The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

poring over the brightly colored pages, until one afternoon the letters all aligned themselves and she hooted like an owl and the two of them danced around the room together, shouting, “‘Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam-I-am!’”

Over the course of a few weeks Meg went from stammering her sentences out loud, her finger pressed to the page and pulling along under the words, to reading everything about Ireland that she could get her hands on. When he turned up one morning to find her tucked up in an easy chair reading a tome entitled Making Ireland British, 1580–1650, Nick tried to intervene. “We’re meant to concentrate on this thing they call contemporary pop culture,” he said. “I don’t think that’s it.”

Meg looked up over the top of her book, her eyes bright beneath her white hair. “Do as you like,” she said. “I’m not in your road.” Down she dived again, her hand groping blindly for an enormous sandwich that sat just out of reach on the table beside her. Nick sighed and pushed the plate closer to her. It had been so companionable while she was learning to read: They had taken breaks from Dr. Seuss by watching their way through The Sopranos and The X-Files, with breaks from that for episodes of Father Ted and Leave It to Beaver. Now Meg was annoyed when Nick watched TV without a headset: “I can’t read with that noise in my ears!”

The star student in every subject was a twenty-year-old Pocumtuk man named Leo Quonquont, who had arrived at the compound six weeks after Nick. The Guild assigned him to Bangalore, so he had to learn Finnish, English, and Kannada. By the end of his second month, Leo was cracking jokes in English. By the end of his sixth month, he outgrew the English class and joined Meg and Nick in their study group. They made an odd threesome. An English aristocrat, an American Indian genius, and an elderly, ravenous Irishwoman, all watching soccer on a Saturday afternoon, eating popcorn and hollering advice and recriminations at the screen. It shouldn’t have been possible. Yet they could joke together, argue together, and learn together: They were friends.

* * *

Nick discovered that he loved “future school,” just as the butcher had said he would. But nothing lasts forever. In retrospect, Nick believed that his friendship with Leo and Meg began to unravel the day he saw Leo talking to Mr. Mibbs.

It was a beautiful late afternoon. Nick had just spent an hour with a coach, practicing modern American manners, slang, facial expressions, hand gestures. He was exhausted. Then he caught sight of Leo walking under one of the huge screens that were everywhere in the education quad, projecting a constant, silent stream of visual information about the present. Nick struck out across the grass, hoping to divert his friend into the bar for a beer. It wasn’t until he was several yards from Leo that he realized that the man walking near his friend—in front of him and a few feet to the left—was actually conversing with him. It was strange. They were not together, and yet they were.

Nick slowed down, and Leo turned as if he had eyes in the back of his head. His face was still and serious. He shook his head once, with intent: Don’t come near.

Nick nodded. It had been a soldierly communication, and all Nick’s battle senses were awakened. He put his hand in his pocket and fished out his phone, flipped it open, and tucked it against his ear. Then he changed the angle of his walk to move parallel with the pair. He strolled along pretending to be talking on the phone, his eyes on Leo’s companion.

At first he could only see the man’s back. His hair was thick and brown, blow-dried. He wore a wide-shouldered business suit as blue as the summer sky, which he filled with meaty precision. The tailoring was immaculate and expensive, but the suit was absurd.

Nick, who tended to dress for the future in jeans and soft cotton shirts, smiled to himself. Maybe that terrible suit was why Leo was keeping his distance.

Then the man turned, as Leo had—as if he knew Nick was watching him. He had a square chin and a thin mouth, and that blow-dried hair was styled up and off his forehead. He looked like the handsome, anodyne white men who predicted the weather on American TV.

But there was something wrong with the way the man looked at Nick.

Even from several yards away, Nick could feel the flat, frozen emptiness of that gaze. He lowered his phone and stared back unblinkingly, no longer pretending disinterest. Time seemed to stop . . . thought fell away. . . .

Then Leo turned, too, and his expression recalled Nick to himself. Leo was communicating something. A more urgent warning. Nick blinked, pivoted on his heel, and walked in the other direction.

When Nick asked Leo about it the next day, Leo said the man had asked the way to the amusement park, and Leo had led him there. Leo wasn’t telling the truth—or at least not the whole truth—but Nick didn’t push it. He’d learned in Spain. A soldier will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.

* * *

Two weeks later, Nick, Leo, and Meg were floating in the pool outside Nick’s house, watching a custard-colored full moon rise over the mountains. Something akin to joy filled Nick’s heart. He was bobbing like a cork in a heated infinity pool in the Andes, his formerly stiff rump tucked into a plastic flotation device made to look like a spotted frog. His two friends were bobbing too, one in a dragon and one in a panda bear. He was happy—like the Frankish butcher had said he would be. He found himself employing a phrase he’d gleaned from TV: “You guys are the best.”

They laughed at him, and Meg used her own new slang: “Sucker,”