7
Lost and found
"How are the tortellini?"
Claire forced a smile, as well as another forkful. "OK."
Noah gave her that fixed grin that told her he was completely aware that she found the tortellini as disagreeable as the rest of her situation, and that he was still trying to pretend that it was a wonderful father-daughter adventure to be sitting in a motel, eating a breakfast of takeaway food from Styrofoam containers and plastic forks, after nearly three days of being on the road, with probably another forty-eight hours ahead of them until they reached the west coast.
"You know," Noah finally went on, in a conversational tone that didn't fool her, "I was thinking about making a stop in Odessa later today."
"And that just came to you like that."
"No, of course it didn't." Of course it hadn't. Claire had suspected there had to be a reason why they had driven so far south, instead of taking a more direct route across the States. And she couldn't say she was surprised to find out why her father had opted to drive through Texas.
"Dad, who do you think you're kidding? Do you have a plan, or are we just going to drive across America until I'm twenty-one?"
His face was serious. "There have been times over the last few days where I seriously considered that as an option."
Claire picked at her tortellini, and waited.
"I want to pick up a couple of things in Odessa. Things to help us disappear if we have to – false IDs, that sort of thing. And a couple of files, to help us know the enemy."
Claire raised her eyebrows. "You mean that there are still files at Primatech after they've been popping up all over the country for some time now?"
For the first time, Noah looked irritable. "Claire, I'm not worried about your face on the front cover of Time magazine. I'm not worried about being swarmed by the press, although it's not something I'm keen on. I'm worried about what others might do to you for exposing people with powers. There are those who wouldn't want to go public, for various reasons. And don't tell me about you being invulnerable."
Claire, who had been about to tell him she was invulnerable, said nothing.
Yes, she could understand he was worried. Yes, she could even say he was right to some degree. So had Peter – they had no idea where this might lead. But the fact remained that, instead of going public with her abilities and finally be done with all the lies she'd been forced to live for so long, she was back to the worst possible outcome, running, hiding, secret identities.
She was so fed up with it.
They finished their meal in silence, and deposited the remains – Styrofoam containers, plastic cutlery, and quite a fair amount of uneaten tortellini – in the garbage.
"It's nice not having to do the dishes, right?" Noah said, in a forced attempt at fraternisation.
She smiled, and nodded, standing up to get her bag, in search of some mints to get rid of the taste in her mouth.
She found the candy, but missed something else. Frowning, she dug around in her bag, finally upturning the contents on the bed.
"Dad, have you seen my cell somewhere?"
"No?"
She checked the pockets of her coat. "I haven't used it in the last two days, have I?"
Noah thought hard. "I thought I'd seen it lying on the dressing table yesterday, in that place in Arkansas."
She looked at him with a puzzled expression. "I'm pretty sure I haven't used it."
"Then I probably confused the places, and I saw it last in Brooklyn."
"It's not here." She frowned as she checked her bag, her case, and again her pockets.
"Maybe you forgot it there." He finished packing away the last of his things. "Who'd you have called?"
"Nobody. I just wonder where it is."
"We can just phone the Brooklyn place, and ask if they found it. The number should be on the bill. It's in the bottom of my case; I'll look for it tonight."
Claire gave him another smile that she hoped looked less forced than the last few. "Sounds fine. Let's go."
"I'll just go drop this off at the reception desk and restock, OK? Can you remake the stretcher?"
"Sure, go right ahead."
Hesam nodded at Shannon Kemper, and snatched his last run report to drop off with the nurses at the reception desk. Before he went to the supply room, however, he took a glance at his watch, and decided he had time to quickly take the elevator up to the Intensive Care Unit, and check on Peter.
Shannon, who was teamed up with him today, already knew why he usually took a few minutes longer than usual whenever he went into the hospital.
Hesam hadn't been very lucky today. He'd been up to see Peter before the shift had started, but he hadn't been conscious then. When he'd come in again around noon, he'd heard that Peter had been awake for some time, but when Hesam got there, he was asleep again.
This time, he wasn't sure whether to call it luck or not. As the elevator doors opened, Hesam had to step out of the way as, just then, a nurse was wheeling a gurney towards the elevator, and a second glance at it told Hesam, with a sinking feeling, that lying on it was Peter. He had known that Peter was scheduled for another surgery later today, but hadn't known exactly when.
"Hey, can you hold open the door, please?" the nurse called out to him.
"Yeah," Hesam said. "I'm not getting out after all." He stood aside as the nurse pulled the gurney in, and looked uncomfortable. "He's having another surgery?" He suddenly realised how deeply unnerving he found any part of hospital routine that took place beyond the Emergency Department. It was so close to what he was doing in his job, and yet so totally different.
The nurse looked at him strangely, until he seemed to recognize him, or work out who he must be.
"Ah, you work with him, right? Yeah, he's due for another one. Can you hit third floor for me please?"
Hesam pushed the button for "Third floor – Surgery", then looked at Peter, and was surprised to see that his eyes were open.
"Hey," Peter said thickly. He seemed to have difficulty speaking, and Hesam deduced that he was again rather heavily sedated.
"Hey, man," Hesam replied quietly. "You hang in there, OK?"
Peter gave a weak nod, closing his eyes again. "Yeah."
With an encouraging if slightly strained smile, Hesam briefly touched his knuckles to Peter's, a gesture which felt completely out of place with one of the two people involved lying flat on his back. Hesam then stood back again as the nurse wheeled Peter out of the elevator, watching them until they were out of sight.
His mind was still up in the surgery ward when he reached the ambulance, and got into the driver's seat.
"This yours?" Shannon asked him by way of greeting.
Hesam looked at the grey cell phone she was holding out to him, and took it from her.
"No." He frowned. "I don't even have mine with me. Where did you find it? In the back?"
"No, it was wedged underneath the backrest of the passenger's seat."
Hesam turned it in his hands. "I think it may be Peter's, actually," he said slowly. "Must have fallen out of his pocket on Sunday."
Shannon cast him a sympathetic glance. "Did you talk to him?"
Hesam gave a bitter chuckle. "Yeah. Sort of. He was on his way to surgery when I went up. I managed to tell him to hang in there. When we're done here, he'll probably still be knocked out. If they've finished patching him up by then, that is."
"What exactly will they be doing?"
"No idea. I didn't ask." Because I don't want to know.
She looked at him, clearly at a loss at what to say.
Hesam pocketed Peter's phone, then started the engine and picked up the mike. "059 here, we're clear."
It was strange to be back in Odessa.
To see that same old town just lying there as if nothing had happened, the same as it had always been, when Claire's life had so completely changed.
If her father felt the same way, he didn't show it, but Claire suspected that his feelings probably were a lot different from hers. For her, even though it had all started here, Odessa was the place where life had been comparatively simple. For Noah, it had always also been that place where he had led a double life between family man and Company man.
He didn't drive straight to Primatech, but went for a motel downtown. It was late afternoon, normally too early to find a place to stay for the night, so Claire assumed that Noah was planning to spend some time at his former workplace.
He left her some money to get something to eat, and made to leave.
"I'll be back in two hours at the latest. Be careful, OK?"
She nodded, and he went out.
Claire sighed, glad that he hadn't made her promise him she would stay at the motel. She would have hated to lie to him.
She took the money, and the motel key, waited for a quarter hour, and left the motel.
She spent some time just walking along aimlessly, her coat open, as it was a lot warmer here than it had been in New York City. She avoided larger gatherings of people, particularly young people, as someone would surely have recognised her. She longed to go into her favourite milkshake place to pick up a chocolate milk, but somebody would definitely have known her there, so she didn't.
She found herself wandering over to the school grounds. It was not completely deserted, even though even most of the afternoon activities would be over by now, so she remained careful not to walk into any scattered pairs or small groups of students, even though she could tell, from a distance, that there was nobody there that she knew. A couple of the kids looked so small.
She sat down on a bench near the stadium, watching a couple of smaller girls playing soccer on a lawn, lost in her own thoughts.
What was she going to do? Most of all, she wanted to be back in a place where people knew who and what she was, and were willing to support her. Right now, that was either Arlington, or New York. It would be nice to be back with Gretchen, though after her revelation, life at college would never be the same again. While she would have been fine with just waiting to see where it all would lead, she realised that Gretchen would not be the greatest help at this time. Which left Peter.
Even though Peter had not agreed with her actions at the Carnival, she still felt he was the closest confidant she had. Plus, he was one of the few people who, with any consistency, treated her like an adult, and whatever the future held, facing it as an adult would be far preferable to being carted across the States by her father.
She sat there until the sun went down, without really being able to reach a decision of what she was going to do. After a while, she sighed, rose from her seat, and slowly started to walk back. She wasn't worried that her father might have come home in the meantime, and sure enough, when she reached the motel, she didn't see her father's car anywhere.
As she crossed the parking lot, she had a vague feeling that she wasn't alone. Feeling scared even though she told herself she had no reason to, she looked around, then quickened her steps until she reached the lobby. There was nobody to be seen.
She walked up to their room, turned on the lights, and then spent a few minutes watching the parking lot through the half-closed curtain. Everything was dark, and quiet.
She looked around the rather bleak room, which had a TV in the corner, but there didn't seem to be a remote control, and the panel on the TV wouldn't open. A look inside the TV guide told her there was nothing interesting on anyway.
Then she remembered that her father had bought a newspaper the previous day. She opened his case in search for it when she heard a distinct pock from the direction of the window.
Her head whipped around, staring at the window, but the curtain was still closed.
Heart beating wildly, she waited.
Pock.
It was strange how paralysed one could feel when it came to something as simple as drawing the curtain from a window.
Pock.
Claire went over to the window in two steps, so she couldn't change her mind along the way, and ripped open the curtain.
A stone, slightly larger than the last three, landed on the windowpane right in front of her nose as she stared. Pock.
She stared down into the parking lot, where a figure, hard to discern as he was backlit by a streetlamp, was just bending down to pick up another stone. He straightened, and pulled back to throw, but didn't follow through when he saw that the curtain had been drawn aside. He lowered his hand.
Claire squinted, and then she opened the window.
"Zach?"
The figure down there made no reply, but she could have sworn she saw him grinning.
"What are you doing?" she called.
He laughed, his voice familiar, even if it seemed to belong to such a remote time in her life. "Throwing stones at your window?" he shouted back.
Claire now laughed as well. Her room was on the second floor, but there was a car port right underneath her window. "Come up here!" she shouted.
He looked around, saw the car port, seemed to assess the best route, and started climbing up to her until he squeezed himself through the open window.
Now, standing in the light, she saw that he had changed, but not much. His trademark headphones were gone, as was the fuzzy goatee on his chin, as if he had finally accepted that he looked more grown-up without it, but the slightly sardonic grin he gave her as he looked her up and down was just as she remembered it.
"So," Zach said. "Jumping for a larger audience now, huh? I always thought filmsbyzach had the exclusive rights for that kind of thing."
Claire smiled. "Hey, you were the one who told me to embrace my inner freak. Remember?"
Hesam took another of his many detours into the hospital at a quarter past six, forty-five minutes before his and Shannon's end of shift, but he knew better than to ask for permission to come in early. Supervisor Jackson was on duty today, and he never let you finish before your scheduled end of shift.
He headed past the nurses' station on his way to the ICU, when he caught one of the nurses giving him a strange look, one that made his gut go cold.
"What?" he asked, turning around and coming back, dreading the answer.
"It's Peter." The nurse caught his expression of alarm and was quick to add, in a soothing way that wasn't reassuring at all to Hesam, "There was some complication with the surgery. He's back on mechanical ventilation; they're keeping him put under again as a precaution."
Hesam nodded his thanks, his jaw working as he slowly walked back to the ambulance bay.