Settling Down
Their new home rested on a foundation of mystery, its security reliant on a willingness to dampen their curiosity and accept that what lay below them shouldn’t play a further role in who they became.
Since Mona had told them that the worlds in the crèche were real, Vin had been thinking about how his hosts had felt his presence. Had he been a voice in their heads, a current of desire, an inclination, an obsessive focus? And how much of him was exposed? The ideas made him feel porous, as if influences with undetectable agendas might transit through him and change him, as if awareness might be a colloidal presence, shifting in interactions with a boundless expanse of mind.
“I don’t think we can use it anymore,” Kim said one evening, interrupting his reverie. “We shouldn’t even log in. I want our lives to mean things that make sense. And that thing isn’t right. I don’t want to think about it any more than we have to, to take care of Mona.”
“No,” Vin agreed, realizing that his experience with the crèche and the reality of having Kim in his life had made him a different person. He felt indebted to Nerdean, and strengthened his commitment to maintaining her secret. Rather than start a company, he found a good job as a software developer, one that allowed him to work almost entirely from home. The people he knew all seemed unchanged from the people he remembered and he didn’t notice anything different about the world itself, but that didn’t quite make sense. He assumed there must be differences he hadn’t discovered or couldn’t detect.
He tried to enjoy planning a future with Kim, but a persistent feeling of looseness in the linkage between events baffled him. How could he fully embrace this life when he was not entirely sure how it came to be? There were stretches when it felt like time was passing so quickly that it became a blur, a roar in his ears, and others—often at night—when he lay in the sleepless and broken reality of a passionate desire just to see an hour end, and in the whiplash between those two he wondered what he had landed in, and what he truly was.
After her internship, Kim took a job as an event planner at a small game company. She captured how he felt one evening after a late dinner. “It’s like I’m a skipping stone,” she said. “I’m completely there, and then I lift off and skip to the next thing so fast it feels as though nothing happened. Big changes happen, are happening, but I only make a choice and then move.”
They converted the basement into an apartment with a separate entrance. He negotiated time to remodel before starting his job so he and Kim could do sensitive work themselves. The plumbing and electricity were already in place.
They put walkie-talkies in the apartment and their master bedroom, and stocked the apartment with canned and boxed food. Vin never told Kim that Mona had warned him about herself. When he suggested adding a second deadbolt to lock the apartment door from the outside, a one-inch cylinder with a hardened steel core that couldn’t be unlocked from inside, Kim didn’t comment.
They agreed to visit the apartment two times each month, together, but Kim only went a couple of times and the visits became his responsibility. He started adding an occasional, unscheduled visit. Concerned that Mona might be getting thinner, he took a few pictures to create a visual baseline. Within a few months, he had settled into a routine of making one short visit each week.
Kim was determined and sure of herself as the challenges at her work increased and Vin watched her build the foundation of her career. She traveled and worked late and on weekends but they managed a few overnights in the mountains, in Eastern Washington, and Las Vegas. They were married during Kim’s eighth month in a small ceremony attended mostly by family.
Vin fell in love with the complexity of her pregnancy, her needs, her vague grumpiness and the imprecise mutinies of her body. He was delighted by moments of contentment that arrived like unexpected weather when she relied on the bond that still surprised him and leaned close so he could comb his fingers through her hair.
No matter how cool their room was, Kim sometimes threw off the covers. One night, after shifting about for an hour or more, she lay on her back, propped on extra pillows, with her arms around the top and bottom of her belly.
She didn’t usually talk when she woke, but she asked, “Are you awake?” He moved a hand to her side in response. She said, “I’ve been thinking about . . . What if it isn’t possible for Bucky to throw that lighter unless you’re inside him? Then the worlds where he kills Matt aren’t created unless you’re there.”
He felt the stillness of the room seeping into his body, filling him and defining his borders. “From what I felt,” he said, “it was possible for him to throw it.”
“But we don’t really know, because you were there.”
He bent his legs and shifted to relieve pressure on his shoulder, then turned away from her and lay on his back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You probably think about that sometimes.”
“It’s a good question,” he said. “Whether it would have been possible for him, emotionally, without me there.” They stared at the geometric plane of the darkened ceiling.
“Are we doing the right thing,” she asked, “for her?” They knew their child would be a girl.
“Yes.”
“I can’t fix what’s happening in the world. Why am I making a new life?” The hard edges of the digital clock shone and the modest electronic beads on the room’s devices each insisted on its individual presence, a combined blue light misting the hour.
“My belly is a big curl.” She rolled toward him. “She’s already turned me into a question mark. My whole body is asking what her life will be. She’s turned me into punctuation.” She was playing with the complaint.
“She’s asking what all our lives will be,” he said.
“I already see mothers and children differently. I’ve already changed. New babies have opaque eyes, like animals, like birds or fish.”
“She won’t be an infant like that,” Vin said, uneasiness flowering. “You’ll see her differently.”
She waited, then sighed, her open hand snaking between his arm and torso, her voice warm. “You always try to answer, but we’re not a question.”
One truth he didn’t examine was that Kim’s pregnancy was distancing him from his experience in the crèche. Shortly before their daughter, Trina, was born, Vin realized it had been weeks since he’d dreamed of inhabiting other people.
The delivery seemed difficult to Vin but the doctor told him it had gone smoothly. After, Kim told him that she was uncomfortable housing a desperate stranger in something like a prison in their basement. Mona always appeared to be peacefully sleeping. They had put a tablet, books, notebooks, and pens in the apartment, but nothing got used. They never encountered her but she sometimes changed caskets.
Vin took Kim’s concern seriously but didn’t want to exaggerate the problem, so he didn’t tell her when he bought a .38 caliber handgun and stowed it with a small stack of cash in the bedroom safe under the title to the house, Kim’s adoption records, and their living wills. And, working from home, it was easy to discretely visit a firing range. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to know, it was that he was preparing for a possibility so remote it wasn’t worth discussing.
Trina had wispy chestnut hair and steel-gray eyes, a wide face and plump baby cheeks that looked happy and vaguely middle-aged. As soon as she came home, Kim started to strategize about how they’d talk to her about drugs and addiction. Vin wanted to look at their new creature, this coagulation of living systems thickened by mutual interdependence in a way that invited future expansion, that offered forage for bacteria, and that promised to be friendly to autonomic function, to the transformation of proteins, the binding of oxygen in organic matter and the irresistible catalysis of affection. He wanted to put the conversation off.
While Kim’s ability to rigorously assess a situation and make quick decisions awed Vin, that brilliance also made her creative with her fear. She faulted her parents for being distant and said she wanted to be close to her daughter, but in the early months, Vin felt she was often cool toward Trina. He saw it when she blinked in response to the same floods of affection that he felt. She held back, as if she feared unintentional currents would submerge her or pull her into error.
A standing person can face in any direction, but the first step Trina took was toward Kim. Kim and Trina were on a lumpy blanket in the big room, Kim cross-legged and glancing through a magazine, Trina squirming on all fours like a felted sea creature. Sophie was stretched out on a plank of sunlight, just beyond Trina’s reach. Vin sat at the dining table, tapping on his laptop. Time blurred and sharpened and Trina was standing, her legs bowed but suddenly stalwart and a puzzled look on her face as if Kim had asked her to describe the purpose of a flintlock. Kim straightened to breathless attention. Trina’s foot twitched up and then wound forward, her arms stretching. She grinned at Kim. Her foot jerked down and she pitched toward the ground. Kim scooped her up before she hit.
“What are you thinking?” Kim asked, hefting Trina to her shoulder as she stood and carried her laughing to the big window.
Before Trina turned two, Vin got a windfall from the sale of Sigmoto. The new CEO had done a decent job—not great, but decent—and one of the technology behemoths snapped the company up, killed the product, and moved staff to other projects.
Then Kim got pregnant again, but in her ninth week she fell into a depression, calling in sick for a week and a half, dragging out of bed at eleven, and saying little beyond what was necessary. Even Trina didn’t move her, and then she miscarried. She felt responsible, tormented by the possibility that her depression had triggered the loss. Her new gynecologist told them Trina’s birth had defied the odds; Kim had always been more likely to miscarry. Surgery might help.
They were angry with the doctor who had delivered Trina and hadn’t told them about the risks. Kim was still struggling, forcing herself out of bed early and into each wobbly day, forcing herself to exercise, reminding herself to smile at work even though it felt mechanical. Vin worried about her backsliding but the opposite happened. Weeks after the miscarriage, Kim began to recover her old self and she rediscovered skydiving.
One evening as she was cutting celery, Vin asked what had helped her through it. She shook her head, her strong fingers pausing the knife midstroke, mouth half-open, dark eyes unfocused.
“I jump to feel the rush,” she said. “It sort of connects me with how big everything is. I think, before, I could feel that kind of thing in a quiet way too. I didn’t need to jump. I could look at the world and think about things. But, with this sadness, nothing seemed to matter except what my body was doing, almost without me. It was like I didn’t have my own body anymore. And I lost that feeling. But I was able to stay in things, and I did. And then I started to feel that I did need to be here, and it started getting better again.”
Kim liked to skydive in new locations, often when she was traveling for work. Vin sent pictures of himself and Trina making V signs to celebrate her courage. Kim said she kissed them for luck. She bought a helmet-mounted camera so they could watch her. Moments after she left the plane, there would be a minute when the sky was so large, the horizon so distant that the falling was invisible. Except for the constant rush of wind, everything seemed still.
As soon as the phone started playing Vin’s custom tone—the first fourteen seconds from the “Floe” movement of Philip Glass’s Glassworks—Trina yelled, “Tell a phone,” from her high chair. Kim straightened from where she’d been leaning against the island counter, stepped over to Trina—who recently turned three—and kissed the top of her head. “That’s right,” Trina said proudly.
Vin killed the flame under the morning’s tofu scramble and answered. Than Nguyen was calling to discuss a large software check-in that Vin had finished the night before. It was the kind of thing they could have covered in the regular morning call, but Than was being extra careful because Vin was working on a public interface. It only took a minute for Vin to reassure him.
Kim was leaning against the island, tapping at her phone. “I really have to go, now,” she said, glancing up as though she were repeating herself. “They want me to look at the end-caps that got delivered to the office. I need to sign off before the shippers come. And I’m out of town on Monday. I’ve got to go to Chicago.”
“Okay. But, no breakfast?”
Vin was wearing a loose short-sleeved T-shirt. Kim was in her work uniform—a navy jacket and slacks with a maroon silk blouse—an outfit that would have been inconceivable to the Kim he knew in high school. She’d recently been asked to review two production contracts in addition to her marketing responsibilities. “People wear lots of hats,” she had explained to him, happily. He would have hired her at Sigmoto.
She tapped out the last fragments of a message and straightened, lifting a hand at him. “I don’t have time anymore. I was really in a hurry.”
“Oh. That was Than again. You know. He’s trying to go the extra mile, even though I’ve already done it.”
“Yeah, sure. You don’t have to justify your”—she looked down and took a breath—“I’m not trying to make a big deal out of it. I just don’t have any time anymore.”
“Well, the food was done, you could have served yourself.” Vin moved the frying pan to a trivet.
Kim said. “Okay. You didn’t tell me. I’m not angry.”
“Okay.”
“Or upset. Right sweetie?” Trina was trying to fold a big chunk of apple into her mouth. She pulled it out and said, “No, Mom.”
“You should cut the apple smaller than that,” Vin said.
“She’s okay. It’s not a problem.” Kim turned to Trina. “Aren’t you?”
Trina nodded.
“I just know how she likes it,” Vin said, “and usually, it’s smaller pieces than that.”
“Okay,” exasperation drove Kim’s voice higher. “You just do what you want. You always know what’s right.” She stopped, took a breath, and then asked Trina, “Do you like the apple, sweetie?”
Trina nodded.
Kim said, “Okay. See? She likes it. I’ve got to go.”
She was looking at the screen of her phone again as she hopped down the stairs to the entryway.
“Alright,” Vin said, “love you.” He heard the door open. “Thanks,” he yelled quickly.
“What? Why?” Kim called back.
“For cutting Trina’s food when I was on the phone,” he yelled, but the door had clicked shut behind her.
Trina would get picked up for daycare just after nine, and he would retrieve her at three. It was Friday, and they were planning to host a barbecue after work, their first attempt at hosting in years. Clouds had rolled in and it was looking like it’d be a cool day for August—seventy degrees, or maybe high-sixties by dinner, though it wasn’t supposed to rain.
He said to Trina, “Daddy’s going to be on the call.”
Frowning, she shifted her head back and forth in an exaggerated gesture of indifference. “I’m going to be quiet.”
“Thank you, Loop.” Her pet name was their code word for a circle, a perfect shape.
“You’re welcome.” She was coloring a mouse that had grown too large for its house and now towered above it and she seemed intent on using each of her thirty-two crayons. Vin imagined she was searching for the difference between complexity and sophistication.
The morning call was routine. Afterward, Trina surprised him by asking why he had phone calls.
“It’s work,” he said. “You know, so I can make a living.”
“Why do you make a living? Momma makes a living.”
“Yes.” He wasn’t sure what she was asking.
“Why don’t you ask her to bring what she made to our house?” Trina concentrated on coloring the air around the mouse dark green. “Then she could show you how to make it.”
With Trina at daycare, Vin brooded, batting away a growing sense that the life he was enjoying was limiting him and he should be trying for more. Raising a child well was one of the most important tasks that individuals could set themselves to, but the world beyond his home was still rife with the lethal problems that his parents’ generation had allowed to fester. He felt he was losing his balance.
He wished he could call Bill and get high. He’d been thinking about Bill a lot recently. Dead, but only in a limited sense. The person he knew was still alive in another universe, or many others. And who was wearing the body that Vin had been born with? Had that person been surprised to see Bill? He tried to distract himself from spiraling into metaphysical confusion. He answered a few emails, but got little real work done.
He’d uncovered a bug in a server operating system. For his use case, it crippled performance on an object he needed. He had half a mind to submit a patch, just to keep moving, but if he wasn’t seeing the whole picture—and he probably wasn’t—that could be a massive waste of time. More to the point, his company allowed contributions to external projects only after endless discussion and negotiation. Better to wait for a response from support.
In this sort of situation, he would usually work on tests and designs for the next sprint, but today he decided to visit Nerdean’s office. He wanted relief from the aching, dragging sense of sameness that was unexpectedly grating through his limbs and chest.
The crèche was a wild and dangerous secret, an endless opportunity to imagine alternate futures, and even though nothing could eject him from his protective orbit around Trina, he wished there were a way to release just a scent of its power into his day-to-day routine. He stepped outside and followed the curving walk of circular concrete pads to the apartment’s yellow steel door.
Mona was a lesson in the risks of the device, and flashbacks from his own shots could still hit him without warning, an almost paralyzing sense that everything, even the air embracing him, might suddenly thin and be stripped away. To hide the panic, he would pretend to be deep in thought. He pitied Mona and wanted to sustain her privacy and shelter, but didn’t feel capable of explaining all of that to Kim.
He unlocked the door’s second deadbolt and then the knob, but the door wouldn’t open. The top deadbolt was locked from the inside. He’d never found it locked before.
A phone app could unlock both deadbolts. Though his phone’s manufacturer assured customers that the phone’s radiation was too weak to do harm, Vin kept his phone beside his computer, where he’d left it. He couldn’t see past the curtained half windows. He knocked loudly and waited, then knocked again.
He went to the master bedroom where the walkie-talkie was charging, and pressed the button that would sound a tone on the basement handset. He waited, and then pressed the button to speak. “Mona? If you’re there, this is Vin. Would you like to talk?” He tried twice but received no answer.
The point of the top deadbolt was for Mona to signal that she wanted to be left alone. She might be in the shower or sleeping after a long shot. He decided to give her space and look for an interesting design problem to work on.
The evening turned out to be warmer than expected and when people began arriving for the barbecue the house felt stuffy to him, its bright spaces dimmed, its rooms stilled and sullen. On the plus side, he’d put the best gas grill he could find on the first floor deck and would be able to cook while feeling as though he was levitating over Puget Sound. His mood was improving and he liked almost everyone they’d invited.
He didn’t tell Kim that Mona was moving about. The less they discussed Mona, the less likely Kim was to insist they do something about her. He poked the long tip of a steel thermometer into a grayed chunk of pork that was cooking on the hot side of the grill and left it in for a moment, watching the needle on the radial dial tick upward.
“So?” John Grassler, a senior developer on Vin’s team, was standing beside the grill. He waved a large hand over the rising heat, drew in a deep breath through his nose, and made a smacking noise. John was in his midfifties, heavy, bearded and bald, with sometimes veiny pink cheeks and a resonant laugh that spread comfortingly through enclosed spaces.
“Maybe another minute and a half for that one,” said Vin.
“And thusly do we stalk our desires,” said John.
“Do we?”
“Aye, with mighty grill and spicy sauce.”
“Verily,” said Vin, “and we lucky few will have all the desires we can eat in just a few more minutes.”
Through the sliding doors, Vin could see that the table inside was already packed with food and Kim was setting down a large bowl of corn on the cob. They’d decided not to grill it to make more room for the meat. Trina was near the sectional, showing a new drawing to one of Kim’s co-workers, Hanna Dawkins—a young black woman with a beautiful, dimpled smile and an alert reserve. She was in her second year at the company and, to hear Kim tell it, might be running the place in a decade.
Kim had also invited her boss, Laughlin, whom she described admiringly as a “take-charge kind of guy.” Vin had invited John Grassler and two younger programmers, Brant Spence and Corey Nahabedian. Corey, Brant and Hanna had formed a little clique on the sectional with Trina. Kim and Laughlin were in the kitchen at the other end of the room, just out of sight.
Everyone turned toward a pounding at the front door, an insistent hammering with the fleshy part of a fist. “What’s that?” Vin said. Kim was coming out of the kitchen and crossing toward the entry. She said something over her shoulder, presumably to Laughlin. There were more blows at the door, then muffled shouts.
As John said, “what’s their problem?” Vin handed him the tongs and the thermometer, saying, “Can you keep an eye . . .” John quickly set his beer on the edge of the grill to manage the handoff, and then Vin was in motion.
Kim stood in the wedge of space between the threshold and the partially opened door. Vin couldn’t see who was on the other side but heard a man’s voice, threatening and indistinct, crackling through a catalog of curses. Just as Vin reached the entry, the man yelled in a deep, hoarse voice, “I know it’s in here. I’ve been in here.”
Kim paled and leaned back. Vin pulled on the door and she let go, letting it swing open so Vin could see their visitor. The man outside took a half step backward.
He might have been in his late thirties, with a narrow face, high forehead and short dark hair. He was wearing an army service uniform, a black jacket with yellow piping and gold buttons, white shirt, black tie, blue slacks. The uniform was loose, shiny with stains and rumpled by hard wear. His tan face was mottled by the pink of high temper, his eyes red-rimmed and glassy as if he hadn’t slept for a while. A holstered weapon was strapped to his belt.
“Can I help you?” Vin asked as he shot Kim a look that was his best attempt at asking her to call the police without actually saying it. She, of course, had no idea that he was requesting anything.
“What’s going on, Kimmy?” Laughlin asked as he arrived behind Vin, his presence announced a moment before by the spicy scent of pot.
“You,” the man said loudly, staring at Vin, “I know you.”
“I don’t think we’ve met.” Vin could feel his blood pressure rise, feel the sudden arrival of the floating sensation that could lift him into real anger.
“You were in the war cabinet,” the man said, and Vin went cold, shut down. He was able to whisper, “What do you mean?” but it appeared as though no one around him heard it.
“Are you drunk?” Laughlin demanded from behind them.
“Only a few,” the man said.
“What are you doing?” Laughlin, who was larger than Vin and built like a boxer, was leaning on Vin’s shoulder, trying to step in front of him.
“Someone drove my car here,” said the man, “and someone’s driving me here.”
“Why? How would someone drive you?” asked Laughlin, his voice reasonable and engaged as he finally pushed between Vin and Kim and onto the concrete pad in front of the door, forcing the man to take another step backward.
Laughlin’s mildly positioned question seemed to disarm the man. His brows came together and he suddenly looked confused. He mumbled something, a long phrase Vin couldn’t hear.
“Well, you need help,” Laughlin said in response.
“Yes,” said the man. “Please.”
“Come down here,” Laughlin said gently, and led the man to the concrete stairs beyond the path. “You can sit on the wall here. Can we call somebody?”
The man walked down a few stairs and then sat on the stone wall.
“Who should I call?” asked Laughlin, pulling his phone from the front of his jeans.
“Don’t call anyone I know,” the man said loudly, his anger turning to fear.
Kim stepped outside and Vin followed. The other four guests had filled the small foyer. Vin, seeing them, turned and went back into the entry. He took Trina out of Hanna’s arms and said quietly to the others, “We should give them space.”
He carried Trina up the stairs and into the dining room and called 911 while she sat on his forearm and leaned against his chest, her arms around his neck. Soon she’d be too big for him to carry like this.
John Grassler had gone outside, closer to where Kim and Laughlin were talking with the man. The rest watched quietly from the foyer.
Vin told the 911 operator that a man who appeared to be wearing a gun had pounded on their door and sounded aggressive and altered. Trina was starting to squirm so Vin carried her to the sofa and sat down as he talked to the operator.
“Why is everyone over there?” Trina asked. “Who is that?”
“We don’t know him,” Vin said after he finished the call. “He’s just a man who came to our house.”
“Why?”
“Loop, you know that sometimes there’s no answer to that question.”
A few minutes later, Kim came up the stairs. “Everyone’s okay up here?” she asked, looking at Vin, the question clearly intended as a check on Trina. Vin nodded.
“Laugh’s calling the police. The guy’s walking away.”
“I called 911,” Vin said.
John came up to the dining area. “He’s gone,” he said. “You really don’t know him?”
“No idea,” said Vin.
“Well, I’m going back out to check on our magnificent grill.” As John passed through the dining room toward the deck, Vin and Kim watched each other, Vin’s arms around Trina.
“That man talked about a war cabinet,” Kim said quietly.
“Yeah,” said Vin. “What did he want?”
“No one knows,” John said, just before he stepped back out on the deck. “He was a confused man.”
“He kept saying he wanted to talk with you, Vin.” Kim’s face was flat, emotionless. “He said, ‘I need to talk to that man who was here.’”
“Kimmy, everything okay?” Laughlin yelled up from the door.
“Yes, thanks, Laugh,” Kim called back.
“He’s gone,” Laughlin said a moment later, as he walked into the room. “That was a bit of excitement.”
“What did he want? What was that he mumbled at you, at the door?” Vin asked.
Laughlin laughed, “I think he said, ‘I’m a buried man, clawing at the dark.’”
“That’s creepy,” Brant Spence said.
“What did he want?” Vin asked again.
“If anything, maybe just to talk. He said there was a ship in this house that he needed to get on, and that you were the captain. But then he started whistling and he staggered away.”
When the police arrived, Kim and Laughlin had a brief talk with them. The strange visitor had given the evening a shot of adrenaline and energized conversation. After dinner, Vin spent about twenty minutes putting Trina to bed. Vin and Kim could both use their phones to listen in or watch her room, and their baby monitor would call them automatically if the volume in her room rose above a preset level. A couple of hours later, Laughlin was the last of their friends to leave, smiling as they thanked him for handling “the gunfighter” so diplomatically.
As they shut the door behind Laughlin, Vin said, half-jokingly, “And why so Kimmy? Is plain Kim not a good enough name for him to use?”
“Alright,” Kim said, losing all trace of the jokiness with which she had seen off Laughlin, “that guy was one of them.”
“One of who? What do you mean?” Vin was caught slightly off guard.
“He said someone was in his head, telling him to come here.” Kim was almost accusing him.
“Okay, but there could be other reasons for that.” Vin was remembering how difficult it was to influence people when he was in the crèche.
Kim said, “No,” and when Vin hesitated, she said, “Remember, Mona said she could make people do things. You said you made that guy ignore the woman he had a crush on.”
“I don’t think it’s the same. Bringing him all the way here—it doesn’t work like that.” Vin wanted to talk about Laughlin and didn’t want Kim to use the crèche to avoid it. “That guy just seemed like a crazy person. Didn’t he?”
“To show up at our door? Our door?”
“Well, we’re near the base of the staircase to Marshall Park. There are all kinds of people up there. To be honest, I’m surprised more people don’t randomly come to our door. Aren’t you?”
“Random people with voices in their heads who come to our house looking for you? And a ship to ride?”
“I don’t know—he wasn’t necessarily looking for me. He saw me and decided, maybe for no reason, that I was the solution to his problems.” Vin had committed to his interpretation.
But Kim saw his doubts. “Is there something I should know?”
“What?” he said, “What?”
“You know what I mean. Is there anything that I should know?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What are you doing? What are you doing here all day? Are you going down there?”
“No. I work.”
“No? You’re not trying to go down there when it’s not on the schedule?”
“No.”
“You didn’t try to go into that thing, today for example? You haven’t gone in, or gone somewhere? You don’t know that man?”
“No. No. No,” Vin said, keeping his voice calm though he felt the fumes of his anger igniting. And then, suddenly, he was shouting. “Of course not. That was a crazy person. And now you’re accusing me of something?”
Both their phones began ringing. The baby monitor was alerting them to noise from Trina’s room, but they didn’t need the monitor. They could hear her yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!”
He ran to Trina’s room and Kim watched him go. After he calmed her, he and Trina talked for a while. She was only reacting to the excitement of the evening, and then to their fight. As Trina lay back down, he sat at the end of her bed and rested a hand on the orange sheet above one of her ankles.
The room was dark and smelled of fabric softener and Trina’s own warm scent. The stuffed elephant Trina slept beside was a bulky shadow above her large head. Trina said that Hanna liked pictures of the stars, and then they talked about the things Trina liked to draw, and at some point Kim appeared at the threshold of the room, looking wrung out. She didn’t say anything, just watched them. After a bit more conversation, Vin and Trina agreed that Trina would go back to sleep and her dark eyes quickly closed. He kissed her and rose to leave. Kim had already gone.
Kim and Vin spent time wordlessly cleaning and then Kim went upstairs as he finished in the kitchen. When he reached the master bedroom, Kim was sitting cross-legged on their bed in underwear and a thin tank top, elbows on her knees.
“This place isn’t right for us,” she said as he walked past her into their bathroom.
Green tile on the floor, yellow and white stonework on the walls. A double soaking tub and a separate double shower. Just the taxes on this house could almost pay the mortgage on a home in a less expensive part of the country. He’d tried to puzzle out why Nerdean didn’t keep the house if she expected to return. The best explanation he had come up with was that she figured the “house sitter”—whoever it ended up being—might not stay under other circumstances. He might want to get on with his own life, maybe take a job in another city. Which might mean a new house sitter, and another person who might learn about the crèche. But that still didn’t make a lot of sense. Unless you also allowed for petulance, a knock on Joaquin for trying to undermine the contract.
He squeezed natural toothpaste onto the end of Kim’s electric brush and the brand he’d been using since childhood onto his own and ran both brushes under hot water and started brushing as he carried Kim’s to her. They went back to the bathroom and stood together in front of the mirror until they each dropped foamy spit into the tap water.
Kim said thickly, “There’s a half-dead woman down there. This house is haunted. I can’t keep working as hard as I do and come home to worry about this too. I don’t feel healthy here. I’m going to dark places. Nothing feels right.”
“Maybe you could work less?”
“My work is one place I know I’m doing things right.”
“If you were to cut your hours . . .”
“We need to leave.”
He walked into the bedroom and started unbuttoning his shirt. The deceptive cluster of electronics was long gone. A single corner of the bedroom hosted an office large enough for both of them, with expensive desks that had special cutouts and weighted springs to easily adjust their angles and heights for sitting or standing. But Kim rarely worked at home, and he’d gotten used to working downstairs where he could keep track of Trina.
“I don’t want to fight anymore,” he said.
Kim leaned against the bathroom door. “I have nightmares. I see her floating down there, under our house. How do we know that she can’t choose whose head she goes into? What if she can get inside one of us? What if she can change our thoughts or what we want?”
“Do you feel like someone’s doing that?”
When Kim didn’t answer, he said, “She hasn’t done anything. Mona is just a sad, lost person. She’s more lost—she’s possibly the most lost person who ever lived. She’s not trying to hurt anyone and she doesn’t care about us. I mean, she cares whether we keep the power on, but that’s it. And why can’t we do that? Keep the power on?”
“The most lost person who ever lived?” Kim said. “That’s what you think she is? We shouldn’t have anything to do with anything that rare. That’s not who we are.”
“We don’t get to choose that kind of thing,” he said. “Life chooses that.”
“Life? What? Are you answering me with a cliché? Are you saying that life has chosen for us to live on top of that horror movie science experiment?”
Vin plugged his phone into its charger on his side of the bed. “I’m sorry you’re scared. That guy was a real crazy, and I agree, it did sound like he might somehow have been referring to it. I’m sorry about how we—how I—kind of lost it. Look, it’s Friday. Let’s let it go for the weekend and think about it. If you still want to move on Monday, how about we talk about it then?”
“I’m going out of town Monday, to Chicago, remember?”
“Well, just let me know what you think before you go.”
Kim sighed. “Yeah, I guess.” She lay down and turned away from him. “I’m sorry too. I don’t feel stable right now, though. This place can’t be good for Trina. I just want—I know I want to leave. It’s time.” He peeled back the sheet on his side and lay on his back and then pulled the sheet across his legs.
Kim, with her back to him, said, “You’re going to restock the fridge down there, and check on the systems tomorrow, right? You still do that just once a week, right?”
“Yeah.” Vin turned out the lamp on his side of the bed and the room went dark.
“I want to come with you this time. I want to see it again,” she said.
Kim had only been to Nerdean’s office maybe three times in the last two years. “Sure. Okay,” he said. “It’ll be nice to have company. So, are you ready for the trip? Are you going to jump while you’re in Chicago?”
“There’s a site. It’s going to be hectic but I may have time. If I do, I’ll text you.”
He said, “Let’s both just clear our heads, and try to think of some way to improve things.”
The next day, they made an effort to be more appreciative of each other. They decided to do extra housecleaning after breakfast and attacked it energetically, but a short disagreement over their plans for Sunday set them on edge. That afternoon, with Trina at a playdate, they went together to Nerdean’s office. Mona hadn’t left any sign that she’d been active. The robe might have moved from the back of one chair to another, but Vin wasn’t sure, and the robe was dry.
While Vin was inspecting the apartment, he called Kim Kimmy, and that immediately revived the disagreement over moving. Kim fortified her earlier complaints by insisting the house was too big for only three of them.
The tension bled into Sunday, a subdued mutual resentment simmering through temperate, late-summer hours. On Monday morning they worked on logistics for the rest of the week, but with a baiting antagonism that left them both relieved when Kim finally set off for the airport.
On Tuesday morning, after Trina had gone to daycare, Vin received the email he’d been waiting for from the server operating system’s support group. They weren’t going to work on his problem. He called his manager to say he had an urgent errand and needed to take the afternoon off. Then he went outside and around the house to the apartment door.
He unlocked the second deadbolt and the lock on the knob, but the door wouldn’t budge. The top deadbolt was locked again. He knew it had been unlocked on Saturday, when he and Kim had been down there. That meant Mona had come out of the crèche again.
He decided that he wanted to talk with her. If they were approaching a decision on whether to move, this was a chance to let her know. He didn’t want to barge in, so he tried the walkie-talkie but she didn’t pick up. He used the app on his phone to unlock the top deadbolt.
He called Mona’s name as he opened the door, but she didn’t answer. The living room light was on. He hadn’t noticed it through the curtains. In the large bedroom, he stepped on the floor switch and after the slight hesitation the chute opened and light spilled up from below. Even though the chute was narrow he had a moment of vertigo when he looked down. He saw and heard nothing below. He called Mona’s name again.
He was feeling even more uneasy than he usually did in the apartment. He walked into rooms and checked closets, turning on all the lights, but the apartment was empty. He went back to the chute and leaned over it, calling down one more time before he put his feet on the rungs.
As he descended, lowering one foot after the next, he called out a few times, “Anyone? Hello?” It was a mild relief to finally hear the whisper of the air conditioner. When he stepped off the ladder he saw that two of the crèches were activated. The first and the third.
He stood listening until he could hear his own heartbeat. He took a hesitant step toward the first crèche, took a breath, shook his arms. He walked up to it and put his hand on the transparent pane. The mist cleared immediately to reveal Mona floating in the blue fluid. He watched her for a few moments. Maybe she’d lost a little weight. Her skin had an odd, loose quality but he thought he might be imagining that. Maybe it was just because he was seeing her through the blue liquid, but he hadn’t noticed it before.
He lifted his hand. The pane misted over and he walked to the third crèche. He didn’t want to touch the transparent pane. He stood beside it, staring.
When, at last, he stretched out his hand and touched the pane and the mist cleared, he saw Kim floating within, naked, her body buoyed in the blue fluid, her beautiful black hair swept back from her face.