“And actually I arrived here knowing quite a bit about Millennium, in a tangential sort of way—more than routine preproduction research would tell me. I did a piece on Ladder, two years ago, at White River, Arizona, on the Fort Apache Reservation. The piece got a lot of favorable attention, and impressed my bosses. That’s why they were so ready to approve this one.
“And Ladder really impressed me. Enough that afterward I got Millennium’s Abilities Release processing in Atlanta, the whole procedure.”
She paused, squeezed Lee’s hand. “I’m sorry, but I seem to have totally blown this conversation. I betrayed your trust, which I shouldn’t have. It was arrogant; arrogance is my chief negative feature. It’s a lot weaker than it used to be, but right when I least expect it, snap! It grabs and runs with me.”
Lee’s mouth was a thin and bitter line, and she didn’t meet Thomas’s eyes. “I need to go home now,” she said stiffly. “Ben will be wondering about me.”
“Of course. I’ll be right back, with keys to the van.”
She returned within three minutes. Neither talked on the short drive back to the Shoreff home, but Thomas walked Lee to her porch, then stood with her hands on the white woman’s arms. “Lee,” she said, “just know that I respect and admire you, as a mother, wife, professional, and person. You’re quality, a class act.”
Then she turned and left.
* * *
Lee said little to Ben, except that she was getting a headache, a fiction she’d never resorted to before. Then she disappeared into the bedroom, leaving him to put the girls to bed. When he came in, an hour later, she was still awake, memory loops old and recent cycling sluggishly, fruitlessly through her mind. She did not turn to sex for consolation, as she commonly did when troubled. She was sunken in apathy, that lowest and darkest of moods, where it seems that nothing will help. Consolation felt out of reach, and Ben seemed to know it, for when he lay down, he simply murmured, “Healing dreams, sweetheart,” and very lightly kissed her cheek. Then he closed his own eyes, and soon slept. As eventually she would, a healing sleep deeper than her apathy, and busy with dreams that would not be remembered even vaguely. When she got up in the morning, a scalding shower and scalding coffee soon had her fit for work, though she was more indrawn than usual.
22
Work brought Lee the rest of the way out of herself—a morning of aligning job descriptions with their flow charts, then running them through various trial sequences in her computer. At lunch she was somewhat uncommunicative, but her mind was on the tests, not on the night before. The television crew was still at the Cote, doing interviews, but they weren’t impinging upon her.
Shortly after returning to her office, there was a knock at her door. “Yes?” she called.
“It is I. Dove.”
The voice itself, and the grammar, would have been enough. “Come in,” she said. He had, she supposed, seen rough cuts of yesterday’s TV coverage, and was stopping by to comment.
She was mistaken. “Lor Lu went over your progress with me,” Ngunda said. “He is unreservedly pleased, and I agree with him. He’d expected excellent results, but hadn’t realized how excellent. I thought you’d like to know.”
She did. “Thank you,” she said. “At the beginning, I was surprised at how positive he was that I was the person for the job. I knew my recommendations were good, but . . .”
“Your references were a relatively small factor in Lor Lu’s expectations. He is a bodhisatva, and thus without many of the perceptual barriers typical of humankind. So meeting you and Ben sharpened the vectors for him—his sense of the—let us say the probabilistic spray of results which might transpire should we hire you.”
For a moment, Lee felt light-headed. In a general way she’d understood what Ngunda was telling her, but all she found to say was, “Actually he rattled me. He could easily have left with a poor impression, or worse.”
Ngunda laughed. “Different beholders, different conclusions.”