The young nurse at the station smiled brightly as she saw Mariah approach. “Hi, Mrs. Tardiff,” she said.
The nurses knew her well by now—knew she normally used Bolt, her own surname, not David’s, but she had told them she had no objection to being called Mrs. Tardiff, if they preferred. Most, especially the older nurses, seemed more comfortable with that, likely suspicious of her disregard for the proper order of things. David would have been more insistent than Mariah herself on her right to use her own name, but he was in no position to argue with anyone—on points of principle or anything else.
“He’s been looking forward to seeing you,” the nurse said. “The orderly rolled him into the hallway an hour ago.”
Mariah nodded and forced a smile. This nurse had a sweet disposition and meant no reproach, she knew, but she gave herself a mental lashing anyway. “Traffic,” she said. “It’s awful tonight.” The nurse smiled sympathetically.
Mariah turned the corner and headed down the hall. David’s was the last room on the right and she could see his wheelchair outside the door, past all the other lonely souls—ancients, most of them, waiting and watching with futile hope in their eyes each time a visitor entered the corridor. Mariah smiled at some of the old-timers as she walked by, pausing briefly to squeeze the hand of the old lady who always called her Thelma and asked about the boys.
“They’re fine, Mrs. Lake, just fine,” she answered, as she always did, now that she had given up trying to explain that she wasn’t Thelma—wondering, as she always did, who the real Thelma was and whether the boys were really fine
She turned once more toward David. She could see him clearly now, watching her every step—those deep brown eyes with irises so dark that the pupils were invisible. Large, innocent eyes that looked right into your soul. Who could resist them? Certainly she had never been able to.
She had met him in the mid-seventies, the year before the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited her. She was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, a political science major specializing in the Soviet-American arms race. When her liberal arts background left her bogged down in the complexities of nuclear weapons, her thesis adviser sent her to the head of the physics department. He, in turn, introduced her to David Tardiff, one of the department’s youngest and brightest doctoral candidates.
But if physics brought Mariah and David together in the first place, biology took over pretty quickly thereafter. Mariah was taken by surprise. Her mother’s life had been ruined by Mariah’s father, a poet and novelist still lionized in literary circles, long after his death. He was no hero to Mariah. How could he be, after abandoning his young child and pregnant wife to pursue his own self-absorbed whims?
Buffeted by a cascade of losses that began with her father’s betrayal, Mariah had grown up determined to chart an independent course for her life—one that certainly didn’t include falling under the sway of some boy wonder from New Hampshire. David Tardiff was on the short side, barely five-eight. Compared to the strapping, blond, too-cool-for-words beach boys she had grown up with in southern California, Mariah found him a bit on the homely side, his nose a little too large, his mop of black curls a little too unruly. And he was cocky, she told herself—funny and bright, but awfully sure of himself.
Still, as she had listened to him wax enthusiastic about physics and hockey—his other driving passion—her longstanding defenses against emotional involvement crumbled. Within three months, they were living together in a tiny Berkeley apartment, making plans for the future. But then things changed—that was the first time she lost David.
The University of California ran a top-secret nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on behalf of the federal government, and Berkeley’s physics department supplied many of the lab’s research staff. It came as no real surprise, then, when six months after they moved in together, David was offered a job at the Los Alamos weapons lab.
Mariah followed him into the desert to work in earnest on her graduate thesis. But if New Mexico provided a good working environment for the thesis, it was no place to nurture their relationship. The split finally came the day Mariah watched a military truck towing a canvas-draped missile through the center of town. She confronted David late that night when he came in from the lab.
“David, this isn’t the place for us.”
He was nuzzling her neck and missed the point. “How about the dining-room table?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her more tightly. “Don’t you just love all this space? So many options!”
Mariah poked him in the ribs with her elbow, laughing in spite of herself. “That’s not what I’m talking about! ” Her smile faded. “I mean Los Alamos.”
He held her at arm’s length, his twinkling dark eyes betraying the clever comeback he was formulating—but her own expression must have squelched the urge. “What’s wrong with it? You’ve got teaching prospects here. And it’s a clean, safe place to make babies and raise a family,” he added, pulling her close again.
“Safe? It’s a nuclear bomb factory! Don’t you ever think about what it is you do over at that lab?”
“We do science—good science, with equipment that any university researcher would kill to get his hands on.”
“Yeah, well, kill is definitely the operative word here. You guys design nuclear weapons.”
“We unlock the secrets of the atom. Come on, Mariah, lighten up. The lab does nonmilitary work, too, you know that. And this work is exciting. The atom holds the key to unlimited energy—not to mention incredible biomedical and industrial advances. Weapons are the least interesting part of it.”
“That’s just a cop-out. If there’s one thing this lab stands for, it’s the creation of the bomb.”
“You can’t blame scientists if the government perverts our work,” he said, a stubborn frown forming on his forehead. “We can’t be responsible for the ethics of the whole nation. The weapons work could be stopped, if people had the guts to say ‘no more.”’
“Oh, dammit, David,” Mariah said sadly. “I’m not stupid—or naïve. I know we won’t get rid of nuclear weapons tomorrow, now that the genie’s out of the bottle. But we design a new bomb, and then the Russians build one bigger than ours, and then we make ours even more deadly, and on and on and on. I just can’t watch you waste your talents by helping these guys develop the ultimate doomsday machine. Because that’s the real reason you’re all here, and you know it.”
They’d had the same argument a dozen times since David had accepted the Los Alamos job. The silence between them as they pulled away from each other that night had simply concluded the debate once and for all with a permanent agreement to disagree. In the end, she had left David and New Mexico and taken a job as an analyst at CIA headquarters in Virginia—telling herself that whatever she might do to help restrain the Soviet nuclear threat could also make the work of David and his Los Alamos colleagues superfluous.
For two years, their only contact was a diminishing trickle of letters and phone calls. Then one day, out of the blue, David had shown up on her doorstep, gaunt and distraught after an accident in the lab had claimed the life of one of his colleagues—a young technician who had died a gruesome, lingering death after accidental exposure to radioactive materials. David had become thoroughly disillusioned with weapons work and said he wanted only to build a career in teaching and to marry her.
They were never separated again. Lindsay was born nine months later and their lives had seemed charmed—until a careening truck in Vienna had brought it all crashing down.
As he watched her approach along the long hallway, David’s mouth lifted lopsidedly, the paralyzed left side drooping while the right struggled upward. Mariah smiled back at this man