting for the right opportunity to leave my room, when a faint shuffling noise came by my door. I recognized it immediately.
“Come in,” I whispered.
The quiet unspooled while I waited, watching for Orson. The door was ajar, but not enough for me to see much of the hallway. I heard a soft footstep and then, just below the upper hinge of the door, in the narrow crack, I saw a shadow and the hint of an eye.
I bolted up. “I see you! Come in!” I called.
The shadow vanished. I pushed off my bed. Bracing myself on the wall, I staggered to the door and threw it fully open. Down the hallway, Orson was striding away in a long brown coat.
“Orson, wait!” I called after him.
He glanced over his shoulder and kept going, faster.
I lurched after him, hanging on to the hallway bannister.
Ida came quickly from the nurse’s station. “What’s wrong? Where are you going?” she asked.
“I have to talk to that man,” I said.
She looked over her shoulder and then back to me. “Althea, please. This isn’t safe. You could fall,” she said.
I pulled free of her and struggled a few steps farther, but then, with a bing, the elevator door opened, and Dr. Fallon came out.
“Althea!” she said. “Just the person I was coming to see.”
I backed against the wall. Not good. This was not good. She didn’t normally come around at night, and she never came dressed in scrubs.