The Perfect Wife

Danny has been remarkably good all day, but next morning he has more energy and wants to know when you’re going home. When you say you aren’t, you’re going to find Mommy, he starts to stress. You can’t blame him. To him, it’s as if you said you’re going to find yourself. When the restaurant of the no-name budget motel you ended up at can only offer him own-label Cheerios instead of the real thing, he has a meltdown. All you can do for him is to let him howl himself out without getting cross or impatient with him. It takes twenty minutes, but he eventually brightens up when you tell him you’re catching a bus at exactly ten twenty-eight. And once you’re on the bus—a tiny minibus, little more than a van, with REDWOOD COAST TRANSPORT emblazoned across the side—he’s almost cheerful. Motion and timetables: two of his favorite things.

The 101 runs along the coast for a while, then veers inland through towering, shadowing redwoods. Tourist season is over, and the road is nearly empty. You notice how, when people here board the bus, they say hi to those already on it. No one seems to notice you’re not like them. You wonder if that’s because you’ve gotten better at fitting in, or whether people are simply more polite here, away from the big cities. Hardly anyone stares at Danny, either.

It makes you think about the nature of being human. It seems to you that you’ve met many people over the last few weeks who weren’t, not fully. It would be easy to single out Judy Hersch, with her plastic smile and botoxed face, parroting her autocue, or Sian and the therapists at Meadowbank, shocking their students whenever they flapped their arms, but actually it goes much wider than that. To the judge, mechanically applying the rule of law to every situation that comes before him. To Tim’s employees, diligently turning his wishes into lines of code while ignoring the toxic, misogynistic environment he created. And to Tim himself, believing that every problem of the heart must have an engineering solution.

The bus driver interrupts your reverie. “Your boy ever drive right through a redwood?” he calls over his shoulder.

“Not yet.”

So the man makes a left, turning into the forest, where the road passes through the middle of a growing tree. The redwood is evidently a local celebrity: the other passengers applaud as you go through it. “That’s something, huh?” he calls cheerfully.

“Sure is,” you call back. Danny hadn’t looked up from his toy train. You don’t have the heart to tell the driver that.

And Danny? Is he more or less human than others? Some might see his rigidity of thought, his love of schedules, and his lack of imagination as robotic. When people talk about their “humanity,” after all, they generally mean their empathy, their compassion, their moral code. But of course Danny isn’t any less human just because he doesn’t have those things. He’s just differently human: someone with an unusual ratio of rigidity to empathy.

Perhaps the real test of someone’s humanity, you think, is how tenderly they treat those like Danny. Whether they blindly try to fix them and make them more like everyone else, or whether they can accept their differentness and adapt the world to it.

77

You get off at the last stop, Smith River, a tiny town a few miles inland that seems utterly deserted. When you inquire about catching the next bus north, which you already know from Danny’s schedule checking is called the Coastal Express, you find the service is suspended for twenty-four hours because of a breakdown. This is devastating for Danny. He loves schedules precisely because they seem to offer order in a chaotic world, and now here they are, letting him down.

To add to the misery, it’s started to rain. You check into another no-chain motel, where Danny stares dully at the TV. He doesn’t even blink when a picture of himself appears on the screen. ROGUE ROBOT ABDUCTS CHILD WITH AUTISM is the caption. There’s the old clip of you striking Judy Hersch, along with a new one of you knocking aside the TV camera outside the courtroom. You didn’t hurt anyone on that occasion, but the way you bang into the camera makes it feel like you did, so they play it over and over. Then there’s footage of Sian, her chin bandaged, gesticulating as she recounts how she bravely fought you off as she tried to save Danny from your clutches. Finally there’s an interview with someone who claims to be a “cyber-psychologist.” His gist seems to be that you’ve formed some strange robotic attachment to Danny because you think the same way he does.

Actually, he may have a point there. Ever since Nathan jailbroke you, you’ve been feeling off-color—a nagging headache that sometimes shoots into something more. It’s as if your mind’s turning to concrete, the once nimble neurons becoming bloated and slow, like a computer that shows the hourglass symbol with every simple task. Even thinking is an effort. It’s as if you can glimpse the algorithms behind everything—not just waves, but the wind in the trees, the wheels of a truck, the way water drips from a tap. Like that poet who saw the skull beneath the skin. What was his name? You wait, but of course nothing comes.

You’re about to turn the TV off when the picture cuts to Tim. Standing next to him, smirking, is Nathan from the phone shop.

“Thanks to this man, we do have some potential leads,” Tim’s saying. Nathan, you little shit. You wonder what Tim promised him in return for selling you out.

“We also know the cobot may be unstable and potentially dangerous,” Tim adds. “It would be safest not to approach. Meanwhile, we’re doing all we can to track them from this end.”

So now Tim has access to everything Nathan knows. It’s a good thing you wiped the iPad along with the hard drives, you reflect. Without that, and the link to Dr. Laurence, you doubt they’ll be able to identify Northhaven as your destination.

Unless Tim can somehow decode those screenshots Nathan took. You recall something Tim said, right at the beginning, when he was explaining how you learned. I could plug in a screen and see the math happening, but I couldn’t necessarily follow it…

You put the SIM card in the burner phone and message Friend.

We’re on our way. But they may be onto us. Still want us to come?

And the answer comes back, moments later.

Come.

78

The rest of the day is interminable, but the following morning you’re up and waiting at the bus stop in plenty of time.

Once you cross the state line into Oregon, you relax a little. It helps that the scenery is stunning—an endless parade of cliffs, pounding surf, and giant sea stacks, dotted with flying pelicans and cormorants, the whole vista endlessly changing but endlessly repeating, like one of those old spinning zoetropes depicting a galloping horse or a flying bird. Danny, too, is happy to be on the move again. He finds the motion of the bus comforting, and he likes that nobody’s making any demands of him.

He looks out of the window and murmurs something.

“What’s that, Danny?”

“Dangerous to the public, indeed,” he repeats softly.

It’s a line from Toby the Tram Engine. When Thomas is told off by a policeman for not having a cowcatcher, the policeman writes down Dangerous to the public in his notebook.

“The law is the law,” Danny adds, “and we can’t change it.”

Then he catches your eye and grins.

Suddenly you realize what’s happening here. Danny’s commiserating. He’s using snippets from the story to show that he understands how you feel about being called dangerous and unstable on the news last night.

From someone who apparently has no empathy—who finds even eye contact overwhelming—this tiny moment of interaction is as momentous to you as a child’s first steps.

Trying not to let your excitement show, you reply with another quotation. “Toby is always careful on the road.”

Danny thinks, then announces, “We’re sorry your line is closing down.”

Has he somehow picked up that time’s running out for you? Is he saying he’ll miss you? Surreal though it is, it feels as if you’re having an actual conversation now.

“Thank you, Toby, for a very nice ride,” you say. You take his hand and pat it.

Danny nods. Then he says thoughtfully, “?‘Is it electric?’ asked Bridget.”

Of course you are electric, and in some strange way you think that’s probably what he’s asking you.

You have to be honest with him, you decide. After all, it may be your last chance. So you reply in the same oblique way.

“Electric indeed!” you tell him.

“Well bust my buffers,” Danny says. He turns and leans against you, staring out of the window. After a moment, you feel his hand reaching for yours. It’s the first time since his regression that you can remember him seeking out your touch.

* * *

—

From then on, you entertain each other by reciting Thomas stories, speaking the best bits in unison like singers dueting a chorus. It’s amazing how many phrases seem eerily appropriate to your situation. And Danny is clearly enjoying the parallels. When a woman gets on the bus and says to him, “And what’s your name, young man?” he replies, “Toby, sir,” without missing a beat.

“Pleased to meet you, Toby,” she replies, only slightly nonplussed.

He laughs and bounces up and down on his seat. For the next hour he happily recites every single word of Four Little Engines from memory.

Meanwhile, you’re thinking about what will happen when you get to Northhaven and find Abbie. Whether you’re really going to kill her.

79