The Hatching: A Novel (19 page)

“Open it,” she said.

The man hesitated. “I can open this one, but I don’t have the codes for the next two.”

“But you brought our associate down there yesterday.”

“Yes. Well, no, not exactly. Not me personally. I
am
the supervisor, after all. I sent one of the maintenance men down with your man.”

Faiz leaned against the wall. “What’s with all the doors?”

The man punched a series of numbers into the electronic keypad. “Water protection. For flooding. The doors are watertight, and they are set up in a series like on a boat or submarine. If one is breached, the next is designed to hold everything out. And if we know the water is coming, we can shut everything down, close the doors, and wait. Once the worst is over, we pump it out and are back up and running in just a few days. You only open one at a time, pass through, close it behind you, and then open the next. Like an air lock.”

He opened the door and ushered them through. He had to push hard to get the door to open. It was maintained well, but the tolerances had to be tight, Dr. Basu thought, if they were meant to hold out water. The man closed the door behind them. The bolts shot home with a loud clank. The light in the hallway was fluorescent and shaky. Dr. Basu pulled a bottle of water from her purse. She unscrewed the cap and was about to take a sip when the ground shook and she stumbled a little. She spilled water on her blouse.

“Did you . . . ?” Faiz let his voice trail off.

“Yes,” Dr. Basu said. “That was a big one.” Ahead of them was another door that looked exactly like the one behind them.

She looked at the Delhi Metro man. “Get the codes. We’re going to need to open all the doors.”

T
he plane was late. It was bad enough that Aonghas Càidh saw his girlfriend only every two weeks, but usually he was the one flying to her. Somehow it felt harder to have to wait for her plane from Edinburgh than it did to wait when his own plane was delayed.

It could have been worse, he supposed. He wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to end up dating somebody like Thuy in the first place. He wasn’t a bad bloke. He was smart enough to make a decent living—he’d taken over the writing of his grandfather’s potboiler detective novels, a very successful series that had been in print for more than fifty years and seemed like it still had steam as long as Aonghas didn’t make a bollocks of it—and he was generally considered good company. He was funny and had a lot of stories to tell, most of them involving being raised by his grandfather in the old castle on Càidh Island, their family castle and family island with their family name, an otherwise unpopulated rock in Loch Ròg, on the west side of the isle in the remote Outer Hebrides. His stories of being six and motoring from Càidh Island across storm-whipped waters so he could get to the Carloway Primary School—he was one of fewer than forty students on the rolls—or
the time his grandfather knocked himself unconscious in the cellar and Aonghas had to wait two hours for him to come around, made him seem like an exotic creature to his friends.

Aonghas was in his early thirties, and until he met Thuy, he’d been the only one of his friends who wasn’t in a stable, committed relationship, despite their repeated attempts to set him up. Sure, he was a little plush around the belly, but he had the kind of big frame that carried it well; if he’d been a little less lazy, he would have done well out on the fishing boats. He had an easy way of talking, and women seemed to like him. But he really couldn’t believe Thuy was his girlfriend. She was athletic, gorgeous, and smart as hell: she’d just missed qualifying for the Olympics in the two hundred-meter freestyle, and had worked for a couple of years as a model before deciding to go to medical school. She was also unbelievably nice and thoughtful, the kind of woman who spent her free time volunteering at animal shelters and never passed a homeless person without dropping some money in their cup. All that, and she liked to cook. He was pretty sure it was a miracle she was his girlfriend. He knew the truth, which was that not being a bad bloke wasn’t really enough to justify having a woman like Thuy fall in love with him. Still, who was he to question the vagaries of the human heart? Or, as his grandfather had put it: “Don’t be such an ass. If the lass loves you, she loves you. Take what little gifts this life has to offer.”

He met Thuy when she came to Stornoway for vacation. She’d walked into the Kenneth Street coffee shop he liked to write in. Three mornings in a row she’d come through the door with a backpack and hiking gear, and three mornings in a row he’d been sitting at a table in the back, hacking away at the newest Harry Thorton mystery, each word he wrote enriching his bank account ever so slightly. Finally, on the fourth morning, Aonghas worked up the
courage to talk to her. It was the wrong time of year for tourists, and she would have stood out even if she hadn’t been Vietnamese and ridiculously good-looking. Aonghas didn’t admit it to her until they’d been dating for nearly six months, but he’d been surprised when she’d spoken to him and didn’t have an accent. She was as Scottish as he was. They’d talked for a while about what she was doing there—she was in medical school and had a vacation and wanted to do some hiking—and he’d suggested a nice walk and a couple of places she might like to eat, and then he’d given her his phone number. They’d gone hiking together the next day and had hit it off.

They had five more days together before she headed back, but he’d already had a trip to Edinburgh planned for three weeks later, and ended up staying at her place. Somehow, it worked out. Even with writing the Harry Thorton books and motoring over to Càidh Island to check in on his grandfather every couple of days, Aonghas had enough free time that it was easy to take the one-hour flight to Edinburgh every other weekend. And here and there, when she could, she’d sneak away to the Isle of Lewis for a few days: she preferred coming to him, she said, and he believed her. She seemed to love the island as much as he did, and arranged to do her residency in Stornoway when she graduated. Two months, Aonghas thought. Two months and he’d get to see her every day, wake up with her every morning.

And with any luck, he thought, as he saw Thuy’s plane come bursting through the clouds that hung over the ocean, two months from now would be the beginning of always.

He fingered the box in his pocket. He’d brought the ring with him the last time he’d gone to Edinburgh, two weeks ago, but it hadn’t felt right, and he’d finally realized why he was hesitating: she’d never met his grandfather. Even though they’d been together for a year, Aonghas had never taken Thuy out to Càidh Island. At first, he’d hesitated because
he wasn’t sure it was serious, and then he’d hesitated precisely because it was serious. Padruig could be intimidating, and while Aonghas didn’t want it to be true, he knew that if Padruig disapproved of Thuy, it would signal the death knell of the relationship. So there was a lot riding on this weekend. And he had to admit, he was scared shitless at what would happen when Padruig and Thuy came together.

The drive to the coast on the other side of the isle took only an hour, and he’d never seen Thuy so excited.

“You think he’ll like me?”

He pulled her bag out from the backseat and then picked up his own bag, shutting the door of the Range Rover with his hip. “He doesn’t really like anybody, Thuy. God, I’ve told you enough stories about how cranky he is. He can be a bit of a cunt at times.”

She smacked him on the head. Not hard. But still. “Don’t talk about him like that. He raised you.”

Aonghas stepped over the rail of the boat and tucked their bags in the cabin. He’d loaded his grandfather’s boxes already: three coolers full of milk, dairy, and fresh produce—more than usual, because he and Thuy were staying—plus mail and two boxes of books and magazines. He held Thuy’s hand to help her on board, and then pulled her tight against him. He could feel her pressing against the ring box in his front pocket.

“He didn’t have much of a choice about raising me, Thuy. He wasn’t going to let his grandson go to the orphanage, and after my parents died . . .” He shrugged. “But you’re right. He’s a good man. He’s a tough bastard, and he has his ways, but I love him, and he’ll love you, Thuy. I promise. I love you, and I love him, and love’s the sort of bridge we can all cross over.”

“You say pretty things sometimes,” Thuy said, and then she kissed him and went forward while he started the boat.

That was one of the other things he liked about her. He could say
stuff like that—that love was a sort of bridge. He could read poetry and good books, and she never, ever, tried to tell him that he should write a “real” book, that he was wasting his time on the Harry Thorton novels. He’d had girlfriends before who pushed him, and in the end, he had to admit he loved those damned mysteries more than he’d loved any of those old girlfriends. He’d grown up with the books, helped his grandfather come up with new plots for them—two books a year, every year, for as long as Aonghas could remember—and taking over the writing of them was all he’d ever wanted to do.

He looked at the way Thuy sat near the bow and marveled again at his luck. She should have been a painting, the way she looked against the water. The weather never seemed to bother her, and even though it wasn’t that cold, there was a bit of spray coming off the water. He liked watching the way she leaned into the wind, how she zipped her jacket but let the hood stay down, catching the mist on her face. Two more months. Two more months. He said it over and over in his head like a mantra. Two more months and she’d be doing her residency in Stornoway. The idea of living with Thuy, of having her on the Isle of Lewis all the time, not just for a long weekend every couple of months, was enough to make Aonghas almost burst with happiness. He patted the ring again.

She was going to say yes. She had to. He couldn’t think about her saying anything else. He felt sick and knew it wasn’t the waves or the water: they’d never bothered him. It was the gauntlet of facing his grandfather.

They rounded the eastern edge of Càidh Island, and he saw the familiar harbor and the castle standing on the bluffs. Thuy gasped, and he smiled. He’d tried to tell her, but nobody ever believed it until they saw it. It wasn’t a big castle, as castles go, but it
was
a castle. His grandfather could never quite figure out how many centuries it had been in the family, and there was no real record of why it was there,
but it was beautiful. It was home. And as far as castles went, it was actually fairly comfortable. Aonghas’s grandfather had spent quite a bit of money to make it more livable: there was solar power connected to a bank of batteries and a generator for the many times there wasn’t enough sun to keep the batteries charged, and a ten thousand-gallon diesel tank to keep the generator running; three large propane tanks kept the castle heated, since Càidh Island was almost bare of trees; two deep-freeze units were stocked with meat, ice cream, and frozen fruit, and the dry storage room was stocked with flour and grains and other dried goods; the furniture and linens, though a little outdated, had all been expensively furnished by a London decorator when Aonghas was still a little boy; and it had a wine cellar. Oh, the wine cellar. Even if he had been lonely at times as a child, Càidh Island, this barren rock in the waters of the Outer Hebrides, had been a good place to grow up, and it was an even better place to visit as a man.

He looked to the dock, but there was nobody there. Aonghas didn’t mind. His grandfather, a man whom Aonghas had always thought of as having almost supernatural strength, was finally showing his age. Padruig had been forty-two when his daughter and Aonghas’s father died in the crash, and at seventy-four, he wasn’t quite as quick as he’d been. He was still a tough old man. There was no questioning that. Except for four years in the military, Padruig had lived his entire life on the island. He claimed he’d never seen a doctor or a dentist, and as far as Aonghas could tell, that was true enough. He spent most of his time reading or writing—even though he had handed the Harry Thorton novels over to Aonghas, Padruig was still hacking away at his typewriter, supposedly working on an autobiography—and when he wasn’t doing that, he was out on the water fishing or back in the castle fixing things. Still, there was no reason for the old man to come down to the dock if he didn’t need to. Besides, if Aonghas was being honest, it was good to have a little
room to breathe. He was really, really nervous about Thuy and his grandfather meeting. Really, really, really nervous.

Aonghas tied the boat to the dock. He helped Thuy out of the boat and then started piling their bags and the groceries on the wooden planks. He heard a soft
ding
and turned to see Thuy pulling out her cell phone.

“Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe I get reception here.”

He wrapped his hands around her hand and the phone. “You’d better turn it off. I wasn’t kidding when I told you that he’ll go batshit if he sees that. He is not a fan of technology.”

“I thought you said he had the castle wired for electricity and that he likes to listen to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal.”

“He does, but it’s the same radio he’s had since before my ma was born. And the electric is only so that he can power the freezer and fridge and the pumps for the septic system. No, other than the radio, it’s books or walking or staring at the water. I tried talking him into buying a television and DVD player once. This was back when I was ten or eleven, and even then he’d have none of it. Basically, he hates the idea of having to rely on anything he can’t fix himself. Just trust me, honey. Turn off the phone.”

“Well, at least we’ll be able to get the news from the radio. I still can’t believe about China.”

“China?” The sound of Padruig’s voice startled them. The old man was standing on the rock path above them, hands stuffed into the pockets of his shooting jacket. With his flowing beard and the shadow from the clouds and the tree behind him, he looked practically biblical. “China is only the beginning,” he said. “There’s never just one of that sort of thing, is there?”