Innocence

“I didn’t like the look of them. Turned me off. Otherwise, she’s a tender little thing. A bit sloppy from lying around all this time, but all in all, prime enough.”

“She’s a child.”

“How prime does it get?”

Gwyneth placed a cotton pad over the puncture in the forearm and taped it down.

Turning quarrelsome, Telford said, “Hell’s bells, the bitch is brain-dead and contaminated. What’re you doing? What’s the use? Why do you care anyway?”

“She’s special,” Gwyneth said.

Picking up the pistol that he had claimed to be too weary to use, he said, “How’s she special?”

Instead of answering him, she pulled the blanket off the bed and threw the top sheet back, so that it draped over the footrail, exposing the girl in her pajamas, head to foot.

“How’s she special?” Telford repeated.

Gwyneth rolled the girl onto her right side, facing away from us, and said, “Addison, help me with this blanket.”

Telford raised the gun, pointing it at the ceiling, as if to get our attention. “I’m talking here.” He must have been even weaker than he appeared, and the weapon must have been too heavy for him, because his wrist kept going limp, the gun wobbling this way and that. “Why is this little slut so special?”

“Because everyone is,” Gwyneth said.

“She’s just a little slut.”

“If that’s so, then I must be wrong.”

“You’re wrong as shit, that’s what you are.”

Together, Gwyneth and I placed the blanket on the bed, so that half of it was draped over the side.

“You’re special, too,” she told Telford.

“What kind of crack is that?”

“It’s not a crack. I’m just hoping.”

She rolled Jane Doe 329 toward us, onto the blanket, and then onto her left side, almost to the edge of the bed.

“Hoping what?” Telford asked.

“Hoping you use what time you have left to save yourself.”

We draped the dangling length of blanket over the girl and sort of tucked it against her back.

“You know I’m dying, bitch. Screw hope.” He struggled up from the second bed, as loose-limbed as a drunk. “I gotta tell you something.”

Gwyneth grabbed the farther hem of the blanket, and pulled it across the insensate child, thereby wrapping her completely.

Telford stumbled two steps forward and grabbed the other bed railing with his left hand to steady himself.

I raised the Mace, and Gwyneth said, “No. That’ll just make him crazy. And then what?”

“Little titmouse, you want crazy, go to North Korea. Maniacs. Lunatic bastards. TV says this thing the lunatics engineered, it’s a twofer.”

Gwyneth said, “Addison, get your arms under her, lift her off the bed. Do it now.”

I didn’t want to pocket the Mace. Maybe it would drive him crazy, the burning in his eyes, but maybe that would be good, even if he had a loaded pistol.

“Do it now, Addison.”

“Hey, Lone Ranger, you hear it’s a twofer?”

“I heard,” I assured him as Gwyneth took the Mace from me.

“Ebola virus, Lone Ranger, and flesh-eating bacteria, and way pumped up, the shit’s totally enhanced, airborne, they say worse than atom bombs. It eats you up from the inside out. How’s that for bad?”

I got my arms under the girl and lifted her from the bed. Strong with terror, I was amazed that she felt so light.

The pistol tumbled from Telford’s hand onto the bed. Dripping sweat, weeping bloodier tears than before, he leaned hard across the railing, not to retrieve the weapon, but instead to spit in Gwyneth’s face. The thick, disgusting wad of spittle contained more than mere saliva.

67

IN THIS FALLEN WORLD, THERE ARE THINGS YOU hope for but never expect to receive because there is no luck and never was, but also because they are things of such great value that not all the good you could do in an entire lifetime would be enough to make you worthy of them. If one of your hopes is fulfilled, if that precious thing ever comes to you, it comes to you as a grace, and every day of your life thereafter, you need to give thanks for the gift. The girl I met in lamplight near Charles Dickens—she was my grace, all I wanted or would ever want.

I stood there helpless, with Jane Doe in my arms, and Telford spat in Gwyneth’s face, a foul phlegm that he worked up for a final outrage. He laughed shakily, and there was amusement in it, a giddy delight, almost rapture. “A gun’s too easy, titmouse. You die like me, just like me.”

She snatched a corner of the top sheet and blotted her face, but I knew that couldn’t be good enough to spare her.

“Die like me, like me.” The curator drew out each me like squeezed air escaping from the pinched neck of a balloon. He was a man and a monster, too, a monster and a clown amusing himself, and if he had possessed the strength, he would have capered in his delight.

God help me, I almost dropped the comatose girl to seize the gun and kill him. A rushing noise swelled in my head, like cataracts of water falling from a hundred feet, flecks of static in my vision, ice in my marrow, for I was overtaken by wrath and almost consumed by it, but I didn’t drop the girl.