All Good Children Page 10

  Now it’s my turn to pause, to struggle for breath, for something solid to hold onto. Hanson waits patiently; I can hear him swallowing, and I imagine him preparing what he’ll say next, what words of comfort he’ll try on this time, which soothing platitudes to conjure up for this occasion.

  Before he can speak again, I ask, “Has the Liaison gone in yet?”

  “June—”

  “I want to be the one, Dan. I want to be the one to tell her. She’s my patient. It should come from me.”

  I’m sure he only hesitates for the benefit of the nurses listening in on his side of the conversation, because I know him and I know he’d make the same request. “All right, Doctor. She’s in 412.”

  THERE’S A NOISE, PENETRATING, SHRILL. I look and see at least four different pairs of shoes underneath the door, moving around, dancing. But they’re not in step with the music, jaggedly pulsing through the air, vibrating the tiles, making the little pools of water by my knees ripple and slosh. Then, a large metal screw clangs to the floor and rolls toward the drain. The door creaks on its one remaining hinge. Oh.

  KEVIN DANIELS WAITS OUTSIDE OF Miss Reynolds’s room. Hands behind his back, dressed in a casual-Friday navy shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, unwrinkled Dockers hemmed perfectly at the ankles of his Doc Martens. He catches my eye and raises his eyebrows at me.

  “Doctor,” he says, nodding. “They asked me to wait for you.”

  “Stay here,” I say, walking by him. My hand is on the door handle when he says, “Pardon?”

  “You’re staying here,” I tell him, meeting his eyes. “I’m handling this alone.”

  “I’m afraid that’s against protocol,” he says.

  My fingers clench around the door handle as my headache surges. “Fine. But you do not speak, do you understand me? Not one word. Not even a hello.”

  He nods again, with a gracious smirk, letting me know his cooperation is a courtesy, a favor. I turn from him and push open the door.

  Magdalene Reynolds is thirty-four, a self-employed architect whose small mostly-family firm specializes in designing and constructing miniature golf courses and other small-scale family amusements. She’s widowed, with no children from her marriage, as her late husband had had a vasectomy. She herself had undergone tubal ligation after he died, for reasons she never shared with me, but two years ago she realized it wasn’t another man in her life she needed to complete her, it was her own children, and so she had the surgery reversed. When she first came to me, it was to consult on in vitro fertilization and to get a prescription for the fertility drug. Her pregnancy seemed stable throughout our consultations, and she glowed with it, with the health of her unborn children, with the promise of their future in her life.

  She’s still radiant now, lying with her head turned so all I see when I enter the room is her profile, her flushed right cheek, still glistening a little, her thin pale lips curved in a gentle smile. I knock politely on the open door. A wisp of dark hair falls over her forehead as she turns to me, and her smile widens.

  “Doctor Fontaine,” she beams. “They told me you were out sick. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  She holds her hand out to me, inviting me further into the room, but she drops it as if it has become too heavy for her to hold up. “Oh,” she whispers to no one, and I see where her eyes have gone, beyond me, to Daniels.

  At first I find I am unable to speak. A thousand words play through my brain but I am unable to latch on to a single one of them. I stand and lick my lips and try to catch her eyes again but they seem glued to Daniels. Who, at this moment, begins to clear his throat.

  “Magdalene,” I say, her name leaping out of me, landing on distracted ears; I don’t even know if she’s hearing me, or if she’s already listening ahead to what she knows is coming. Where do I even start? How can I say this?

  “Maggie.” I step forward, close enough to take her hand but it seems inappropriate. “I’m…I’m sorry. Your child—”

  “My daughter,” she cuts in, finally looking at me. Our eyes lock and the uninhibited pain in hers is the only thing that keeps me from looking away.

  “Your daughter.” I swallow. “We…she...The process has to begin immediately. I’m so sorry.”

  Tears come, and her face seems to fold in on itself, her body seems to shrink into the bed, and she turns her head to stare at the blood-pressure gauge on the wall. I consider touching her, giving her shaking shoulder a comforting squeeze, but then I think, were I her, the last person I would want touching me was the person who just told me I’d lost everything.

  From behind me, Daniels clears his throat again. When I look at him, I imagine I must be glaring because all I can see is darkness outlining his blurred red body, a beating black thing in the center of it. He takes no notice. My eyes focus enough to see him mouth the words, “Shall we?”

  I THINK, NOW, NOW THAT I can think, I think I decided to do it on the way down to the nursery. I let him walk ahead of me this time, so I could watch him, the ease of his step, almost jaunty, his ponytail swaying as if caught in an updraft in a lazy meadow somewhere, his hands clasped behind his back, just so. He should be whistling, I remember thinking, or humming.

  When we reach the nursery, he goes in ahead of me, straight to Reynolds’s daughter. I can smell them, all of them, these new lives, fresh as talcum powder, as barely ripened fruit. And Daniels leans over the daughter, picks her up and tickles her with an index finger to her chin.

  “Fairly strapping,” he says. “Remarkably healthy after coming out of all that.” He means her traumatic birth, in which two of her siblings died, the third waiting his or her turn upstairs in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “I’ll say Seed for now. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

  He’s bouncing her up and down in his arms now, which her little face scrunches up to enjoy, thinking he is playing, but I know he is only weighing her, sizing up her future in his eyes. As I look at him, something happens, something changes, and I only see her, the woman who did the same to my children, if through different methods; sized them up, and took them down.

  “Doctor,” he says to me, looking at me as if I’d gone somewhere. “Aren’t you going to mark this down?”

  That’s when I notice he’s laid the baby back in her cradle, and that’s when I act on my previous decision, trying to pretend I only just thought of it now—or, rather, that I didn’t think of doing it at all, but only did it.

  “Can you grab me the clipboard?” I point behind him.

  When his back is to me, I run at him. I scream, some sort of desperate cry, some sort of warning, and then I have his ponytail in one hand and his throat in the other. I pull hard. His neck jerks back and I hear him yell and feel something ripping, ripping right off into my hand. He grabs the wrist of my right hand but the more he tugs on it, the more it tugs on his ponytail. I bite his ear, trying for a chunk but ending up with only a nip. I dig nails into his throat, so deep, trying to gouge, to stab, and scrape them along, hoping for a vein.

  Then I’m flying over him and hitting the floor, blacking out for only a second, coming to on my back, looking up at him, hearing footsteps running, and another man’s voice calling my name, asking what I’ve done, what do I think I am doing. And Daniels’s head, leaning over me, looming over, one hand on his neck, the blood standing out in tiny magnificent droplets.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says. I wish he’d said it like a threat, I wish it made me angrier, ready for round two. But he says it sad, pitying, and it frightens me. It frightens me into getting up, into pushing Doctor Hanson aside, into running through the hall until I find the locker room, the shower stall, the silence of the rushing water, the company of my own shallow cuts, the comfort of my blood washing away the memory of his.

  “JUNE? JUNEBUG. DRINK THIS, OKAY? Just a little sip, please? You’ll feel better.”

  The cup is warm in my hands, hotter against my lips and tongue. I swallow it, knowing before I do it that he’
s put a sedative in it, something to make me drowsy, something to make me sleep while he, my stalwart husband, figures out a way to take my incoming bullet.

  I’m back in my office. After they used a drill to take off the shower door’s hinges, Jay picked me up and carried me here; I was too busy crying to protest. Someone had given him towels to give to me. They line my chair now, to keep me from soiling the leather. One is wrapped, turban-like, around my hair. The hot chocolate comes from the machine in the waiting room; the sedative probably came from Doctor Hanson.

  Jay kneels in front of me, one arm draped across my knees, the other absentmindedly scratching at a spot on his thigh. He’s still dressed the way he was this morning, his jeans and shirt bearing the grass and sweat stains of his recent labors. I take another long drink of the hot chocolate. I notice my headache is gone.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask him, my voice already sounding thick, strange.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I’m thinking.”

  He rakes his hand down his face and I see the sweat still beading along his hairline, down the side of his cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.

  “Don’t,” he says, squeezing my knee in his big, calloused hand. “I didn’t want this to happen. I…it’s my fault. I should have…I should have looked after you closer, made sure… You never should have been here.”

  An old anger flashes through me, but is quelled by whatever drug swims fast through my blood stream. “You’re right.”

  “I don’t want to be right,” he says, the anger coming to him too, turning his ears red, and straightening his back. “Goddammit, June, I don’t want to be right. This…I can’t take this. I couldn’t take this. If…” He looks at me, his face becoming a blur, but I can still read him, like I’ve always been able to, no matter what face he tries to put on for my benefit. “If I lose you…I won’t be able to keep on. I just won’t.”

  I set the cup down on my desk and take his hand in both of mine. I can’t think of anything to say, and I’m quickly losing the energy for that anyway, so I just hold his hand, and he holds mine back. We just look at each other, every bit of each other, until my eyes start to close.

  A shrill ring makes me jump, makes Jay pull his hand away from mine. He answers the phone, and looks at me, and asks the caller, “Why?” After a few seconds he frowns and hands me the receiver.

  “I can’t,” I start to say, but he stops me, saying, “It’s Omalis.”

  I don’t even have the energy to hate the sound of her name, or the obnoxiously elegant lilt of her voice, her pretentiously crisp consonants, her languid vowels.

  “Mrs. Fontaine,” she starts. “I’ve heard some rather disturbing news. Are you all right?”

  It’s really the last thing I’d expected her to ask, let alone start off with. I choose not to say anything, preferring instead to sway unsteadily and blink rapidly against the exhaustion that’s consuming me.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “Your behavior today is unacceptable. There are strong consequences for lashing out at a Liaison. You know this.”

  “I know,” I say, so tired, so ready. “Just let me say goodbye.”

  “Mrs. Fontaine—”

  “No,” I say, “No, wait, I don’t want them to know. Don’t tell them. I’ll…I’ll write them a letter… Jay will…Jay will give it to them… Only, give me enough time to….”

  “June,” I hear my husband’s voice, but I’ve closed my eyes and he sounds far away. “What is she saying? What is she telling you?”

  “Mrs. Fontaine,” she says again. “That won’t be necessary. I’ve spoken with Mr. Daniels. He’s agreed to report this incident as an accident. There’ll be no need for goodbyes.”

  I open my eyes halfway at her words, at the meaning that begins to sink into my ever-hazy mind. I look at Jay and want to tell him what she’s said, but can only manage a smile.

  “What is it? June? Give me the phone.”

  But Omalis is speaking again. “You have to remember that this sort of leniency is not to be expected again. You have to remember that, Mrs. Fontaine. Now more than ever you have to be careful. If not for yourself, then for your children.”

  At the mention of my children the anger flares up and, with it, the words I’ve wanted to say since hearing her voice again. “Miss Omalis,” I say, slowly, so as not to slur. “When I was hurting him, I was thinking only about you.”

  I let the receiver fall from my hand, hear it clatter to the floor and listen to Jay scramble to pick it up and ask Omalis to repeat what she’d said to me. And then my eyes grow heavy, my head grows heavy, the world grows heavy, and then, thankfully, it all goes away.

  SIX

  JORDAN

  MOSTLY, IT’S LIKE GROUP THERAPY. I figure I have a leg up on how to deal over most of these other girls, who still sit in the circle on their cold metal folding chairs, backs straight and legs crossed, ears at attention and eyes front and center. They still don’t realize their number’s been up so long it’s seared into the claws of the Over, which are dug so deep into our backs we won’t see ’em until they’re ripped out of us, only to be replaced by another set, or something worse. At least, that’s how I hear the things do it, with their claws, more like talons, like a vulture’s. I’ve heard more stories about them here in one week than during countless playground hours. I believe every horror story, no matter how contradictory, because the alternative is denial, and that’s just fucking sad. Anyway, they don’t make me sit in on the group sessions anymore, and I guess that’s why Omalis is back here now.

  It’s day seven, I know because I’ve been scratching the days into a floorboard under my bed, right beside the days marked down by every other girl who’s lain awake on this cot before me. We wake up early because there’s a bell tower somewhere nearby that I’ve never seen that sounds more like a gong and it bangs and bangs and bangs until every last one of us is up and standing around the flagpole in the recreation yard, hands on hearts, belting out “God Bless America.” Well, in all fairness, it’s not a requirement, it’s just something I do, get the blood pumping for that star spangled banner that streams ever so gallantly. There’re no flags on the flagpole, but when I try real hard, by golly, I can see it, and feel it, feel it right there in my heart. I made one of the girls cry the first time I did it, and she joined in. She says it right along with me each morning, only she probably really does feel it, and she probably talks about that in group, thinking anyone who matters now will relay this information to her executioners and they’ll throw her a pity party instead of a wake. I don’t know her name; we’re all numbers here. She’s Five. I’m Jordan.

  I think that was the scariest day, the first one, when our plane landed and my stomach dropped because I thought one of the Over would be there to escort us through our final days, but that was just nerves. Our hosts, of course, were just like us, only older and with dry eyes and faker smiles. When Omalis dropped us at the hangar where a tin-can of a jet awaited us on the tarmac, the flight attendant took our bags and stowed them somewhere I think was probably a garbage can because we did not get them back when we landed. And yes, there was a fucking flight attendant, and she was a brunette who wore too much lipstick and cucumber melon body spray and tapped me on the shoulder to ask me if I preferred Coke or Pepsi and served us a micro-waved mini-pizza. Jason ogled her cleavage every time she leaned over to refill Jeremy’s spring water, and I think he probably told Jeremy to pretend to be more thirsty than he was because she refilled it at least six times. There wasn’t a bathroom on the plane.

  I watched the sun rise over the clouds and set again and then we were landing. I tried to count the hours but I fell asleep a couple of times. Not that it mattered if I could somehow calculate our location; we were Nowhere, Earth, and if anyone made it out long enough to relay our locale, it wouldn’t really matter. Who was going to come rescue us, or any future crop of kids from this place? Our parents, our
government? They’re the ones who put us here in the first place.

  When we got off the plane, my brothers went one way and I another. There was a field of other planes, small jets like ours, all de-boarding at once, and all the girls followed the women in pink polo shirts carrying peach-scented clipboards and all the boys followed the men in blue polos carrying sports-decaled clipboards. I didn’t say goodbye to my brothers and they didn’t say goodbye to me. I kept my head low and snapped my bracelet against my wrist until it went numb. Then they took that away from me, too.

  We got on yellow school buses, and someone’s leather-skinned grandmother checked our names off on her clipboard and handed us buttons with adhesive backs to stick to our shirts: our numbers. On my bus, there were ten girls and six “counselors,” for lack of a better term. They wanted us to call them “mentors,” as they’d be our guides through this six-week process, our hand-holders, our open shoulders. The engines rolled over and our counselors passed back brown boxes with our numbers on them, and told us to change right there on the bus. Inside the box were two pairs of gray sweats and sweatshirts, two pairs of white socks and underthings, and one pair of white sneakers. They told us to put everything we were wearing into a canvas bag that they passed around after we changed; we’d get it back at the end of the program. The girl next to me started crying, quietly, but she also started to untie her shoes.

  I opened my window and tried to shove the box through it but it was too big. I had to take the items out one by one. The leathery grandma grabbed my elbow after one sweatshirt and both socks went out. She was surprisingly strong, but I could see it in the wrinkles on her burgundy face that she didn’t have much stamina.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Her voice was constructed of cooking sherry and uppers, and her breath smelled like someone’s grave. She shook my arm until I dropped the box.