The phone rang, and Emma dove for it. More than forty-eight hours had passed since her son had been arrested on live national television, and the phone had been ringing off the hook with calls from journalists begging for an update. But Emma had had no news for them, since not a single call had come from David, or from anyone who knew what had happened to him.
"Hello?" she snapped, as she pulled the receiver to her ear.
"Hello," said a voice that seemed to belong to a young-ish man. "My name is Brian Barker. I'm calling from the admissions office at NYU. Is David Lamb available?"
"He is otherwise occupied," Emma replied icily.
"Whom am I speaking to?" Brian Barker asked.
"This is his mother," Emma said.
"Ms. …?" Brian began, by way of asking what name she used.
"Dr. Lamb," she supplied.
"Dr. Lamb," Brian said, "I have in front of me some preliminary application materials from a David Lamb. Might this be the same David Lamb who is the mutant called Donatello?"
"I believe it is," Emma said. She didn't know where this was going, and she wanted to get off the phone, to keep the line clear for the call she was really waiting for. But this Barker fellow was at least not a journalist, and something told her to not hang up on him.
"… That would explain why he is otherwise occupied," said Brian, who had obviously seen the footage from the protest, along with everybody else on the planet.
"I hope it also explains why I have other things on my mind," Emma said. "What is it you want, Mr. Barker?"
"I want to offer Mr. Lamb a place at NYU," Brian said.
Emma had surely heard that wrong. The stress and sleep deprivation were getting to her. It couldn't be the case that her son - who, as far as she knew, was sitting in prison right now - had just been admitted to a top university.
"Excuse me?" she said.
"I… want to offer your son a place in NYU's class of 2008," said Brian, who didn't seem to understand Emma's confusion. "Or later, if he'd like to defer, since I understand he's only fifteen." He hesitated. "We can't be the first school to contact you about this."
"If anybody else has tried," Emma told him, "all they got was a busy signal. These reporters just won't quit."
"Really?" Brian said, with a level of amazement and eagerness that bordered on predatory. Emma didn't like it very much. Then Brian regained something resembling composure. "Dr. Lamb," he said, "I'm putting together a package right now. It will be in the mail tomorrow morning. Between his grades, his experience, and his… situation, we have to have him. Every other school will tell you the same. But please, please consider NYU."
"A… package?" Emma said blankly.
"We want to offer him a full scholarship," Brian said.
Emma was familiar with that term from her own college-search days. But she could not seem to process it in this context. "A what?" was all she could get out.
"We will pay for everything," Brian explained. "Tuition. Room and board, if he wants to live on campus. A stipend. World-class security and disability support. And, of course, the education and resources that only NYU can provide."
Emma couldn't figure out how to respond to this at all.
"Contingent on his standardized test scores, of course," Brian added, "though I'm guessing he won't have any problem with that. We'd be willing to waive the essay requirement." When Emma only listened in silence, he kept babbling, as if more words alone would persuade her to take his incomprehensible suggestion seriously. "Based on his oratorical skills, if nothing else. That was quite a speech he was in the middle of giving, when… events became unfortunate."
Emma still didn't say anything, and, seemingly having running out of words himself, Brian moved to wrap up the call. "I'm putting my business card in the offer materials," he said. "Please call me after you've looked everything over."
"I… yes," Emma said.
"I understand it's a difficult time for you," Brian said. "I do hope everything works itself out. Good evening, Dr. Lamb."
"Good evening," Emma echoed, and then Brian hung up.
The phone was still in her hand when she heard a key in the apartment's front door lock, and the next thing she knew, Terri and Ron were spilling into her entryway.
"Goodness, Emma," Ron said, as he loosened his thick scarf. "That is quite a guard you hired."
Emma was having difficulty putting together any coherent thoughts right now, but she was fairly certain she had not hired any guard. She said as much.
"No?" Ron said. "Six feet tall, wearing a hockey mask, doing a very effective job of keeping people out?"
Emma just shook her head.
"Anyway," Ron went on, "he was no match for Ms. Dubreuil. Nothing stops this woman."
"I've just never understood why so many people see roadblocks everywhere," Terri said, hanging her coat in the tiny front closet as if she lived here. She more or less did, anyway. "It's a very negative worldview."
"Not all of us have your charm, Terri," Emma said.
Terri just shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with Emma's observation. "I brought gifts," she said.
"Of course you did," said Emma.
Without acknowledging the sarcastic comment, Terri pulled boxes from the capacious tote bag she still carried everywhere, and piled them in Emma's arms. "More clothes for the boys," she said. "I don't know who does their laundry, but he or she is probably already tired of doing it every day. Now they'll have something to change into."
"That's great," said Emma, who would have dumped the boxes directly onto some flat surface, if any had been within reach, "except right now they're probably all wearing prison uniforms."
"They're not in prison," said Ron.
Emma rounded on him. "What makes you think they're not in prison?"
"Let's sit down," Ron suggested, as he gently relieved Emma of the clothing boxes, as well as the landline phone that was still in her hand, its cord stretched to the limit, "and figure out what we all know."
Emma thought a better plan would be go right now to wherever David is, but there really was no stopping Terri, and Emma was powerless as her friend escorted her to a chair.
"Here's what I know," Ron said, when he joined them in the living room, empty-handed. "Ever since the notebooks leaked – and they were doing the rounds of the scientific community before they were on the evening news - I've been getting calls from a scientist named Baxter Stockman. He was almost more persistent than the journalists. He was determined to recruit me to his research project. I turned him down, of course."
"What do you know about the notebook leak?" Emma demanded. "When did that happen?"
Ron hung his head. "I'm sorry to say I know exactly when it happened," he said. "A few weeks ago, David asked me for copies of the notebooks. I pulled them all out and left them on my desk briefly, until I had a moment to scan them. But my intern beat me to it. I've never had an intern that proactive. It was a real shame I had to fire her for sharing another copy of the notebooks with researchers at other institutions."
"Are you telling me you just put all those pieces together today?" Emma asked. She asked it in a dangerous tone, strongly implying that the answer had better be yes.
"No," Ron said. "What happened today was that Dr. Stockman made another attempt to recruit me, after not contacting me for a week, after hiring the intern I had just fired. And what happened today was that he added another enticement to his pitch. He told me that he has the boys."
"What?!" Emma screeched.
"He gave me a long and self-serving explanation of how he had gotten the boys released from prison by generously offering to act as their legal guardian until their personhood status is sorted out," Ron said. "Now, I'm not saying that Dr. Stockman arranged for them to be arrested in the first place, just so he would have the opportunity to gain custody of them. But it is well-known in the community that he's been involved in some questionable dealings with the court system."
All of that was very interesting information, but Emma needed to sort out one key point first. "How can he be their legal guardian?" she asked. "I am David's legal guardian."
"You are not," Ron pointed out. "That is one of the downsides of having a child who doesn't officially exist."
"But he officially exists now," Emma said. "At least, for some definition of official. Did I not become his legal guardian automatically, by virtue of having raised him?"
Ron shook his head, while Terri looked dismayed by how difficult it was for her friend just to lay claim to her own son. Then she looked startled, as Emma turned to her with a furious look.
"How did Stephen forget to mention that?" Emma hissed.
An ordinary human would have answered that question with a vitriolic harangue about how Stephen was doing all of this pro bono, and how could Emma possibly be so ungrateful, and shouldn't she have just asked about guardianship outright, instead of making an ignorant assumption? But all Terri said was, "He's doing his best, Emma. It's a difficult case."
"We're going to talk about this later," Emma said, as she turned back to Ron. "But of more immediate importance, where is Dr. Stockman? Because we are going there right now."
"He wouldn't give me an exact location," Ron said. "He told me it was for security reasons, which I have to admit sounds legitimate."
"Then we'll find it ourselves," Emma said. "We found an old farmhouse last fall. It's got to be easier to find a science lab."
Ron was about to reply to that, but then the phone rang in the other room. Emma didn't move.
"Aren't you going to get that?" Ron asked.
"I'm tired of saying no to journalists," Emma replied. "And now I know it won't be from the jail. Unless you think Stockman is going to suddenly start calling me -"
"I'll get it," Terri said quickly, and hurried to the kitchen.
"What are you doing here, anyway?" Emma asked Ron. "Why didn't you just call?"
"As I was about to say before the phone rang," Ron replied, "I know that Stockman's lab is somewhere near New York. I thought it would be best to get here first and then figure out a plan of action. I came down on the train, but then I got waylaid at your front door for quite a while, by the gentleman you say is not in your employ. Fortunately, Terri arrived and removed all obstacles, in her inimitable style."
"She is good at that," Emma agreed. "But who -"
"Emma," Terri said, popping back into the living room as far as the phone cord would let her go. She tried to hold out the phone in front of her, but it wouldn't really stretch any further. "It's David."
Emma practically teleported to the phone, and then she screamed into it, "Where are you?!"
"Hi, Mom," David said, with an exaggerated casualness that she was going to murder him for. "I'm at my apartment in Westchester. This goal of buying a mansion in the Hamptons might be realized sooner than I thought."
"David," Emma said, as if she could strangle him solely with the force of her voice.
"No, really," David said, in a much more serious tone. "It's a shithole. But it is an apartment and it is in Westchester. And it's mine. More or less."
"Why are you not in Dr. Stockman's lab?" Emma demanded.
"Uh," David said. "I'm going to table the question of how you knew I was in Dr. Stockman's lab, and also I'm going to assume you're not implying that I still should be in Dr. Stockman's lab. Instead I'm going to say that we helped Dr. Stockman understand the value of our services to him, and he's agreed to provide us with rent-free off-site housing."
"Nothing about what you are saying is remotely clever or funny," Emma informed him.
"Mom," David said, and now he sounded exhausted and homesick. "Just get here. Do you have something to copy down the address?"
Emma grabbed a pen and paper, and David read her an address in Ardsley.
"We're all here," he assured her, when she was done scribbling the zip code. "We're doing fine. But we… we need an adult."
"Ron and Terri are here," Emma said. "We're leaving right now."
"Okay," David said. "I'll see you soon."
Emma hung up, and quickly repeated to Ron and Terri what she had just learned.
"How are we going to get there?" Ron asked. "Do you want to call a cab?"
"Let me try one other thing first," Emma said, and she led her long-time friends downstairs.
Crossing the deserted lobby of the veterinary clinic, she peered out through the glass front door. Though it was now after business hours and after dark, the crowd of protesters and reporters still had not dispersed. They were keeping a distance from the building, though, and that fact seemed to be due to the large and menacing man standing just in front of the entrance.
Emma rapped on the glass, and the man turned around, showing that he was wearing an old-style hockey mask, just as Ron had said. He seemed surprised to see anyone inside the building, until he recognized the "intruders" as the woman who had overcome his defenses earlier, the professorial gentleman who had ridden the woman's coattails, and the proprietor of the clinic.
"Who are you," Emma asked, after she had unlocked the door and opened it a crack, "and why are you 'guarding' my premises?"
"Somebody's got to," the man said. His voice was muffled behind the hockey mask. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. "Look at all these whackbags trying to get in."
"Doesn't seem like your problem," Emma pointed out.
"We all gotta watch out for each other," the man replied. "If we don't bear arms against the people trying to come on our land -" He twirled a baseball bat in one gloved hand. "- then who will?"
Something about this guy's way of speaking - something about his outline in the dark - seemed very familiar to Emma. She had a sudden flashback to a moonlit gravel driveway in Massachusetts. "Are you the man who isn't Casey Jones?" she asked pointedly.
The baseball bat almost slipped from his fingers. "Uh, no," he said.
"No, you're not the man who isn't -" Emma started, and then she gave up. "Never mind. Do you have a car?"
"Sure," the man said, "but it's across town. I only got my bike here." He eyed the trio of people standing just inside the lobby. "Can only take one."
Ron looked at Emma. "I can walk back to the train," he said.
"And I can keep an eye on things here," Terri said. "You go, Emma."
"I need -" Emma started, but she didn't finish that sentence either. Terri handed her a stuffed canvas tote. Emma vaguely recognized the bag as a free "bonus" she had received years ago for opening some bank account. She'd thrown it in the front closet and forgotten about it.
"Coat, snack, cash, gifts for the boys," Terri said. "I forgot to mention, there's a card for David. It's from Anna."
Emma took the bag as if she wasn't quite certain it really existed. "When did you put all this together?" she asked.
"Don't worry about that," Terri said. "Just go."
Emma couldn't understand how her life had managed to jump to levels of weirdness well beyond the benchmark she'd been gradually incrementing for the past fifteen years. But the next thing she knew, she was clinging to the back of a strange man's motorcycle, speeding through the January night streets of New York.