I stood naked in the bathroom, my clothes already sealed for incineration and the tub filling with hot water and a capful of Doc Von Braun’s Ultraviolet Bubble Bath for Kids™ while Mom tugged at the jagged ends of my hair where the ponytail had been ripped away.
“I sure hope Claudia can do something with this mess,” she said, sighing.
“I like it this way.”
“When the other kids start making fun of the way you look, you won’t like it at all, cara.”
I climbed into the deep purple bath, held my breath and sank below the surface, letting the bubbles mop up all those nasty alpha and beta particles with “a zesty candy fruit scent kids love,” according to the label. I soaked for a full fifteen minutes, until my skin stopped tingling, just like it said on the bottle, then dried off with a ShipKids® Exfoliation Towel. Mom dusted me down with AntiRad Atomic Girl Talcum Powder, just to be on the safe side.
After I’d dressed in my ShipCo Kids Club uniform (yellow skirt, spangled blue shirt, red ankle socks), Mom sent me next door to have my hair styled by Mrs. Donato. She and Mom had come to Canada at the same time, two little girls crossing the ocean to New York City, where Mom’s mom had lived for a time, aboard the good ship L’America. Their friendship, if you can call it that, was formed as the two of them hung over the railing to vomit into the waves. It was later cemented by the trauma of being herded with their mothers into the Great Hall at Ellis Island. Under a giant American flag, they were told that they couldn’t stay because America had enough Italians, thank you very much, but there was a cold country to the north, run by the Queen, who might just agree to take them in. After all that drama, Mom and Claudia Donato had little choice but to become lifelong friends.
Whatever Mom did, Mrs. Donato did it, too. Babywise, Mom got a head start with Linda, but when she got pregnant again with me, Mrs. Donato caught up by having twins. When Mom named me after her favourite movie star, Debbie Reynolds, Mrs. Donato one-upped her by christening her daughters Judy-Garland and Jayne-Mansfield.
Over endless lines of laundry (diapers, housedresses, aprons, girdles, their husbands’ oily workpants and dusty overalls), Mrs. Donato told Mom that her girls were going to be majorettes. Mom responded that Linda would be a classically trained musician and I, a tap dancer, like my namesake. Sure enough, Linda ended up studying violin, and Judy-Garland and Jayne-Mansfield became the top two baton twirlers in Shipman’s Corners (junior drum majorette division), winning the Queen of the Majorettes competition two years in a row. I, on the other hand, turned out to be as musically gifted as a fence post, flunking out of tap at age six.
* * *
When I got to the Donato house, Judy-Garland and Jayne-Mansfield were sprawled in front of the RCA colour console watching Doc Von Braun’s Amazing World of Tomorrow, one of the children’s shows pumped over the border like oil. Standing at her ironing board in a black slip and high heels, Mrs. Donato squinted at the screen through eyes reddened by contact lenses and cigarette smoke. In his stiff Prussian accent, a famous scientist was explaining how we’d get to the moon after Earth blew up: “Und now Goofy and Pluto vill enter zee Mercury rocket . . . but look, zey are veightless!”
“Boring old Kraut, he’s a pushier snake oil salesman than the Fuller Brush Man,” Mrs. Donato muttered around her du Maurier. “Okay, honey, let’s see if we can turn this mess into a pixie cut. We’ll give you the French girl artist look. Very sophisticated. How’d it get hacked off, anyway?”
I told her about being in the Z-Lands, on the job with Dad, and getting caught in the fence. I felt her fingers quickly lift from my scalp.
“Cara, you decontaminated at home, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “Fifteen minutes, just like the bottle says.”
Mrs. Donato grunted her approval, pushing my chin to my chest to trim the stump of my amputated ponytail. Once that was done, she backcombed the crown of my head, teasing my hair into a poofy dome not unlike her own. She emptied half a can of Final Net over it to turn it into a helmet.
“It ain’t great, but it’ll do for the picnic,” said Mrs. Donato, taking a drag on her cigarette. “Tell your daddy to leave the haircuts to me next time.”
I glanced up at her through a cloud of smoke. We both knew that Dad’s job involved doing a lot worse things than cutting off a ponytail.
Afterwards, Mrs. Donato shooed me home while she backcombed the twins’ hair into towering beehives.
Crossing the yard to home, past the vines where my grandfather, Nonno Zinio, was setting up a scarecrow to keep birds off the ripening grapes, I noticed right away that something was wrong: Mr. Holub was there, talking to Mom and Linda in the driveway. His car was parked out front. I didn’t see Dad anywhere. Worry radiated off Mom like heat waves.
“No Carlo, no car,” I heard Mr. Holub say as I walked up. “We get to the roadway, it blocked by gate. Shut and locked up tight.”
“I’d better call the plant,” said Mom.
Despite it being a Saturday morning and a long weekend, Dad’s boss answered her call right away. He said: Don’t panic. They would find Dad. No need to get all het up. In the meantime, it was very important that Linda, Mom and I go to the company picnic. Act like nothing unusual was going on. Because nothing unusual was going on. Dad was lost or maybe confused, that was all. To be expected. Stress of the job. Sometimes a guy just needs time alone to think things through. They’d call the company medic, just in case Dad needed a little something to help him relax when he finally showed up. Maybe he should take up golf. Or book a few comfort meetings with one of the ShipCo Snugglegirls, if Mrs. Biondi had no objections. Most wives of managers at the senior command-level were more than happy to delegate their husbands’ tension relief to skilled professionals, leaving the wives with more energy for their bridge clubs and volunteer work.
Just before hanging up, he asked Mom a question: was there any reason for her husband to desert his family on purpose? Mom was left speechless by that one.
After she hung up the phone, Mom stood staring out the kitchen window for a long time, then washed a sinkload of dishes she’d already washed. Linda and I sat at the table, doing one another’s nails, keeping an eye on Mom while we waited for her to snap out of it. Eventually, she made coffee for the three of us, sat down at the table and told Linda and me, word for word, what Dad’s boss had said.
“But Mom, we can’t just go off to the picnic without Dad,” said Linda, wiping tears. “People will ask questions.”
Mom held up her hands wearily. “I know, cara, but if Dad’s commanding manager says go, we go. You drive us in the Morris. I’m too upset to be behind the wheel. And not a word to Nonna Peppy or Nonno Zin.”
At Plutonium Park, the picnic was in full swing. Mom went off to the tent where the women were dropping off their cakes and casseroles and Jell-O salads. Linda and I bought a string of tickets for carousel rides at a card table set up in front of the cenotaph, a huge black granite bomb with Cadillac fins hung in mid-plummet on almost-invisible steel wires. Behind it stood an older stone statue of a soldier fainting into the arms of an angel. TO OUR GLORIOUS DEAD read the faded inscription beneath the soldier’s boots, followed by a list of Shipman’s Corners men who had laid down their lives in two world wars. The angel and the soldier were overshadowed by the big stone bomb. Its plaque read:
TO OUR RADIANT DEAD
In honour of the gallant machine operators
of ShipCo (Canusa division, Shipman’s Corners unit)
who answered the call of industry
to build nuclear arms for peace.
May the Almighty Manager grant them eternal rest.
* * *
At the carousel, a bulky-shouldered boy was tearing tickets and boosting kids up onto painted horses frozen in mid-gallop. He was wearing a ShipCo Schooners baseball cap over his crewcut and a shirt buttoned to his neck, despite the heat. When Linda and I tried to hand him our tickets, he shook his head.
“No charge for you, gorgeous. Little sister rides free, too.”
His eyes kept walking up and down Linda, catching on her like fish hooks, his smile a lure. With blond, blond hair and dark, dark eyes, he was what my sister and her friends called “a hunk,” except for one thing: his left ear ended in a chunk of ugly scar tissue. Amputations weren’t unusual in an industrial town like ours, but most people lost limbs, not parts of their head. I couldn’t stop staring at the pink worm of flesh coiled below his ear canal.
Linda made a little noise in her throat like a hum. “Giving us special treatment hardly seems fair to the other customers.”
The blond boy shrugged. “Life isn’t fair, is it? You’re not like the rest of them. You two are exceptional. No charge.”
I could feel Linda hesitating, until the boy boosted me into the saddle of a horse with flared nostrils. “There you go, little sister. Best seat on the merry-go-round.”
Linda let the boy put his arms around her waist and sit her sidesaddle on the black charger beside me.
“He’s crazy about you,” I whispered to Linda.
“He’s just a carnie,” she said.
“Did you see his earlobe?”
“Maybe a dog bit it off,” said Linda.
Impaled on poles, the carousel horses slowly began to drop and rise to the sound of a tinny pipe organ:
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.
I’m half crazy all for the love of you.
I rode a white horse with a gold bridle; Linda rode a black horse with a silver bridle, plunging ahead and falling back in an endless race. Like the good and bad sisters in a fairy tale. The younger sister is always the good and beautiful one, the one who gets to marry the prince and live in the castle, leaving the jealous older sister with the wicked stepmother. I liked to remind Linda of this story. I said it could be about us, because we were sort of like princesses, since our father was the Decontamination Supervisor of Shipman’s Corners.
When a siren sounded the end of the ride, the blond boy came back to lift me down.
“Another ride?”
Linda shrugged. “Maybe later.”
“My name’s Billy. I’m off in an hour. Buy you a soda?”
Linda shrugged again. “We’ll see.”
“See you later, gorgeous,” said Billy, and he flashed us a two-fingered V. The anarchist’s salute.
“Your boyfriend’s a Yammer,” I whispered to Linda.
“Shut up,” she responded.
We walked away from the carousel, past a pink gazebo reserved for a troop of Snugglegirls costumed as cheerleaders, French maids and Shetland ponies. Employed by ShipCo, the girls were always on duty during family picnics, in case any managing executives required tension relief. Mom had repeatedly warned us not to stare at the Snugglegirls, but I glanced in anyway. They were lounging around a table, smoking and playing cards. In a tent not far away, Mom and the other mothers were setting out platters of hot dogs in buns like rows of babies swaddled in puffy white blankets. By some unspoken agreement, the ShipCo Snugglegirls ignored the ShipCo wives, and vice versa, even though they were always stationed side by side at the company picnics.
Linda stopped outside the mothers’ tent and glanced casually back at the carousel, where the carnie was still lifting kids onto horses.
“Why don’t you run along and find your friends?” she suggested.
“So you and Romeo McAnarchy can be alone?” I teased her.
“You are such a brat,” she said, letting go of my hand.
I watched my sister disappear into the crowd. It felt good to be on my own. Now I not only looked like a boy, I felt free to act like one, too. I pressed on the top of my head, trying to flatten the poofy helmet of hair as I walked to the playground where the Donato twins were playing Fallout Shelter under the high slide. Judy-Garland waved an aluminum pistol in the air.
“Let’s pretend to shoot people who try to get into our shelter,” she suggested.
“Why not just let them in?” I asked.
Judy-Garland snorted. “You dummy, you’d run out of food. You have to look out for number one.”
These words sounded straight out of the mouth of the twins’ father, Al Donato. I’d heard him say pretty much the same thing at a barbecue a week earlier. Dad had argued with him: “You want to stay alive when everyone else dies? What kind of a world would that be?”
“You kiddin’? Someone has to re-people the world,” Mr. Donato said, grinning and grabbing Mrs. Donato’s bottom while she was handing him a beer. She smacked his hand, but she was smiling.
Dad had looked away, embarrassed.
I was arguing with the twins over whose turn it was to have the gun in our game of Shoot the Neighbours when a policeman and a nurse walked up. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like. All I saw were two uniforms.
“Miss Debbie Biondi?” asked the nurse, with a bright smile. She was wearing a white dress, white stockings, white Oxford shoes and a stiff white hat with little meringue wings.
I raised my hand. “That’s me.”
“Come with us, miss, please,” said a tall skinny body in a blue uniform that smelled sharply of solvents, as if it had just been dry-cleaned. The policeman wore a silver badge reading OFFICER SMITH, #ABC123. He took my right hand. The nurse took my left.
I had a wild idea that I should twist out of the grown-ups’ hands and start running, just as Dad had said to do when we left the Z-Lands. I shook that idea out of my head. I was a good girl with a boy’s haircut and a missing father, heading off with two unknown authority figures. What could possibly happen?
“Did they find my dad?” I asked as we walked away from the playground.
“Still looking,” said the policeman in a monotone.
“What’s your favourite ice cream?” asked the nurse, a smile in her voice.
I looked up at her. “Butterscotch.”
“Well, honey, you’re in luck. Where we’re going, there’s a whole tub full of Scutterbotch with your name on it.”
“Underlying conditions,” muttered the policeman in his dead-sounding voice.
“Oh, yes, of course,” said the nurse. “Honey, you look like a healthy young girl. You don’t have any, oh, let’s call them ‘troubles’?”
My slick-soled shoes slipped on the grass as the two of them hurried me along. Off in the distance, I could hear the tinny sound of “Daisy, Daisy” again. I suddenly wished I were sitting on a horse in full gallop. “What kind of troubles?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you need to take needles for sugar? Or you get sick when you have your friend?”
The policeman grunted impatiently. “Get to the point. Is she bleeding? Affects blood pressure, sweat glands, all that.”
“There’s no need to be crude,” the nurse told him, the smile gone from her voice.
I shook my head. “I’m invulnerable.”
The nurse gave a funny little laugh, as if she was worried about something. The policeman grunted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I got the U-shot. Nothing can hurt me now,” I told them.
“Isn’t that nice,” said the nurse vaguely. The policeman tightened his grip on my hand.
We reached the brick building that housed the park’s snack bar, shut tight for the season. As the policeman unlocked the door, I stared at the giant cardboard strawberry ice cream cone stuck to the outside. We went into a room with lumpy white walls, then through it into another room with a grey metal door and no windows. Rakes and shovels hung from hooks along the wall. Once the door to the second room was closed, I couldn’t hear anything from outside anymore, not even the music from the carousel. The lights in the room were twilight-dim.
The nurse sat me down in a straight-backed wooden armchair, the kind you’re sent to when you’re in the principal’s office, next to a table with a box on it, wires hanging down. The box was bright pink with blue polka dots and glowed palely in the gloom. The top of the box was full of knobs and dials, like a shortwave radio or the cockpit of a jet. I’d seen pictures of both in magazines with names like MEN and Action! that Dad left stacked in the bathroom.
“What’s that thing?” I wasn’t scared yet, but it was starting to dawn on me that maybe I should be.
“Have you ever heard of a polygraph, honey?” asked the nurse.
I shook my head.
“A lie detector,” said the policeman. “This here’s a special one, just for kids. So we know which of you are naughty and which are nice.”
He laughed at his own joke. The nurse glared at him.
“It’s a machine that shows us if you’re telling the truth,” explained the nurse.
“How’s it do that?” I eyed the machine with growing fear. The electrical wires reminded me of the barbed-wire fence.
“It picks up signals from your body. It shows us if you’re getting all tensed up and scared, the way people do when they’re lying,” said the nurse. “See that graph there? It jumps when you get scared. That’s when it knows you’re lying.”
“Don’t tell her how to beat it,” growled the policeman.
“I’m not; I’m simply explaining to the child,” said the nurse. I could tell by her tone of voice that she didn’t like him.
They slid my arm into a sleeve, like the one at the doctor’s office, right up to my armpit. The nurse pumped a little rubber ball attached to it and the sleeve went tight. She stuck wires on the tips of two of my fingers, then pulled a strap tight around my chest. The nurse said that Pat Boone had a lie detector just like this one in his own home to keep his kids honest. Every time they did something bad and he thought they were lying, he hooked them right up to the machine to sort things out.
“Who’s Pat Boone?” I asked.
“He’s a world-famous operatic tenor! Kids these days,” the nurse said, sighing, as if only a juvenile delinquent wouldn’t know who Pat Boone was. For a crazy moment, I thought he might be the Trespasser’s secret identity. Stall for time, I told myself. That’s what captive girls always did in comic books while waiting for a superhero to show up.
I said, “The strap around my chest is too tight. It hurts.”
The nurse laughed her phony laugh again. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”
The policeman sat down at the table across from me, loosened his tie and switched on a metal gooseneck lamp, illuminating a gauge that looked a lot like the one on Dad’s Geiger counter. I tried not to stare at him. I’d seen police only on TV shows. We didn’t have any cops in Shipman’s Corners. ShipCo looked after all the troublemakers.
“Let’s get a base line,” said the policeman. “What’s your name, girl?”
“Debbie,” I said.
“State your full name,” he said, louder than before. I figured this meant the test was starting for real now.
“Debbie Reynolds Biondi.”
The nurse clapped her hands. She was watching the needle on the gauge move. “Very good! You’re telling the truth! See how easy it is?”
“Who was with you in the Z-Lands?” asked the policeman.
“Linda. Dad,” I said. Then I remembered the Trespasser. Did he even count?
The nurse shook a finger at me. “Somebody’s fibbing.”
“I’ll repeat the question,” said the policeman.
I didn’t wait for him. “There was a guy in the canal. A trespasser,” I said. “But I don’t know who he was.”
Silence. “That doesn’t sound like a true memory,” said the nurse.
“The polygraph says it is,” said the policeman. “What happened next?”
“The Geiger counter made a lot of clicks and Dad said to leave. I got stuck on the barbed wire so he cut off my hair. Then we drove away real fast and got a flat. He said for me and Linda to run home while he fixed it.”
“What did your dad tell you about the clicks?”
“That he was surprised ’cause it hadn’t been that high since ’55.”
“What did he mean by ‘high’?”
I thought about this. “I don’t know. The, like, counts. The radioactive stuff, I guess.”
“Did you or your sister, or the two of you together, hurt your dad?”
“No!”
“No? No what?”
I sat for a moment in confusion, hearing his question as know what?
The nurse said, “Where are your manners, honey? When you speak to Officer Smith, you call him ‘sir.’”
The policeman leaned in close. His face smelled like wood chips and salt. Officer Smith used the same aftershave as Dad.
He asked, “Are you or your sister a member of the Youth Anarchy Movement, also known as ‘Yammers’?”
“No, sir.”
The nurse clucked her tongue. “Watch your tone, missy.”
“Did you tell anyone else about this?” asked the policeman.
I wasn’t prepared for this question. I remembered Kendal and me on the stoop. How he said kids shouldn’t be expected to keep grown-up secrets.
“No, sir,” I repeated.
“You’re lying, Debbie,” said the policeman.
“No, I’m not.”
“You just lied again, Debbie. Twice in under thirty seconds. Not nice. If you want to go home — ever — you’d better start telling the truth. Otherwise, I could find you a nice little hole in the ground where you can sit in the dark until you’re an old woman. I know the perfect one. We’ll feed you, keep you alive and give you plenty of company. You like slugs and worms?”
I started to cry. I had a particular fear of worms and slugs.
“Now, now,” said the nurse, handing me a box of tissues.
“I told a boy,” I sobbed.
“What’s his name? Where does he live?”
Feeling sick to my stomach, I told them about John Kendal. Meanwhile, the policeman pulled a shiny black-and-white picture out of a manila envelope. He put it on the table in front of me.
“Now, let’s get back to the intruder you saw in the Z-Lands. Is this the individual?”
I stared at the photograph of a good-looking young man in an industrial army uniform. A Corporal Pipefitter, judging by the crossed wrench insignia on his collar. His fair hair was buzzed into a crewcut. He wasn’t the Trespasser, but he sure looked familiar.
“No,” I said.
“You know him?”
I stared at the picture. The young man’s head angled to one side, but I could still make out a lumpy knot of tissue dangling from one ear. He was Linda’s carnie, Billy. If I told the truth, would they punish her along with him?
“Maybe,” I said slowly.
“From where?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What a fibber,” clucked the nurse.
Before the policeman had a chance to ask another question, Dad’s boss walked into the room. He was wearing a plaid tie, just like the one Dad had on that morning, with the little red tie bar that told everyone he was a senior officer. He smiled at me unconvincingly.
“How’s it going?” he asked the policeman.
The policeman told Dad’s boss about Kendal. “We should get that kid in here, pronto.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” said Dad’s boss, smoothing his tie. “There are better ways. Got a widowed mother to support. We can use that.” He gave me his el-fake-o smile again. “Your dad’s fine, dear. He’ll be home to tuck you into bed tonight. You believe me, right, kiddo?”
“Yes, sir,” I said in a small voice.
The polygraph needle jumped. I might as well have called Dad’s boss a liar to his face, but he patted me on the shoulder.
“That’s all right, you’re a good girl. Off you go now. Have fun at the picnic.”
“Not finished, sir,” said the policeman. “The girl saw an intruder. Might be a known anarchist. We should get her to dig into that memory. Dotty here could give her a light injection of truth serum to move things along. And we’re still trying to track down the kid’s sister for interrogation.”
“Check the manual. She’s a minor. There are limits,” said Dad’s boss. “As for the sister, forget it. We’ve got what we need.”
The policeman shrugged. “Your funeral,” he said to Dad’s boss, then turned to me. “Don’t tell anyone about this. We don’t want to have to bring you back in or put you in that place I told you about before.”
The nurse nodded. “That certainly would be a shame.”
And just like that, the nurse unhooked me from the machine and bustled me out the door. My knees felt all jangly, like a broken walking doll. In the outer room, the nurse told me to wait. She opened a cupboard door. Inside, there was a little freezer. I watched her lean into it and dig around. Over her shoulder, she said, “You’re an exceptional girl, Debbie; you cried only once. So I’m giving you two scoops.”
I could hear the carousel. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true . . .
“Scutterbotch. Double scoop. As promised,” said the nurse, handing me an ice cream cone. “All better now?” She opened the door and pushed me outside, slamming it behind me.
I felt queasy, my jaw stiff, as if I might throw up. I walked jerkily to a garbage bin and tossed in the ice cream cone. Then I started running. I’m not sure where I thought I was going. I wanted to tell someone what had happened to me, but who? If I told Linda, they’d put her in a hole for the rest of her life. Mom, too. Maybe all three of us. The only person I knew I could tell — had to tell — was Kendal. To warn him. Because they knew that he knew what happened in the Z-Lands. If they stuck him in a hole in the ground, it would be all my fault.
It was starting to get dark. A crowd was gathered at the bandstand just ahead of me, but somehow they seemed far, far away. Shivering despite the warm evening, I made myself walk toward them, past the carousel and the hot dog tent and the playground where I’d been playing Shoot the Neighbours with the twins just a little while ago.
I could see Mom now with Claudia Donato, both of them standing with their arms crossed, looking up at the bandstand. A troop of managing officers in ShipCo dress uniforms — sports jackets, hard hats, plaid ties — were standing at attention behind the managing commander, Dad’s boss, who was at the microphone holding a big white envelope.
I tried calling — Mom, Mom — but nothing came out of my mouth. When she finally saw me, she threw her arms around me in a hug. I wanted to hug her back but my arms hurt when I tried to lift them.
“Oh, Debbie, cara, they found Daddy. He took the car to the plant to clean it and the door locked behind him in the decontamination bay. Someone heard him yelling, finally, and got him out. He’s on his way here right now. Isn’t that great?”
I nodded my head. Up on the bandstand, John Kendal was walking up to Dad’s boss, shaking his hand and taking the big white envelope. The other managing officers on the bandstand saluted Kendal. A photographer took their picture.
“What are they doing with John Kendal?” I whispered.
“ShipCo is giving him a scholarship,” said Mom.
Oh no. Not a scholarship.
“Where to?” I asked weakly.
“The Industrial School for Boys out in Bramborough.”
This was even worse news. Bramborough was farm country, a good hour from Shipman’s Corners. No one who went to Bramborough on scholarship was ever seen alive again. “Being awarded a scholarship” was another way to say that a kid was a goner.
“At least his poor mother will be looked after. I’m sure it’s for the best,” Mom said, sighing. “Such a nice boy, though.”
Mrs. Kendal was sitting on the stage, her hands clamped over her mouth. Kendal’s head was down as he took the paper from Dad’s boss. I couldn’t see the expression on his face.
“If it’s for the best, why’s Mrs. Kendal crying?” I asked.
Mrs. Donato lit a du Maurier off the butt of the old one. “Tears of joy,” she mumbled.
Mom was scanning the crowd: “Now, where on earth did your sister get to?”
That’s when I saw a picture in my mind. Linda with Billy inside a kaleidoscope — no, that couldn’t be right; they were inside the drum-shaped space in the middle of the carousel with its tiny reflecting mirrors and organ pipes. He was kissing Linda so hard that her back pressed against the lever that started the carousel going.
Daisy, Daisy — the tune played in the distance, even though no one was riding the painted horses at that time of the evening. The world began to move up and down around me: the crowd, the bandstand, the puzzled face of Mrs. Donato, Mom mouthing words I didn’t understand, round and round, up and down. I felt myself falling backwards. Grass prickled the back of my neck.
A man’s voice said, “Give her air.”
I opened my eyes. A face was looming over me. Heavy, black horn-rimmed glasses, a ginger-coloured crewcut and the worst sunburn I’d ever seen. The man wore a plaid tie and a stethoscope around his neck. His fingers pressed the inside of my wrist.
“She’s coming around now,” he said. He grinned down at me and made a V shape in front of my eyes. His middle finger ended at the knuckle, just like the Trespasser.
“How many fingers?” he asked.
“One and a half.”
“Good. No concussion.”
“Who are you?” I whispered.
He smiled. “Dr. Duffy, but my friends call me Duff. Company medic. Biogeneticist, really, but I have basic medical training. Subbing for the regular ShipCo doc. Dr. Welby twisted his ankle on manoeuvres, so they sent me up to fill in tonight. Didn’t think I’d earn my keep, ’til you fainted. Low blood sugar, I’ll bet. When was the last time you ate, young lady?”
Mom was stooped over looking at me. “Oh, cara, with everything going on, you didn’t have lunch.”
“Case closed,” he said. “Mom, this girl needs an ice cream cone. Two scoops. Doctor’s orders. What’s your favourite flavour?”
“Banana. Like that bus I saw you standing on,” I whispered.
He frowned as he slipped a penlight out of his pocket. A point of light shone in one of my eyes, then the other.
“I thought you said no concussion, doctor?” said Mom, hovering beside us.
“Give me a moment, ma’am,” he murmured in a brisk who’s-the-doctor-here voice.
Taking the hint, Mom moved off toward the trees, arms crossed, to talk with Claudia. Once he was sure she was out of earshot, Dr. Duffy bent low to my face.
“What bus?”
“In the Z-Lands,” I whispered back. “Except you were old and you had long hair, like a girl. You were melting.”
“Melting?”
“Your hands fell off.”
I heard him take a sharp breath. “Did I say anything?”
I nodded. “You said, ‘you’re it, Debbie.’”
Dr. Duffy swayed back on his heels. “‘It.’ As in ‘I.T.’ I said you were the Ion Tagger? Not your sister?”
I shook my head. “I dunno, you just said ‘it.’” I hesitated. “A policeman was asking me questions about you. He’s probably looking for you.”
Dr. Duffy nodded and pulled a cotton swab out of his shirt pocket. “Open wide.” The tip of the swab scraped hard at the inside of my cheek as he explained in a low, rapid voice: “Listen closely. I’m from the future, helping my partner identify the Ion Tagger. Sounds as if an older version of me thinks that’s you. Which means you’re going to have to collapse time and migrate the entire population of Earth into a parallel world that’s weakly coupled to ours. Otherwise, humanity is doomed. Understand?”
Tears leaked from my eyes again. After the day I’d had, the last thing I wanted to hear was that I was responsible for saving the world.
“How can you expect me to do all that? I’m only twelve years old!”
“Age is irrelevant. It’s your DNA that matters,” he muttered, half to himself, half to me, as he slid the swab into a plastic tube and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “If your epithelia check out, I’ll be back.”
“Wait! What’m I supposed to do? And what’s gonna happen to Kendal?”
He looked down at me. “Save John Kendal or the world is doomed.”
I watched him walk off into the darkness beyond the park lights.