Blind Lake

Maybe that was why she had been so impressed with Ray when Ray began to take an explicit interest in her. Ray had been ten years her senior, doing cutting-edge astrophysical work back when she was still struggling to find a way into Crossbank. He had been blunt in his opinions but flattering toward Marguerite, and he had obviously been sizing her up for marriage from the begi

Clearly, she had been a lousy judge of character.

So what did that make Chris? A lockdown romance? A potential second father for Tess? Or something in between?

And how could she even begin to construct an idea of the future, when even the possibility of a future could end at any time?

Chris had been working in his basement study, but he came up the stairs when he heard her puttering around the kitchen and said, “Are you busy?”

Well, that was an interesting question. It was Saturday. She wasn’t obliged to work. But what was work, what wasn’t work? For months she had divided her attention between Tess and the Subject, and now Chris. Today she’d pla

“The pilot I pulled out of the wreck is stabilized over at the clinic. I thought I’d pay him a visit.”

“Is he awake?” Marguerite had heard the man was in a coma.

“Not yet.”

“So what’s the point of visiting?”

“Sometimes you just want to touch base.”

Back in the car, then, back on the road with Chris at the wheel, back through the bright, cold February afternoon and the tumbling windblown trash. “How could you possibly owe him anything? You saved his life.”

“For better or worse.”

“How could it be worse?”

“He’s severely burned. When he wakes up he’s going to be in a world of pain. Not only that — I’m sure Ray and his buddies would love to interrogate him.”

That was true. Nobody knew why the small plane had been flying over Blind Lake or what the pilot had hoped to accomplish by violating an enforced no-fly zone. But the incident had turned up the anxiety level in town more than a notch. In the past couple of weeks there had been three more attempts to breach the perimeter fence from inside, all by individuals: a day worker, a student, and a junior analyst. All three had been killed by pocket drones, though the analyst had made it a good fifty or sixty yards wearing a rigged thermal jacket to disguise his infrared signature.

None of the bodies had been recovered. They would still be there, Marguerite thought, when the snow melted in the spring. Like something left over from a war, burned, frozen, and thawed: biological residue. Vulture bait. Were there vultures in Mi

Everyone was frightened and everyone was desperate to know why the Lake had been quarantined and when the quarantine would end (or, unspeakable thought, whether it would end). So, yes, the pilot would be interrogated, perhaps vigorously, and yes, he would certainly be in pain, despite the clinic’s reserve of neural analgesics. But that didn’t invalidate the act of courage Chris had performed. She felt this in him more than once, his doubts about the consequences of a good act. Maybe his book about Galliano had been a good act, at least from his point of view. A wrong righted. And he had been punished for it. Once burned, twice shy. But it seemed to go deeper than that.

Marguerite didn’t understand how a man as apparently decent as Chris Carmody could be so unsure of himself, when certified bastards like Ray walked around in the glow of their own grim righteousness. A line from a poem she had studied in high school came back to her: The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity…

Chris parked in the nearly vacant clinic parking lot. The solstice was past and the days were getting longer again, but it was still only February and already the watery sun was close to the horizon. He took her hand as they walked to the clinic door.

There was no one at reception, but Chris rang the finger bell and a nurse appeared a moment later. I know this woman, Marguerite thought. This bustling, chubby woman in nursing whites was Amanda Bleiler’s mother, a familiar face from the weekday-morning grade-school drop-off. Someone she knew well enough to wave at. What was her first name? Roberta? Rosetta?

“Marguerite,” the woman said, recognizing her. “And you must be Chris Carmody.” Chris had phoned ahead.

“Rosalie,” she said, the name popping into her head a moment before she pronounced it. “How’s Amanda doing?”

“Well enough, considering.” Considering the lockdown, she meant. Considering that there were dead bodies buried under the snow outside the perimeter fence. Rosalie turned to Chris. “If you want to look in on Mr. Sandoval, that’s okay, I cleared it with Dr. Goldhar, but don’t expect much, okay? And it’ll have to be a quick visit. Couple of minutes tops, all right?”

Rosalie led them up a flight of stairs to the clinic’s second floor, where three small rooms equipped with rudimentary life-support gear punctuated a row of offices and boardrooms.

Not very many years ago, the pilot wouldn’t have survived his injuries. Rosalie explained that he had suffered third-degree burns over a large part of his body and that he had inhaled enough smoke and hot air to seriously damage his lungs. The clinic had fitted him with an alveolar bypass and packed his pulmonary sacs with gel to hasten the healing. As for his skin—

Well, Marguerite thought, he looked ghastly, lying in a white bed in a white room with ebony-white artificial skin stretched over his face like so much damp Kleenex. But this was very nearly state-of-the-art treatment. In less than a month, Rosalie said, he would look almost normal. Almost the way he had looked before the crash.

The most serious injury had been a blow to the head that had not quite cracked his skull but had caused intracranial bleeding that was hard to treat or correct. “We did everything we could,” Rosalie said. “Dr. Goldhar is a really exceptional doctor, considering we don’t have a fully equipped hospital to work with. But the prognosis is iffy. Mr. Sandoval may wake up, he may not.”

Mr. Sandoval, Marguerite thought, trying to take the measure of the man under all this medical apparatus. Probably not a young man. Big paunch pushing up under the blankets. Salt-and-pepper hair where it hadn’t been charred from his skull.

“You called him Mr. Sandoval,” Chris said.

“That’s his name. Adam Sandoval.”

“He’s been unconscious since he got here. How do you know his name?”

“Well…” She looked distressed. “Dr. Goldhar said not to be too free with this information, but you saved his life, right? That was really brave.”

The story had been broadcast on Blind Lake TV, much to Chris’s horror. He had declined an interview, but his reputation had been massively enhanced — not a bad thing, surely, Marguerite would have thought. But maybe Chris, a journalist, felt uncomfortable at the center of a media event, however small-scale.

“What information?” Chris asked.

“He had a wallet and part of a backpack on him. Mostly burned, but we saved enough to read his I.D.”