Safe Passage (20 page)

    
Though she had always loved the attention the twins attracted—girls vying for them even though they were so homely, and people watching them run because they stayed in stride with each other (a kind of victory, she supposed, though they never won the races)—there were times when their
doubleness
caught up with them. When Merle got pneumonia, Darren complained so bitterly of pains in his lungs that he had to go to the doctor, too. And when fifteen-year-old Darren took the car to pick up his brother, their
twinness
got him arrested.

    
The police called the house to notify the family but were told that Mr. and Mrs. Singer were out of town. This was not true; they were only at meetings. But Gideon, who'd answered the phone, reasoned it would be wise to keep his parents out of it. Perhaps he also wanted to make Percival a hero in the eyes of the twins, who usually looked up only to Gideon. He told the police that Percival, who was eighteen and therefore of age, would come to the station to get his brother.

    
This was during that period when Percival spoke to Gideon only under duress. It was also a time when Percival went to as few classes as possible but spent most of his weekday
evenings
home by parental decree.
Mag
insisted he could be grounded as long as he lived at home and believed he might do some homework if he had no other choice. Gideon had just come in when the police called. He didn't realize until later that Percival was not in their room as expected, but out taking advantage of their parents' absence, probably raising hell somewhere with Tim O'Neal.

    
Mag
and Patrick learned the rest of the story later. For the next two hours, Gideon looked for his brother. He called Tim O'Neal's house and the homes of several of Tim's friends. He went to a spot where Percival and his girlfriend were known to park. He searched in several high school hangouts. He finally found him eating a barbecue sandwich with Tim in a restaurant called Flip's. Gideon, Percival, and Tim arrived at the police station not long after
Mag
and Patrick did (having been notified, after all, by Merle). They stood under the too-bright fluorescent lights of the precinct house, Percival and Tim looking a little sheepish and Gideon appearing to be in real agony.

    
"We managed to find our way back into town," Patrick said sarcastically to Gideon, having learned of Gideon's deception. "I didn't know where you were," Gideon said, which was true.

    
"It's okay,"
Mag
told him. She had assumed Gideon's pain was from anticipated parental anger, but her letting him off did not seem to deflect it. Tim O'Neal excused himself and went home. Percival walked as far away from Gideon as he could. Gideon looked even more desolate.
Mag
knew then he regretted entangling Percival in a situation he might have avoided otherwise, on a night when everyone might have believed him safely grounded at home. Gideon's discomfort surprised her, because Percival was bestowing no kindnesses on him in those days, and she hadn't thought Gideon would care. But that night—and again now, looking at his crouched form on the floor—she understood the panic that must have possessed him, to keep him driving from place to place trying to find his brother, so Percival could rescue the twins and be the hero…and the distress of realizing finally that his gesture was only going to get Percival in more trouble.

    
"Gideon!" she whispered. He didn't move until she said it a second time. Then he woke up so slowly—a lazy opening of an eye—that it was as if he were moving in slow motion. She knew there must be something terribly wrong with him. Odd…she'd once thought that because Percival tormented him and beat on him during the early years and finally stopped speaking to him, a rage had grown in Gideon and killed his attachment. She'd even thought his anger was what made him run so fast.

    
But it was not true at all. The night he tried to let Percival bail out Darren, and today when he flew home from Utah, he did it out of love.
Mag
kneeled down so he could hear her, but spoke low enough not to wake him all the way up. "Get in bed," she said.

    
With labored,
robotlike
movements, he stood up, walked the few steps to his bed, and fell clumsily onto his mattress. He pulled the cover to his chest. She switched off the light. She wanted to bend over and kiss him the way she'd done when he was little, but she only touched his hair on her way out of the room.

    
There was no point in trying to sleep. The night was almost over. She walked into Simon's bedroom and turned off his alarm. She did not want him out there this morning under the dark sky. She didn't want him cold or fleeing from vicious dogs. It was bad enough that he was ready to sacrifice himself to a surgeon's knife. She would deliver the papers herself.

    
She put on a pair of
RipOffs
and another sweatshirt on top of it and running shoes that one of the boys had grown out of. Patrick turned over and groaned while she dressed in the darkness, but he didn't wake up. Even Lucifer, curled between Patrick's face and
Mag's
pillow, gazed up at her but didn't stir. Who said cats were nocturnal animals?

    
Downstairs, she found two sets of cotton work gloves in the closet. Patrick had taught the boys to layer themselves with clothes. She didn't bring the papers into the garage. She didn't want to see them that clearly. Even where they lay stacked in the driveway under the porch light, their copy was all too visible. She caught a glimpse of a headline and a picture of the ruined building beneath. She didn't look at it, wouldn't. It wouldn't tell her anything new. She turned the stacks of papers upside down, so the headlines didn't show.

    
The temperature was not below freezing, but the darkness felt damp and bitter. She pulled up the hood of one of her sweatshirts and sat on the driveway, rolling the papers. She was not as fast as the boys, but she was steady. She
folded,
she snapped rubber bands into place. In time she wasn't even cold.

    
Was Percival cold?

    
Simon would warm him by having his ear fixed. He would buy his brother life. Let Simon sleep, she thought. Everything was topsy-turvy. Before yesterday, she'd demanded the ear operation from him as surely as she'd demanded victory from the others. Why did she think she needed perfection? Just let them all come home. She dragged out what
Freestate
Sentinel
bags the boys had managed to accumulate over the years and stuffed the papers in. She loaded them into the station wagon and drove off.

    
She could not remember doing the papers by herself before.
 
Whenever she helped Simon, she always did certain houses and he did others; she did not know his part of the route well. She improvised. Whenever she was not sure if a house got a paper or not, she gave them one. If she ran out, it would happen on the section she knew. Then she would call the office and say she was short. The
Freestate
Sentinel
could afford to give away a few extra papers. Simon must sleep; he must have time for his head to clear. There was a sort of missionary zeal about her task. She felt sluggish from being awake most of the night, but she made herself concentrate. Trying to figure out which houses got papers and which didn't, she was briefly so absorbed that for a moment there was only that. It was not until she drove over onto Trevor Circle that she remembered Monster. She had a vision of the bruise on Simon's leg. A fury filled her. It seemed that she'd been gearing up all along to face the dog this morning.

    
She delivered to the first few houses cautiously, but there was no sign of the animal. She carried a full load in her pack, ready to swing it at him, use it in her defense. Adrenaline coursed through her; she was wide awake. Four houses, five. No dog came charging at her, there was not even any sound.

    
She approached Monster's driveway. A fierce, rapid barking began. It was almost a relief. She moved closer, walking at her usual pace. Then she saw that the beast was inside, facing her from behind a living room window, perched on the back of a couch. She was disappointed. As she approached the porch, the dog bared its teeth at her, snarled,
then
resumed its quick, frenzied yapping. She bared her own teeth back. Retreating a little, she tossed the paper at the window, letting it hit the glass right in front of Monster's teeth. He made as if to catch it—stupid—and then realized the paper was on the other side of glass, out of reach. Angry, he snarled again, watching the paper drop onto the porch. It was satisfying, giving the beast a taste of its own impotence.
Mag
wanted something more. She wanted to vanquish it utterly. But the owners had been responsible for once, kept the dog inside-and she felt cheated.

CHAPTER 8

    
A cloudy light had sheared away the darkness by the time
Izzy
woke up. He hadn't thought he'd be able to sleep so long, with everything that was on his mind. Rubbing the fuzziness out of his eyes, he gazed around and could see even without his glasses that Gideon was in one of the other beds. He wasn't surprised. For years when they were younger, Percival and Gideon had been practically glued to each other, doing everything together and keeping him up half the night with their talking. They were worse than the twins. Later the talking stopped except for formalities—"1 think
those're
my socks you've got on, Gideon." "Oh, yeah." A stripping off of socks. Absolute politeness. But
Izzy
thought they were pretty attached even through their silence. Now Gideon looked a little sick. That was probably normal, considering what time he must have gotten in.
Izzy
supposed the only one who'd really thought Gideon would stay at school was his father.

    
He remembered now that he'd dreamed about his father. He'd dreamed his father was in a cage, like one of the laboratory dogs at school. God. He'd watched his father the whole damned day yesterday and had no more clue to what was wrong with him now than he did before. He reached for his glasses on the night table and cleaned them with the sleeve of his shirt that was lying on the floor. When he put them on, the room came clear, but the reason for the blind spells didn't, and it was driving him nuts.

    
He dressed quietly and went downstairs. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. She had made a whole pot of tea, as if they were in for a long siege, but nobody else seemed to be up. The TV was not on, and the morning paper was lying on the table untouched.

    
"
Izzy
," she said, as if it had taken her a minute to figure out which one he was. She looked awful. She had on a pair of those baggy old
RipOffs
his father had made when he was still experimenting with the design, and her hair looked like she'd been out in the wind. She didn't have on any makeup.

    
He was going to ask her if she'd heard anything, but she spoke first. "Are you still living with that same girl?" she asked. He was surprised she'd think about that right now. He never told her when he was living with a girl, but since the twins had come to College Park to school this year, they always filled her in. It embarrassed him that she knew about his various girlfriends, because they made him look so unreliable.
Izzy
knew that in no other sense had he ever been an irresponsible person.

    
"She moved out last week," he said. It was odd, but he hadn't thought about Jocelyn from the moment she left until now. It was odd that a person could live in the same apartment with someone for eleven weeks, sleep with her every night, eat dinner with her, talk to her for hours every day, and when she left -not think about her at all.

    
"Well, if one of them ever lasts over three or four months, bring her home to meet us," his mother said.

    
"Snide, Mother."

    
"You're very nice-looking,
Izzy
. It must be hard on the girls." She sounded tired. He figured she hadn't slept. "Want some tea?" she asked.

    
"I'll get it." He went to the cabinet for a cup. He wondered what his mother would say if he told her he'd picked the fight with Jocelyn on purpose. He couldn't exactly tell her the whole story, considering the circumstances. Jocelyn had been running around his apartment in her underwear at the time. But the point was,
Izzy
was annoyed by it. He had been trying to get her to be serious. He wanted Jocelyn to think of someone to take one of his laboratory dogs, Rusty. Rusty was half Labrador, half golden retriever, a gentle, playful dog that would make the perfect pet. The trouble was, he was four months old and growing out of his cage in the lab.
Izzy
didn't want to take him to the pound with the rest of the dogs because he was pretty sure nobody would get far enough past
Rusty's
size to appreciate his temperament. They'd decide on a smaller puppy, and three days later Rusty would be gassed.

    
But Jocelyn hadn't been in the mood for thinking about laboratory animals just then. She was wearing red and black string bikini underpants and a little red bra, drinking Michelob from a bottle—not her first Michelob, either. Normally there was nothing
Izzy
would have liked better. But he wanted her to concentrate on Rusty.
 
Every time a dog like Rusty came along,
Izzy
thought how taking the dogs to the pound was no better than killing them with
pentobarb
, which was what he'd done working on an experiment at
Biolab
two years ago. God, he'd hated that. And Jocelyn knew it, too.