All Good Children Read online

  “They’ve shown what they can do,” Omalis says.

  “Oh yes, well, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard.” The elevator arrives and the doors swish open with a loud ding. “Oh, here you are then. Did you have an appointment, though, or…?”

  Omalis enters the elevator and presses the button to close the doors. The silence in the small steel box is almost as inviting as a bullet, as the slow scrape of a knife across her throat.

  On the top floor, Omalis finds the waiting area is empty. The large oak double doors of the briefing room are closed. When the Over are ready for you, the doors open. Omalis stands before them and waits, ticking off the seconds by tapping a finger against her wrist.

  Her palms begin to sweat. Heat rises from beneath her arms. She wishes for her blazer, to hide the smell. Not that scent matters so much to the Over. The line on her chest where the seatbelt burned her all those days ago begins to throb. Her mouth and throat go dry. The blood in her ears pulses rapidly. She has a few seconds to irrationally regret drinking that tequila, and then the doors open.

  Rebecca Hartmeyer walks out. She appears a little dazed but otherwise quite herself. She even smiles at Omalis. She is older by ten years, the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes curving attractively. “We’ll get through this,” she says, offering Omalis’s elbow a quick comradely squeeze. She walks away before Omalis has a chance to ignore her.

  In the room, the windows are blacked out. Before the door closes behind her, from the little light bleeding through from the waiting area, Omalis sees the Over, only one of them, who may be but is probably not the same one she sees every time she comes here. There is nothing in the room except for it, and now her. It towers there against the blacked-out windows at the other end of the room, its monstrous nine-foot frame caught in the yellow light from the waiting area, a light that appeared normal out there but is all too sickly in here, gleaming against the slick dark feathers of the thing’s wings, which, for the moment, are folded in to hide its talons. At the instant of complete dark, when the click of the door’s latch catching reverberates hollowly through the room, the thing’s eyes flash bright orange, like the flick of a candle, and flame out.

  Omalis doesn’t hear it breathing, though of course it breathes, through the holes at the top of its beak, beneath its eyes. It breathes and it moves, but she doesn’t hear that either. She is listening to the pounding of her own heart, the rushing of her blood, to which it, of course, also listens. At the moment of contact, Omalis always screams, always, and thanks whatever cruel god created the Over for rendering them without ears.

  She screamed as a child, too, the first time. Her birth, kind of like a birth, she thinks, like a rebirth, the first step to becoming a young woman, the young woman they made her into. The young woman her mother forced her to become.

  Wait, Omalis hears with her little-girl ears, Wait, wait. Please wait.

  Her mother was pulled out of hiding first, yanked up from beneath the floorboards with no warning, only her screams trailing behind her, exploding into Heaven’s own face, where she tried—triedtriedtried—to burrow deeper into the hard earth beneath their kitchen floor. And her own screams bulleting out of her, ratatatat, as the sharp talons grabbed her too, ripping through her shirt, stopping just short of her flesh.

  And there is her mother, crying, screaming, Wait; and there is Omalis, little Heaven Omalis—Heaven Silamo then, before she crossed the ocean and buried her family name as deep as the reversal of a few letters would allow—her mother’s last hope, all her faith rolled up into a then-eleven-year-old girl, all of her salvation.

  Wait. Isn’t there something, isn’t there anything, anything I can give you?

  Little-girl Omalis thought money, little-girl Omalis thought baseball cards, pocket radios, bite-size candy bars, because these were things the boys at school would bully her for, and if she handed these things over, the boys stopped, and if she fought back, the boys kicked harder. And these things were bullies if there ever were bullies, Kings of Bullies, Overlords of Bullies, and if we give them what they want, little-girl Omalis thought, they will leave us alone, even as the houses in her neighborhood burned, even as the sirens wailed and the guns fired and the bombs dropped and the people screamed, Omalis thought it and believed it and prayed it, Give the bullies what they want and they will leave us alone.

  It never occurred to little-girl Omalis that the Bully Overlords might want her. It never occurred to her that her mother would even offer.

  That first time, that first connection, Omalis felt the pain not from the thing’s teeth, but from her mother’s voice, her vacant eyes, her final sobbing words. Take her, take her. I’m old and worn out. Take her, take her.

  “Take me,” the words falling from her mouth as they have a thousand times and will a thousand times more. The Over’s claw splays against the base of her neck near her spine, the teeth in its palm opening and piercing her skin, digging something deep into her nerve endings and catching. Her scream dissolves into a whisper and then into a memory. Her senses spiral into a blur as the Over rakes through her mind and takes from her her report. It takes from her mind into the collective mind of the Over all of her memories since her last report: her drunk and vomiting, her angry and fucking, her visiting homes and ripping families apart one pink slip at a time. The things it does not take, the things it can’t go deep enough to scrape up, even Omalis is unaware.

  When it’s finally finished, the suction dies and the mouth slakes off with a slick peeling sound, leaving the back of Omalis’s neck red and wet but not bleeding. The bleeding only lasts for the first few times, and Omalis is nothing if not a veteran. The doors open behind her and Omalis turns to exit them on wobbly legs, not wanting to see the thing again. On her way out she gets the message, not in words but in some complex jumble of nerve firings that after all these years she can easily decipher as their voice. Do not do it again, referring to the drinking, and, Keep peace, referring to the work she must now do to smooth things over with her frightened clients.

  As Omalis stumbles out, Blake Jefferson catches her arm and stares at her, agape. “Are…are you okay?”

  She looks at him, puzzled that he has to ask. “No,” she says. Finally, the truth.

  TEN

  JUNE

  IT FEELS LIKE EVERYTHING’S CHANGING, but nothing is. Here I am at the grocery store, trying to remember we only need one box of meatloaf mix now it’s just the two of us, and buying two anyway because I guess I’m just that stubborn. Here I am at the check-out counter, resentfully leafing through tabloid and fashion magazines, sneering at the young and the beautiful and the talented who get to keep their youth, beauty and talents until their natural deaths, thinking, My kid could’ve been you; my kid is a thousand times more young, beautiful and talented. Here I am outside of a Rent-a-Center, plastic bag of meatloaf mix and USA Today dangling from one hand, fitting the key in the door of my Civic when all the televisions in the store-front window blare out the news behind me: The Over swarm above Kyoto....

  Everything is changing. It’s Sunday, the streets crowded with shoppers and churchgoers out to brunch, school children playing in sprinklers in the park, riding their bikes in the street, leash-less dogs padding this way and that. We all stop in front of that store-front, paralyzed by the images, the thoughts. Some rush inside the store to hear better, others pick up their children and race home. I watch until the story starts to repeat itself, the blurred images looped around the same disconnected scrawl of ticker tape, and then I get inside the car and I scream.

  My phone is already ringing. It’s Jay, of course.

  “Baby, don’t do anything,” he says.

  “Do anything? Do what, Jay, what would I do?” He’s been this way for weeks now, since that thing at the hospital I refuse to think about. It’s worse than walking on eggshells—he’s trying to hover completely over them. When did I become so frail and yet so dangerous? He’s afraid I am going to lash out again, even though I’ve been
taking those antidepressants our doctor prescribed—he knows because he watches me swallow them down each morning, checks under my tongue and everything. He’s afraid I will shatter what little stability he believes we still have.

  “Just come home, we’ll talk about it.”

  He’s thinking, Never should’ve let her out of the house. Never should have left her side. He should be thinking, Never should have let her take our children away. Never should have even let her get close.

  Because we talked about it, talked about it when I first conceived, years before the One Child Rule was enacted, when we didn’t have to worry about that decision but there were plenty hard times ahead. We’d been reading about conditioning, how to raise not a child but a statistical probability. Athletes are thirty-two percent less likely to be chosen for camps; children with an extraordinary aptitude for academics are forty-six percent less likely, those exhibiting prodigious musical talents twenty-three percent, or especially proficient in other arts and sciences, fourteen percent. Jay is from farmer stock, a family of laborers, necessary but too prevalent to be special; both of my parents are doctors. With Jason, we pushed him to science but he had no appetite for it—he wanted to play, chase girls, be a kid. Jay was happy, he had his son, his strong boy, to help him, maybe even succeed him. I think he forgot about the camps. But Jeremy reminded him.

  Poor Jeremy. He was a crier from the start, normal, weak. My baby. I remember tracing his small infant fingers with my own, measuring his hand against the mold we pressed of his brother’s two years earlier. Long fingers, I told Jay, remarkable hands; he’ll be remarkable. We tried him on so many instruments, hoping for guitar, praying for cello (the classical string instruments had the highest success rate in keeping kids out of camps). Of course, piano, that’s a string instrument too. Jeremy loved it, so much fun; we thought we had it locked, we thought, at least, we had this one saved. But Jeremy, bless him, he didn’t like competition, he couldn’t take it, got physically sick. That first recital, not even officially up against anyone, seven years old and heaving up his dinner backstage, all the way to the bile then to the blood. Had to take him to the hospital, feed him ice chips. It was a long time before he played again, and then he never played for anyone else. I caught Jay watching him one night, listening to him play something he wrote himself, so sad and longing and gorgeous—and Jay, standing there in shadow in the doorway, just shaking his head, shaking, shaking.

  That might have been the night Jay said goodbye, in his heart, but I don’t want to believe it.

  Now in the car, I tell him, “I’ll be right there,” and hang up, because I have my own call to make.

  When Jordan was born, we didn’t even try the conditioning—third time’s a charm, they say, but we were exhausted. They instituted One Child only five months after I gave birth to her, so I was just feeling lucky, so undeservedly special. Immediately upon entering school, Jordan wanted to play sports. She tried out for all the teams. I ferried her from practice to practice, game to game, my chest tightening with hope. But then the fights started, and the school gave us the ultimatum—start her on drugs or she’s out—and we didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. We argued. What’s best for her, what’s worse? Any kind of psychiatric diagnosis increases probability of selection by twenty percent. Twenty percent! We reasoned, though, that with her behavior under control she could excel at sports. They labeled her with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, gave her a bouquet of little orange bottles I had to refill every few months, and I watched, helplessly, as her enthusiasm for anything other than quarreling with me quickly leaked away from her.

  I fish around in my purse for the business card. Someone behind me flashes their lights and beeps a little; they want my metered parking space. I wave them around, single-finger-style.

  When Jason was passed up his first year of camp eligibility, we were ecstatic. Maybe we’d done it. Jay and I celebrated. I was half-afraid we might accidentally conceive again, so I slipped our pharmacist a few extra twenties for that morning-after pill. Then Jeremy’s year was up and passed unnoticed, and another year gone, and another. Each time, Jay was so happy, but I started to worry; what if this year, or this year, or this one? Until finally it happened, and all at once, and we weren’t ready, not one fucking bit.

  Our fight before the Liaison’s first visit was pathetic. Jay just couldn’t—wouldn’t—see that our fortune had run dry.

  I remember it was late, I was tossing dress after pantsuit after skirt onto the bed, trying to find the right combination that said, Please don’t pick my kids, look at the kind of upstanding citizens they will become if they take after their mother, please, reconsider. Jay came in and closed the door, looked at me with this irritated scowl.

  “Hon, what are you doing?” He kicked his shoes off into the corner and undid his belt. “All that shit on the bed, I got to get some sleep.”

  “Our Liaison comes tomorrow,” I told him, as if it couldn’t be any clearer what I was doing, how important it was to make an impression.

  He sighed, dropping trough and unbuttoning his flannel. “It’s just the first visit, don’t worry about it.”

  “Are you serious? Are you standing there and actually telling me not to worry about one of those people coming into my home and appraising my kids? Did you get hit with a shovel out there in the field today or something?”

  “Calm down, Junebug.” He started to push my tossed-about clothes to one side and pull back his corner of the covers. “I’m only saying it’s stage one, long way to go before—”

  “It’s mighty fucking close to me, Jay,” I hollered at him, which shut him up fast because my temper is one thing I can usually control, at least around him. “I watch these soulless monsters take children from my hospital every day, every day, like it’s just another job, like picking out the best sow for the slaughter.”

  “June—”

  “And now one of them is coming here, and I don’t know what to do, Jay.” I piled my discarded outfits together and chucked them at him, threw them on the floor, all around the room. “Tell me what to do to save them, Jay. If your only idea is to wait, then help me pick a color combination because goddammit at least I’m doing something.”

  He threw a salmon blouse right back at me and laughed. “You’re deluding yourself.”

  “I’m what?”

  “You really think the Liaison makes any kind of decision? They’re pawns, June! They’re….they’re little more than fucking robots. If the kids are going, they’re already on a list somewhere, they’re already—”

  “Jason, Jeremy, and Jordan.”

  “What—”

  “Jason, Jeremy and Jordan. If you’re going to condemn them so easily at least call them by the names you fucking gave them.”

  “I’m not condemning anyone.”

  “You’re not doing much of any goddamn thing—”

  “What do you want me to—”

  “—except standing there in your underwear like some—”

  “—if I could do something I’d do it—”

  “—fucking idiot ready to just let them take our babies—”

  “—no one’s taking anyone, goddammit June—”

  “—goddammit Jay, I’m scared!”

  “I’m scared too!”

  His voice stole my own straight from my throat, the way it boomed and broke, like a gunshot, like a bomb. The room vibrated with percussive silence.

  After a time, he said, “We can send them away.”

  Eileen and Ben Stockton tried that with their kids two years ago. One day the whole family is in church and the next their thirteen-year-old twin boys are gone, reported missing, posters up all over town. Except someone found out, somehow; a distant relative of Eileen’s had them in his basement for two weeks before the police showed up and arrested him. The parents didn’t want to admit to what they’d done, so they pressed kidnapping charges and the kids went to the camps anyway. When they didn’t come back, Eileen
and Ben confessed to the entire plot.

  “We’ll be smart about it,” my husband told me, reading the look so easily behind my vulnerable eyes. “Keep ’em moving, in one place no more than a week, maybe not even together.”

  “I don’t have enough family….”

  “We have plenty of friends who—”

  “What kind of life is it, though? The risk to everyone else—”

  “You wanted ideas, that’s all I have.”

  In this next silence, Jay bent to pick up a pair of my slacks and began folding them, placed them neatly on the bed.

  “I like the blue top,” he said finally.

  “I’ll kill for them,” I told him.

  “June—”

  “I’ll kill to keep them, I swear to god I will.”

  I would have gone on like that, except his hands touched my face and his lips stopped mine. I cried into him until I wasn’t sure which were his tears and which came from my eyes. I wanted to push him away but he was all I had in that moment, and he is all I have now, and I resent it, I regret it.

  I will change it.

  Omalis picks up on the second ring. I don’t know how to begin. “Miss Omalis, this is June Fontaine, I….”

  “You saw the news,” she guesses.

  “Yes, it was…it’s…”

  “It’s a lot to take in right now, Mrs. Fontaine, of course it is.” She’s so irritatingly professional. “I can assure you that this incident will in no way affect the safety and well being of your children. Should you need further assurance—”