Chapter 9

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Chapter 9

Nolan Gage thanked Nika's day nurse, Shirley, as she left the museum for the night.  After watching how gently Shirley cared for his Nika at the hospital, Gage had hired her away at double her salary.  He felt better knowing someone with such a kind spirit was keeping an eye on her.  Gage closed the door to the basement room and was alone with his daughter.

He turned to face her as she drifted through her endless sleep.  His heart caught in his throat.  Every time he saw her, he had the same reaction.  A thick throb in his chest, self-loathing gripping his every breath.  His daughter, his once angelic cherub, now a husk of bones and sunken skin hooked up to prosthetic machines that stimulated her heart to beat, forced air into her lungs, monitored her brainwaves.  Her lips, once full and apple red like her mother's, now two dried earthworms coated in petroleum jelly.  Her eyes--warm, brown eyes that Nolan Gage could barely remember--shut from the waking world, sealed with medical adhesive against the desiccant air.  His little Nika, her mind trapped in a dead body.  Her mind remembering the carefree whimsy of her childhood.  A time before Gage forced her away.

He had brought her to the museum basement a month ago.  When she was still at the hospital, Maury had insisted that he was making progress, that he was constantly locating and transmuting increasingly complex dreams from her mind.  It had grown more difficult to hide his work from the doctors and staff.  They had started to question Gage about Maury and what exactly his specialty was.  They didn't understand why a woman in her condition would need a psychiatrist.  But Gage still had his faith.  If he couldn't believe in Maury and his enticing promises to bring him happiness, what else was there to live for?  Soon enough, he would transmute a full-scale dream-Nika.

He reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a small pink teddy bear.  It was holding a smaller version of itself in its stubby stuffed-bear paws.  He placed the bear in the bony crook of Nika's arm and pushed a wisp of lank, straw hair from her forehead.  His poor Nika; today, her nineteenth birthday.  She didn't look nineteen.  She didn't even look human anymore.  Nika had always had an adorable kewpie doll face, but now her skin looked like a wet napkin draped over a toy plastic skull.     

Whenever he closed his eyes, imagining his daughter, she was the enchanting girl captured in Sophie's mural on the wall of the Serenity Wing.  Eight years old.  Pigtails and scabbed knees.  Sun-dappled freckles and a grin showing off her missing front teeth.  Not so long ago, really, but a lifetime ago in actuality.  A short lifetime, a lifetime that Gage felt responsible for bringing to such an abrupt close.

He had met her mother at a black-tie fundraiser for urban renewal.  He hated those things.  Men with enough money to bring about guilt gathering to congratulate one another, and women without any shame for seeking such men circling like vultures.  The banquet hall was set up with enormous circular tables spread out like an archipelago of millionaires.  Michelle's golden hair fell to shoulder length, but her smile is what captured Gage's heart.  She sat at a long oak table near the doors, seeming so small and fragile, a stranger set adrift in the upper crust menagerie of her surroundings.  She didn't look up from the pile of papers spread before her when he inquired about making a bid on a tilting slab of red clay that they were trying to pass off as art.  The clay was not kilned, and a name brand shoeprint was visible on the side of the solid slab.  A shoe kicking over a structure somewhat building-like.  How symbolic. 

She hadn't lifted her head to look at him.  Just her eyes.  Gage, looking down the slope of her face--the gentle bridge of her nose, and the delicate curve of her lips--had quite suddenly fallen in love.  Her smile and upturned gaze set him off balance.  He stammered.  She explained how to fill out the form for the silent auction.  She smiled, and he made an outrageously high bid for the piece of junk art without realizing it.  He stammered and asked for her name.  She told him, Michelle

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