Scanned by Highroller.
Proofed by .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Charlotte Abbott for her many valuable insights.
And thanks to the usual crew for their enlightened and discerning input: David Hartwell, Coates Bateman, Elizabeth Monteleone, Steven Spruill, and Albert Zuckerman.
TUESDAY
1
Kate Iverson stared out the window of the hurtling taxi and wondered where she was. New York was not her town. She knew certain sections, and if it were daytime she might have had some idea as to her location, but here in the dark and fog she could have been anywhere.
She'd started the trip thirty minutes and who-knew-how-many miles ago in the West Twenties with a follow-that-cab scenarioI still can't believe I really said that that moved across town and up the FDR Drive. The East River had served as a comforting landmark for a while, but as twilight had faded to night, the river fell behind, replaced by dark shapes and fuzzy lights looming in the fog beyond the roadway.
"What road is this?" she asked the driver.
Through the Plexiglas barrier came the accented reply, double-rolling the r's: "Bruckner Expressway." The driver's ID tag showed a dark mustached face with glowering black eyes and indicated he was Mustafah Salaam.
She'd often heard "the Bruckner" mentioned in the incessant traffic reports on New York City radio but had no idea where it was.
"This is Bronx," the driver added, anticipating her next question.
Kate felt a quick stab of fear. The Bronx? Visions of burned-out buildings and rubble-strewn lots swirled through her brain.
Oh, Jeanette, she thought, staring ahead at the cab they were following, where are you going? Where are you taking me?
Kate had stashed her two teenagers with her ex and taken a short leave from her pediatric group practice in Trenton to stay with Jeanette during her recovery from brain tumor therapy. The experimental treatment had been a resounding success. No ill effects at least none that would be apparent to Jeanette's treating physician.
But since completion of the treatment, Kate had noticed a definite personality change. The Jeanette Vega she'd come to know and deeply love over these past two years was a warm, giving person, full of enthusiasm for life, with an opinion about everything. A delightfully edgy chatterbox. But slowly she had changed. The new Jeanette was cold and distant, rarely speaking unless spoken to, leaving her apartment without a word about where she was going, disappearing for hours at a time.
At first Kate had chalked it up to an acute reactive depression. Why not? What medical diagnosis can rock the foundations of your world more deeply than an inoperable malignant brain tumor? But depression didn't quite explain her behavior. When Jeanette should have been depressedwhen she'd been told she had a literal death sentence growing in her brainshe'd remained her upbeat self. Now, after a miraculous cure, after regaining her whole future, she'd become another person.
Maybe it was a stress reaction.
Or a side effect of the treatment. As a physician Kate prided herself on keeping current with medical progress, so she was familiar with medicine's cutting edge; but the experimental protocol that had saved Jeanette seemed damn near science fiction.
Yet it had worked. The tumor was dead, and Jeanette would live on.
But would she live on without Kate?
That, Kate admitted, was what was really disturbing her. Nearing middle agein darn good shape for forty-four, she knew, but still six years older than Jeanetteshe couldn't help worrying that Jeanette had found someone else. Someone younger.
That would be so unlike the old Jeanette. But this new Jeanette who could say?
Jeanette had been put on notice that her remaining time on earth was numbered in months instead of decades; she'd believed she'd seen her last Christmas tree, tasted her last Thanksgiving dinner. And then it was all given back to her. How could anyone's psyche survive that sort of trauma unscathed?
Perhaps the ordeal had caused Jeanette to reassess her life. Maybe she'd looked around and asked, Is this what I want ? And perhaps, in some new back-from-the-brink perspective, she'd decided she wanted something else. More. Different.
At least she could tell me, Kate thought. She owes me that much.
Jeanette hadn't asked her to leaveshe had the right since it was her apartmentbut she had moved out of the bedroom they'd always shared on Kate's visits
and into the study where she slept on the couch. No amount of questioning from Kate had elicited a reason why.
The not knowing gnawed at her. So tonight, when Jeanette had walked out the door without a word, Kate had followed.
Never in a million years would she have imagined herself trailing the woman she loved through the night. But things change. It hadn't been all that long ago that she never would have imagined herself loving another woman.
Up ahead, Jeanette's cab turned off the Bruckner and Kate's followed it onto a road the signs identified as the Bronx River Parkway. And after a few miles the city suddenly disappeared and they were in the woodsin the Bronx?