Free Edge by Michael Cadnum

feeling that this was the way our future would begin.
    I braced myself to accept whatever he told me.
    Unchanged and stable . The phrase repeated over and over in my mind.
    The man behind the counter looked up as the motel office door made a sweet-sounding chime. “You better tell the people in the pool to go back to their rooms and go to bed,” I said.
    â€œAre they being noisy?” he said, soft-voiced man, muscles going to fat, as though he couldn’t hear the voices, someone starting a game, Marco to be answered, from another part of the dark Polo , the kind of fun Dad and I used to have in motel pools.

T HIRTEEN
    â€œI can’t go anywhere looking like this,” she said, gazing in the bathroom mirror with the light off, her reflection a shadow.
    We had not even tried to sleep. It was 5:03 in the morning. We had just turned off a movie about an ex-con who lived in San Francisco just before World War II, the city of the movie empty of tall office buildings, nothing but white apartment buildings and hills, and the blank Bay in the background. The man had plastic surgery so he could start a new life, but he didn’t seem like someone with a new face. He encountered the people he met like someone accustomed to the muscles of his smile.
    Mom did not put on what she called her Street Face, although she did brush her hair as we drove the streets. I was careful at each stoplight, some of them blinking red, too early Sunday morning for the normal red/green/yellow. She brushed her hair, finding snags, working the boar-bristle brush I had bought her for Christmas along with a matching rosewood hand mirror. She sawed the bristles through the tangles fiercely, as though she wanted it to hurt, taking a bitter satisfaction from the pain. It was dawn the way you hardly ever see it, the constellations fading in the east.
    We had plenty of empty spaces to choose from. If I made up tests I wouldn’t ask questions about how a bill becomes a law, or the formula for photosynthesis. I would ask Where do you like to park, under a tree or near a streetlight or out in the middle of nowhere?
    The hospital was full of light. Sofia arrived just as we did, explaining that her sister had driven up from Santa Monica to stay with Daniel.
    The nurses passed among us with soft steps, and when they hurried into his room it was the way people zip in to do something already planned, responding to a schedule and not to any sudden urgency.
    But we did not go in to see him. We didn’t even ask. We wanted to be close, but we did not want to alter the tempo of what was happening.
    My mother and Sofia talked about private schools for Daniel when he was old enough, how important it was to control the amount of television he watched. Sometimes the effort of being patient with Sofia tightened my mom’s lips and made her close her eyes for a moment. But what kept all of us calm now was not mutual understanding so much as very great weariness.
    â€œI was born in a hospital, wasn’t I?” I found myself asking, as though I wanted reassurance that I had some past connection with a place like this.
    â€œDaniel was born down the hall,” said Sofia. “The staff was so friendly I just couldn’t believe it.”
    Sometimes I thought maybe my mother was right about Sofia. Sofia is always saying she just can’t get over the weather or the traffic, or how she just can’t believe something. For Sofia, a pleasant vacation was really neat , a kind person dear . Dad told me she had a brilliant head for statistics, the number of termite eggs per cubic meter.
    â€œKaiser Hospital in Oakland,” said my mother, answering my question at last. “You knew that already,” she said, not really chiding me, understanding: we had to keep talking. “Dr. Chung couldn’t be there, so that doddering Dr. Luke talked the whole time about his new computer. ‘Is that the baby’s head,’ I would ask,