Slow River

“Where is she?”

“What?”

“Katerine. Where is she” Where did you send her? She’s not in jail. It would have been on the net.”

“Tok said we should get the police. But I couldn’t. She’s your mother.”

She’s a monster. “She should be in jail.”

“I couldn’t…” He seemed unwilling to continue. I just waited. I was scared, I realized. What if she was somewhere nearby?

“Don’t you see? Not having control, not knowing what was going on hurt her.” Not enough. Not nearly enough to make up for Stella, and Tok, and me, and Lucas Chen. “I made her leave. Divorced her. Divested her of her holdings.” It all sounded impossibly military, like a court-martial. “She’s watched. We get reports…”

He trailed off. I had a sudden, sickening feeling in my stomach. “Who sees to the reports?”

“Greta.”

Greta. She was everywhere.

Oster was still talking to me. “… don’t understand why she would want to hurt you. She’s your sister. Are you… are you sure?”

He was hunched up, like a dog expecting a kick, I felt sorry for him. “I’m sure. And I don’t think she does want to hurt people. She doesn’t think about that. What she’s thinking about is the family. The business. Control. The patents, the intellectual property, the profits. It’s her life. The way she’s found to not think about being small and held down by her sweating, crying mother…” I was the one who was crying. Greta, who had got me a lock. My mother, lost…

He stared at me. His eyes were bright with city lights. “How do you know all this?”

“Oh, Papa, you are the one who should have known!”

He reached out and touched my tears, found a handkerchief. “We can’t be everywhere, and know everything at once,” he said sadly.

But you didn’t even try! He had removed himself from the responsibilities of ownership, He had been happy to leave it all to his wife and her family. He had delegated himself right out of the command chain, and gone off in his boat to count endangered fish.

“The business carries your name. You’re responsible.”

I didn’t know how to make him understand. I met a man called Paolo, I wanted to say, whose life is ruined because you didn’t care enough to oversee the business. The money comes in, and you take it, you don’t care how it’s made, you don’t care that we still rake in tithes on every patent use, that we preside over a monopoly that we don’t need anymore. We already have so much money we don’t know what to do with it.

But even when I was seven years old I had known he preferred to leave the real work to others. He wasn’t a termite on the forest floor, organizing the building; he was a brightly colored bird soaring up, up above the canopy, unconcerned with what went on below, as long as the sun still shone and there was nectar in the orchids.

There was too much for me to explain, and I didn’t have time.

“I have something to do tonight,” I said. “Something that won’t wait. I’ve made a tape. I’ll give it to you. You must make Greta give back Lucas Chen.” I hesitated, then decided not to threaten him with taking it to the police, making the whole sordid business public. “And I want your help. I want you to speed up the formal reclaiming of my identity. I want a copy of my PIDA.”

He knew there were things I wasn’t saying, but he merely nodded. “I have it.” They had probably sent it to the family as proof that they had me. “I’ll get it messengered over first thing tomorrow. Will I see you then?”

He looked old and frail. “Oh, Papa, yes.”

We walked farther. We had been walking awhile.

“I have to go.”

We held each other again. Longer this time, and harder. I had my father back. “Tomorrow,” he whispered. I hurried down the towpath.

Spa

I didn’t bother to sit down. “Why did you do it?”

She shrugged, looking down at her drink. “Why not? You always said I would do anything for money.”

“And will a quarter of a million make you feel good about yourself?”

“Money always helps.”

“That’s what you’ve been waiting for all along, isn’t it? A reward. For your prey to finally get big enough, worth the risk. Worth lunging for, pumping full of poison.”

Her eyes seemed dry and blank. No reflections there. No clues about how she felt, or if she did feel anything anymore. I doubted she understood a word I was saying.

“Did you hate me right from the begi

She stirred. “You didn’t have any self-respect when I found you naked and bleeding and nameless. No, what I hated was that you had choices. You chose to not go back to your family. I had no choices. I’ve never had choices.”

“That’s not true. There is always a choice.”

“Easy to say when you’re a van de Oest.”

Perhaps she was right. I would never know. I was not her, and I was glad. “What do you want me to say? That I hate you? I don’t.” And I didn’t. I didn’t feel much of anything except sorrow that she could not and would not see the chances and choices and possibilities of change I felt everywhere about me. And it wasn’t just because I was a van de Oest. Stella had been a van de Oest, and she had killed herself. Greta had been brought up as one, and she had twisted and stayed twisted. You had to allow change, you had to want it. You had to believe you deserved it. Spa

I left her sitting there alone, looking at her reflection in her beer. I wondered what she saw.

The medic had a clinic in the center of town. I had to offer him a triple fee to open up for me for a nonemergency.

There was no nurse. He cleaned my left hand himself, worked on it quickly and efficiently, and closed up the incision with a plastic staple. He sprayed it with plaskin. Put a small sticking plaster on the top. “That’s to remind you it’s stapled. Otherwise, you might forget and try to use it.”

I wondered how many times he had saved people’s lives, or how many times he had tried and failed, without notifying the authorities. His eyes were very tired, down-drooping, like a bloodhound’s. He was exhausted. What would happen if there was a gunshot wound, or a serious stabbing to attend to, and he was too tired?

“Doctor,” I said on impulse as he collected his instruments in a tray, “if I made a donation, would you give me some information about one of your past clients?”

“No”.

“For thirty thousand?” He hesitated. “For thirty thousand now, and a yearly stipend—enough to hire an assistant for the night shift? I’ll put it in writing if you like.”

He put the tray down and looked at me steadily, his eyes more like a dog’s than ever. “What’s the question?”

“Did you treat a man, just over three years ago, with a wound to his neck? A man about six feet tall. The wound would have been about here.” I pointed to the left side of my neck, at the carotid.

“What kind of wound?”

“Puncture. Tear. Made with a long, rusty nail. And if you did treat him, did he die?”

He said nothing for a long time. “Let me ask you a question instead. You know I need the money—the clinic needs it. If I refuse to give you confidential information, would you withhold it?”

The man had saved my life. He knew it, I knew it. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” That wasn’t enough. The thirty thousand was stolen, anyway. “You can have the thirty thousand. No strings attached.”

He went to his terminal and for a moment I thought he was going to pull the information I needed, all the case notes, because I had made the selfless choice—like the child in a fairy tale being rewarded by the old witch in disguise. But life isn’t a fairy tale. He was making up my bill.