Q

by Christina Dalcher

  “See what I mean?” says Malcolm.

  When Freddie was five, I thought she was on the autism spectrum, maybe far off to one side of it but still on the spectrum. She simply wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t focusing. Several hours of testing and consulting, and several hundreds of dollars later, our pediatrician shook her head.

  “Asperger’s?” I asked.

  “That’s still on the spectrum, so I don’t think so,” she told me. “I’d be pushing the envelope with that diagnosis.”

  “Then what’s wrong with her?” I asked. Even now, I want to bite my tongue when I hear myself saying it. Wrong. Like my daughter is some broken mechanism that needs to be fixed.

  Dr. Nguyen laughed, not unkindly, and glanced toward the kids’ play area, where Freddie was building a tower of blocks. “Nothing’s wrong. Freddie’s a little anxious, that’s all. She’ll grow out of it.”

  “Am I—are we—supposed to do anything? I mean, sometimes she curls up and blocks the world out,” I said. “Plus, she repeats things. Like an echo.”

  Again, the doctor chuckled. “What do you want to do? Treat her like glass?” She put a hand on my arm. “Treat her like a little girl. That’s what she is. Maybe a bit nervous.” She scribbled an illegible prescription on the pad from her desk. “We’ll try a low dose of Paxil for now. It’s a serotonin reuptake inhibitor.”

  I knew what that was, and I didn’t like the sound of it. “You think she’s depressed?”

  “No. No, I don’t. I think Freddie worries more than some children her age. And the worry means her head is full, and a full head means she has trouble paying attention. We’re going to target the worry, not the attention-paying, okay?” Dr. Nguyen looked at her watch, and I knew it was time to go.

  Now, in the car, I turn to Malcolm. “What if she just needs a higher dose of meds? Can we try that? Can’t you get some sort of—I don’t know—stay or whatever you call it? Get her retested next month.” Even as I said the words, I knew this scheme would never work. It didn’t matter whether Malcolm agreed or not. If Freddie felt the pressure of another testing day in four weeks’ time, who knows what kind of meltdown would ensue? Also, I hate the desperation in my voice. The begging. “Never mind.”

  Besides, I want to steer the conversation away from tests before another fight happens. Freddie’s been holding her head above water, barely, but always able to keep her Q score hovering around 8.3. Of course, Malcolm doesn’t know about the hours I spend with her at my parents’ house before the exams, doesn’t know about the extra dose of selective serotonin reuptake-whatevers I dose Freddie with. It’s better for all of us if the word “test” is absent from our conversations.

  I come back to my grandmother’s question. “What if I asked for a transfer?”

  Malcolm’s knuckles relax somewhat as he turns the car into our driveway. My tone must have done it; he must think all the anger has drained out of me because he’s doing that thing with his palm flat on the steering wheel. This is Relaxed Malcolm. Not someone I see much of. It makes me wonder how much he and Freddie have in common.

  “Transfer where? You don’t like the Davenport School anymore?” He kills the engine and gets out, not bothering to come around to the side door. “There’s another silver school, but it’s farther away. It would double your commute.”

  “I was thinking about one of the green schools. Or even a state school.” I untangle Freddie’s coat from the seat belt and let her run off by herself to the back door.

  Malcolm only stares at me.

  “Well?”

  “Out of the question, Elena.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing, Anne and I need you at home. Which is the only reason I’m letting you off the hook for that scene you pulled earlier.” He touches a finger to his face casually, as if I’d thwacked him with a kid glove instead of laying on my left hook. “And then there’s the other issue.”

  I already know what the other issue is. The Other Issue, if I say the words the way Malcolm pronounces them. The Other Issue is that if I left, I’d be in the same position as Moira Campbell down the street. Malcolm’s protected from the gray women with the clipboards, the ones who troll neighborhoods in search of “unfit” families. He pulls enough in annually that he’ll be able to keep custody of Anne and Freddie. I don’t.

  As usual, justice boils down to how high you can keep your Q rating.

  As usual, your Q depends on how quickly you’ve climbed aboard the commonsense train.

  Twenty-One

  Instead of sharing Malcolm’s bed tonight, I share Freddie’s again. It’s a twin, and I have to curl my arms and legs around her so we both fit. The result is something womb-like, me wrapping myself around my daughter’s thin frame as if I could draw her back inside me and shut out the world. As if I could unweave reality one strand at a time and turn it into a prettier tapestry.

  She stirs and snuggles closer. Maybe Freddie’s trying to crawl back inside, too.

  Then, out of the blue, a question. “Do you love Daddy?”

  I can’t lie. And I can’t tell her how things really are. So I dodge. “I did once.”

  “But not anymore.”

  Out of the mouths of babes come brutally honest truths.

  Before I can answer, Freddie asks another question. “Why did you love him?”

  The bedtime story I could tell her would start like this: Once upon a time, Elena was a stupid little shit. I could tell her about the games Malcolm and I used to play when we were a shade past Freddie’s own age, how we tore the school population into good, better, and best with our silly colored-card idea.

  Guilt has a foul taste to it. A sewer-like taste, black and rotten, rises in the back of my throat.

  Freddie’s voice, small as it is, snaps me back to the now. “Maybe you’ll stop loving me, too.”

  “No, honey. Never.”

  She drifts off to sleep, that glorious place of escape where nothing can hurt us. I stay awake and stare at the darkness over me, tossing her nonquestion around for hours. At midnight, I’ve had enough, and I go upstairs to my office.

  The first search string I type in returns pages and pages on the Bund Deutscher Mädel. There’s a second part to the name, and I don’t need Google to translate it for me.

  In der Hitler Jugend.

  My grandmother was a Hitler Youth girl.

  I click on images, and within seconds copies of Oma’s uniform flash up on the monitor. Inside the uniforms are girls, blond and fit and beautiful, smiling broadly at the camera. There are photos of girls marching, skipping rope, running across sandy beaches. There are photos of girls lined up like soldiers, heads held high as if they are looking into their own futures.

  There are photos of girls with their right arms raised in salute.

  Oh, Oma, I think. Did you know? Did you know where it would all end up?

  These are pictures I don’t want to look at, but like the gory scenes in a horror film, I can’t help but stare at one after the other, sifting through slideshows in archive sites, wondering if one of the blondes is named Maria, if one of them had a childhood friend named Miriam. I’m so lost in thought I don’t even hear him behind me.

  “What are you doing, Elena?”

  Malcolm is in the doorway, just two steps away. I close the browser windows quickly, but it’s too late. I should have been facing the door, should have pulled up school reports or grading spreadsheets or solitaire. Anything but this blank laptop that reveals I have no answer to his question other than the truth.

  So I say nothing.

  I expect him to lecture me, tell me my grandmother is filling my head with propaganda and sensationalism, but Malcolm acts as if I’ve done nothing wrong.

  “Come to bed. I’m having breakfast with Alex tomorrow, and you’re joining us,” he says.

  “I’d really rather spend the day with Freddie, I think.”

  He smiles. “You can do that. After breakfast. We’ll be back by ten.”
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br />   I hate Malcolm’s tennis pro/doctor friend Alex. He’s smarmy, and he looks at me as if I’m something to eat whenever he’s at our house.

  “I don’t want to,” I say, trying to think of an excuse.

  A firm hand grips my shoulder. “I don’t care. You’re coming to breakfast, and we’re spending the day together. All of it.” He pauses, and his smile turns sour. “I can divorce you like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. The sound in the sparsely furnished office is crisp and clean, a breaking sound. He doesn’t need to spell out the rest, mention the words “sole custody” or “demotion.” With his left hand still on my shoulder, Malcolm reaches around and shuts down my computer. End of discussion.

  It’s two in the morning when we pass Anne’s and Freddie’s bedrooms on the way to our own. Behind each closed door, there is crying.

  Twenty-Two

  I don’t know where the weekend went.

  They say time is constant, steady, always moving at the same pace. But that’s a bald lie. Any child knows time slows down in the days before Christmas; any bride knows time speeds up during a wedding reception. And any mother knows time flies in the years after she gives birth. Eight pounds become forty pounds become a hundred pounds. If they could just stay little till their Carter’s wear out, like the jingle sang.

  Freddie’s suitcase is light for me, but her muscles strain when she tries to pick it up.

  “Roll it, sweetie,” I tell her and pop up the extension handle. The sound of wheels as she pulls it across a bare patch of hardwood floor is like thunder.

  Anne takes over, showing her younger sister how to roll the suitcase. Her iPad has been off since Saturday, and I haven’t heard a word about which boy has which Q, or the homecoming dance. Or really anything at all. She’s stayed glued to her sister all weekend, which somehow makes everything worse.

  Malcolm, who’s made the generous paternal gesture of going into work late on Monday morning, gives Freddie a hug and pats her head. “Be a good girl, now, and study hard. We’ll come visit at Christmas, okay?”

  The way he puts it, anyone would think we were packing off our youngest daughter to an elite Swiss boarding school.

  “Okay, Dad,” Freddie says. Her eyes don’t match the stiff smile she’s plastered on. They’re wide, like the eyes of a frightened dog.

  My hall clock chimes its six thirty bells at the same time as Anne’s iPad and the alarm clock in the kitchen ping their own warnings. Reluctantly, Anne shoulders her backpack and goes to the front door. She’ll come home to a family of three this afternoon, and she knows it.

  “I feel sick today,” Anne says. The silver bus outside idles, and the fembot voice calls out in her machine voice, Davenport Silver School students, this is your final call. Davenport Silver School bus is ready to depart. Final call for Davenport Silver School.

  “Anne,” Malcolm says, and that one word pushes my older daughter outside.

  Now we wait. The green bus rolls up to the end of the street as Freddie watches through the window, silent. And we wait some more.

  “Time to go, Freddie,” I say, and we walk out the front door together, Freddie hunched and focused on each mortar line between the bricks of the path leading from our house.

  The scared girl, the one Anne said was fine a few days ago but who looks anything but fine today, leans against a car, arms folded and head down. No crimson pleated skirt and jacket today, no backpack bursting with books. An olive green soft-sided suitcase sits on the sidewalk next to her. Sabrina.

  Whoever drove the girl today waits in the car, a steel gray SUV, new-model Lexus. I think it’s a woman from the size of the shape, but it’s hard to tell because that shape is hunched over, head bent onto the steering wheel, shoulders moving in a jagged rhythm. Sabrina stares down at the sidewalk, a yellow card clenched in her fist.

  They get them out right away, those yellow cards. Freddie’s arrived yesterday by courier in a padded manila envelope addressed to the Fairchild Household. In the upper left corner was the sunshiny emblem of the Fitter Family Campaign, a silhouette of three figures with something that looked like a halo around the smallest figure’s head. To me, it was more like a crown of thorns.

  Another thing I know about Sabrina: She’s gone from a silver school to a state school without passing through green. Kind of like getting booted out of heaven and finding yourself tumbling all the way down to the eternal inferno, skipping through the slight hope of purgatory. As Judy Green did last week.

  This new and sudden shift in the way things work makes me more uneasy. We have rules, systems, well-oiled machinery that, even if some of us hate the product, at least we know what the machine spits out, when and where the widget drops onto the production line. Yellow buses make their rounds once a month, always on the Monday after testing day. Silver school kids who fail bump down to green schools. This is how the machine works.

  The machine didn’t always function this way. All buses were the same color. All children went to the same schools. People went to graduate school and studied what they wanted instead of what they were told was necessary for the greater good.

  Before I let Malcolm persuade me to switch to the more lucrative field of life science, I sampled everything college offered. Philosophy, literature, classics. There was a poster in my Latin class of an elephant who had just taken a dump with Stercus Accidit! at the bottom in bright yellow letters—the professor’s idea of a Latin joke. But now that I think of that poster, I realize the image was completely wrong. Shit doesn’t happen all at once; no invisible elephant unloads a pile right where you’re about to step. What happens is this: Some bunny rabbit lets a little pellet drop. Then another one. Then another. You don’t worry much because the bunny’s cute and the pellets are small, easily brushed away.

  Stercus accidit. A little bit at a time. Usually while we’re not paying attention. Like my mother’s story about the frog in the boiling pot.

  “Hi,” Freddie says as we approach the waiting car.

  “Hi,” says Sabrina.

  And now we wait again.

  Behind us, Mrs. Delacroix’s curtains shift slightly to the left as she sets herself up to watch the morning’s events. In the houses on either side of hers, things are less subtle. Blinds roll up with an audible snap. Mrs. Morris pretends to be dusting a windowsill. Mrs. Callahan sprays Windex on the same pane five times, rubbing at squeaky-clean glass with a new paper towel after each squirt. Every one of them joined Sarah Green’s social engineering campaign some years back.

  Enjoy the show, ladies. Fuckwits.

  Freddie takes out her phone and starts tapping chickens across traffic-filled roads, her way of escaping into another reality. I let her play—anything to prevent one of her meltdowns. Sabrina continues staring at the sidewalk as if it were a work of art. The figure in the SUV’s driver’s seat steps out, lights a cigarette (it takes her three tries before she finally makes the flame meet the end of it), and looks at me hard.

  “You’re that Fairchild asshole’s wife, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” I don’t add, For the time being.

  Sabrina’s mother draws heavily on her smoke, exhaling in my face. “That’s for him, bless his heart.”

  You have to grow up in the south, or at least spend time there, to get the fact that “bless your heart” isn’t exactly a polite way of wishing someone well. Quite the opposite, actually. I wave a cloud of smoke away and stand next to Freddie as the yellow bus rumbles around the corner. More indistinguishable shapes of various sizes press against the windows.

  “Get back in the car, Sabrina,” Mrs. Sabrina says. “We’re going home. And I don’t care what happens to your brothers’ Q scores. We’ll move. We’ll go somewhere sane.” She says this last bit with her eyes on me.

  Sabrina only stands there, looking down. She shakes her head once, then twice. “I have to go, Mom.”

  “No. You. Don’t.”

  “You don’t understand. I do have to.”

  “Eno
ugh. Come on, girl,” Mrs. Sabrina says, pushing her daughter inside and pulling her seat belt on before running around the front and getting in herself. The engine purrs to life.

  There’s an elementary physics lesson; I know of it from proctoring years of tests. The idea is this: To effect change, you require force. And force is exactly what comes pouring out of the Lexus as Sabrina tumbles out of the car, shouting at her mother to go away as the yellow bus blasts its first sharp honk into the neighborhood.

  What happens next happens fast. Sabrina running to where her suitcase sits on the sidewalk. Mrs. Sabrina stalling the Lexus’s engine as she tries to reverse. Sabrina scrambling toward the yawning door of the yellow bus, stumbling. Mrs. Sabrina leaving the car, careering blindly in the direction of her daughter, grasping for purchase on Sabrina’s jacket and coming away with fistfuls of air.

  It’s as if the girl wants to go.

  For a ridiculous moment, I’m thinking of that old movie with the Child Catcher, wondering why anyone would want to board his horrible little wagon with its iron bars while desperate mothers are screaming in the streets.

  Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Morris and Mrs. Callahan are still at their windows, watching. I yell at them to mind their own business, and there’s a clattering of window blinds as, one by one, the women roll them down. There’s something in the sound of those blinds being released from their prisons with the flick of a finger. Something that sounds like a collective sigh of apathy.

  Suddenly I’m back in another school board meeting with Malcolm, six-year-old Anne at home with the babysitter, listening to the questions and complaints coming from the audience of concerned parents, tired teachers, and frustrated community ombudsmen led by Sarah Green from up the street.

  My kid’s teacher spends more time on the ones who can’t read.

  I can’t do another round of summer school this year. I just can’t.

  Do we really have room in the budget for more sign language interpreters and ESL specialists?

  And, finally:

  Can’t we just put them somewhere else?