Shelter Read Free

rag, faded and too short and too tight in the armpits, the daisies long since fallen away. When she couldn't even get her arms through the armholes anymore, she washed it one last time and tucked it, carefully folded, under her pillow. When she came back home from school that day, her latest foster mother had thrown it away. "It was too small for you. We'll get you one that's big enough." Even then she knew it was her own fault. She had never told anyone why the nightgown was important to her.
     
        * * *
     
        Twenty years later, she dreamed that she was wearing the nightgown again. In her dream, she walked down a deserted, very dark street, past abandoned warehouses and shuttered auto-body shops. She'd been hiding Fred and Nicholas in her apartment, but that wasn't safe anymore; if her probation officer caught her, she'd be accused of inappropriate compassion and given gene therapy. So she'd carried Fred and Nick outside, into the no-man's-land of Eleventh and Harrison, where the freeway ran through the Soma District. Now she was heading northeast, trying to get to school, where all three of them would be safe.
        Head bent, muscles clenched and knotted, she held the sleeping Nicholas cradled in her left arm, wrapped in a blanket, and Fred balanced in her right, wrapped in a towel. Both of them, Nick's forty pounds of slumbering flesh and bone and Fred's inert housing of metal and diamond, were too heavy for her, but only she could carry them to safety. Her arms felt like lead, and spasms of pain shot through her back with every movement. She knew she should run, because if she didn't hurry she'd never get safely across Market and up to Levi Plaza, but she also knew that if she ran she'd drop Fred or Nicholas, and that neither of them would survive the fall.
        She had another two miles to walk. It was bitterly cold, and the tattered yellow nightgown did nothing to protect her against the wind or the damp fog blowing in from the Bay. The strain of carrying Fred and Nicholas made her arms and shoulders ache. She walked step by step over the uneven sidewalks along Harrison, her numb feet bleeding where she had stepped on broken glass. She could hear the freeway to her right, rushing traffic like the roar of the ocean, but she didn't dare look into the shadows of the overpass, because she knew that if she did, she'd see someone following her.
        A rat ran over her foot and she jerked spasmodically, almost losing her grip on her two fragile burdens. Nicholas woke up and saw the rat just as it ran into the shadows.
        "I want it," he told her, and tried to wiggle out of her grasp. Pain shot through her shoulder.
        "You can't have it, Nick."
        "I want it," he told her.
        "No, Nicholas." She knew what would happen if she put him down and let him catch the rat.
        "I want it," he said, and began to scream.
        "Hush," Roberta told him, trying to keep her grip on him while he struggled, unable to steady him with the other arm because it held Fred. Her lips and tongue were stiff with cold, and her words came out thickly, as if she were drunk or had had a stroke. "Nicky, you have to be quiet. You have to be quiet, or they'll catch us."
        Nicholas cried louder, howling in rage. Roberta knew that only Fred knew the right words to calm him, and Fred, impossibly heavy in the crook of her right elbow, had erased himself to try to save Nicholas. Fred could no longer speak to offer comfort or advice or reassurance.
        She heard footsteps, then, growing louder behind her, and somewhere a siren began to wail.
        She awoke, gasping, into the darkness of her bedroom. It was an old dream, but it had never woken her before. She rolled over, still disoriented, to discover that her bedside clock read 6:30 A.M. Her alarm wasn't due to go off for another halfhour. She lay blinking, readjusting to her life, reintroducing herself to reality. Fred and Nicholas weren't