All Good Children Read online

  “Why?”

  I really need to explain it? “She went through the war. She…survived. And now she works for them. Kind of a fucked up decision, if you ask me.”

  “Maybe nobody asked her,” Taylor says, dropping her arms in front of her, picking at the side of her thumb with her other thumbnail. “Maybe it wasn’t her decision.”

  “Whatever.”

  Taylor comes closer and gives the stomach of my t-shirt a light tug. “It’s almost time for dinner,” she says, cocking her head to the boathouse archway. “Come on, all the good gruel will be gone.”

  I smile. She smiles. It’s almost normal. It’s almost just another day at summer camp.

  SEVEN

  OMALIS

  WHEN SHE SHOPS AT THE market on Banquet Street, she never brings a list. She goes straight for the candy bars, filling her basket with M&Ms, Snickers, 100 Grands. Next, she grabs a bag of chips, salt and vinegar, and a couple packages of microwave popcorn. Three apples, six oranges, a cheese ball, a box of green tea. The greeting cards she saves for last, selecting whatever is closest from the Any Occasion rack. She pays with cash.

  It’s late evening, the sun is finally settling in for the night, dropping down behind the low buildings on Banquet Street, no clouds to hasten its progress. It hasn’t rained since April, the farmers are getting nervous, taking special care this summer to maintain their irrigation systems, which for a number of the smaller operations means stocking up on children’s sprinklers. The market is having a sale on umbrellas. Omalis buys one on impulse on her way out.

  In her car, she lets the engine of her Miata warm up while she divides her purchases into five separate groups. There are brown boxes she picked up from the post office earlier in the day on her backseat, and she fills them all, seals them, and digs around briefly in her purse for the labels she printed out yesterday. She delivers them personally, even though the Over don’t require it, but the labels help her keep track of which one goes to whom. As if she would ever forget.

  Her first stop is the Fontaines’. She would save them for last but she has a feeling—rather, her experience allows her to know—that their visit will prove the most difficult and she wants to have the energy to give them the attention she knows they will need. It’s been nearly a week since Mrs. Fontaine’s incident at the hospital, and Omalis knows she has not been back to work. This will leave her restless. This will leave her vengeful.

  Omalis pulls into the gravel drive. Mr. Fontaine’s truck is gone, but his wife’s Honda Civic is parked off to the side, near the lawn. Omalis cuts the engine, picks up one of the packages, and gets out slowly, taking her time walking to the door, giving Mrs. Fontaine time to prepare herself. Although she did call ahead, no one answered, and no one responded to the message she left on the answering machine. It would not surprise her if the Fontaines went out for the evening to avoid this visit. In that case, Omalis would turn around and continue the rest of her visits, and call back to reschedule this one. It would not be against regulations to leave the package at the door and be done with it, but Omalis never does that.

  She raps on the door with her free hand. This evening, she’s wearing a pair of straight black slacks that mask the curve of her hips, a light V-neck sweater the color of twilight, and her black sneakers. Her hair is down, straightened this morning, falling just below her shoulders, bangs brushed back from her eyes. Casual Friday, a couple days early.

  After a moment, she knocks again, louder without becoming insistent. She feels the house shift and hears movement inside, footsteps on the stairs. Another moment and the door opens.

  Mrs. Fontaine is wrapped in her downy bathrobe, hair pinned up in a towel. Her skin is dry.

  “Have I come at a bad time?” Omalis asks, affecting a smile, a jovial lilt.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Fontaine says. There’s redness around her eyes, puffiness to her cheeks. Familiar features, to Omalis.

  “My apologies,” she says. “I suppose you didn’t get my message. I’d be happy to come by another time.”

  Mrs. Fontaine considers for a moment, her face hard, her eyes uninviting. Omalis is patient. Finally, a sigh. “Just come in now.”

  The living room hasn’t changed much since she was here three weeks ago, except there’s dust on the end tables and it smells like tomato soup instead of cookies. Mrs. Fontaine sits on the couch, in the middle. Omalis sits on the same chair she occupied three weeks ago. She puts the package on the coffee table.

  “Your children put this together for you,” she says, nodding to it. “Jeremy thought it silly that the children should be the only ones to receive care packages, said it didn’t seem quite fair.”

  Mrs. Fontaine looks at the package for a long moment. Omalis waits for her. Somewhere in the kitchen, a clock ticks, a quick, tinny sound, probably a battery timer.

  “When my brothers were away,” Mrs. Fontaine says, “my parents received letters, drawings, little crafts. With my sister, it was a care package, chocolates and a card.”

  Omalis waits for her to say more but she doesn’t. Omalis snaps open her shoulder bag and pulls out a business card.

  “I wanted to give you this, Mrs. Fontaine.” She holds out the card. “It’s a number for parents. Parents with children in the program. I’ve taken the liberty of adding my own personal number to the back.”

  Mrs. Fontaine takes the card and puts it in the pocket of her bathrobe without looking at it. “Is that everything?” She’s still looking at the package.

  “No.” Omalis stands up and moves closer to Mrs. Fontaine, who doesn’t move at all. She sits down next to her, speaking to her profile. “I want you to know, Mrs. Fontaine, that I’m not only here to act as liaison between you and your children. I’m here for you as well. For anything you might need.”

  Mrs. Fontaine clasps a hand to her mouth and begins to shake. When she turns her head to face Omalis, her eyes are wet but sounds of laughter escape behind her palm. She drops her hand, spit building up in the corners of her crooked mouth.

  “I want to kill you,” she says through her teeth.

  Omalis doesn’t flinch. She waits.

  “Do you have children, Miss Omalis?”

  “No,” she says tightly, waiting.

  “Do you have anyone?” The spittle at the edges of Mrs. Fontaine’s mouth has trickled out, falling onto her chin. She doesn’t wipe at it. “Anything you care about more than yourself?”

  “No,” Omalis answers.

  A gruff laugh bursts free of the woman’s throat; some spittle flies onto the shoulder of Omalis’s sweater. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Silence, then. A flat buzzing from the kitchen.

  “My laundry,” Mrs. Fontaine says absently.

  Omalis stands, giving Mrs. Fontaine room to go around her to the kitchen, but she stays sitting. Omalis stands for a second or two longer, finally unsure. She decides to sit back down, wait for Mrs. Fontaine to speak again, to ask her to leave, or to threaten her, or to cry.

  “How are they?”

  “They’re well,” Omalis tells her. “They are all very well.”

  “Would you tell me anything else?” But she answers her own question. “No. My husband…even he won’t tell me anything else.”

  “Where is your husband?”

  “He had to sell one of our bulls on auction, since my salary’s been suspended.” Mrs. Fontaine stops herself, glares over at Omalis as if she just manipulated a confession out of her. “You don’t need to speak to him.”

  “Right,” Omalis says. “But if he should need to speak to me—”

  “He has nothing to say to you,” she says.

  Omalis nods. “Then it appears we’re all set. If you have any letters or small gifts you’d like me to pass along to your children—”

  A burst of laughter again, this one softer, sadder. “What can I give them now?” She speaks to her hands, clasped at her waist. Omalis wants to leave, then, leave this woman to her private conversation with herself. “The
y’re lost to me.”

  “No.” Omalis clasps her own hands together to keep from reaching out. “A letter, something simple, something to let them know you’re with them in spirit, means all the difference. Something real, something of yours they can touch, to remind them.”

  Mrs. Fontaine looks at Omalis, her face still hard. Her hands unclasp. “Do you mind waiting?”

  TWO HOURS LATER, HER PACKAGES all unloaded but feeling weighted still, Omalis reclines in her single window seat on the small private jet, alone save for the pilot up front and the flight attendant who knows to keep himself busy pretending to grill the Salisbury steaks until Omalis gestures for her in-flight meal. They’re over the ocean now, flying west, and it will be another seven or eight hours before they touch down. In another hour she’ll have her dinner, and when she’s finished she’ll try to nap but sleep will refuse her. Instead, to pass the remaining hours, she’ll thumb through her itinerary again, make sure all her papers are in order, maybe fuss over her makeup a little in the jet’s coffin-sized lavatory. But for now, she has a headache, and another kind of ache, one less common but all the more piercing for its infrequency.

  She aches for the thing she promised Mrs. Fontaine she could deliver to her children: something real, something she can touch, to remind her, remind her of something good.

  But since she does not have this—cannot have it, will not have it—she calls Marla Matheson.

  “Hey, sugar,” Marla’s honeysuckle voice croons through the transatlantic static on the plane’s phone. “How did today go?”

  Omalis suppresses her sigh. “Fine, it always goes just fine. I don’t want to talk about my day. Tell me about yours.”

  “Uneventful,” Marla says, “which is always nice. Though I’m bone tired; remind me I’m not as young and limber as I used to be, can’t go covering girls’ shifts back-to-back.”

  “I’m sure you’ve lost nothing for the years,” Omalis says, allowing Marla’s southern semantics, even thousands of miles away, to slip into her own speech.

  “Well, that’s what I’m saying, sweetie. Gained a few pounds, a few bags, and a mess load of unseemly veins.”

  “And a couple fistfuls of cash?”

  Marla laughs, a balm as cooling as a breeze in the desert. “Won’t be worrying about rent for a while, no.”

  “So it was a good day.”

  “It was a good day.”

  The silver-tongued static crackles in Omalis’s ear. She’s silent, straining to hear Marla breathing beneath it.

  “You there?”

  “I’m here,” Omalis says.

  “I want to take you out when you get back,” Marla tells her. “Someplace extravagant, someplace beyond our means.”

  Omalis smiles. “Whatever you want, darling.”

  “You really must’ve had an exhausting day. You usually put up at least a pretense of a fight whenever I want to do something for you.”

  “I just wanted to hear your voice, Marla. Doesn’t much matter what the words are.”

  Another pause. The plane gives a slight jump and then another. The ice in her plastic cup of water tinks together.

  “Well,” Marla says, drawing it out. “I can’t decide if that’s a sweet sentiment or if you’re just being an asshole.”

  “Pick one,” Omalis says, a little dryer than she means to.

  “Fuck, Heaven,” Marla hisses, and her next words whisper along with the static, almost as if she were talking to herself, or to someone else on her end. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Omalis says. “I’m just tired. You know I’m tired.”

  “I know you’re tired, baby,” Marla says, her voice dropping low, sad, repentant. Omalis is about to call her out on her sudden change in tone, when she is frozen by her own name, and the ticking off of numbers that always leads to memories, memories she never recalls willingly.

  This time she’s on her back, looking through the cracks in the floorboards, staring up into a darkened room. She can feel her mother’s hand in hers, sweating so much it’s hard to keep their palms together for the slipping. Her mother is breathing shallow, silently, and Heaven mimics her, but she’s scared; scared more of her mother than of the smell that streams down into their musty hiding place, the smell that precedes death, or worse, for some. And then the floorboard that hides her, protects her, rips away with a violent tearing sound like flesh ripped from bone. She’s screaming, still looking into blackness but this blackness is alive, this blackness is moving for her, and then it is on her, in her, and she’s screaming and she’s kicking and above the noise, above the stench, above the pain, her mother’s voice, her mother’s final plea, her fatal promise: “Wait.”

  Omalis wakes up as the wheels touch down and the jet taxis on the runway, coming to a jerky halt. She rubs her eyes, stretches and yawns. Her stomach growls. She really must have been tired, to sleep through dinner.

  JORDAN FONTAINE LOOKS WORN DOWN. There are shadows under her eyes, her cheeks are drawn and pallid and her hair is mussed, uneven at the roots, indicating she may be pulling at it, willingly or in her sleep. If she sleeps very much, as Omalis suspects she does not.

  The girl slouches into her place across the table from Omalis, and looks blankly at her. “Come to spring me?”

  Omalis can’t help a pinprick of a smile. The girl is down but not out.

  “Not quite,” Omalis says. “Checking in, merely.”

  “Merrily?”

  “Merely,” Omalis says. “It means simply, or only.”

  “I know what it means,” Jordan says, shaking her head. “Trouble understanding you, with your accent and everything.”

  “Right.” Omalis nods, straightening the papers she has in front of her. “That old preoccupation.”

  “Getting tired of it? I thought we were building a rapport.”

  There’s that aching again, someplace lower than the grumble of the hunger pains, someplace deeper. Jordan’s voice triggers it this time, that hollow, hopeless desperation disguised beneath a cracking patina of sarcasm. She was not like this a week ago; she had more life in her, more fight. Omalis knows it is because the program has accelerated, inevitably, redoubtably. But, still, that ache.

  Omalis steers directly into it. “How are you dealing with the changes to the program?”

  There’s a pause in which the girl’s eyes seem to go somewhere else though their focus never leaves Omalis’s face, and then they are back. “I guess I’m dealing how they want me to.”

  “And how would that be?”

  “I don’t want to play this game,” Jordan says.

  “Which game would you rather play?”

  Jordan flinches slightly, no doubt not quite anticipating such a response. Instead of answering, she asks, “How many weeks are left? Three?”

  “Four,” Omalis says.

  Jordan sighs and straightens her back a little, then lets it slump back down.

  “You seem disappointed.”

  “I just don’t like waiting.”

  “You can do more than wait, Jordan,” Omalis says. “You can try.”

  “Really?” Jordan’s eyes refocus, making Omalis realize she hasn’t been looking into her eyes at all, but in-between them, not seeing them, until now. “Because I have a theory, more like a bet, I guess. It goes that my death certificate was signed the moment you showed up at my house, mine and my brothers’, and any other’s kids’ you or yours visited three weeks ago. Now it’s just a matter of how it goes down, how long it lingers. Seems to me the shorter the better. So, I guess I am disappointed.”

  For a long moment Omalis says nothing. She watches the girl’s eyes shift down to the table, then her cheeks flush with color, and her hands comb through her hair, trying to hide her sudden redness but not in too obvious a manner.

  “Our last visit, Jordan,” Omalis begins, “you were less inviting of your fate.”

  “Well,” Jordan says, “a lot’s happened since then.”

 
; “What sorts of things?”

  “I’m sure you can get the list from one of the Gestapo.”

  Omalis almost laughs, tries not to register her shock at the reference, but is too curious to let it lie. “Where did you learn that term?”

  “A lot of people know it,” Jordan says, eyes as evasive as her words.

  “A lot of elderly people know it,” Omalis corrects.

  “You know it,” Jordan counters.

  “At any rate, its history is no longer part of the public curriculum. You must have made a friend who is Outside Educated.”

  “What history?” Jordan asks, and Omalis can tell she does not know. She’s only using it as a word, a synonym, perhaps, for warden, guard, soldier. “What’s the big deal? Is it offensive or something?”

  “Not to me,” Omalis says, deciding to get back to the task at hand. “Have they begun the physical exams yet?”

  Jordan’s hesitation is all the answer Omalis needs. “Yeah.”

  “Which ones?”

  When Jordan doesn’t reply, Omalis gets the most embarrassing out of the way first. “The gynecological exam?”

  Jordan almost recoils, dropping her hands down to cover her lap. “No! Are they…are they going to do that?”

  “It’s quick,” Omalis says, “and quite painless.” She is struck by how small Jordan has become in her chair, how so like a little girl, a toddler afraid of the world simply because she has not yet known it. That is why she shivers, why she makes cavalier comments about death, why she hides behind other things to distract her, the things that make her blush, make her feel older.

  And that’s when Omalis wants to leave, and when she knows she can’t leave. She has one more thing to do.

  “Before I go,” she says, aware of the change in her voice, the dropped octave and thick, stilted words. “There is one test I must administer to you myself.”

  “What is it?” Jordan asks, curious but not afraid.

  Omalis walks around to her side of the table, kneels down so she is eye level with Jordan. Jordan is looking in that space between her eyes again, and she’s holding her breath, the redness beginning to creep up from her neckline.