Q

by Christina Dalcher

  None of what I discovered that night sounded appealing, let alone possible. Years later, when Joe and I went at it in the backseat of his Mustang, I discovered it was possible, and more than appealing, if I was with the right man. But the idea of Alex’s hands and mouth on me, the thought of him pushing into my body, takes me back to that age of sexual latency and fills me with dread.

  He offers me a drink when I step inside, a small crystal glass of neat Scotch. I’m thinking I might need a few of them.

  “So,” he says. “What shall we talk about?” Alex takes a seat on the sofa after inviting me to sit across from him in one of the Eames chairs.

  I take a sip of my drink and let it fill me with warmth. Direct is probably best now. “I want you to help me get home. With my daughter,” I say, crossing my legs, letting some skin show.

  His lips curl into a smile, but the smile doesn’t reach the other parts of his face. Cold, calculating eyes stare back at me, leveling themselves with mine. Not even a glance down to my legs.

  Forty is a strange age, a milestone. A time to sit down and think about life. Growing older never bothered me, and I always thought the few wisps of gray at my temples lent a scholarly sort of air. I dyed them, of course, at Malcolm’s suggestion. “It’ll take years off your life,” he said. About a thousand times.

  I still run and do the weights routine at my gym, I haven’t yet acquired that dreaded middle-aged band of fat around my waist, and whatever skin-care nonregimen I’ve been on for the past decade seems to be working. But forty hit me hard. It just didn’t hit me as hard as the realization that Alex doesn’t seem to give a shit about the only thing I have to offer him.

  “There’s a way out of here, Elena. If you want to take it.”

  “Tell me.”

  He leans back, letting the sofa receive him, folding his hands behind his head as if we were two people having a chat over drinks. Casual and carefree. “I need volunteers. For some tests I want to run. Tell me, and tell me the truth, because I can find out. Are you still menstruating?”

  I feel naked, exposed, the way I felt the first time I went in for a Pap smear, feet up in stirrups, the entirety of me opened up for a doctor to prod at. My voice is a hoarse whisper when I answer yes.

  “Regular?”

  “Yes.” I am, but I know one day I won’t be. I won’t bleed to the tune of a clock anymore. We tell our girls when they start their periods that they’re women. We say trite things like You’re a woman now. Does the converse also hold? At the other end, when nature stops us, do we become unwomen? Do we dry up when we cease being capable of breeding? I’ve always put this question off, and now I can’t put it off any longer. I know what Alex is asking, and what he is about to propose.

  “Good.” He reaches forward for a small book and leafs through it. “I can schedule this for later. Seven o’clock this evening.” It isn’t a question, only an order.

  “You’re one of them,” I say. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  The air in his apartment goes stale and cold.

  “We’re doing good work at the institute. Great work. Another twenty years and we won’t need the state schools anymore. Think about it, Elena. Think about a world where everyone is at the top. No more disease, no more social inequality, no more competition. We’ll be rid of the bad apples.”

  Bullshit, I think. “It’s the fish barrel problem again. Take out the old ones, and you still have the problem. Sameness is an illusion, Alex.”

  He waves a dismissive hand at me. “Malcolm was right about you.”

  “You talk to my husband about me?”

  “I talk to him about quite a few things. But yes. You’ve come up.” He stands, smooths out his trousers, and pours himself another drink. There’s no offer of a second for me. “I’d love to sit here and discuss your marital problems, Elena, but I have to call my wife.” He opens the door, waiting for me to go through it. “Seven tonight. Sharp. Meet me in the lobby. And I’ll arrange to fly you home immediately after.”

  He hasn’t mentioned Freddie. Not once.

  “What about my daughter? I’m not leaving here without her.”

  “You’re the first trial subject,” he says. “After a week, we’ll know more. And then we can make arrangements for your daughter.”

  Make arrangements for my daughter.

  I hesitate at the door.

  “Anything else?”

  “Only that you’re a monster.” And with that, I go.

  When I leave the way I came in, I think about how I came to Alex’s apartment expecting him to put something into me. I didn’t expect he would be taking something out.

  Sixty

  My flight is only hours from now, a direct hop from Kansas City to Washington Reagan. There will be two passengers: Alex Cartmill and me. The fare? Nothing.

  Well, that’s not true. This flight is going to cost me.

  Alex even arranged a surprise. I got to have an early dinner with Freddie. Just us, no one else, unless you count Alex himself, who made sure I kept the conversation to banalities. Dinner was easy. The goodbyes were not.

  “I’ll see you soon, baby girl,” I say, stroking her back, lulling her into a quiet place. “Very soon.” I didn’t know whether it was true, but I made it seem so, saying it over and over again until Freddie’s grip finally relaxed and we let each other go.

  The monster watched us with icy indifference.

  At six thirty, Lissa walks me through the workings of her pen. “Camera’s at the butt end. Click once to snap a picture, click twice to record. I’ve captured an image of the page we went over this afternoon. No sense trying to take a hard copy of anything with you,” she says. “And I recorded my article. It’s all on the drive. Micro-USB.”

  I’m half listening.

  “Elena.” Her voice is hard. “You need to get this to my contacts at the Washington Post. Bonita Hamilton, if you can. If not, ask for Jay Jackson. That’s it, get it? Those two and no one else. One or the other of them is always there. And, for chrissake, don’t lose this. It’s got everything on it.” She hugs me briskly and turns me over to Ruby Jo.

  “You sure you wanna do this?”

  “No,” I say, my cheek pressed against Ruby Jo’s. “But I have to.”

  She doesn’t ask me again.

  Sixty-One

  When the time comes, I walk through the doors of a building on the far side of the school grounds, accompanied by Alex. He smells of antiseptic instead of Scotch and expensive cologne, and he avoids looking directly at me.

  Inside a room that brings back uncomfortable gynecological visits, there’s another man waiting, a diminutive man in a white coat who instructs me to strip from the waist down and lie on the examining table.

  “There’s a paper sheet for you, ma’am,” he says, pointing to the table. “Just give us a shout when you’re ready.”

  I’m dumbstruck when they leave me. My limbs don’t want to work, refuse to perform the simple tasks of removing my shoes and slipping off my underwear. For several moments, I stand still in the center of this cold and bright room, wanting to run back out into the night. I don’t know where I would go, or how far I would get, but my feet want to run.

  A knock at the door startles me. “All set in there, Dr. Fairchild?”

  No, I’m not all set in here. I’m not all set anywhere. It takes me a moment to find my voice.

  “Just a minute,” I say. The words come out in a hoarse whisper, and I search the room for another door, a window, an air-conditioning vent. Any escape that will carry me out of this and back to the apartment with Lissa and Ruby Jo.

  How strangely one hell becomes a sort of heaven.

  Another knock, but this time the voice isn’t the pleasant little man in the white coat. It’s Alex informing me I have exactly one minute. One minute to decide whether to let this monster have his way with me.

  My hands move on their own, working one leg at a time out of jeans and a pair of silk panties I
bought to tempt Malcolm once, back when tempting him was still a thing I wanted to do. I clamber up on the examination table and unfold the sheet that will hide my lower half, both protecting me from being seen and protecting me from seeing. Every motion is automatic, dictated by some part of my brain that can only think in future images: Freddie on a table, Anne on a table. The woman I am tells me to run, but the mother inside me makes a different choice. The only choice, really.

  Maybe I say “I’m ready.” It’s possible I don’t, but the door opens all the same, and Alex walks in, followed by the much shorter, much less handsome man. They’re a striking contrast, one perfect silver school poster child and the other not.

  “You may feel some pressure,” the short man says as his hands disappear under the sheet and he begins prodding me with latex-covered hands. “Here’s the fundus,” he says. “Anteverted seventy to eighty percent. Ovaries appear normal.”

  While he fingers my flesh from inside and out, I get a close-up of the embroidered name on his lab coat. It reads Mender in light blue script. Nurse Mender. How fucking ironic can you get?

  A steel tray is on the table next to my elbow. On it is a pouch, one of those sterile tear-apart envelopes I’ve seen during doctor’s visits, the kind that hold specula and swab sticks, single-use paraphernalia. Alex snaps on a pair of latex gloves, tears the pouch with a practiced gesture he must have done a thousand times, and slides a foil packet of poison from it.

  The label says mepacrine hydrochloride. I know this is the International Nonproprietary Name for the same drug I found in Alex’s paperwork. What I don’t know is how I snap a picture of it on Lissa’s pen camera without being seen.

  I cough. “Could I have a glass of water before we start? Please?”

  Nurse Mender smiles at me. “Of course, dear.” And he leaves the room as Alex turns to his phone and I wiggle my right hand free of the paper sheet, holding my breath.

  Click.

  Alex’s head snaps up and the smile fades from his lips. “Problem?”

  “No. Just felt my arm falling asleep,” I say.

  Then his hand is on me, under the sheet, working its way up along the inside of my thigh.

  My eyes widen. “Stop.”

  He stops, but only to lock the door. When he comes back, he leans in, close, and I can smell the aftershave and pipe tobacco underneath a heavy layer of soap as he takes off his gloves. “Are you as cold a fish as Malcolm says you are?” One hand is back on my leg now, skin to skin, the other pushing me down into the examination table. “I’ll bet you aren’t.”

  The paper sheet crumples as I jerk myself to one side and swing my left hand out. Alex catches it in midair, as if my fist were a foam ball, not flesh and bone and nerve. It hurts. It hurts like hell. “Let me go.” Again, my voice is small, weak, thin. I try again, and Alex laughs.

  “I’ll let you go. All the way to Washington.” He releases my hand, goes to unlock the door, and turns to the sink to scrub. The water runs and runs and runs, and it seems like he’s trying to scrub me off of him. Then, with dry hands, he pulls on a fresh pair of latex gloves. “I could hurt you, you know,” he whispers in my ear at the same time he tears the wrapper off a plastic speculum. “I could puncture you or make your insides burn. I could do all kinds of things, and you wouldn’t even realize it until it was too late. I could make you disappear.”

  Disappear.

  It’s the right word. The word for what I’d like to do now if I had the power. All I can do is think about Rosaria Delgado and Joe’s baby and all the other ones I made disappear. And someone else. A memory I suppressed long ago.

  Nurse Mender is back and holds a paper cup of water to my lips. “There you go, dear,” he says. “Nice and slow. Small sips.” His hand is cool against my forehead, soothing. He takes it away after I drink and presses me back against the exam table, then tells me to scoot down a bit. My feet move into the stirrups without my help.

  “This should take less than a minute,” Alex says, pushing the speculum in, opening me up artificially.

  I lie still, and for the first time in my life, I allow my body to be violated. In a way, I deserve it.

  Sixty-Two

  THEN:

  I started hating Mary Ripley when I was in the twelfth grade, a few months after Mary transferred into the new private high school where I now found myself running with the in crowd of lipsticked and hair-sprayed girls I’d always thought I wanted to be a part of. Every day, I had to sit behind her in Mrs. Hill’s AP English class; every day, I had to watch flakes of dandruff fall from her scalp onto the same black pullover she wore.

  She was a thin, redheaded girl from the other side of town, not stupid, but not like the rest of us, just one of the half-dozen charity cases Rockville Academy took on each year. Mary brought her lunch in a crumpled paper bag, worn soft from folding and unfolding and refolding. Her shoes were scuffed and a size too small, so Mary would slip her heels out of them sometimes during class, revealing threadbare socks whose heels had been rubbed to translucency. But I didn’t hate her for being poor, or for being one of ten siblings.

  I hated Mary Ripley because she was going to drag me right back to the bottom of the barrel I’d tried so hard to climb out of.

  The girls I hung out with called her Scary Mary. They flinched away from her in crowded hallways, worried they might catch something; they huddled at cafeteria tables over bags of chips and hoagie sandwiches they bought with their allowances; they whispered epithets about her overbreeding Irish parents when they thought she couldn’t hear.

  “She’s not that bad,” I said that early November Tuesday at lunch. Three pairs of mascaraed eyes flashed at me.

  “Maybe you should take her to the homecoming dance instead of Malcolm if you like her so much, El,” Susan joked. She slid down into her chair. “Oh, God. Here she comes.”

  Mary was on her way over to us.

  “Hi, El,” she said, ignoring the rolling eyes of the other girls. “Maybe we could hang out on Saturday if you’re not doing anything.” Mary had a soft voice, the kind I associated with a dog that had been kicked one time too many.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s homecoming.”

  Susan tittered, elbowing first Becky to her right, then Nicole to her left. When Mary was gone, she said, “You have to get rid of her, El. I mean, people are staring at us.”

  On Wednesday, Mary bumped into me after gym class.

  One minute I was up, forcing a comb through a still-wet mass of hair, yelling to—I don’t know—Becky or Susan or Nicole across the room. Homecoming was this Saturday, and we were in full what are you wearing? mode, worrying over shoes (strappy or closed toe) and lipsticks (matte or gloss) and what color polish to put on our nails (French mani or classic vixen red).

  “I’m going for a Midnight Mauve lipstick this time,” Susan called out from under a towel.

  Nicole reached over and snapped the waistband of Susan’s panties. “Like that’s a surprise. They might as well call it Midnight Missionary Position. Or Midnight Billy Baxter’s Cock, since that’s where it’ll end up.”

  Susan came back with something equally catty, Nicole howled a laugh, and I started across the locker room to show off my latest makeup acquisition. That’s when Scary Mary, head bent in avoidance or supplication or self-loathing, walked into me.

  Give it up, Elena. You walked into her. You didn’t see her because she was invisible and you walked right into her.

  And we both went down in a tumble of towels and gym shorts.

  Nicole howled again. “Watch it, Len, or you’ll get those Catholic cooties on you.”

  I could have said something. Well, I could have said something other than what I said. I could have said anything besides what I said. I could have said something different from the last words I ever said to Scary Mary, words I haven’t dared let myself remember.

  Because, after all, Mary wasn’t as important as whether I’d be back at the bottom of the fish barrel.

&nb
sp; I think we all have a built-in defense mechanism, a protective shield that kicks in when we make stupid mistakes. Mine kicked in that morning like some fucking force field out of a bad science fiction movie, a gravitational pull that sucked me in and wouldn’t let go. I stood, leaving Mary bewildered and probably shattered forever on the tile floor, as if she had been some delicate crystal ornament teetering on the edge of a mantelpiece while spoiled children played around her, never caring what devastation a wild hand or a quick turn of the head might bring about. I stood and I walked away and I said to myself that I’d rather die than be her.

  All of this is true. Except I said something far worse. And I didn’t say it to myself.

  After that, Mary turned into a ghost of a girl, so none of us was surprised when Mary turned into exactly that.

  I don’t mean a real ghost—I don’t believe in that shit. But one day in early December, Mary stopped coming to school. The next week during assembly, we found out why.

  Someone said it was pneumonia. Someone else, cancer. Someone from the football team, coarse as always, spread around a story that Mary looked in the mirror one morning and died of fright. It being high school, all the someones went to her funeral—the principal handed out free passes.

  This is what I remember about that day:

  I sat in the back pew, all the way to the left, not really wanting to see Mary’s parents when they entered, definitely not wanting to approach the plain wooden coffin, slathered with varnish to make it look more expensive than it was. I studied my hands, the hymnal in the little rack, the kneeling bench that creaked when my foot absently rocked it up and down, up and down. I did everything I could to keep my mind off Mary’s body in that box as her five brothers carried it down the aisle, weeping like children.

  Word made its way around our town, speculations about how she did it, whether it happened quickly or slowly, who found the body and where they found it. Bathtub? Garage? Basement?

  By the spring term, when college acceptances began rolling in and the first daffodils replaced slush and snow, everyone had forgotten about the girl who wore the same moth-eaten sweater and the hand-me-down Thom McAns with soles as thin as early winter ice.