"Ah." Roberta's mouth tasted like ashes now. Interdependence, that famous Green buzzword. To Roberta, it sounded like codependence. Her life would have been a lot easier if she'd been much less interconnected with the Walfords. "And now that you've figured all of this out, you've forgiven yourself?"
"No. No, of course not. At least, not exactly. It doesn't work that way."
"I wouldn't know. To the best of my knowledge, I've never destroyed anyone's life." She regretted the words as soon as she'd said them, and was angry at her own regret: Meredith surely deserved to feel a full share of guilt.
But Meredith was shaking her head. "Roberta, your life hasn't been destroyed. It's been—derailed, I admit. It's been inconvenienced. And that shouldn't have happened. But it hasn't been destroyed."
"I wasn't talking about mine." Roberta heard the stiff, schoolmarmish tone of her own voice and hated it. Meredith didn't even know about Kevin yet. "That homeless guy, the one you had brainwiped—"
"Okay, yes, I know." Meredith, head down, was walking more quickly, clutching the picture frame. "I didn't actually personally have him brainwiped. I asked them not to brainwipe him; I did. But calling the cops on him was the worst thing I did, even if a lot of other people would have done the same thing, even if he had that previous history. He was trying to help. He hadn't done anything wrong. I handled it terribly. I know that."
"You do? Sounds to me like you're still making excuses."
Meredith hunched her shoulders. "I'm doing the best I can! It wasn't so black-and-white when it was happening! You weren't there!"
"Excuse me?" Roberta couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Yes, I was there—which is why I'm here."
"Not in my shoes, you weren't! Look, Roberta, I tried to destroy myself In Mexico. That's—why my face looks like this. But that wasn't the answer, either. The only answer, finally, was to come back. Not to run away anymore."
To stop running away, you have to stop making excuses. Roberta wasn't going to say that. She probably shouldn't have said half of what she already had. "So what are you going to do now?"
"I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet. I don't even—have anywhere to stay. Unless I can stay with you until I can reach Kevin. And I know that's a lot to ask."
Roberta grimaced, remembering Preston's charge. She was going to have to tell Meredith that Kevin was dead. She was going to have to go with Meredith to the house on Filbert Street. She didn't want to think about that. She didn't want to think about the last time she'd been there. "Yes, it is a lot to ask."
"I know. I told you I knew. I—Roberta, isn't that your building on the next block?"
"What?" Roberta squinted down the street. "Yes. What—"
"Why's there a helicopter on top of it?"
* * *
"This is outrageous!" Roberta said. "This is totally unprofessional. Sergei, I cannot believe that you broke into my apartment—"
"I didn't break into your apartment! I climbed in the window from the fire escape. The window was open." Sergei, looking aggrieved, sat perched on the edge of her couch, clutching some sort of document tube. A small, pale man with a drooping mustache and watery eyes, he always reminded Roberta of a puppy who'd just been kicked. "Roberta, I'm sorry. Annie called me after you left and said that Mason and Camilla had showed up at the shelter, and I knew you'd be happy and I wanted to give you the news myself, and I had to take a ride down to San Jose, anyway, and this was right on the way, and I knew from the GPS that you'd be coming back any second. Where's Zephyr?"
"I have no idea," Roberta said coldly. Well, now she knew why Sergei had allowed her to leave the building: he'd been hoping to surprise both of them when they came back. Meredith had stayed downstairs; Roberta hoped that Sergei wouldn't decide to go exploring. "Is this in your handbook? Dropping into people's apartments without any warning?"
"You had warning! You saw the helicopter on your way back, didn't you? Look, I'm sorry. I'll leave. Ijust wanted you to know that Mason and Camilla are fine."
"You could have called me to tell me that. Aniliese could have called me to tell me that. Sergei, I don't like you and I don't trust you and I don't want you in my space, okay?"
"Tell Zephyr—"
"If you have something to tell Zephyr, tell her yourself, if you can find her."
He squinted at her. "The person downstairs isn't Zephyr?"
I guess you're not on Preston's payroll, Roberta thought grimly. "The person downstairs is none of your business!" Why am I protecting her? I could call ScoopNet, tell them she's back, and make a mint. But that would piss Preston off, which is the last thing I need. "Sergei, if you're here to try to interrogate my neighbor, do it yourself I'm not going to help you."
Mr. Clean came creaking out of the kitchen, and Roberta regarded him ruefully. Sergei could have dropped in to deposit a bunch of new bugs in her apartment; Mr. Clean was probably wired for video. "I'm not here to spy," Sergei said, sounding miserable. "Really. I was trying to do something nice. I was trying to bring you good news. It was on my way. It was convenient. "
It didn't cost you anything. "You were trying to trap my neighbor," Roberta said pleasantly. She must have been right that he couldn't run voiceprints without cause, or surely he would have done it by now. ''I'm glad Mason and Camilla are all right. Really, I am. Thank you for, uh, dropping in to tell me. But now it's time for you to leave, Sergei. Run along."
He blinked at her. She suddenly remembered a kid she'd known in grade school, after her parents died, a blinking cringing child, as pale as one of those blind insects you find under rocks. The other kids had picked on him incessantly, and because it made her angry, she'd beaten them up. But then the insect, pathetically loyal, had begun to follow her around, and she'd discovered that she didn't like him any more than the other children did. One day she'd rounded on him and said fiercely, "Go away." The look on his face had been terrible then, an open wound, ten times worse than his expression of mute resignation when the bullies tormented him.
She wondered what the rest of Sergei's life was like. She didn't think she wanted to know. And then it occurred to her that if Zephyr was wanted for questioning by the police, they wouldn't have sent a probation officer to pick her up—would they? Was he authorized to make arrests? Was that a warrant he was holding? "Sergei," she said carefully, "what do you have in that tube there?" Maybe he'd tell her it was none of her business; maybe it was connected to whatever he was supposed to be doing in San Jose.
But instead he pulled a roll of paper out of the document tube. He unrolled it, mutely, and held it up for Roberta to see. He was blushing.
It was a poster from one of Zephyr's performance pieces. Clad in a black leotard, Zephyr sat in a lotus position with bots perched on her head and thighs. "I have a lot of others," Sergei said, "but this is my favorite. I thought—I thought if she was here—I could just-she could—"
"You wanted her autograph," Roberta said gently. He nodded, blushing again. Oh, poor Sergei.
"I know you must think—"
"I don't think anything," Roberta said. "It's all right, Sergei. I just wish you'd explained up front. I thought you were raiding me for some reason."
Sergei looked down and began rerolling the poster. "Well, she's usually not shy"—now there was the understatement of the millenium—"but I guess she's being more private now, and—I'm not a stalker. Roberta, really. I would have come by to tell you about your clients, anyway."
"Of course you would." He'd been trying to prove his devotion to Zephyr by sweeping in via helicopter, the dashing cavalier. At state expense. And he'd been talking quite clearly in front of the bugs. Sergei, Roberta thought, for your own sake, I hope your bosses don't listen to this. "Do you want me to keep the poster, Sergei?" She could fake Zephyr's signature, probably. "In case—"
"No," he said quickly. "No, it's—it's a limited edition. I like to keep it with me." He stood up. "Look, Roberta, I—I'd better leave. My pilot's waiting." He walked to the window and climbed through it, back out onto the fire escape. ''I'll check in again when I get to San Jose," he said through the open window. "I'll call you."
"That's fine," Roberta said. "Good-bye, Sergei."
"Good-bye, Roberta. Thank you for not laughing at me." Finally he began climbing the ladder back to the roof. She watched until his feet had vanished, and then, with a sigh of relief, went back downstairs to collect Meredith.
She wasn't in the hallway. Roberta saw the door to Zephyr's apartment standing open and went in, wading through less water and grime than she would have expected. Zephyr hadn't taken her furniture with her when she left, only her motley collection of bots; the place looked much the same as it had when she lived there, although it was considerably quieter. Here was her faded purple sofa, waterlogged now and stinking; there were her asymmetrical wooden knickknack tables, the ones the bots had loved to perch on. The carpet had once been bright pink shag; now it looked like the pelt of a dead animal. "Meredith?"
''I'm here." Meredith came out of the kitchen, holding a plate, a bowl, a mug, some cutlery. "So what was the deal with the helicopter?"
"My parole officer stopped by to say hello. He climbed down from the roof through my living room window."
Meredith wrinkled her ruined nose. "Goddess. Does he do that a lot?"
"No. I think he only did it this time because he thought you were Zephyr. He, ah, he seems to have a crush on her. He brought one of her posters. He wanted her autograph."
Meredith started to laugh. "A Scoophead with a hard-on for celebrity, huh? The poor man!"
"Well, it means he doesn't know about you, anyway." Roberta nodded at the china and silverware Meredith was holding and said, "What's with the place setting?"
"I figured the least I could do is supply my own dishes. While I'm at your place. I'll wash yours too. I—"
"No." Roberta, exhausted, shook her head. She wondered if excessive dishwashing was some surviving fragment of Meredith's illness. And then it occurred to her that Meredith would surely deny that her elaborate domestic systems had ever been illness, just as Roberta had steadfastly denied that her own compassion was actually a disorder. They had both been slapped with psychiatric diagnoses by ScoopNet, hadn't they, even before actual doctors got involved? Roberta remembered watching the coverage of Meredith's behavior—so long ago now—remembered some smarmy family friend cooing about how concerned everyone was about Merry, holed up in her mother's house cleaning anything that would stay still. At the time, Roberta had felt superior to the neuroses of the very rich. Now she wondered bleakly what the smarmy woman, surely no longer a family friend, had done with the money ScoopNet paid her. "Meredith, you don't have to do my dishes. My dishes are fine, and Mr. Clean will do them. He gets cranky if he doesn't have enough work. He spins in circles and whines." Then she remembered that Meredith hated bots. "Unless he scares you too much. I'll put him away if you don't want him there."
Meredith smiled. "No, it's all right. I got—used to them, in Mexico. More used to them, anyway. I freaked out last night because of the fever. I guess I was having flashbacks." She stood there, holding the dishes, and said, "Roberta, you have to tell me what I can do for you. I need to do something for you. I know I can't make up how I've hurt you, can't repay that, but I want to do something. As a goodwill gesture. I need to do that. Do you understand?"
"Yeah. I do, actually." Roberta thought about it. She could ask Meredith to try to get her remaining six weeks of parole erased, but even if that were possible, it couldn't compensate for the previous five years. What did she want? What in the world could Meredith do to make any kind of amends?
And then something occurred to her, and she said, "Okay. I want to go upstairs and get something to eat, and maybe take a nap. When I've gotten some energy back, I want to bring some plastic chairs down here and set up in a corner that's not too stinky, and I want the two of us to sit down, and I want to hear your version of this whole mess. From the beginning." On the street, she'd thought she didn't want to know what had happened to Meredith, but now she did. "I want to do it down here because I don't think there are bugs down here, and if there are, they've probably been shorted out by the water."
"Oh," Meredith said quietly, and then, "So you won't be selling my confessions to ScoopNet?"
"I won't sell them to anybody. Or maybe I will: I don't know. This is what I'm asking, Meredith. I want to know what the hell was going on in your head that whole time. I wasn't in your shoes, you said; well, put me in your shoes. I want to know if there's any way in the world I can relate to anything that's happened to you, or if you've been so rich and famous since you were born that you might as well be from another planet. I just want to know."
"All right." Meredith's voice shook a little. "That's—I guess that's fair. I'm really not from another planet, Roberta."
"Prove it."
Meredith made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "Well. I hope I can. But if I tell you the whole story—you know, it will take a while. I'll have to go pretty far back."
"Of course you will," Roberta said wearily, and turned to go back upstairs to get something to eat.
Part Two The Ones You Miss
Five
SEVERAL weeks after her release from isolation, fourteen-year-old Meredith Walford was interviewed by ScoopNet, the slickest and most successful of the trash networks, whose motto was, "Gossip so gripping, it's almost news!" Meredith didn't want to be interviewed by ScoopNet. She didn't want to be interviewed by anyone, but her father had suggested gently that it would seem crass for Meredith not to respond somehow to the truckloads of cards and gifts that had been arriving at the family estate since her return home. "Meredith," he told her, the familiar aquiline features staring out from the monitor in her bedroom, "the image of you emerging from isolation has become a national symbol of hope. You have to acknowledge the concern of your public."