COSMOS magazine

Friday, May 16

"Here's your book back." Frowning, Wayne transferred The Genius Within to his undamaged left hand, passed the book to Nathan Pritchett.

"Thanks. Did you have a chance to read any of it?"

Wayne shook his head, looked at the floor next to Nathan's feet. "They try to get you to remember stuff about your childhood. Well, I couldn't remember anything, so I couldn't do it."

"Sometimes when people can't remember their childhood," Nathan told him carefully, "it's because of an unpleasant event when they were kids. Maybe too painful to think about."

Wayne stared at the floor, shifted his weight in the wooden chair.

"One of the things I do for people," Nathan added, "I help them remember. So they can deal with their past from the safety of the present."

"Just wanted to get my head straight, is all." Wayne's gaze flicked to, went back down to the floor. "No point dredging up stuff dead and gone thirty years ago."

"Okay. Let's talk about more recent issues." Nathan wished he could send Wayne home again to finish reading the book. The triggers were there, the text aimed and cocked. No, it wasn't going to be that easy. "Let's get right to the heart of things. Tell me a little about your wife."

"She was the most beautiful girl in high school. The most beautiful woman in the world." Wayne did not smile, but his mouth underwent a transformation from stubbornly set to eager. "Everybody said she'd forget all about me when I left to go to college, but she waited for me." He closed his eyes. "She waited for me."

Fern and Wayne had been married for a little over eight years, according to the dossier. So yes, he was talking about the first wife. Right off the bat. Nathan masked his excitement.

"Melody. My Melody. I would've done anything for her. I would've given my life. If only–' Wayne looked at Nathan as though seeing him for the first time. "You don't really care about any of this, do you? You're just sitting here listening to me because Fern paid you to listen."

"I do care, Wayne. I wouldn't have spent six years of my life studying psychology if I didn't care about people. I want to help you however I can, in whatever way you want. You said you'd like to improve your mind. Freeing your mind of distractions is very important. And one of the worst distractions is traumatic events that have never been put to rest. Another distraction is discord in your home life."

"My home life was fine before Fern started working at that freakin' hotel."

"Before we get to that. You were speaking about your first wife. Melody?"

"What's the point? They killed her."

"Who did that?" Nathan asked neutrally.

For the briefest moment, Wayne's face collapsed into anguish. Then the features shifted and hardened. "The doctors. Supposed to help her, but they made her live through the worst kind of hell. She didn't deserve that." Wayne's face flushed, his breath came in ragged gasps. "My Melody deserved Heaven. Not Hell," he said loudly. "Better if they'd taken her out back like a dog and shot her in the head!"

"It's okay, Wayne." Nathan spoke quietly, trying to establish a calmer mood. He would have given most clients a reassuring touch on the arm or shoulder, but he was terrified that Wayne would lash out at him.

"It's not okay! They good as murdered my wife."

"What exactly did they do?" Keep him talking about it. Encourage the rage and focus it, maybe that way lay breakthrough.

"They gave her chemicals that made her so sick she threw up every time she tried to eat. She looked like a skeleton. And her hair—her beautiful blonde hair—it just… It fell out like a goddamn mangy cat's fur. She was so weak at the end, she couldn't even talk to me."

"I'm so sorry, Wayne. I'm so sorry."

"That's what they said too. Sorry. And they were too. The sorriest kind of bastards. But them saying it didn't bring Melody to life again. Didn't give her a peaceful death." He was gasping, breathing in throttled gasps. "Pay them back for what they did. Make them see what it felt like to—"

Nathan waited, but his client fell silent, staring at the carpet again, face drained.

Saturday, May 17

Alex's face lit up when his mother came home early from her shopping expedition to the farmer's market. A week ago, Jill would have left Alex at Weekend Day Camp and gone by the office after her shopping stint, tried to get in a couple of hours work. Not any more. Seeing her son unconscious had terrified her. How supremely precious he was! When he was a baby, she remembered in a blazing rush of emotion, he used to smile with his whole body. When had she stopped noticing how much he still needed to know she cared?

"Hey, kiddo, let's go swimming." Jill plopped down her bulging brown paper bags.

"Really?" He looked sideways at her, clearly wondering if she were serious.

"Yep." She kept her voice steady with great effort. "Get your backpack and we're outta here."

She put the shopping away quickly, ignoring the heavy medical science book still on the table.

---

Deep Eddy Pool was spring fed, the water crystal clear and free of chemicals. Jill had always favoured it, because it seemed healthier than heavily chlorinated pools. She'd come here in the summer when she was young. Before her father died and her mother flipped out, Jill had spent hours each day in the water and had done very well in local and state competition; her coach encouraged her dream of making it to the Olympics. After her hormones went nuts during her pregnancy, and acne ruined her face, after she started packing on the pounds, she'd sworn off bathing suits forever.

Inside two minutes, Alex and a Hispanic kid named Luis were throwing a tennis ball into the water, then racing to see who could get to it first. Her son seemed perfectly all right, but Jill kept a close eye on him. He could all too easily drown if he had a seizure in the water.

Dangling her feet, she waved to him. A sleek-muscled man, early thirties, sat down to her right, looked her over. Her body tightened; she averted her eyes.

"Hi, I know this is a cliché," he said, "but haven't I seen you someplace before?"

A long time ago, when such advances were all too frequent, Jill had learned how to deal with this: ignore it. Or try to. Her muscles remained clenched through her limbs and abdomen. Stupid pickup line, but he did in fact look slightly familiar. "Hmm. Do you spend prodigious amounts of time hanging around the court house?"

"That's it!" Brave soul. So he was going to have a polite conversation with the plump lady with the lunar face. Unless—worse and worse—he was kinky that way. "Law school. You had Gannaway for torts, right?"

"Oh yeah, of course!" Back when she'd been slender and attractive. He must be wondering, she thought, why I let this happen to myself. "Jill Shannon."

"John Striefel." He held out a hand, and she grasped it firmly. "Who are you working for?"

"Allen Hoffman."

"Ah, Blickster's Greens."

"The very ones." She laughed, looking into his eyes. Despite herself, she found her tension ebbing.

"Wouldn't mind finding something more socially responsible myself. I went with—" He was staring past Jill. She turned. Luis was standing close behind her, hand reaching out to her.

Jill's stomach contracted.

"Alex is... he's—" The kid broke off in confusion, leaning against her, dripping water on her shoulder.

"Where's Alex, honey?"

"He's lying down. I think he's sick."

On the far side of the pool, she saw Alex stretched out on his back, unattended. Unconscious? He was lying very still. Oh dear God, if he rolled over, he'd fall into the water and drown. The quickest way to reach him was swim. "Thanks for getting me, honey." She flung herself fully clothed into the pool, barely aware of the biting cold of the water, the dragging of soaked garments at her heavy limbs.

By the time she reached Alex, a cramp was tearing at her side; she was completely out of breath. But she was at his side, and he was breathing normally. She had to stop and rest before she could speak. He opened one eye as she tried to catch her breath.

"Mom? Were you and Luis racing?" He giggled, and Jill's heart soared.

"Luis... came to get me... said you were sick."

"I just felt a little dizzy is all. I'm fine now."

"Probably just being out in the sun," Jill said, trying to convince herself. "Maybe you've had enough swimming for the day. What do you think? Time to go home maybe?"

"Okay." This was not like Alex. Normally, he'd be begging to stay longer.

Luis had followed Jill across the pool. "Is Alex gonna be okay?"

"Sure he is. But that's enough swimming for us. Thanks again for coming to get me, Luis." She glanced back across the pool. Striefel was gone.

---

Once Alex was safely tucked into bed, Jill sat at the kitchen table going through files from work, making notes for interrogatories to be served on a former employee who had sued BlickPharm, alleging wrongful termination just one week before the rights to his pension vested. That was rather troubling. Jill had promised to get the interrogatories done by Monday, but she could not keep her mind on her work. She was jittery but made more coffee anyway, then put the mug down on a book sitting on the edge of the table. Oh, yeah, that Mitochondrial thing. She felt sick with guilt, looking at it, and so her eyes tended to slide away. She forced herself back to it. She couldn't believe she'd lugged it from San Antonio back home to Austin. How the hell was she going to return it? It was heavy; the postage wouldn't be cheap. She should have left it at the Health Center.

She opened the laptop and went on-line. There was no listing in the San Antonio White Pages for a Gibson, Paul. Maybe he was only visiting for a short time.

Okay, Fitzroy was a suburb of the Australian city of Melbourne. Forty-eight Gibson, P. listings in the Melbourne, Victoria on-line White Pages. Google turned up ten pages of links, most of them posts about a heavy metal rock group. A few, however, seemed compatible with the subject matter of the book. She clicked on a post headed "The Role of the Basolateral Amygdala' and read:

The nucleus accumbens appears to play a primary role in motivational circuitry... Dopaminergic afferents signal changes in pleasure inducing stimuli; glutamatergic afferents tie behaviour to conditioned reward...

The email address of the author was pgibson@ unimelb.edu.au. She searched the web. Okay. Unimelb must be the University of Melbourne. Had to be him. She found his Australian listing on the University of Melbourne homepage. This Paul Gibson was a postdoctoral fellow currently on transfer to here in Austin, hey, at the University of Texas Institute for Neuroscience. Research interests included molecular studies of neurotransmitter-metabolising enzymes, developmental cascades, and neural mechanisms of reward through pharmacological and neurochemical means. The photograph on the site had been taken some years earlier when he had even longer hair and fewer wrinkles around his eyes. But it was clearly the man from the Garcia Center.

And zowie! No phone number was listed, but there was a UT email link.

Okay, maybe like her he'd only been visiting the San Antonio Center. She clicked his address, and her email program opened up.

"Dear Dr. Gibson," she typed. Then she shook her head and backspaced. "Hi Paul, I have your book on Mitochondrial Function. You left it on the table at the Garcia Health Sciences Center the other day. I was going to turn it in to the front desk, but things tend to disappear in public places, so I decided to keep it safe for you. I'm relieved to see that we're both in Austin. I feel like a complete idiot. You can reach me at 462-5684. Jill Shannon."

I can't believe I'm going to all this trouble to chase some scientific genius who wouldn't give me a second look, she thought. She pushed the laptop away. Need to keep my mind on my work, or I'll have hell to pay Monday.

After a time, she found herself staring numbly at the words on her pad: "Thomason v. Miller, 555 S.W.2d 685, The knowledge of an agent is imputed to his principal." Such arid abstractions could be used to change the course of real people's lives, for better or worse, forever. She forced herself to concentrate, to decipher the parallels between the purchasing department supervisor at BlickPharm and a boss who was held responsible in 1977 for his employee's misrepresentation of the health of a bull. Aloud, she muttered, "Paul Gibson."

That made her grin. She liked the way it sounded. Letting her eyes close, she pictured his relaxed posture, the way his mouth curved when he smiled...

Disgusted with herself, she rose abruptly and went to the back door. The white trumpet-shaped flowers of Sacred Datura had opened, and a large Sphinx moth buzzed over them.

Your life is fine, Jilly, you moron, she told herself firmly. Don't screw it up by obsessing about a man who'll never be interested in you.

She sat on the ground, breathing the musky fragrance that had attracted the moth.