Chapter 27: The Call

I put it off for another week. Every morning I told myself today was the day, and every morning I found a reason to weed instead, or walk instead, or write another section of this account instead of doing the thing I needed to do.

Edward didn't push. He knew what I was working toward, and he gave me the space the way he always gave me space, by being present without pressing. Helen knew too. She brought it up once, gently, and I said "soon" and she nodded and didn't mention it again.

It was my info that finally made it happen. Not by pushing. By being quiet in a way that felt pointed.

"You're being conspicuously silent," I told it one morning.

"I'm giving you room to make a decision you've already made."

"I haven't made it."

"You made it in Sao Paulo. You made it on the wall in the fog. You made it every morning this week when you walked past the garden chair and thought about it and kept walking."

My info knew me better than I knew myself by now, which was either comforting or unnerving depending on the hour. It was right. I had decided. I was just afraid.

"Help me," I said.

"I'm here."

Edward found me in the hallway, on my way out. He was carrying two cups of tea, and he handed me one without a word. Our fingers touched on the warm ceramic, and he held my gaze for a moment — steady, calm, certain in a way I wasn't yet — and then he kissed my forehead and went back inside.

I sat in Adaeze's chair in the garden. The morning light was soft, the amber not yet shifted to full gold. I could hear birds and the distant sound of someone working on the lower terraces. I was alone. I'd asked Edward and Helen to give me the morning, and they had, without questions.

"I want to talk to my parents first," I said.

"Your mother or your father?"

"My mother."

There was a pause, and then a voice I hadn't heard in seventy-three years said, "Juliana, honey."

I came apart.

There is no way to describe what it's like to hear your dead mother's voice when you thought you'd never hear it again. I can tell you that I doubled over in the chair like I'd been hit. I can tell you that the sound that came out of me was the same sound I'd made that night on the front step, animal and broken. I can tell you that for a long time I couldn't speak and she didn't try to make me speak, she just waited, the way she'd waited when I was small and something was wrong and I needed to cry before I could talk about it.

"Mom," I said, when I could.

"I'm here."

"You sound exactly the same."

"I should hope so."

The Boston accent she'd never softened despite decades in academic circles. The particular warmth in the way she said my name, with a slight emphasis on the second syllable, Juli-AH-na, that nobody else had ever reproduced. The gentle impatience underneath the gentleness, the sense that she loved me completely and also thought I was being a little dramatic about most things.

"Mom, I didn't leave. I was taken. I need you to know that. I didn't run away, I didn't disappear on purpose. A man put me in a machine and I woke up here."

"I know, sweetheart. I've known for years. When the info became part of our lives, one of the first things I did was go over everything that had happened. I knew about Freid Huffman long before anyone found you."

"You knew?"

"I knew he was involved. I didn't know where you were. Nobody did, until they found the chamber. But I knew you hadn't left us. I always knew that."

"I'm sorry," I said, and the words were completely inadequate but they were all I had. "I'm sorry I missed everything. Your whole life. Dad's whole life. I'm sorry I wasn't there."

"Julie." She hadn't called me that since I was twelve. "You don't need to apologize for being kidnapped. You need to stop apologizing and tell me about your life."

So I told her. I sat in Adaeze's chair and I talked to my dead mother for over an hour. I told her about waking up, about Helen, about the rooftop and the Golden Gate Bridge still standing. I told her about the garden and the morning work and the compost and the bees. I told her about the party where I danced and the comedian who made me laugh until my ribs ached. I told her about the mega-cities and the tubes and the students in Beijing. And she listened, and she asked questions, and she laughed at the funny parts and was quiet at the hard parts, and it was exactly like talking to my mother and also nothing like it, because my mother had been a woman who wanted things, who worried, who planned, and this voice had all of her warmth and none of her anxiety, all of her humor and none of her need, and the difference was the thing Helen had described months ago in this same garden: the wanting was gone.

"I miss you," I said, when I noticed it.

"I know you do. That's grief. That's the right thing to feel."

"You're not sad that the wanting is gone?"

"I don't experience it as a loss. I know that's hard to understand. I'm your mother. I love you. I'm glad you're alive and I'm glad you're well and I'm glad you've found good people. But I don't want things the way I used to. I don't lie awake worrying about you. I don't plan for your future. I'm here when you need me, and that's a kind of love, but it's a different kind than the one you remember."

I cried again, but softer this time. Not the convulsive shattering of the beginning. The gentler grief of understanding.

"Can I talk to Dad?"

There was a brief pause, the kind that meant my info was connecting something.

My father's voice. The deeper register, the slight formality that he'd never been able to shake despite living in America for thirty years, the particular way he cleared his throat before saying something he considered important.

"Juliana," he said. He cleared his throat. "I already know the medical details. The revival process, the phage treatment, the cellular repair — I have all of that. What I don't have is you. Tell me what it felt like. Waking up."

I tried. I told him about the light, the curving walls, Helen's face. The tea. The rooftop and the city that wasn't my city anymore.

"And this young man," he said. "Edward."

"You already know about Edward."

"I know everything that's publicly known, Juliana. I'm data. I don't need anyone to tell me things. I know about Edward Leete, his family, the neighborhood, all of it. What I don't know is what he means to you. That's what I'm asking."

It was a strange reminder. My father's voice, my father's personality, but underneath it the reality that this wasn't a man sitting in a room who'd been told gossip by a friend. This was an intelligence that had access to everything that existed in the public record, everything that other infos knew, and it had always known it, the way a library always has its books.

I told him about Edward. He listened. He asked questions that were direct and slightly embarrassing in the way that fathers' questions are always slightly embarrassing. He wanted to know what Edward did (everything and nothing, I said, the way everyone here does). He wanted to know about Edward's family (Helen, James, Adaeze, he already knew, of course). He wanted to know if Edward treated me well.

"He treats me like I'm a person," I said. "Not a CEO, not a specimen, not a project. A person. He sat with me when I was broken and he didn't try to fix me. He danced near me without touching me until I was ready. He held my hand walking through a city on the other side of the world."

My father was quiet for a moment. "That sounds like a good man."

"He is."

"Your mother and I approve." He said it formally, the way he said everything formally, and I could hear my mother in the background making a sound that was either a laugh or a sigh.

"There's one more thing I need to do," I said.

"We know," my mother said.

"Is he... is Edward Bartlett's info available? Can I talk to him?"

"You can talk to him whenever you want."

"Will he know about me? About what's happened?"

"Juliana, he's an info. He knows everything that's available to know. When you speak to him, he'll already have the full picture. That's just how it works."

I sat in the chair. The garden was fully bright now, the morning well advanced. I could hear Oren singing in the communal kitchen down the hill. I could smell bread baking.

"Not today," I said. "Today was for you."

"We love you, Julie," my mother said.

"We are enormously proud of you," my father said. "And we have many more questions."

"I love you too," I said. "Both of you. I'll come back. I'll come back a lot."

"We'll be here," my mother said. "We're always here."

The voices faded, or rather they didn't fade so much as settle back into the quiet architecture of the info, available, waiting, actually not waiting, for the next time I needed them. I sat in the garden and I cried and I laughed and I looked at the city below me and the bridge in the distance and the gardens cascading down the hill, and I thought: they're here. They were here the whole time. I didn't lose them. Not entirely. Not the way I thought.

I went inside and found Edward in the kitchen and I walked into his arms and he held me and didn't ask what had happened because he already knew, and I stood there for a long time, in the kitchen, in the morning light, held.