The Silenced Tale, стр. 13
“And what would we do with Alis?” I ask.
“Dad would come to the house for a few hours if we—”
“Every day? That’s asking much of Martin.”
Pip blows out a frustrated breath. “It would make me feel better if you . . . practiced.”
I am not certain how to reply to this, so I do not. True, Pip has been acting oddly since Elgar called to confess that his typewriter had vanished. Her sleep has grown lighter, and she no longer rests on her back. Yesterday, I caught her looking through a glossy booklet that she must have requested from a home security company, for it looks too grand to have simply arrived as junk mail. And now she is expressing concerns about my ability to fight.
What has Pip so agitated? Which clues have I been missing? For something has obviously happened—or is currently happening—and I have failed to notice.
“Da?” Alis asks when we are silent for more than a few paces. She has stopped beating her legs against the footrest, and she holds Library up toward me like a tithe.
“I’m fine, sweeting,” I tell her. “Though I thank you for the offer.”
“Ma, Ma, Ma?” Pip leans over and kisses the much-abused plush lion on the head. “Yah,” Alis approves, and returns to babbling contentedly to the toy, to the sidewalk, to the people passing by, and the small birds that flit between the trees that line the main avenue, searching the snow for crumbs.
“Oh,” Pip says, as we reach a corner crossing. “Actually, can we cut left? I just want to pop into the thrift shop to see if they’ve got a playpen in.”
“We have a playpen.”
“Yeah, but I thought it would be nice to leave one in my parents’ car.”
“They already have one, as well.”
“Well, yeah, but if there’s a spare in their trunk, then they don’t have to take down—”
“Bao bei,” I interrupt. The crossing signal comes on, and I start to cross, not turning where Pip has requested.
“Syth!” Pip protests, but follows Alis and I across the street.
“Pip,” I rejoinder. “We do not need a third playpen between us, any more than we need to keep a spare bag of Alis’s diapers and things in their trunk, as you suggested last week.”
“I just thought that—”
“That it would be prudent to turn your parents’ car into a bug-out-bag on wheels?”
Pip stops walking when we reach the far sidewalk and stares up at me, mouth agape. After a moment where I can see that she is thinking at a rapid pace, analyzing all that we have discussed, she blinks and says, “I didn’t know you knew that term.”
I level an unimpressed glance at my wife. “Honestly, Pip,” I say gently, scoffing a little to keep the conversation light, teasing.
“I . . . I just . . .” She shakes her head, hard, and takes my hand again, nudging us back into motion. Pip chews on her thoughts for another block, and I leave her to her silence, answering Alis whenever our daughter pauses in her banter long enough to indicate that she desires my input on her monologue.
Finally, Pip lets out a long sigh. “I guess I have been trying to build a bug-out-bag.”
“You have,” I say. “And what I would like to know is why. Why are we buying doubles of things Alis already possesses? What purpose is it to leave them with Martin and Mei Fan? Pip, you worry me. The training, the running, the long sessions with your therapist, and now this? You wish me to spar and retrain and . . . Pip, what has you so frightened that you would have us prepare for war?”
Pip looks up at my face, her expression morphing from introspective worry to stunned shock. “You mean, you don’t know?”
“Know what?” I ask, letting my wife choose her words, letting the line on which she dangles play out so that the hook buried in her logic does not tug and harm. If she comes to it on her own, perhaps we can discuss her behavior without any of the shouting I fear might otherwise accompany it.
Because I can well guess where the source of Pip’s unease lies. And if she knows that I have been aware of it since the start, and have said nothing, have done nothing about it—at least in her view—she may accuse me of being uncaring. I am not uncaring. I have been vigilant with my scans of the Internet, in assessing the world’s news, in playing out the scenarios in my mind.
But there is no proof that anything is going awry in the Overrealm, and as much as I respect my wife’s very understandable paranoia, I also do not want to feed it without irrefutable evidence. I had hoped that perhaps she would work herself through this period of frenzied activity and frenetic worry on her own, before we had to confront it head-on, but it seems I had hoped in vain.
“Well . . . that these things come in threes.” She does not clarify what she means by “these things.” She does not need to.
“I am not unaware,” I say slowly. “But I also refuse to live my life looking over my shoulder. I will admit that I am usually the first to believe in the worst, to prepare for it, to fear it. But . . . Pip, my darling, this is not a book. We are in the Overrealm, where endings do not tie up neatly and the story goes on beyond Happily Ever After.”
“But the—”
“I know,” I say, and kiss her knuckles again. “I know, and do not think that I am not preparing on my end. I have laid contingencies into every computer program I write. But it could also be nothing.”
“I just get this feeling that the . . . the thread holding up the sword is going to snap.”
“I understand.