Afterparty Part 31

He chuckled. "My driver tried to stop me, but what could he do? I was his boss. In any case the man was too frightened by me to accept the car, or my clothing. He took my card, though." He laughed again.

"My son heard what happened. The driver told him. Eduard took away my access-to my money first, then my company, then to anyone I used to work with. I kept trying to help people, give them what they needed. I couldn't be trusted, he said. If I fought him, he would have me committed." Edo shrugged. "Given my history, I knew this was no idle threat, eh? And I couldn't afford to let that happen. So we moved out here. Oh, I travel when necessary. But Eduard only lets me see a few members of the board, and key customers who insist on meeting me, and I must follow the script. Because if I don't-"

He stopped suddenly and put a hand to his face. He was overcome with some intense emotion: sadness, grief? I couldn't tell. Something in the Numinous had made Edo into an empathic wreck. No wonder his son had isolated him.

I said, "'Give everything to the poor and you will have treasure in Heaven.'"

"I'm sorry?" Edo said. His cheeks were wet with tears.

"The Bible story," I said. "Rich man, the eye of the needle...?"

He still didn't know what I was talking about. What kind of know-nothing G.o.d possessed him? "The rich man goes away sad," I said. "He loves money too much to get into Heaven."

Edo nodded. "Sounds like my son."

The sun beat down. I could barely breathe, but Edo seemed to soak it in. During the trial he'd described his G.o.d as a great pulsing ball of light and heat, a flame that surrounded him but did not burn him. He was his own burning bush.

We eventually reached the compound. There were three buildings: a sprawling, two-story Spanish-style house; a four-bay garage; and, farther back, another adobe-walled building that could have been a guest house or offices. Rovil parked the car in the circle drive.

Edo stepped up to the front door, then realized I wasn't following.

"I should have told you," he said. "I was afraid."

"You were afraid? Of me?"

"I was afraid you'd take her away."

He opened the door. After a moment I followed him in. The foyer felt like an icebox. A dark-haired woman appeared from a far doorway and stopped, startled to see someone with Edo. She was even more surprised when Rovil stepped into the doorway. "Mr. Vik, how did-?"

"These are friends of mine," Edo said. "Esperanza, this is Lyda Rose and Rovil Gupta." Somewhere in the distance was a ba.s.s beat of music, and I was ninety percent sure that I wasn't imagining it.

Esperanza nodded at us, then handed Edo a white towel and a sport s.h.i.+rt. "Sasha's still in her room?" Edo asked her.

Dr. Gloria put a hand on my elbow. I became aware of the tightness in my chest, my tripping heartbeat.

Edo tugged the s.h.i.+rt down over his gut. "This way." He led us into a vast, airy room. The ceiling slanted up to a peak thirty feet above us. A huge stone fireplace filled one wall, and a staircase led up to a railed balcony and the second-floor rooms. The st.u.r.dy furniture, I was pretty sure, had been constructed from the hulls of eighteenth-century battles.h.i.+ps, then upholstered in b.u.t.tery, deep-brown leather that could only be obtained from cows fattened on foie gras.

"Tell Rovil," Dr. Gloria said. "This is how you decorate a house."

Edo led us through an archway to a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was ajar. The music blared from there, a heavy funk beat under a ma.s.sive horn section. It sounded like a New Orleans marching band that had added a rank of synthesizers.

"Ten years old, and already a teenager," Edo said, grinning. I could barely hear him. My eyes were fixed on the wedge of sunlight spilling from that door. A shadow flickered there, and I sucked in my breath.

Edo reached the door and pushed it open. The room was large and bright with windows on two sides, the desert sunlight blasting in. A skinny girl with a wild nimbus of red-brown hair danced in the corner of the room where the windows met, her back to us. She wore a lime-green T-s.h.i.+rt, multicolored tights, and a Hawaiian gra.s.s skirt. In front of her stood a large easel with a rectangle of white paper bigger than she was, three feet wide and four tall. The easel's tray was full of liquid paints in shallow plastic cups. She held a paintbrush in each hand like drumsticks, dancing and painting at the same time, her little booty shaking that skirt, hands swiping and stabbing at the paper, throwing down colors.

She spun around, skirt fanning, droplets of paint flying-and stopped cold. She was a cartoon of shock: mouth agape, eyes wide, arms outstretched. No one moved for a long second.

Then something broke inside me. A bark escaped my body, a wild laugh, and then the laughter kept coming, tumbling out of me. My knees weakened and I nearly lost my balance. The dancing, the gra.s.s skirt, those paintbrushes!

I couldn't stop laughing. Tears filled my eyes. The girl looked stricken, which only made the moment more hilarious. I didn't know what was happening to me. My stomach began to cramp.

The girl looked up at Edo, then back to me. I kept thinking, She dances. My daughter dances!

I was past hilarity now and deep into some unlabeled emotional state, something roaring and chaotic. How does a wave feel when it crashes into the beach?

The girl (my daughter, my daughter who dances) stared up at me. She smiled tentatively, set the wet brushes on the floor, and touched my elbow. Dr. Gloria stood behind her, hands on her hips, waiting patiently for me to recover. Edo walked to the wall and did something that silenced the music.

I wiped at my eyes. "Whoa," I said. I smiled to rea.s.sure the girl.

Rovil stared at me. "Are you okay?"

I had no idea what I was. Edo, though, seemed unperturbed. "Sasha," he said, "this is Lyda Rose."

She held out her hand. So polite. I took a stuttering breath, then took her hand in both of mine. I pumped officiously. "Pleased to meet you, Sasha."

She nodded, equally mock-formal, in on the joke.

Edo said to Sasha, "Do you know who this is?"

She was staring at my hand. My left hand. Then she pirouetted away from me. The room was huge, much larger than the bedroom I'd grown up in. The queen-size bed was unmade, the bedclothes a riot of pinks and greens. Every wall that wasn't a window was covered with her paintings and drawings. There were charcoal pieces like the one Eduard Jr. had shown me in Chicago, and pieces done in marker, but most were paintings on pages the size of the one on the easel, singing with color. The paintings looked like random swirls and stripes, but I began to see figures in them: an alligator in a red-checked suit; a fat woman holding a pink parasol; a parrot wearing a top hat, hiding in a tree. The pirate bear was a frequent subject-and there was the toy itself, a stuffed bear half buried in the sheets and blankets.

Sasha crouched and reached under the bed. She brought out a rolled-up page, then looked over her shoulder at me. I went to her and helped her unroll it.

In the center were two figures, holding hands. One woman was tall and thin with an imperious afro; the other shorter but with wild red hair that spiked in all directions like flames. Their outside hands were waving at us. The paint was bright, the paper unwrinkled. I thought it must be a recent piece.

Sasha reached for my left hand. She lifted it up so she could touch the ring there. Then she reached inside the neck of her s.h.i.+rt and drew out a necklace. Dangling from the end of it was a benzene ring-Mikala's ring.

"I think she knows," Dr. Gloria said.

Sasha took us on a tour first of her room, showing us her artwork and toys, then of the entire house, then outside to the pool and the rock garden and the sprawling vegetable garden, where three Hispanic men in long-sleeved s.h.i.+rts were a.s.sembling aluminum sprinkler frames. They greeted her in Spanish, and she made Edo introduce me and Rovil. Then it was into the huge garage, where Sasha demonstrated her skill with a device that looked like a cross between a skateboard and a teeter-totter. I could not even stand up on the thing. Sasha kept trying to coach me, putting her hands on my s.h.i.+ns and ankles, but I was hopeless. Finally she flicked open a digital fan and shook it at me until I understood that she wanted me to take out my pen.

I produced mine and she tapped it, not with her fan, but with her finger. A message appeared: Stand on the dots!

Ah: the two orange circles on the toy's deck. I put one foot on one dot, stepped up-and the device shot out from under me. Edo caught me before I hit the ground. Sasha shook her head in mock disappointment.

My pen kept filling with messages from her. I couldn't see how she was typing-the fan wasn't even in her hand anymore. It was the closest thing to telepathy I'd ever seen. The fake mind readers in the NAT ward would have been so jealous.

We walked back to the house down a path made of pink gravel. Sasha was at my side, chattering away electronically. Rovil and Edo were up ahead, talking pharmaceutical biz.

"You sent that message to me, right?" I asked Sasha quietly. "The one telling me to come here?"

My pen flickered with a new message: Are you mad?

"No, I'm not mad," I said.

"Not in the way she meant, anyway," Dr. Gloria said. She was walking a few feet behind us, her hands clasped behind her back. She'd stayed within a dozen feet of me since we'd come through the gate, ready to swoop in as soon as I fell apart.

"Bug off," I told her.

You've got a friend. Like Grandpop.

I stopped. "You noticed that?" I asked Sasha.

I do too. Lots of them.

The pen slipped from my hand. Sasha crouched and picked it up. She opened the screen wide and held it up to me. The letters were blurry. I blinked until they came into focus.

That's okay. GP cries all the time too.

I said to Sasha, "I don't usually..." I cleared my throat. "I mean, twice in one day? I think it's the heat."

She nodded as if this made any kind of sense and pulled me toward the house. The rest of the group had gone inside and gathered in the enclosed sun porch. The room was positioned at the back of the house, facing the expanse of desert. Floor-to-ceiling windows let in maximum sunlight while the house's air-conditioning delivered maximum cold, a textbook example of the kind of have-your-cake-and-burn-it-too att.i.tude that the uber-rich specialized in. f.u.c.k you, Mother Nature. I thought about saying something, and then Esperanza came into the room with cookies and lemonade. It's hard to be a militant liberal when you're being served kindergarten snacks.

My pen pinged. We grow our own lemons!

"They're great," I told Sasha.

Rovil had noticed this latest exchange. He leaned over and said to Sasha, "How long did it take you to train the network?"

The girl shrugged. I pushed my pen to him. It said, It's still learning.

"What's this networking thing?" I asked.

Edo nodded toward the ceiling. "The house is watching her. Fingers, gestures. Some of it's virtual keyboard, but some of it's body language. She's got her own dialect." He sounded proud.

Sasha nodded. The pen said, Macros!!!

Rovil said, "Why don't you just talk?"

Edo frowned. After a moment I said, "Rovil, Jesus..."

"What?" Rovil asked. Embarra.s.sment has a frequency, like a dog whistle. Only some people can hear it.

The pen said, Why should I?

"Good point," I told Sasha.

Of course I was dying to know why she didn't speak. Eduard had said she was smart and artistic. Was the muteness congenital? Had the Numinous done this to her?

I said to her, "I need to talk to your ... to Edo now. Adult talk."

Sasha looked offended. She flicked her eyes to the side, then up to Edo.

"Just for a little while," Edo said. "Go with Esperanza and pick out the best of your drawings. We can do an art show later."

Esperanza had appeared on cue. "Up you go," she said. Sasha grabbed two cookies and hopped from her chair.

"I hope you'll stay the night," Edo said.

"I don't think so," I said.

He frowned. "You should get to know her. She's a wonderful person."

"How impaired is she, Edo?"

"The speech issue? We're working on it. You have to believe me, we've consulted all the top specialists."

"That's what Eduard said. Great doctors. The best money could buy."

"It's true. But she is also fine." He leaned forward. "She's so smart, and funny, and gifted."

"She's not speaking, Edo. Do these specialists know why that is?"

He shook his head. "Her vocal cords work-I've heard her make sounds in her sleep. And it's obviously not comprehension-look at how she writes! But the MRIs show that her visual centers are hyperactive, firing all the time, as if she's constantly being bombarded with images."

"So something deep in the wiring," I said. "Something Numinous did to her."

Edo shook his head again. "You don't know that."

"Oh come on, Edo. Do you think that stuff is harmless?"

"I'm not saying that, but there may be ... other reasons."

"Like what?" I said testily.

"I think there was a trauma at the foster home, before we adopted her."

He didn't speak for a moment. "What happened at the foster home, Edo?" My voice was flat.

"There was an accident," he said. "A houseparent fell down the stairs, ended up with a fractured disk. He blamed Sasha."

"A six-year-old girl," I said.

"She tripped him, he said."

"What did he do to her?"

He seemed not to understand me.

"She must have had a reason. Did he abuse her?"

His eyes widened. "No one suggested anything like that."

"It's a pretty common profile. A man-and they're almost all men-gets himself access to vulnerable children. Grooms them with gifts. Makes them dependent on him. He may even adopt them."

Edo looked at Rovil, then back to me, blinking hard. "That's not-you can't think-"