Page 57 of The Infinite Light of Dust

“What is it exactly?” I asked him as the silence got to be too much.

“My liver is failing.”

“How? You’re not even fifty.”

My dad had gone to PT every morning for the last twenty years, so how could his health be failing? It didn’t make sense.

“Well, illness doesn’t seem to have any age limits, Karina. It sounds worse than it is, I’m not going to die right now. I don’t know when, but there’s still some time for me to get things right.”

I almost laughed at how outrageous this was. He refused to call it what it was, and was keeping the details to a minimum, but his eyes were full of vulnerability, the only time I had witnessed such an emotion from him. My father was sick and now wanted to make amends with everyone around him, Mendoza was wounded and couldn’t use his body from the waist down, my brother may or may not be fine, Elodie’s baby was coming in a few weeks . . . I was so overwhelmed I wanted to scream. It felt like every time I turned around, something bad was happening to someone I cared about. My father and I had our issues, but I would never wish death on him.

“Does Estelle know?” I thought about how much she had been taking care of me the last few days and how overwhelmed she must be. My dad was essentially all she had.

“Yes. Your brother doesn’t, and I don’t think it would do any good to tell him right now,” he confessed.

I hated the idea of lying and deciding when the right time to share devastating news was, but my father was right in this case.

“Why did you tell Kael before me?” I asked him, genuinely unsure how and when the two of them had even been around one another.

“I trust him with your life, Karina.”

Trust. . . what an interesting choice of words for a man who proved again and again to be the opposite of trustworthy. It seemed everyone around him trusted him, except me. Did he blatantly lie to everyone else, too, or was I the special one?

“Well, that’s a mistake,” I warned him, standing up to leave. I couldn’t stay cooped up here any longer, moping around while the world continued to go on.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Kael

I followed Fischer back to his room. As he shut the door behind us, he turned on his heel and faced me, shame clear on his exhausted face.

“It’s a long story, but my mom has been around for a little bit now. She hasn’t seen my sister yet,” he explained quietly, his words coming out in a rush.

I immediately thought of how Karina thought she’d imagined her mom in the alley; had it really been her after all?

“You’ve seen her?” I tried to make sense of the situation as a knock tapped at his door.

He nodded and pulled the door to his assigned room open. A woman, appearing no older than thirty but who had to be, sat on the bed with her hands in her lap. Her dark-blond hair was the color of sunflower petals covered by a shadow. She stood up and her long dress swept the floor as she greeted Fischer with open arms.

“My god. Are you okay?” Her face was shockingly similar to both of her children’s but especially Karina’s.

The shape of her eyes, the slightly wide bridge of her nose, her square chin, they were nearly identical to Karina’s. I could see now how much Fischer looked like his father compared to how much Karina looked like her mother. From all the stories I had heard about her, I felt like I had met this woman at least a dozen times.

The beaded bracelets on her wrists clinked together as she cupped his face. Nothing about the way she had decorated herself or her embrace with her son made any sense to me.

“I’m okay.” Fischer began to explain the short version of what had happened. I could barely follow his words because I was too busy staring at the ghost in the room.

Even her reactions were exactly like Karina’s, from the way she nodded slowly as she followed along with the story to the way her eyes went wide at the violent parts.

“This is Martin, by the way. He’s the main reason I’m alive today. He’s saved my ass more than a few times, and he’s the one I told you about, who helped me enlist.”

Her attention turned to me. “So you’re the famous Martin?”

From what Karina had told me about her mother’s emotional relationship with the Army, I expected her to get angry with me, or at least be cross. Instead she smiled at me, the same smile I’d seen on her daughter’s face a million times. The same heart-shaped face, the same thick dark eyelashes. It made me uneasy as hell. According to Karina, her father was the only one who had a photo of her mom, so I’d never seen one and now wished I had, so I wouldn’t have been so caught off guard. Genetics were strong, but this was uncanny. No wonder Karina’s father couldn’t help but compare the two of them.

I realized I hadn’t responded to her question. Fischer was watching me with an anxious smile.

“Yeah. That’s me,” I managed to say.

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