can’t blame scientists if the government perverts our work,” he said, a stubborn frown forming on his forehead. “We can’t be responsible for the ethics of the whole nation. The weapons work could be stopped, if people had the guts to say ‘no more.”’
“Oh, dammit, David,” Mariah said sadly. “I’m not stupid—or naïve. I know we won’t get rid of nuclear weapons tomorrow, now that the genie’s out of the bottle. But we design a new bomb, and then the Russians build one bigger than ours, and then we make ours even more deadly, and on and on and on. I just can’t watch you waste your talents by helping these guys develop the ultimate doomsday machine. Because that’s the real reason you’re all here, and you know it.”
They’d had the same argument a dozen times since David had accepted the Los Alamos job. The silence between them as they pulled away from each other that night had simply concluded the debate once and for all with a permanent agreement to disagree. In the end, she had left David and New Mexico and taken a job as an analyst at CIA headquarters in Virginia—telling herself that whatever she might do to help restrain the Soviet nuclear threat could also make the work of David and his Los Alamos colleagues superfluous.
For two years, their only contact was a diminishing trickle of letters and phone calls. Then one day, out of the blue, David had shown up on her doorstep, gaunt and distraught after an accident in the lab had claimed the life of one of his colleagues—a young technician who had died a gruesome, lingering death after accidental exposure to radioactive materials. David had become thoroughly disillusioned with weapons work and said he wanted only to build a career in teaching and to marry her.
They were never separated again. Lindsay was born nine months later and their lives had seemed charmed—until a careening truck in Vienna had brought it all crashing down.
As he watched her approach along the long hallway, David’s mouth lifted lopsidedly, the paralyzed left side drooping while the right struggled upward. Mariah smiled back at this man she had loved for so long—still loved, she reminded herself. Still loved but missed horribly even as she sat beside him during the few short hours she managed to snatch with him each week.
“Hi,” she said warmly, putting a hand around his neck and touching her forehead to his. She closed her eyes briefly, trying not to notice that faint aroma of decay that clung to his atrophied body, despite all the toiletries she brought in for him.
“How are you, lover?” She kissed his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair, giving the curls an encouraging nudge toward the frothy chaos that had once been their preferred arrangement. “Sorry I’m a little late. Traffic.”
He blinked. She dropped in his lap the paper sack she had brought in from the car, then moved behind the chair. “Let’s go sit. I’m beat.” She wheeled him into his room, where she kicked off her shoes and shrugged out of her trench coat, tossing it on the bed and pushing up the sleeves of her suit jacket. Then she moved him over to the computer table in the corner.
“Headstick?” she asked. One brown eye closed, opened, then closed—the signal for no. He seemed alert and Mariah berated herself again for having made him wait.
She put aside the headband with the attached stick that he used to tap the keyboard when his faltering right hand became exhausted. The left hand was useless, drawn into itself and held tightly against his chest by the constricted arm, perpetually reverted to a fetal position except when he was deeply asleep and his muscles finally relaxed.
Mariah removed the paper bag from his lap and pulled a rolling table over his thin legs. She lifted his right hand, bringing it to rest on the computer keyboard. His bony index finger reached out shakily and landed on a key. Mariah looked at the screen and saw the letter L—Lindsay.
“She’s at the swimming pool,” she said. “I’m picking her up on the way home.” Mariah leaned back against the windowsill and smiled. “She’s doing great in the water. The coach says she may even make the team next year. She’s such a fighter, David.”
His eyes regarded her intently.
“And the doctor says it’s doing wonders for her leg,” she went on. “It’s definitely growing and he thinks there’s a chance it might eventually catch up to the other one.” Mariah reached into the paper bag she had brought. “Lindsay couldn’t come, but she did bake cookies for you—chocolate chip.”
Slow, lopsided grin.
“She does this to irritate me, you know, just because I’m allergic to chocolate. I hope it gives you both zits.”
David watched her pull out one of the cookies. She put it in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. The tendons on the back of his hand stretched taut like puppet strings as he lifted the cookie to his mouth with agonizing slowness. Mariah took some shirts out of the bag and walked over to the small wardrobe next to the bed. David’s eyes followed her every step as his jaw slowly worked on the cookie.
“I washed your flannel shirts for you. It’s getting frosty out there.” He didn’t go out much, of course, except when she and Lindsay took him for walks on the weekend or, once a month or so, home overnight. But it was a recognition that he was alive and the seasons were still turning.
Mariah came back and pulled up a chair next to him, wiping a line of chocolate drool that ran down from the corner of his mouth, then stroking his arm absently as she spoke to him. She talked about Lindsay and her new school, their evenings, office gossip, inconsequential stories of people, some of them old friends, some people he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, as long as she could make him feel that he was still part of their world.
As she rambled on, David’s eyes watched her and smiled. It was the only part of him that was recognizable anymore, Mariah thought. The orderlies always managed to do something peculiar with his curly black hair. Not their fault, really—they hadn’t spent years watching him step from the shower and give his head a distracted shake until each curl found its own equilibrium, had they? Now, the way they combed it, the curls were straightened and flattened, parted at the side, giving him a strangely organized air that he had never possessed when he was in charge of his own grooming. And he was getting grayer. In the ten months since the accident, he seemed to have aged a decade or more beyond his forty-one years. His frame, slight to begin with, had withered to a wispy frailty.
Only the eyes held the essence of the man David had once been. They were also the only part of him capable anymore of reflecting a familiar emotion. The emotions she saw there these days were fleeting and elemental—pleasure at her coming, sadness at her leaving, frustration during his rare attempts to communicate.
Once though, in Vienna, when he had fully emerged from the coma into which he had been plunged for several weeks after the accident, Mariah had seen in those eyes the terror of realization.
For several days previous, there had been times when he seemed to recognize her. In those moments of brief lucidity, he had struggled to reach out to her, but his body had become permanently contorted, twisted into an unnatural stiffness by the misfiring synapses in his brain. The effort exhausted him and he would lapse again into catatonia. One morning, however, Mariah had stepped off the hospital elevator to the sound of unearthly shrieks coming from the direction of his room. Heart pounding, she had raced down the corridor, the cries growing louder as she approached his door.
It was what she had most dreaded—the one thing she had prayed would never come. Multiple skull fractures from the accident had left irreversible brain damage. She had seen the X-rays and CAT scans herself, had had the damage explained in detail, and she knew that his life was over, even if his heart still beat
