All Good Children Page 25

  Omalis smiles in a way that looks like a frown. “I know you are. I know you would do this in a heartbeat because you want your death to mean something. And it will. But…your life could mean something, too. Your mother, she asked me to bring a deal to the Over—”

  “And they rejected it,” I finish for her. “She told me. I told her it was stupid, all the parents probably do it.”

  “You’re right,” Omalis says. “Most of the parents do it. And sometimes, a fraction of the time, the Over accept. With conditions. Jordan, they’ve agreed to allow your mother to take the place of one of her children. They want me to decide who gets to go home. If you wanted to go home, I would celebrate that decision. Marla would celebrate it.”

  I’m dangerously close to losing control of my legs, my blood, my heart. All I get out is a choked, “Why?”

  “Because they are truly monsters, the Over. They have the bodies of animals but the minds of…of us. And they put these minds to cruel and sadistic things, for your torment, for their pleasure. They—”

  “Why would you tell me?” I shout it, then rein it back in. “Jesus, you didn’t…you shouldn’t… I was ready. I’m ready. Don’t tell me I can live. Don’t tell me my mom…that she’s dying for me. Don’t tell me that. Please. Just let me do this. Just let me—”

  Omalis steps to me and grips my hair from the back, tugging on it painfully, keeping me standing and bent back slightly over the sink. The pain stops my mouth from saying things. She pulls my hair hard and looks at me hard and speaks to me hard: “I’ve never lied to you. You deserve the truth because you can take the truth. You have a mother who cares enough to give her life for you and you deserve to know that. What you don’t have is the luxury of time, Jordan, you just don’t. Do you want to go home?” Like a flame winking out in a sudden breeze, she softens. Her grip softens but doesn’t let go, her eyes soften but also do not let go. She says, “Jordan, do you want to go home?”

  I want to wake up at five a.m. to slop last night’s dinner in the pig trough and grab a pail and milk the cows before the sun comes up and the chickens get restless and their eggs are still warm when I gather them. I want to make hot chocolate and watch my dad out the kitchen window, combing out the horse’s mane with a tenderness he doesn’t think I know he has. I want to chase Jeremy through the wheat fields and tag his shoulder and laugh as he chases me back. I want to ask Jason what it feels like to kiss someone you really want to kiss, to hold a girl’s hand and have it feel right. I want to go to one of Taylor’s hockey games and cheer her on and meet her friends and eat pancakes with them after the game at some retro diner that only serves coffee and beer and none of the waitresses are under forty. I want to give my mother a hard time about the way she dresses, the way she combs her hair, chews her food, drives, talks to me, lives.

  I want so many things. But going home won’t give them to me. Maybe someone else can have them. Maybe someone else.

  “Can it be Jeremy?” Omalis has to lean in close to hear me. Her grip on my hair turns into a caress on my neck. “Can you take Jeremy home? Jason’s stronger, you know. He won’t be as afraid to be alone, or to…to die. Jeremy’s emotional and, and he’s like an artist, like Mozart, and he…and my dad will need that. They’ll both need that.”

  Omalis presses her lips to my forehead. Amazingly, I’m not crying. But I’m shaking like I’m cold when really I’m hot all over, especially on my forehead. Matching my low tone, Omalis says, “Yes. Jeremy can go home.”

  She moves her hand from my neck and runs it down my left arm, stopping to press her thumb into the crook of my elbow. “Make a fist,” she says.

  I ball my fingers into a fist for her. She flicks the vein in my elbow until it rises to the surface of my skin. She touches the needle to it. She says, “Thank you.”

  The needle goes in smooth. I don’t even feel it. I watch the fluid enter me as she presses down on the plunger. It’s a ghost, it’s a phantom. It’s a promise.

  She retracts the needle and throws it into the toilet bowl, plop. There’s a little blood but she swipes it with her thumb. She curls my arm so my fingers are touching my shoulder. She holds it there. It’s so silent in this room; there is only the sound of my blood, pumping softer now, pumping steady.

  Omalis picks something up off the counter and puts it in my other hand. “Will you read this now?”

  I’d forgotten about this part. The part where Omalis doesn’t remember any of this. The part where I have to erase it all from her. The part where I can say anything.

  “Omalis—”

  “Heaven,” she says. “Please call me Heaven.”

  “Heaven.” It feels strange in my mouth. It feels forbidden to me. It feels like only Marla should be allowed to call her that. “Is it okay if I… Can you…” But I swallow it, I bury it. I say instead, “Can you tell me what’s going to happen to Taylor?”

  She looks at me with that smile-frown again. “She’s going to Breed.”

  I knew this. Of course. But maybe I’ll have time to get her the razor before the Over take me. I go to the loose tile I’d bumped earlier, pry it up, and scoop up the baggie. Omalis takes it from me.

  “You can’t make her go there,” I tell her.

  “No.” She tosses the baggie into the toilet bowl and flushes it. I can’t even move. From the same pocket with the vid player, she pulls out a small orange vial. She screws off the cap and spills a single white pill onto the palm of her hand. “Cyanide,” she says. “So it can be quick.”

  “And quite painless,” I breathe.

  “Put it in your cheek. You’ll have a second to say goodbye, but if they catch you passing anything to her…”

  “Okay.” I take the pill from her and stuff it down between my teeth and bottom lip.

  “The phrase,” Omalis prods.

  “Okay,” I say again. Everything is speeding back up. I unfold the paper again, hold it in front of me, and read: Here is a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

  I’ve barely got the last word out before Omalis makes a choking sound and I look up to see her eyes roll back in her head and she collapses. I don’t move fast enough to catch her. I kneel beside her while her body spasms, I don’t know what to do. Did I say it wrong? She thrashes for a second, and when I go to touch her, she stops. Her eyes open and they look glassy, distant. She scrambles up and looks around and almost bowls me over diving at the sink. There, she vomits, like arch-your-back, hold-the-rest-of-your-guts-in vomits. She runs the faucet and wipes her mouth, avoiding the mirror. Finally, she seems to remember something, and turns around to face me.

  “Jordan.” Her voice is the same but there’s a quiver in her cheek, near her lip, that suggests she’s forgotten something. “I…I have to take you away now. Do you…do you understand?”

  Behind my back, I rip the paper into tiny squares and let them fall into the toilet bowl. I tell her, “I’m ready.”

  Omalis holds her hand out to me. I take it, which surprises her; her skin jumps and she swallows harder than usual. She looks at me oddly. I hold her hand tighter.

  “Jordan, I want you to know…how brave you are.”

  “You’re brave, too.”

  She squints her eyes at me but doesn’t say anything. She leads me out of the bathroom.

  I feel the Over’s dark, thick presence without looking in its direction. Taylor is still on my bed, knees pulled up to her chest and her face buried in the space where they connect. I break free from Omalis’s grip and run to her. When I pull at her face with both hands she is startled; she’s been crying and her pupils are small, like dots, and the skin around them is doughy and pink. Her mouth drops open to say something, and I fill it with my own mouth. With my tongue, I push the cyanide pill from against my teeth to against her cheek, and break the kiss.

  “Bite and swallow,” I tell her. I hope she knows what I mean. I hope she knows it’s the only thing I have to give her.

  The Over rips me open f
rom behind; at the base of my neck, under my arms, between my shoulder blades. I shriek, a raw, animal sound, a sound that travels from the Over into me through my skin and screeches out my mouth. Taylor screams and pulls at my arms. The Over pulls at me, too, pulls me away from her, shrieking all the time, shrieking so loud maybe I’m the only one who hears it. My arm spasms out toward Taylor. She tries one more time to keep me but her fingers snag on my bracelet. As I’m pulled in the opposite direction, the string grows taut and snaps, and the beads fall like rain. As the shrieking gets louder, as the pain becomes a darkness that forces its way into my vision, I watch those beads fall, one-two-three, they nick my groping fingers and fall all the way down, into nothing.

  I REMEMBER ONLY THE COLD. Some sort of freezer, I thought when my eyes opened. I thought I was inside the Over, that it had swallowed me up, bones and all. Of course, it was not after my bones. Blood is the thing. It feeds us. It binds us. It cannot keep out the cold.

  I’ve since been moved from that place, wherever it was. The cold has hollowed me out, left me paralyzed, unable even to shiver. All I am is blood, which for some reason I thought would be warm; isn’t blood supposed to be warm? Where did I get that notion? Where was I before? Where am I now? Where am I going?

  Here’s something: There is more than just me. It’s a vast room, as hollow as me, except for the low hum of the machines. I don’t know exactly what they are; they feel slimy and sharp, pricking my skin, burrowing in and out and over and under me, encasing me. I think maybe the Over took my eyes. Put them someplace dark, where I can only see a pinprick of light in the distance, like the end of a tunnel. I know there are others in the room because that is what the machines do: they bind us by blood.

  I’m on a hard table, or the ground. Arms rigid at my sides. My feet angle toward each other, toes groping for comfort from each other. I can curl my fingers but only slightly. The machine’s sharp points have penetrated the backs of my hands, the underside of both wrists, the clefts of my elbows and knees, the base of my spine, my temples, the heel of each foot, four along my sides spaced a couple of inches apart. The machines hum, but they aren’t always doing anything, or at least I can’t feel them doing anything. When the transfusion starts, they become louder, their gears roar into place, and they scream.

  A smell precedes this. The Over smell. I always imagined they would stink, must stink, because they live in the earth, they should stink of the earth. But they smell of blood, a sweet bronze odor, like the water fountains at the library. I don’t remember the library, but sometimes I can smell the pages of musty books. Sometimes I can smell the remains of a hot dinner, butter and salt, something baking, fresh. These are phantoms. The only smell is blood, mine and theirs and all of ours.

  The Over cluster around me when the machine kicks up. It used to be painful. The blood goes in, the blood goes out. It lasts for a while. During this time, I start to remember things, things I never knew but know now. I remember sleeping in the earth, sleeping for a very long time, my brothers and sisters heaped around me, all of us sleeping, sleeping. Then we woke up. We fought for the light. We fought for the air, the sky we always dreamt of, the sky our ancestors promised us while we were asleep. The fight was long; we made it look easy because we knew that would frighten them. I feel their fingernails under my skin; I feel their bullets in my teeth. They made the earth hot; they set it on fire. They killed themselves. It was easy after all.

  We knew these humans before they knew us. This was our advantage. Fear. Fear, and faith in our prophecies.

  This knowledge blinks into existence, burns its way across my brain, and flames out. Every time. I know how many we are. I know how many are in this room, becoming as I am becoming. We know each other. Soon, we will speak, but not with our mouths. Those will be gone.

  Something is wrong, though. There is a hiccup. My mother used to say that when something was wrong. It is just a hiccup, she would say. No worries. This was maybe my mother and maybe not my mother. I have so many mothers now. We all have so many mothers, but very few memories of any of them. Soon, none.

  This hiccup. It’s in the blood. Mine, and theirs. They take it every day, all the time. Are there days here? They take it. It binds us. It has a hiccup. It hurts us. They don’t feel it yet. I feel it because it comes from me. They don’t know this yet, because they keep taking it, and giving it, back and forth, weaving this deadly tapestry. It’s okay. Somehow I know this. I know it is okay.

  The light grows brighter all the time. Sometime soon I will be able to see them. Sometime soon they will unhook me from the machines and I will see what I’ve become, and I will forget having been anything else. I will forget about our hiccuping blood. I will forget about the cold.

  It will be heavenly.

  EPILOGUE

  OUTSIDE ON THE VERANDA, JUNE Fontaine and Heaven Omalis sip tea. The courtyard flutters with activity: a group of women in pink polos and white tennis shorts struggle to play croquet with foam mallets and large hollow plastic balls that keep getting swept up in the afternoon breeze; a few ladies, dressed in bright pastels, dirty up their checkered aprons by kneeling to weed out the flower beds; some are merely shuttled along the pristine walkways in their wheelchairs, conveyed by older women with graying or white hair to complement their plain white uniforms. These June thinks of as orderlies but she is certain they do not think of themselves this way.

  “Jeremy’s semester started Monday,” Omalis says. She stirs her Earl Grey with a miniature plastic spoon. Even the teacups are plastic. The utensil makes no sound as it scrapes along the cup’s edge. “They’re doing block classes now. He seems to be adjusting, though.”

  “Hm.”

  June is usually monosyllabic on their visits. They sit at one of several two-person tables seemingly reserved for them (it’s always available, even when all the others are taken; in light of this June is almost certain Omalis has reserved it, by whatever means one might do such a thing here). They meet once a week, on Thursday afternoons, and have tea or coffee. Omalis stays until June has finished her cup. Sometimes this is an hour, sometimes only minutes. Today, the tea in June’s cup is as cold as the waning autumn breeze, and they’ve been sitting for at least two hours.

  “He’s getting better about doing his chores on time,” Omalis continues. She sips at her cup. She’s had it refilled with fresh tea three times. She takes it plain, not even a drop of honey. “Time management will be important, especially now with school starting. Jay’s been good about instilling this in him.”

  Omalis always opens these visits by asking after June’s health, but June, confident that there is a meticulous report kept somewhere, ignores these inquiries. Omalis then moves on with a report about how the farm is keeping up, how profits are moving or not moving, or how the neighbor’s farms are doing, or how the town is doing. She segues from these less personal reports into accounts of how Jay is doing, how he’s keeping himself and Jeremy busy with the day-to-day. She visits them once a week as well, and probably does the same thing, except it must be a far briefer report, as June doesn’t feel she does anything, or she does the same thing, most every day until there’s a delivery. She hopes—she prays—Omalis does not tell them about those days.

  “Do you know,” Omalis’s tone grows lighter, almost playful, “Jeremy taught your husband to play ‘Heart and Soul’ with him on the piano? Jeremy does the more difficult part, of course, but Jay holds his own, though his larger fingers often press two of the keys at once—”

  “Don’t you have to pee?” June says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’ve had three cups.”

  Omalis looks down at her half-full cup. She pushes it aside, folds her hands in her lap. She is the only one in this place who is not wearing bright colors; a midnight-blue peasant blouse, a lengthy maroon skirt, casual dark flats. She has the courtesy not to wear makeup here—it would make the women and the girls jealous—but she can’t help her wardrobe.

  “I’m so
rry, June.” She brushes her fingers over her temple. Her haircut is shorter now, there’s no longer hair to brush back but she makes this move at least once during every visit. “Shall I… Shall we stop now?”

  Before June can answer, one of the wheelchair-bound women is pushed almost into June’s legs. “Pardon me,” the woman says. No, she’s one of the younger ones, a girl no older than Jordan. Her name is Stacy Lee; June is not her usual doctor—if she can call herself that, in this place, but then what else?—but she sat in on one of her sonograms several weeks ago. The girl looks behind her at the graying orderly pushing her. “Samantha, geez. Eyes open, right?”

  Samantha smiles sheepishly and looks away. Back to June, Stacy says, “Doctor Fontaine, my doc’s with someone else today, and I know I don’t have an appointment, but.” She rubs her palms over her swollen belly. Seven months along and close to bed rest. The young ones invariably get bed rest. “Something’s wrong. I can just feel it, you know? Can you help me?”

  June pats the girl’s knee. “Of course.” She tries on a smile. All she can see when she looks at these girls is their red and crying faces as they fight so hard to deliver their babies, the babies they never get to see or smell or touch before the Over take them. All she imagines when she looks at these girls is their red and crying faces as they fight so hard to escape the boys—whose faces may also be red and crying—who are forced to come inside them to create life for the Over. It’s difficult to smile for them, but their struggles are much worse. “Have Samantha take you to my office. I’ll be right up.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much.” And Stacy Lee is wheeled back inside.

  Although the estate is large—four floors, two massive wings stretching from the main house—most of the women prefer to spend their days, whenever possible, outside on the grounds. Even though wherever they may wander on the grounds they are always within eyesight of the thick iron fence and the armed guard towers, which can become oppressive. But inside, stationed three to a floor in the center of each wing and the main room, stand the Over. Still as pillars, as if they were holding up the very house, which they may well do. Their eyes never seem to close, their bodies never seem to move, not an inch. They seem to make no sound but after two months June can hear them breathing as easily as she can hear herself breathing.