The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  Cheerful thoughts, candyass, Maddy whispered, and Lily blinked. Ever since Dorian had rolled over the back wall into the garden, it seemed as though Maddy was everywhere, always ready to offer her opinion. But it was rarely anything that Lily wanted to hear.

  After church, Greg directed his driver, Phil, to take them to the club. Lunch at the club was a Sunday routine, but Lily wished she could beg off. The thought of their friends was almost unbearable today. Lily wanted to be back in the nursery with Dorian, trying to unravel the mystery of the better world.

  As they pulled out of the church parking lot, Greg pushed the button that raised the partition, blocking Phil out. Lily was alarmed to see his eyes bright with excitement.

  “I found a doctor.”

  “A doctor,” Lily repeated cautiously.

  “He’s not cheap, but he’s licensed, and he’s willing to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Plant you.”

  For a moment Lily had no idea what he was talking about. The word plant made her think of implants, and her mind went automatically to the tag in her shoulder. But no, Greg meant something else. A truly awful idea popped into Lily’s mind, and she shrank from it . . . but she also knew that it was exactly what Greg meant.

  “In vitro?”

  “Of course!” Greg took her hand, leaning forward. “Listen to this. The doctor says he can use my sperm, just stick it in another woman’s eggs. You have the baby and no one ever has to know.”

  Lily’s mind went blank. For a moment, she considered simply throwing open the car door, rolling out while it was still in motion and fleeing to . . . where?

  “What if it’s not my eggs that are the problem?”

  Greg’s brow furrowed, and his lower lip pushed out a fraction of an inch. He had expected his idea to be received with enthusiasm, Lily saw now, and the unadulterated contempt that had reared its head on the night of Dorian’s arrival (of the rape, Maddy reminded her) seemed to multiply and fester inside her. Greg thought that he had come up with a great idea, that having another woman’s eggs forcibly implanted inside her would seem like a godsend to Lily. And for the first time, it occurred to her to wonder whether Greg even understood that he had raped her. After Frewell, it was almost impossible to prove rape at all, and spousal rape hadn’t been prosecuted in years. What would consent even mean to Greg? The bulk of his sexual education seemed to have come from his father and his frat buddies, and none of them had done him any favors.

  Lily cleared her throat, dragging the words up as though with a chainfall. It would be so much easier not to say anything, but she had to know. “The other night—”

  “I’m sorry, Lil.” Greg took her hand, cutting her off. “I didn’t mean to take it all out on you. Even without the bombing, work has been so bad lately.”

  “You raped me.”

  Greg’s mouth popped open, an expression of such complete surprise overtaking his face that Lily realized she had been right: he didn’t know. She turned away, staring out the window. They were just passing through the great stone arch of the New Canaan Country Club, and beyond, the vast greens of the golf course stretched toward the near horizon. Greg cleared his throat, and Lily knew what was coming even before he spoke.

  “You’re my wife.”

  Before she knew what she was doing, she laughed. Greg’s face darkened, but he didn’t know that Lily wasn’t laughing at him, but at herself. Frewell’s bullshit had worked on her too, because until the other night she had honestly believed that marriage turned men into better people, better protectors. But marriage didn’t change anyone. Lily had married a man shaped by his father, the same father who had put a hand on Lily’s ass at the wedding rehearsal dinner and asked whether he could get an early slice of the cake. Was she actually surprised, now, that this was where they had ended up? Was she even allowed to complain?

  The tag, Lil, Maddy whispered, and she was right. The tag was the great equalizer. Lily couldn’t run, because no matter where she ran to, all the money in the world wouldn’t keep Greg from finding her there, and Security wouldn’t lift a finger to stop him from taking her back; they would fall all over themselves to assist one of their own.

  The car pulled up at the entryway, and Lily sensed Greg’s relief at the end to the conversation. Coldness had descended on Lily now, a state of nearly frozen calculation. For the first time, she saw that she might have even bigger problems than what had happened the other night. She knew the amount of professional grief Greg was enduring about being childless; it was certainly impeding his career. But she had underestimated how desperate Greg was, how far he was willing to go. They moved through the enormous marble entryway of the club, an edifice that Lily usually admired, but now she barely saw it, her mind continuing forward on its unpleasant track. In vitro fertilization had been illegal since Lily was in grade school, but it was a booming black market among wealthy couples, who saw additional children as an easy way to earn the Frewell tax breaks. If Greg had found an in vitro doctor, would that doctor be able to tell that Lily was on contraception? Was there a way to flush the hormones out of her system somehow? She couldn’t ask the Internet; that was the sort of search that got you a visit from Security.

  Why don’t you tell him you don’t want kids?

  But that was no longer possible, if it ever had been. She had told Greg so, in tiny ways, for years. It was nothing he was able to hear. And if the other night had proven anything, it was that what Lily wanted wasn’t worth a damn. She would have to find a way around the in vitro doctor, just as she had always circumvented the surveillance system in her house. But at the moment she could think of nothing. All of the years of her marriage, years she had spent scrambling, trying to escape this noose . . . and now it seemed to be drawing tight around her neck. Lily estimated that she had less than half an inch of space left.

  In the restaurant, the maître d’ led them toward their table, where Lily saw several of their friends, the Palmers and Keith Thompson, already seated. Lily didn’t enjoy the circle jerk that was lunch with Greg’s golf buddies and their wives, but their presence suddenly seemed like a godsend, infinitely better than sitting across from Greg alone. And Keith wasn’t too bad, definitely her favorite of Greg’s friends. He never leered or groped or shot veiled barbs about Lily’s failure to get pregnant. He was a hurried little man who’d risen to become president of his family’s grocery chain; his father was the chairman. At one of their dinner parties, Keith had wandered, extremely drunk, into the kitchen where Lily was organizing dessert, and they’d had a long talk, during which he confessed to Lily that he was simply waiting for his father to die. But he was only drinking water today, and his brittle smile telegraphed his displeasure at his lunch companions.

  “Mayhew!”

  Mark Palmer stood up and Lily saw that he was already drunk; his cheeks were rosy and he had to grab the edge of the table for balance. Michele, beside him, had her own buzz going; her eyes were dull and she merely nodded as Lily greeted her and took a chair. When Dow and Pfizer had merged, the resulting company had kept Mark and fired Michele, but Michele still had friends somewhere in the production line. She sold under-the-counter painkillers to half of New Canaan, and made a good profit. Lily’s body still ached whenever she sat down, and for a moment she considered doing a little business with Michele today, but then discarded the idea. She was hiding a terrorist in her nursery, and Greg wanted to haul her off to a back-alley doctor. Painkillers would make Lily as dull as Michele, who was her own best customer, and Lily couldn’t afford that. But they would still need to go off to the bathroom at some point, so that Lily could return Michele’s books and ask for more.

  Greg ordered whisky, shooting another resentful look at Lily as the waiter walked away. She had driven him to drink, that look said. There was no introspection in Greg’s gaze; the word rape seemed to have rolled off him like water. Lily suddenly remembered a day several years ago, a weekend in college when they had driven up the coastline, no
t going anywhere in particular, simply cruising, Lily with her right foot stuck out the passenger-side window and Greg with his left hand on her thigh. What had happened to those two kids? Where had they gone?

  Lunch was served, but Sarah and Ford did not appear, which was odd. They always lunched at the club on Sundays. Lily hadn’t seen them in church either.

  “Where’s Sarah?” she finally asked Michele.

  The table went quiet, and Lily realized that everyone knew something she didn’t. Michele gave her a discouraging shake of the head, and Mark quickly began to tell a story about some mix-up at work. A few minutes later Michele jerked her chin toward the lobby, and Lily stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  Greg had grabbed her wrist and was looking up at her with narrowed, suspicious eyes. Lily suddenly realized that she hated her husband, hated him more than she had ever hated anyone or anything in her entire life.

  “To the bathroom. With Michele.”

  Greg let go, giving her arm a small jerk as he did so, and Lily stumbled away from the table. Keith Thompson stared after her with concerned eyes, and Lily wished she could tell him that it was all right, but that seemed extremely optimistic.

  In the bathroom, Lily asked again, “What happened to Sarah?”

  Michele paused in the act of fixing her eyeliner. “It happened three days ago. How do you not know?”

  A fair question. There were no secrets in New Canaan; Lily usually knew the scandals of her neighbors before they even knew themselves. “I’ve been busy.”

  “With what?”

  “Nothing special. What happened?”

  “Sarah’s in custody.”

  “What for?”

  “She tried to take out her tag.”

  Lily said nothing for a moment, trying to connect this information with Sarah, who had once told Lily that her husband only used his fists because he cared so much. Of all of Lily’s friends, Sarah seemed the least likely to try something so drastic. “What happened?”

  “Don’t know.” Michele began to fix her lipliner. “She went at her own shoulder with a knife. Missed the tag, but she nearly bled to death. Ford turned her in.”

  Now that was in character. Once, on a family vacation, Ford had left Sarah at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. If Sarah hadn’t called him a few minutes later, he might have been all the way to Harrisburg before he noticed she was gone.

  “What’ll happen to her?”

  Michele shrugged, and Lily saw that Michele had already begun to forget about Sarah, to move on. This forgetting was something you learned to do when someone disappeared, the response so ingrained that it seemed like poor taste to do anything else. Lily had not been able to forget Maddy, but that was different. She bore fault.

  “I have your books.” Lily pulled them from her bag, but before she could hand them over, Michele reeled away, bent over and threw up into the sink. Even before she was finished, the sink’s cleaning mechanism began to wipe it away, making small, methodical sweeping sounds.

  “Are you all right?” Lily asked, but Michele waved her away. Her voice, when it came, was garbled.

  “I’m pregnant again.”

  “Congratulations,” Lily replied automatically. “Boy or girl?”

  Michele spat into the sink. “Boy, and a good thing too. If we had another girl, Mark wanted to have it taken care of.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t really care, either way.”

  Lily stared at her. Michele had never talked this way before, and although Lily could imagine that it was no picnic being Mark Palmer’s wife, she had always assumed that Michele was like the rest of her friends: happy to be a mother. Michele was always going to soccer games and bragging about her children’s grades. Lily tentatively offered her the books again, and Michele shoved them inside her enormous purse. The size of Michele’s handbags was a running joke among their group of friends, but she needed the space for all the contraband she had to transport around New Canaan. Michele did many of her dealings in this very bathroom, one of the few places in the city that had no surveillance camera.

  “What are you going to do?” Lily asked.

  “Have it. What else am I going to do? Mark’s already bragging to everyone at work.”

  “What about the painkillers?”

  Michele narrowed her eyes. “What about them?”

  Lily pursed her lips, feeling like the unpleasant chaperone at a party. “Aren’t they bad for the baby?”

  “Who cares? Eighty percent of upper-income mothers are on tranquilizers or painkillers, or both. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you didn’t. Drug companies don’t want that information made public. People might start asking why.” Michele fixed her with a disgusted stare. “And then there’s you. Never have to be pregnant, do you? Never have to be a mother.”

  Lily recoiled. She and Michele had never been good friends, but they had always gotten along . . . and now Lily realized how little that meant.

  “Mark laughs at you two all the time . . . Greg and his empty oven. But you’ll never have to have four screaming kids hanging off you, will you?”

  Lily backed up a step at the sight of Michele’s normally pretty face, contorted with hatred and—jealousy? Lily thought it was. But even as she backed away, she felt her temper rising. The picture Michele painted was the stereotype of a poor woman with too many mouths to feed. Lily had even seen the image on government posters whenever a social services bill was up in Congress. But Michele had two nannies to help raise her three children. Some of their friends even had three or four nannies. Michele spent perhaps an hour a day actually being a mother.

  Michele had taken out a bottle of pills now, and she swallowed two of them with ease. The digital cleaner had finished, and now the sink was as clean and gleaming as it had been when they came in. Michele splashed some water on her face and dried it with a towel. “We should go back out.”

  When they sat down at the table, Keith leaned over and asked Lily, “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, fixing a pleasant smile on her face. For the rest of the meal, she tried to keep her eyes off Michele, but she couldn’t help it. Were all of her friends so miserable on the inside? Sarah had answered that question. Jessa, maybe; her husband, Paul, was a decent enough guy until he drank. Christine? Lily didn’t know. Christine’s eyes had a constant, glazed shine that could be either drugs or religious fervor; Christine was the head of the Women’s Bible Circle at their church. Lily had never trusted any of her friends, but she had thought she knew them.

  Over lunch, Lily tried to talk to Keith, who asked after her mother and about her plans for the rest of the summer. But Greg was now staring at Keith as well, with the same narrow, suspicious stare. Lily had seen that look many times growing up, on their dog, Henry, who didn’t like to share his chew toys with anyone else. Here was the real pig in a poke: she didn’t belong to herself anymore. She was a doll, a doll that Greg had bought and paid for.

  There are ways around that, Maddy whispered, but it did nothing to alleviate Lily’s anxiety. Dr. Davis’s clinic was one thing, but finding a doctor who would perform an abortion . . . that was a whole different level of illegal. She suddenly remembered the heavily pregnant woman in the clinic, the one who had bled all over the chair. Was it possible that Dr. Davis performed abortions as well? Lily had never heard a whisper of that, but of course she wouldn’t have. That was something you didn’t tell anyone.

  Greg was staying at the club to play golf with Mark and a few of their other friends, so Lily went home alone, glad for the quiet emptiness of the backseat. After Phil dropped her off, she made Dorian some broth and took it to the nursery, along with a bottle of water. She had been afraid to feed Dorian anything but broth, chicken and beef, but if Dorian had grown tired of the selection, she didn’t say anything. When Lily entered the nursery, she found Dorian on the floor, stretching, reaching for her toes. Her shirt was soaked wi
th sweat. She must be getting better, to be able to stretch that way, but she still looked very pale.

  “Won’t you tear your stitches?” Lily asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dorian grunted. She had tied her blonde hair up into messy pigtails, and this made her look more like Maddy than ever. “Can’t afford to be laid up.”

  “I’m sure he’d rather you get well first.” Out of deference to Dorian, Lily didn’t use Tear’s name out loud. But she wondered: was the Englishman really so demanding that he would expect Dorian to be up and about two days after being shot? Or did she put this pressure on herself?

  “This is a nice nursery,” Dorian remarked. “But I don’t hear any kids running around.”

  A wild giggle popped from Lily’s mouth. “I don’t want kids.”

  “Me neither.”

  “No, I mean, I might want them. But not here.” She gestured toward the house around her. “Not like this. I take pills.”

  She had hoped to surprise Dorian, maybe impress her, but Dorian merely nodded and continued with her stretching.

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “God, no. I’m a dyke.”

  Lily recoiled, slightly shocked. “You have sex with women?”

  “Sure.”

  The nonchalance with which Dorian confessed this stunned Lily into silence. Openly confessing a crime to a stranger, especially a serious crime like homosexuality . . . that seemed like real freedom. She pointed to the scar on Dorian’s shoulder. “Was that from your tag?”

  “Yup. First thing we do is remove that little bastard.”

  “How?”

  “Can’t tell you,” Dorian replied, panting, as she reached for her toes. “Valuable information if you were ever taken into custody.”

  “I wouldn’t tell.”

  Dorian smiled grimly. “Everyone tells in the end.”

  “I mean I’m trustworthy.”

  “Trust me with a secret, then. Where do you hide your pills?”

  Lily showed Dorian the loose tile in the corner, the pile of contraband underneath.

  “It’s good, well camouflaged. How many hiding places do you have?”