The Divide by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

twelve-year-old, yes, she guessed so. Privately, she connected the stutter with her father’s grim refusal to discuss anything connected with the event, though he picked her up every weekend in his car and drove her places: the beach, park picnics, Disneyland, his apartment. Day trips, rituals of silence.
How are things at school, Susie? Fuh-fuh-fine.
Then his cancer erupted, a fierce Round One: in this corner, Laryngeal Nodes; in that corner, the Surgeon’s Knife. He recovered, or seemed to, except for his voice. His conversation dimmed to a whisper. The doctors said there were devices he could use, but he refused. To Susan he seemed to have achieved a whole new identity, more gaunt and wholly withdrawn. After the surgery, she was afraid to talk to him. Afraid that her own voice might strike him as a rebuke or a taunt:
See, I still have my tuh-tongue.
    She felt infected by his silence and determined to overcome her own. She performed speech exercises. She joined the yearbook staff at high school and studied back issues of
Seventeen
for clues to the social graces. It was a scientific project—as solemn as that. She was not John Shaw, inventing a new self; but the inspiration was similar… a willful disguise. And it was effective; it worked; but she remained painfully conscious of the creaking machinery behind the proscenium. People would look at her oddly and she would think
Oh! I made a mistake.
    Approaching John Shaw had been hard enough, even under the cloak of impartiality. Approaching Benjamin would be even harder. Because she wasn’t just a messenger from Dr. Kyriakides anymore. This had become, in a way, her own project now. And she needed her own words.
     
     
    She began by renting a car. She chose a late-model Volvo and spent a day with her city map, learning the downtown. Then back to the hotel to shower, followed by cheap Chinese food on Spadina Avenue and another evening with Travis McGee. No one called; no one left a message.
    She set her wristwatch alarm for 5 a.m. and slept with it under her pillow.
    By the time it annoyed her awake there was morning light coming through the big plate-glass window. Not sunlight, but only a grey, tepid half-light and a few flakes of snow. She stood under the hot water of the shower until her skin hurt, then dressed in Levis, a cotton shirt, and a jacket. She rode the elevator down to the parking level, coaxed the Volvo to life, and drove into St. Jamestown.
    She parked in front of the rooming house where John Shaw lived.
    The snow evolved into a cold, steady drizzle as Susan shivered in the car. She watched the people who emerged from the rooming house, made ghostly by the condensation on the Volvo’s windows. None of them was John Shaw—or Benjamin. Seven o’clock slid past. At seven-thirty she was beginning to feel not merely misguided but embarrassed—playing espionage games before breakfast. She pulled her jacket closer around her and decided she would go for coffee and a croissant—she had seen a place on Yonge Street—at, say, eight o’clock. If nothing had happened.
    Moments before her deadline, Benjamin left the rooming house.
    She almost missed him. Dr. Kyriakides had warned her about the possibility that Benjamin might not look much like John Shaw. Obviously his features were the same, but there were subtler clues of posture and style and movement, and from this distance—through the rain—he might have been another person altogether. He walked differently. He
held himself
differently. He stepped into the October morning, his face disguised by the hood of a yellow raincoat, and this was not John’s long, impatient stride but something more diffident, careful, reserved. He paused at the sidewalk and looked both ways. His glance slid over the little Volvo without hesitation, but Susan pressed herself back into the seat.
    He turned and walked westward through the rain.
    Susan waited until he reached the corner; then she turned the key in the ignition and