Risa does her best to comfort her. “You’re not stupid, and it’s not your fault, Grace.” She rubs Grace’s back that now hunches under the weight of their loss.
“It was, it was,” wails Grace. “Argent always says I ruin everything.”
“Risa’s right, it’s not your fault,” Connor assures her. “You wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to leave if Risa and I weren’t fighting. We’re the stupid ones.”
Risa meets his eye, but Connor can’t read her. Is that look an apology for having grabbed the letter from his pocket like the pin from a grenade? Or is she waiting for him to apologize for losing his temper? Or maybe that gaze is just mirroring his own look of defeat.
Connor has picked up all the pieces of the printer. He now has them laid out on a table before him in the basement. Broken plastic, twisted metal. Gears and belts. When Sonia saw the state it was in, she grunted, climbed back up the stairs, and went home. Connor suspects there’ll be no dinner for them tonight as she privately mourns their loss. For longer than Connor’s been alive, the thing has sat in a box in a corner of the antique shop. It took an instant for them to destroy it.
“What’s the big deal?” asks Jack. “It’s just some old printer.” He, like the other kids in the basement, is totally oblivious, and bewildered by the sudden air of despair, even more potent than the usual air of despair that permeates Sonia’s basement.
“It belonged to Sonia’s husband,” Connor tells him. “It has sentimental value.”
“Right,” says Beau. “Sentimental value.” And he slowly draws a finger along the broken plastic casing, coating his fingertip with the bioslime he risked his life to retrieve. He holds that finger up to Connor as an accusation, and tries to stare Connor down. Connor coldly holds that glare, refusing to give him anything. Beau finally backs down and returns to his task of ruling the roost.
Grace, her face in her hands now, sobs more quietly, and Risa leaves her long enough to assess the damage with Connor.
“You can fix it, can’t you?” Her voice has none of its usual confidence. It’s not a question; it’s a plea. “You’re good at fixing things.”
“This isn’t a TV or a refrigerator,” he tells her. “I have to know how something works before I can fix it.”
“But you can try.”
Before, Connor had been afraid to even open the casing to look inside. Now he picks up each of the pieces, rearranging them on the table, trying to get a feel for how it goes back together. “It looks like the printing cartridge and head are still intact,” Connor tells her, although he can’t even be sure of that. He holds up an electronic component. “This looks like a hard drive, and it’s not broken either, which means it probably still has the software it needs to do what it does. It’s mostly the mechanical parts that are broken.”
“Mostly?”
“I can’t be sure about anything, Risa. It’s a machine. It’s broken. That’s all I know.”
“Well, someone somewhere’s got to know how to fix it.”
The thought that comes to Connor next hits him with such grand and absurd unease, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or puke.
“My father could fix it,” he says.
Risa leans away, as if trying to escape the deadly gravity of the thought.
“I mean, I’m good at fixing stuff because he taught me.”
Risa doesn’t say anything for a long time. She lets Connor’s words drift in the air, maybe hoping they’ll hang themselves. Finally she says, “Congratulations. You’ve been looking for an excuse to go back there since the moment you arrived.”
Connor opens his mouth to deny it, but hesitates, because on some level Risa is right. “It’s . . . not that simple,” he says.
“Did you forget that these are the people who tried to unwind you? How can you forgive them for that?”
“I can’t! But what if they can’t forgive themselves either? I’ll never know unless I face them.”
“Are you entirely delusional? What do you think they’ll do—take you back into their home and pretend like these past two years never happened?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know! All I know is that I feel as broken as this machine.” He looks at the fragmented device on the table before him. He may be whole, but there are times he feels unwound in the deepest possible way. “I can fix myself, but part of that means facing my parents on my own terms.”
Connor looks around, realizing that they’ve been raising their voices again, attracting the attention of other kids. The others pretend like they’re not listening, but he knows they are. He lowers his voice to an ardent whisper.
“And it’s not just my parents, it’s my brother, too. I never thought I’d say this about the little snot, but I miss him, Risa. I miss him like you can’t believe.”
“Missing your brother is not a reason to forfeit your life!”
And then it occurs to Connor that not only can’t Risa ever understand—she can’t even understand why she can’t. She was raised in a state home. No parents. No family. There was no one who cared enough to love her or to hate her. No one whose lives were so focused on hers that they could be made either proud or furious by her actions. Even her unwind order was not signed out of impassioned desperation, as Connor’s was. For Risa it was a product of indifference. The deepest, most personal wound of her life wasn’t personal for those who inflicted it. She was a budget cut. Suddenly Connor finds himself feeling sorry for her because of the pain she’ll never be able to feel.