All Good Children Page 7

  “All of them?” she says, low but angry, hand shooting for her throat. “All of them?”

  Mom had six younger brothers and two sisters, a fertility drug family before it became fashionably survivalist; four of her brothers went away for the summer, and one of her sisters, the oldest one. Only the sister came back. But I guess, when you only have three to choose from, your odds of being spared one are fairly dismal. Way to go organic, Mom.

  Dad’s hand comes out from his pocket and his fingers work the knot at the base of Mom’s neck. I can only see the back of his head from my spot near the door but I’d bet anything he’s screwed up his rustic, farm-hard face to be glaring at Omalis, absolutely boring into her all his outrage and denial, trying to appeal to her sense of common decency with a single well-placed scowl.

  Omalis puts the papers back on her clipboard and sighs. She looks up at my parents, squinting against the lowering sun. “Mr. and Mrs. Fontaine, this is the decision that has been made. I know you are aware that this does not mean one or all of your children will not be returned to you at the completion of the Program. And of course, you will remain in contact with each of them, through me, and through scheduled visits and phone calls once they have been placed. If you have any questions or concerns you can always call our—”

  Mom’s laugh is so shrill and brittle it even startles me. Dad pinches her neck and looks at her. She wipes at her eyes and says through her dry laughter, “Concerns? Yeah, I think I may just have a few, now that you mention it.”

  But before she can say anything else something stops her, something inside her throat, but also Dad’s shadow, falling over her like a shield as he steps in front of her and slowly, all hard-knuckles-business, descends the steps toward Omalis. She immediately unclips the papers again and holds them out to him. I expect her hand to be shaking but it isn’t. Her eyes are steady, too.

  “If we asked you to leave,” my dad starts, and I have to take a sliding step toward him to hear the rest, his voice is so low and deep. “If we asked you, would you go?”

  There is a breath of a pause; I imagine I can hear the wheat stalks exhaling into one another. I wonder if Miss Omalis gets this question all the time, this thin line between begging and threatening. I wonder what she’ll say or do, but really, I think I already know.

  “Mr. Fontaine,” she says, rounded vowels as steady as her outstretched arm, “if I go, others will come. And you will lose everything, Mr. Fontaine.” It’s so quick, but here I think I see her candle-flame-blue eyes flicker over Jason, Jeremy, my mother, and then me, and back to Dad. “Everything.”

  Dad’s arm shoots out and he snatches the papers away from her violently, crumbling them in his meaty fingers. He doesn’t stop staring at her and she doesn’t stop staring right back at him. Once, on Jeremy’s tenth birthday, I got jealous because he got a bike and I’d been asking for one since I was six but all I kept getting were plastic kitchen toys and dolls and stuffed animals, and once a pair of plastic skates that I didn’t even like but cried anyway when the wheels fell off. So I got jealous and I pushed Jeremy right off that bike and I took it and, not knowing how to ride it, I ran with it to the top of the hill at the backend of our yard, and pushed it down and watched it soar over the property line and fall and flip over a few times and finally land in a small creek, mangled and satisfying. Dad took me inside and sat me down and I tensed up for a spanking, but it never came. He just sat there and stared at me, so hard for so long, just stared and wouldn’t let me look away. Finally, when I was ready to break down and apologize, he opened his frowning mouth and just said, “I’m very disappointed in you,” and he walked away. I cried for days.

  Now, he’s giving Omalis the stare-down, but she’s clearly not moved by it. I can tell Mom is about to lose it, the way her elbows shake. Shit, someone has to do something to move along the inevitable. I volunteer.

  “Adios, mis parentos,” I say in a poor imitation of Spanish and Drill Team cheer, hoisting my duffel bag onto my shoulder and trundling down the porch steps. When I pass Omalis she looks at me and I smile, the crinkles it causes at the corners of my eyes hopefully offsetting the fading redness. “Onward and upward. Vamanos!”

  I hear my dad say my name in that stern way he does but I keep moving to the van, throw open the sliding side door and toss my bag inside, before turning back to the others. Mom is holding Jeremy by his arm now, probably permanently imbedding her fingerprints into his deflated biceps, her eyes on me and holding back tears. Jason steps around her, picking up his own gray gym bag from the porch as he goes. He stops at Dad’s side and pats his shoulder, not like a son but like a man, like a buddy saying goodnight after a good poker game. Then he passes me without looking at me and climbs into the van after his bag.

  Jeremy starts to go too, but Mom holds him back, and I have to look away when she starts kissing his forehead and he doesn’t even try to struggle. Dad walks over to me, looms over me, I can smell his heavy cologne, like oregano and sweet sweat. He’s staring at me but it’s not a hard stare, it’s not soft either, but it’s new and I don’t like it. He reaches out and squeezes my shoulder, pinching my neck with his thumb, almost too hard, but that’s not why I can’t breathe.

  “You’ll be okay.” He stops and swallows a couple times, then licks his dry lips and says, “Take care of your brother.” He means Jeremy, who’s finally broken away from Mom and comes up beside us. Dad ruffles his hair and tries to smile and then walks back to the porch.

  I hear Jeremy say, “We’re really going,” almost like a question but directed to no one and it sounds strange, like he said it but not from where he’s standing, from farther away, from someplace else. He gets in the van.

  I’m about to get in when Mom shouts my name, urgent and breaking on the last syllable. When she stands in front of me I can smell through the lemon hand soap her natural ammonia-and-latex smell, those long hospital hours seeping out of her pores, and I look at the neckline of her church clothes, wondering bitterly why she still dressed up, again, for this day.

  “Jordan.” She starts to say something else but stops in favor of leaning in for a hug, but it’s too much. I back away only a step and finally look into her eyes that are so wet and so red and so much like mine must look right now, and I say, “Mom. I pierced my navel.”

  FOUR

  OMALIS

  HEAVEN OMALIS DRIVES DOWN THE onramp with the windows rolled down. A chill drifts in from the west on the backs of gray clouds and the wind pushes against her loose hair, her cheek. As she accelerates her stomach dips and it makes her want to laugh; how odd that merging onto the highway can still make her anxious, how inappropriate. She eases the van into the center lane as the right quickly disappears, brings the speedometer’s needle to rest between sixty-five and seventy, and flips on the cruise control. She cracks her ankle. After manually rolling up the old van’s window, she flicks her eyes to the rearview mirror.

  No one’s spoken since they pulled away from the house, except for Jordan, to ask if she could turn on the radio. Some pop song Omalis is too old or removed from popular society to recognize spills out of the speakers, some child-turned-sex-object crooning in a key so close to whining Omalis is mildly concerned tears might begin to pour from the speakers along with the music, until the chorus hits and the tune takes an upbeat swing, and the child-turned-sex-object bounces with renewed empowerment. In the backseat, the boys sit tall and straight, looking out the windows on either side of them, not seeing the other cars stream by on the other side of the concrete median, the trees along the flat grassy fields. If they hear the music, which she doubts they do, they make no attempt to follow its beat with a nod or a gentle foot tap.

  The girl, too, sits silently, but slumped, feet propped up on the dashboard, appearing casual, but if she were truly comfortable, Omalis thinks, she would’ve kicked off her shoes as well. Her hands are folded in her lap, fingers discreetly pinching a wrinkle in her shirt. Omalis looks at her only a moment, then turns her at
tention back to the road.

  These drives are usually silent, when they’re not filled with the sound of bravely suppressed sobs, so deafening in such a tiny space. Sometimes, when she’s transporting more than one of them, the children talk to each other, ignoring her and their destination, trying to pretend they are only going on a day trip, a weekend getaway. Omalis hates it when they do this but she hates the crying even more, the silence the most, but she can think of no alternative she would care for anyway. She’s grateful this is the only delivery she has to make today.

  They drive on in silence for another forty minutes before Jordan speaks up again.

  “Where are we going?”

  The sound is strange at first and it takes Omalis a moment to react to it. She looks into the rearview to see Jason turn his head to look at his sister.

  “I’m taking you to a private runway where you’ll board a plane that will take you to your assigned camp.” The words are stale and overused, but they come out almost bright, downright conversational, just like they always do, just like they’re supposed to.

  “Will there be other kids at the plane?” Jordan asks.

  “Jordeena,” Jason says from the backseat, “who cares?”

  Omalis watches him roll his eyes and turn back to the window, his elbow bent against the armrest so he can hold his chin up with his palm. Beside him, Jeremy’s knees squeeze tighter together and he drops his gaze from the window to the unopened book in his lap.

  “Will there be?” Jordan asks again.

  “I don’t know,” Omalis answers truthfully. “Sometimes there are, sometimes there aren’t.”

  Silence follows, but Omalis can tell it will not last long. Sometimes the teenagers she transports start chatting with her, sometimes they ask her inane questions that calm them down—did she see the game last Friday? What does she think of all the construction on Route 52 lately? Sometimes they ask her other things, things that she wishes they wouldn’t because they’ll be answered in good time anyway, in proper course. And her history with this girl, Jordan Fontaine, tells her the questions will not be inane, and will most certainly not calm anyone down.

  She decides to try to curb the barrage before it can begin, by turning the focus of the conversation, the questions, onto Jordan herself. “You told your mother about your piercing,” Omalis says, looking at the road and smiling slightly. “I’m proud of you.”

  Jordan sits up straighter in her seat, stretching her legs. “Yeah, I confessed. Guess I don’t need any priests to stop by the camp later.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Jason explodes from the backseat.

  “Don’t need him either,” Jordan says quickly, “I’m cool.”

  “Will you stop it?” Jason shouts, leaning forward, straining against his seatbelt. Omalis rests her foot just above the break pedal. “Just shut the hell up. I don’t want to hear your voice anymore, okay. Just shut up.”

  Beside him, Jeremy seems to shrink, the seat and the space around him swallowing him up. Jordan crosses her arms and opens her mouth and Omalis tenses. Jordan sucks in air and closes her mouth tight, her cheeks puffing out dramatically.

  After a few seconds, Omalis can hear it but she is unsure if the others have caught it yet. Jeremy hides his head in his hand, the other clutching the tattered spine of his well-read paperback, but his small palm can’t muffle the sound of his crying nearly enough for Omalis’s ears. She sees in the rearview that he is trying to pull his knees up to his chest but he’s too lanky for the seat and his feet keep slipping off. She wants to pull over and get out and take him aside and tell him to be brave, be brave for his younger sister and older brother, show them how to be a real man, but she knows she only wants him to be brave for her, so she won’t have to listen anymore. His sobs grow louder, choked and fractured.

  In her periphery she catches Jordan glancing back quickly over her shoulder, then folding her hands tightly together, pressing the knuckles of her left hand into her right, making the tendons in her muscular forearms and wrists stand out. Omalis knows Jeremy’s crying is unsettling but she doesn’t know what to say or do to quiet him. She drives on, switching over to the right lane, thinking she’ll pull over if anyone starts shouting again.

  She’s never had to use force against the children she transports. More than a few times she has had to physically subdue a parent or guardian, but it is always swift and she only ever needs to take them down once and then they get it. Almost all of them beg her like Mr. Fontaine had, offering bribes or trades. But it isn’t her call. Somewhere inside she knows they are aware of this, but she is there and she is a body, a person no taller than they, no larger, no less human. Their survival instinct kicks in and she becomes a target. She does not blame them for this; in fact, she regrets when they lunge at her or throw a punch or go for a weapon, because she knows it will only end with more pain for them, and—have mercy if this should ever happen—if they somehow overpowered her, she would never forgive herself.

  Now, she looks in the rearview and sees Jason try to squash himself up against the side of the van, as far away from his quivering brother as he can make himself, pressing his forehead into the glass. Jordan drops her feet to the floor and begins to crack her knuckles. Omalis can see the tension building in her jaw and knows she is holding her breath. The pop music station cranks out another obnoxious chart topper. Omalis switches off the cruise control. She knows Jordan is bracing herself for something, and her mind races for a sentence, a word, a look even, that might diffuse the impending situation.

  “Mind if I change the station?” Jordan asks, already reaching for the dial. Her voice startles Omalis, who blinks and swallows and shrugs her answer. She watches Jordan lean over and listens to the harsh static crackle between stations as Jordan spins the dial. Up ahead, a quiet suburb peeks into view, its sensitive inhabitants stalwartly protected against the intrusive traffic noise by a sound barrier twenty feet high, trees sprouting up around it, trying to blend the unsightly beige in with the natural greens and browns.

  The static crackles in and out, punctured by a momentary burst of guitar chords or cymbal slaps or the indignant laments of some irate talk-show pundit, but the static comes back, the dial keeps on flipping. Omalis glances down at Jordan, whose fingers move almost frantically around the radio dial, her eyes closed.

  “Jordan,” Omalis begins, slowing down, prepared to pull over if the girl seizes up or faints, which is not uncommon. But her name is all Omalis can get out before Jordan moves, quick and sure, her hands grasping the wheel below Omalis’s own and jerking it to the right. For one second Omalis is too stunned to counter the movement, but then she regains herself and tries to adjust the wheel. The van has already sped across the rough shoulder and the uneven ground crunches beneath them. Jeremy begins to scream and Jordan tightens her grip on the wheel. Omalis shouts and tears Jordan’s hands away, simultaneously stepping hard on the brake, which is a bad move as the van is still turning and the tires slip and before she knows what is happening Jordan’s window shatters inward and Omalis falls to her right. Her chest is caught painfully by her seatbelt, which knocks the wind out of her and brings a dizziness and a darkness to the corners of her eyes.

  WHEN SHE COMES TO, IT takes her a moment to realize she’s even been out. She opens her eyes and the world is perpendicular, the horizon line cutting vertically through her line of sight. The static on the radio blares and beneath it she can hear the unsteady rumble of the van’s engine. She smells cold air and petrol. When she tries to move, her chest burns. She fingers the seatbelt, pressed so far into her chest and side it might as well be embedded, and she inches her hand along until she finds its clasp. She is about to release it when she realizes the belt is the only thing keeping her from falling into Jordan, and then she looks and sees that Jordan is no longer there to fall into.

  The passenger door is crumpled against the ground. Grass pokes through the broken window, the glass shards littered along the inside of the door and Jordan’s vacat
ed seat. Omalis shifts to look over her shoulder and sees that Jason is gone too, the sliding door on his side of the van partially open to the darkening sky. Then she hears it, the crying, which quickly melds into retching, and she cranes her neck over her other shoulder just in time to watch Jeremy vomit onto the cracked window next to his head.

  “Jeremy,” she says, but he doesn’t look at her. His book has fallen from his lap onto the door and his seatbelt keeps him fastened awkwardly to his seat, even as he pulls against it with his hands. “Jeremy,” she says again. “Don’t move, I’ll get you.”

  She says it to be comforting, to let him know she will help him, but it comes out sounding to her more like a threat. He just keeps on crying, mouth open and dripping, hands fidgeting.

  As quickly as she can, Omalis unfastens her seatbelt, holding the armrest so she won’t fall while she swings her legs down onto the passenger door, which has become the floor. She crouches through the space between the two front seats and kneels by Jeremy. She can smell his sick this close but she tries to ignore the sour sweetness of it as she touches his shoulder and says calm and soothing things to this weak and frightened young man.

  “Jeremy, Jeremy, please, listen to me, listen. You’re okay, you’re all right. I’m going to get you out of here, okay? Come on, hold onto me, Jeremy, hold on to my shoulders.”

  When she finally gets him to wrap his arms around her he latches onto her with an unexpected ferocity that pulls her hard against him. He tucks his head beneath her chin and cries unabashedly into her shoulder, gripping the back of her shirt so tightly she’ll be surprised if he doesn’t rip it. She releases his belt and pulls him free. She hoists him like the small child he hasn’t been for a long time out through the sliding door in what has become the roof, bends to retrieve his book, and then follows quickly after him.