Page 32 of Installment Immortality

Isaac must have seen my immunity to tears in my expression, because his lip stopped wobbling and his expression turned cold in that way that only very self-possessed children can ever quite manage. It was less arrogant than it was aspiring to arrogance, like it might be really cutting if the child who wore it was just given a decade or so to practice looking witheringly displeased. I’ve had a lot of practice not laughing at that sort of look, and to my delight, I managed it once again as I swallowed my initial reaction.

“Did you wake up because Lottie had a cookie?”

A nod, expression thawing by a few degrees.

“Wouldyoulike to have a cookie? I know the one she ate was chocolate, but I bet there’s some oatmeal walnut with sun-dried tomato cookies in the jar.”

Cuckoos have weird taste buds—it’s not just Sarah, no matter how tempting it might be to think that her passion for tomato in everything is a personal choice, rather than a function of the way her species processes Earth flavors. For Isaac, sun-dried tomato chunks baked into an oatmeal cookie were probably about the most appealing thing I could have offered.

He held his arms out, silently asking me to lift him out of the bed. I leaned over and scooped him up, noting how much bigger he was than the last time I’d seen him. With a kid on my hip, I couldn’t just relocate myself to the kitchen, and so I left the room the normal, living way, one step at a time, child balanced against me with his arms around my neck and his head against my shoulder.

His grip tightened as I went down the stairs, until I felt obligated to stop and say, “It’s not polite to choke people, Isaac.”

He relaxed his hold on my neck, allowing me the air I didn’t need.

“Thank you.”

We reached the kitchen to find Elsie gone and Charlotte sitting on a puzzled-looking Arthur’s lap. That was apparently the last straw for Isaac, who had been trying to hold himself together. He saw his beloved sister sitting in the lap of the monster he’d detected from his bed, and he pushed himself away from me, jumping to the ground before he rushed over to yank Charlotte down from her perch and put himself firmly between her and Arthur, glaring at Arthur with every ounce of menace he could summon into his little cuckoo face. One of the advantages of letting him bond so closely to Charlotte was finally fully apparent: he had amuch more expressive face than most of the cuckoos I’d known. He was learning facial expressions from her, and he clearly understood how to put them to good use.

“No!” he shouted, balling his hands into fists. “You don’t touch mysister!”

“Isaac!” said Shelby, hurrying to his side and trying to turn him away from his cousin. “That’s not how we talk to our guests!”

“He’s not a guests! He’s a monster all up inside, where he isn’t supposed to be!” Isaac allowed himself to be turned and looked at Shelby with wide, injured eyes. “Make him go away!”

“I’m so sorry, Arthur, he’s not normally like this,” said Shelby, holding Isaac by the shoulders as she turned to look at Arthur. Charlotte, clearly confused but not wanting to be left out, sniffled and started to cry.

That was the last straw for Arthur. He shoved his chair back as he stood, lurching away from the table like the monster we were all insisting he wasn’t. “Thank you for your hospitality, Shelby,” he said, and looked to me. “Tell Elsie I’ll be in the car.”

“Art—” began Shelby, only to cut herself off at his bitterly unhappy expression. He didn’t say another word, to any of us, just pushed out of the kitchen and stormed down the hall. Isaac relaxed. Charlotte stopped crying.

The front door slammed.

“That went well,” I said. “I should go after him. Shelby, when Elsie gets out of the shower, can you let her know we’re outside?’

Charlotte blinked, and then started wailing again, this time while lunging at me. She grabbed hold of my thigh again, even tighter than before. We were definitely going to have a talk about circulation for normal people. “No!” she shouted. “No go!”

“Sentences, please, sweetie,” I said. “How about ‘I don’t want you to go’?”

“No,” she repeated, at a lower volume, but with the same vehemence. “Marystay.”

I looked at Shelby. She sighed, taking her hands off of Isaac’s shoulders. He responded by mirroring Charlotte, spinning around and wrapping his arms around Shelby’s hips like she was all that was tethering him to the world. “We’ve been working on talking to people so they can understand her,” she said. “It’s hard going. Isaac doesn’t make it any easier, and because of the way he is, we can’t even think too hard about most possible solutions.”

Meaning she couldn’t consider separating the pair so Charlotte couldn’t rely on Isaac’s telepathy anymore. That might be the only way to help Charlotte with her verbal language skills—although from the little I’d seen, the skills were perfectly present. It was just a matter of convincing her she needed to use them. “I’ll see if I can come up with some answers while I’m not here,” I said, then turned my attention back to Charlotte. “Your cousin Arthur had a bad accident when he was doing something really important with Sarah,” I said. “He got hurt, really a lot, and the scars are where Isaac can see them.”

Charlotte looked puzzled. “Grandpa is all over scars,” she said. “Is Arthur like Grandpa?”

Martin Baker—her paternal great-grandfather—was a Revenant, a reanimated corpse made up of multiple formerly dead people assembled into a unified whole by a scientist with a flexible relationship to things like “scientific ethics” and “physical reality.” We didn’t know much about Martin’s creator. He’d never been something Martin wanted to talk about. But the reanimation process left its scars, some more visible than others.

It wasn’t the worst comparison, not least because Arthur as we presently knew him was also a sort of revenant. In her desperation to save the man she loved, Sarah had reassembled his mind using the memories of everyone close enough for her to reach out and touch. He was a patchwork man, and none of his thoughts or memories were originally his own. Unlike Martin, however, he wasn’t content with this, and had been trying to fit back into thespace he’d occupied before his accident for as long as I’d known him.

It probably didn’t help that Martin had died, been reanimated, and gone off to start a whole new life, with people who’d never known him as a living man—not any part of him—while Arthur was still surrounded by his original family, many of whom were hoping, as quietly as they could manage, that he was somehow miraculously going to fix himself and turn back into the Artie we all knew and loved. More and more, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, but we’d suffered so many losses lately, it was hard not to hope.

“Arthur is a little bit like Grandpa,” I said. “They have some things in common. But he’s also not like Grandpa at all, and he’s very sad and very sorry and very tired of people telling him that he’s broken. I understand why Isaac looked at him and saw a monster, and I understand why he wouldn’t want Arthur touching you, but you need to remember that Arthur isn’t a monster. He’s your cousin and he loves you.”

Isaac, still clinging to Shelby, hiccupped and looked faintly ashamed. I glanced at Charlotte. She was wearing the exact same expression. I frowned. Was Isaac looking ashamed, or had he just managed to copy Charlotte’s face when he thought it was necessary? It was impossible to say.

I stepped away from Charlotte, turning intangible so that her clutching arms passed right through my thigh, leaving me free to make my exit. She stumbled and nearly fell at the loss of my support, then looked at me, her huge blue eyes brimming over with tears.

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