“They’re going to be pretty annoyed when they find us,” Arby said. “How do you think we should tell them?”
“We can let it be a surprise.
“They’ll be mad,” he said.
“So? What can they do about it?” Kelly said.
“Maybe they’ll send us back.”
“How? They can’t.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Arby shrugged casually, but he was more troubled by this line of thought than he wanted to admit. This was all Kelly’s idea. Arby had never liked to break the rules, or to get into any kind of trouble. Whenever he had even had a mild reprimand from a teacher, he would get flushed and sweaty. And for the last twelve hours, he had been thinking about how Thorne and the others would react.
“Look,” Kelly said. “The thing is, we’re here to help find our friend Dr. Levine, that’s all. We’ve helped Dr. Thorne already.”
“Yes
“And we’ll be able to help them again.”
“Maybe…”
“They need our help.”
“Maybe,” Arby said. He didn’t feel convinced.
Kelly said, “I wonder what they have to eat here.” She opened the refrigerator. “You hungry?”
“Starving,” Arby said, suddenly aware that he was.
‘So what do you want?”
“What is there?” He sat on the padded gray couch and stretched, as he watched Kelly poke through the refrigerator.
“Come and look,” she said, annoyed. “I’m not your stupid housekeeper,”
“Okay, okay, take it easy.”
“Well, you expect everybody to wait on you,” she said.
“I do not,” he said, getting quickly off the couch.
“You’re such a brat, Arby.”
“Hey,” he said. “What’s the big deal? Take it easy. You nervous about something?”
No, I am not,” she said. She took a wrapped sandwich out of the refrigerator. Standing beside her, he looked briefly inside, grabbed the first sandwich he saw.
“You don’t want that,” she said.
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s tuna salad.”
Arby hated tuna salad. He put it back quickly, looked around again.
“That’s turkey on the left,” she said. “In the bun.”
He brought out a turkey sandwich. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” Sitting on the couch, she opened her own sandwich, wolfed it down hungrily.
“Listen, at least I got us here,” he said, unwrapping his own carefully. He folded the plastic neatly, set it aside.
“Yeah. You did. I admit it. You did that part all right.”
Arby ate his sandwich. He thought he had never tasted anything so good in his entire life. It was better even than his mother’s turkey sandwiches.
The thought of his mother gave him a pang. His mother was a gynecologist and very beautiful. She had a busy life, and wasn’t home very much, but whenever he saw her, she always seemed so peaceful. And Arby felt peaceful around her, too. They had a special relationship, the two of them. Even though lately she sometimes seemed uneasy about how much he knew. One night he had come into her study; she was going over some journal articles about progesterone levels and FSH. He looked over her shoulder at the columns of numbers and suggested that she might want to try a nonlinear equation to analyze the data. She gave him a funny look, a kind of separate look, thoughtful and distant from him, and at that moment he had felt –
“I’m getting another one,” Kelly said, going back to the refrigerator. She came out with two sandwiches, one in each hand.
“You think there’s enough?”
“Who cares? I’m starving,” she said, tearing off the wrapping on the first.
“Maybe we shouldn’t eat – ”
“Arb, if you’re going to worry like this, we should have stayed home.”
He decided that was right. He was surprised to see that he had somehow finished his own sandwich. So he took the other one Kelly offered him.
Kelly ate, and stared out the window. “I wonder what that building is, that they went into? It looks abandoned.”
“Yeah. For years.”
“Why would somebody build a big building here, on some deserted island in Costa Rica?” she said.
“Maybe they were doing something secret.”
“Or dangerous,” she said.
“Yeah. Or that.” The idea of danger was both titillating and unnerving. He felt far from home.