They climbed into bed together at the same time for the first time since they’d come home, like a domesticated couple, and Mimi dug under her pillow and set something down with a tin tink on the bedstand, a sound too tinny to be the hunting knife. Alan squinted. It was the robot, the one he’d given her, the pretty thing with the Dutch Master craquelure up its tuna-can skirts.
“He’s beautiful,” she said. “Like you.” She wrapped her wings around him tightly, soft fur softer than any down comforter, and pressed her dimpled knees into the hollows of his legs, snuggling in.
He cried like a baby once the pain in his hand set in. She pointed the knifepoint at his face, close enough to stab him if need be. “I won’t kill you if you don’t scream,” she said. “But I will be taking one joint of one toe and one joint of one finger tonight. Just so you know.”
He tried not to fall asleep, tried to stay awake and savor that feeling of her pressed against him, of her breath on the nape of his neck, of the enfolded engulfment of her wings, but he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Soon enough, he was asleep.
What roused him, he couldn’t say, but he found himself groggily awake in the close heat of those wings, held tight. He listened attentively, heard something else, a tinny sound. The robot.
His bladder was full. He gently extricated himself from Mimi, from her wings, and stood. There was the robot, silhouetted on the end table. He smiled and padded off to the toilet. He came back to find Mimi splayed across the whole bed, occupying its length and breadth, a faintly naughty smile on her face. He began to ease himself into bed again, when he heard the sound, tinny, a little rattle. He looked at the robot.
It was moving. Its arms were moving. That was impossible. Its arms were painted on. He sat up quickly, rousing Mimi, who let out a small sound, and something small and bent emerged from behind the robot and made a dash for the edge of the end table. The way the thing ran, it reminded him of an animal that had been crippled by a trap. He shrank back from it instinctively, even as he reached out for the table light and switched it on.
Mimi scrunched her eyelids and flung an arm over her face, but he hardly noticed, even when she gave an outraged groan. He was looking at the little, crippled thing, struggling to get down off the end table on Mimi’s side of the bed.
It was the Allen. Though he hadn’t seen it in nearly 20 years, he recognized it. Tiny, malformed, and bandy-legged, it was still the spitting image of him. Had Davey been holding on to it all these years? Tending it in a cage? Torturing it with pins?