The Program

Chapter forty

Pants loosed around her hips, Dray lay sprawled on the bed, arms stretched to the headboard, shoulders propped on a bank of pillows. Tim's face pressed into the warmth of her bare stomach, her C-section scar a smooth ridge against his cheek. He closed his eyes, and he listened.

"I was thinking we should turn the study into a nursery," Dray said.

The skin of her belly was impossibly soft.

"When you get back this time, maybe we really settle. I mean, no more life and death, no more secret missions and undercover ops. We'll be a nice, dull-as-hell family in Moorpark with a nursery painted blue and yellow. And we'll talk about diapers and how we wish we were rich enough to afford a nanny, and we'll shut it out, the whole world. It'll just be us three, and everything will be safe. A made-for-TV life."

He kissed her stomach, then laid his cheek on it again.

He thought he heard a heartbeat. Was it possible to hear a heartbeat already? It must have been Dray's. Or his own.

She took a deep breath. "Sometimes I wonder if I've got enough left to make another run at a blue-and-yellow nursery."

"You do."

"Oh," she said. "Are you still here?"

He knew she could feel his smile against her skin – he felt her stomach tense on the verge of laughter. "Don't," he said.

That sent her over the edge, her laughter bouncing his head. He made pained groans and objections, as if the abdominal tumult were inflicting great abuse on him. Finally she quieted, sniffling a few times.

Dray was never big on tissues.

She watched him curiously as he stood and pulled on his shoes, but she didn't ask where he was going. He paused by the door. "Ginny's bottom lip disappeared when she smiled."

Dray made a soft hum, a noise of pleasure and longing mixed together.

He said, "Remember her laugh when she really got going?"

"The hiccupping one?"

"And when she colored the bottoms of her feet with Magic Marker and ran around on the new carpet? That expression she'd get when we'd ground her – the slanted eyebrows? Furrowed brow?"

"The demon-spawn scowl."

They looked at each other, smiling.

"Yeah," Dray said. "I remember."

Tim's hands sweated, as they always did when he approached the front walk. The bordering lawn, uniformly green, rose to the precise level of the concrete. Like Tim's lawn used to. He stood in the night chill, the parked Blazer at his back, and gathered his courage.

After hitting a snarl of traffic – L.A.'s eternal antidote to sanity – he'd found himself in Pasadena, then at the house.

It struck him that The Program's regression drills didn't depend on implanted memories alone. Most people had pain that could be accessed and exploited, exposed nerves to pluck like harp strings. TD sniffed out the hollows in which trauma was buried; he cracked people wide, and they welcomed him like a conquering god.

Tim stepped up on the porch and rang the doorbell. A snowball plant rose from a terra-cotta pot, the perfect bulb of the crown picked clean of dead foliage. A single brown leaf lay on the soil.

The even cadence of footsteps. A darkness at the peephole, then his father opened the door, blocking the narrow gap with his body. "Timmy." His eyes flicked over Tim's shoulder at Dray's Blazer. "You brought the truck for your mother's desk?"

Tim had been steeling himself, but he felt a sudden calm. "Why do you always want to bring me down a peg?"

Easing out on the porch, his father plucked up the solitary dead leaf and folded it into a handkerchief he produced from his pocket. He returned to his post at the door. "It's nothing personal. I make it my business to oppose self-righteousness."

"So you started on me when I was five."

"That's right."

"That's bullshit. It was personal. Why me?"

His father looked away, and in that instant Tim saw him with detachment – a man in his fifties standing in the doorway of another suburban house. His father kept his eyes on the street, his face pale. "Because you thought you were better than me."

A car turned onto the street, its headlights bleaching the house.

He cleared his throat, fixed his gaze on Tim. "Why don't we haul that desk out for you so you can get on your way?"

"I don't want the desk."

If he was disappointed, he didn't show it. He nodded definitively, a single dip of the chin. "Where's your music, Timmy?" He crossed his arms, a union-boss show of opposition. "This is your big scene, isn't it? You sat at home, dreamed it up, dreamed up how you could take a big stand against your old man, and here you are, your moment in the sun. You deserve a musical score, don't you think?"

A beep sounded – an annoying rendition of some classical motif. Tim followed his father's gaze down to the electronic monitoring bracelet at his ankle.

The parole officer's beckon.

Tim's father glanced back up, a ripple of chagrin disrupting the inscrutable mask.

The halting melody followed Tim back down the walk.

As Tim folded clothes neatly into his overnight bag, Dray watched him morosely over the top of the paperback she was pretending to read. He'd already touched up his disguise, trimming his goatee, plucking his false hairline, giving his hair a touch-up rinse.

He finished packing and joined Dray beneath the sheets.

In less than eight hours, he'd be sitting in the passenger seat of Randall's van. He rehearsed his story in his head, trying to make Leah's desertion plausible.

They made love deliberately, taking nothing for granted. Each touch seemed heightened – she shivered when he kissed the edge of her wrist, the inside of her elbow, the point of her jaw.

They fell asleep in a warm tangle.