Nancy Kress Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’ve got a spare room. We’ll move your furniture and things.” His mind raced over practicalities, glad to consider moving trucks and dressers instead of considering Babs. Whom he’d failed as badly as Barbara had failed Lillie.
    “Thank you,” Lillie said. “I think the police want to talk to me before we go.”
    They did. Awaiting his turn at interrogation, Keith walked out into the hallway, turned a corner, and pounded his fists on the wall. It didn’t help.
    He arranged for cremation of the body. He moved Lillie into his spare room, first throwing out the treadmill (no space) and emptying the closet of junk he didn’t even know he had. Through Lillie’s school he found a grief counselor whom Lillie saw every week. He informed Lillie’s school and pediatrician and the state of New York that he was now her legal guardian. The paperwork began its slow drift through various bureaucracies.
    Lillie turned quieter, more somber. But she didn’t collapse into hysterics or start doing crack or run wild in the streets. Keith discovered that it was pleasant, when he turned the key in his lock after work at seven or eight or nine o’clock, to be greeted by Lillie’s smile and a warmed-up casserole. On Saturdays (but not Sundays) he conscientiously refrained from work and took her places, unless she was going out with friends. He met her friends. She met the women he casually dated. Gradually they created a routine that satisfied them both.
    Quite abruptly, it seemed, Lillie’s body went into overdrive. One day she was almost as skinny as Barbara had been. The next day, she was wearing tight jeans and a midriff-baring top over a figure that made him blink. He found a box of tampons in the bathroom and pretended to not see them. Thirteen—was that early or late? There was no one he could ask. And Lillie seemed to be doing fine with her new body. Lipstick tubes appeared on the ornamental shelf under the foyer mirror, tubes with fantastic names: Peach Passion and Ruby Madness and Jelly Slicker. The names amused him.
    And then on March 10, 2013, Keith came home and found Lillie lying on the sofa, staring into space, and no amount of shouting or shaking or anything else could bring her out of it. An ambulance arrived within ten minutes, and as the medics carried Lillie on a stretcher out of the apartment, they bumped into the shelves and all the lipsticks clattered to the floor.
     
    April 2013
    Troy was an amazingly ugly city enjoying a huge economic boom because of technology invented at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and manufactured not far from the campus. Part of that manufactury, Keith knew, was parts for SkyPower, now being assembled in geosynchronous orbit. The Hudson River, a peculiar shade of sludge, flowed through the center of Troy.
    Dr. Dennis Reeder lived in a far suburb, away from the factories, surrounded by semi-open fields. Keith had forgotten how beautiful spring could be away from New York. Tulips and daffodils and even daisies foamed around the Reeder house; everything bloomed earlier now that summers had become so long and hot. The driveway where he parked his rented car was littered with plastic toys. A powerscooter, unchained and unlocked, leaned against the garage.
    “We keep our daughter at home with us,” Reeder told Keith. “My wife is a nurse. She quit working when this … happened to Hannah, and we’ve also hired an aide. Would you like a drink, Mr. Anderson?”
    “Keith. Yes, please. Scotch, if you have it.”
    Reeder did. The large, comfortable house seemed equipped with everything. Hannah’s mother, a strikingly pretty blond woman with tired eyes, joined them in the living room but drank nothing.
    “Lillie is hospitalized,” Keith said. “I’m her only family.”
    Reeder said bluntly, “You’re an attorney. Are you considering some sort of class-action suit?”
    “No one to sue. If Miller were still alive, we’d pursue criminal charges. No, I’m here just as a