I shook my head.
“Can I tell her?”
I kept pushing my noodles around as I mumbled a yes.
Abdul took off his glasses, and his eyes shrank to normal size. “Niki's father was abusive, Maggie. Sexually abusive. And one day Niki must've had enough, because she killed her parents. She killed them both in their sleep.”
“I had no idea,” Maggie whispered.
“Juno covered it up for her, and I helped him.”
Now it was Maggie who had no idea what to say. In her head, she was probably replaying the conversation she and I had on the barge, when she'd referred to Adela saying, “What kind of girl kills her parents?”
The cook came in from the back and asked how our food was, clearly concerned that none of us were eating. I took a bite of fish and swallowed it down, again tasting nothing. Maggie and Abdul started picking through their bowls, and the cook went back to unpacking a crate of noodles.
Maggie asked, “Has she seen a psychiatrist?”
“Three.” I admitted.
“What did they say?”
“What does it matter? What do some shrinks know about my wife?”
“What did they say, Juno?”
I dropped my fork again, letting it clang against the bowl. “They said she wanted to be taken off of life support. And they said she was of sound mind.”
“How come they didn't do it? Don't they have to follow her wishes?”
“I talked them out of it.”
“And how did you do that?”
“I was persuasive,” I said.
“Isn't it illegal to keep her alive against her will?”
“That law doesn't make any sense,” I snapped.
The shrinks had already tried to give me their little lecture on the law. They showed me old pictures of maimed freaks and brains in jars that had been kept alive for centuries before the Unified Worlds made it illegal to forcibly keep somebody alive against their will. They showed me bodies so atrophied that they looked like skeletons with shrink-wrap skin. All three of those asshole shrinks put me through the same shit, picture after picture of nothing but desperate, drooling, diapered shells of former humans. And then, when they thought I'd had enough, they came at me with their neutral speaking tones and their phony feel-my-pain faces, asking me, “Now is that what you really want for Niki?”
But those pics they showed me, they weren't Niki. She was fixable. I'd already replaced everything but the spine. They were wrong about me. I wasn't one of those selfish monsters they'd showed me, like the mother who rejuved her stillborn baby and kept dressing him in cute little ducky PJs even when the brain-dead sap was thirty years old. I wasn't so afraid to let go of Niki that I'd imprison her. I'd never hurt her. That wasn't me. They were wrong, all three of them, and I used my enforcer talents to make them see the goddamned light.
Abdul's put his hand on my shoulder again. “You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the psychiatrists.”
“She's not terminal, dammit. There won't be anything wrong with her when she gets her spine.”
“There won't?”
“Listen, Abdul, I know she's depressed, but that'll change when she gets patched up.”
“You sure about that?”
“You'd be depressed, too, if you couldn't move.”
“C'mon, Juno, you know better than that. You know she was depressed before she broke her neck. She's always been depressed.”
“Things will be different this time,” I said defiantly.
Abdul shook his head. “I'm not getting through, am I? How about this? Once she's got her new spine, what's to keep her from doing it again? You'd have to lock her up.”
“If that's what it takes.”
“You're not being realistic.”
I went back to pushing my noodles around.
Abdul took a few bites of his meal before talking again. “She begged me not to tell you, Juno. She just wanted me to come out and do it, but I thought you should know. I thought it was important for you to be onboard with this decision.”
“Well, I'm not onboard.”
“It's time for you to get onboard. Don't you want to say good-bye? Because one way or another, sooner or later, she's going to be gone.”
“What are you saying, Abdul? Are you saying you're going to go behind my back and pull the plug?”
“No. I'm not saying that, but I am saying that if you don't promise me you'll think about it, and I mean think about it seriously, I'll do exactly that.”
I pushed the noodles to the left then pushed them to the right, back and forth, back and forth.
“Promise me, Juno.”
“Don't force me, Abdul.”
“Promise.”
I couldn't meet his gaze. I set the fork down. I rubbed my eyes to clear away my suddenly cloudy vision. I don't want to lose her. I can't.
Abdul leaned in. “I'm not leaving until I get an answer.”
“I promise.”
“You'll think about it?”
“Yes, damn you. I'll think about it, okay?”
My thoughts weren't coherent. I was in that semiasleep stage where half-assed ideas skip through the brain so fast as to create a constant stream of pure gibberish. Ian, Niki, Liz, Abdul, Maggie, they were all there, in my mind, talking nonsense.