Q

by Christina Dalcher

  If I were dressed in anything but sweat-stained pajamas, I might venture it. But I’m not. One glance in the side mirror tells me I look like hell. Also, I don’t have shoes and I don’t have money. I don’t have anything I need, and there are so few good Samaritans to count on. The jogger to my right, ponytail swinging like a pendulum, is listening to music, puffing her way through another mile. A couple passing me does a double take before herding their children quickly away, the wife checking twice over her shoulder. Families cycle by lazily, trailing babies in covered Burleys, and the morning dog-park crowd congregates on a corner, engrossed in observing their pets’ antics and picking up their pets’ leavings, hurrying on after they get a good look at me.

  They aren’t used to seeing the imperfect, not here, not anymore.

  What I want most right now is a number. I’ve learned to hate numbers, but I want three digits plus three digits plus four digits. The public hot spot where I’m parked must be weak, not even one bar, so I drive the Acura up several blocks, stay long enough to find the Post’s confidential tips page, download the Signal app, and send a hopeless message asking for Bonita Hamilton or Jay Jackson. Then I cut off the Wi-Fi on Malcolm’s computer before he can track me, and I return to K Street.

  And I wait, curled up in the backseat, with the blanket that’s protected the trunk from plants and mulch and topsoil wrapped around me like a shroud.

  I dream about all the things. Freddie as a baby and a girl and a woman. Girls in blue skirts and white blouses, not knowing what they hate or why. Qs with their long, curly tentacles, reaching out for a new victim. I dream in the present and the future and the past, jumbled images of love and hate and peace and war. I dream of my body going quiet, resting. I am an object at rest.

  I don’t know how long I’ve waited. I don’t know whether I’ve slept or whether I’ve dreamed of sleep, and when the sound of an angry fist on the window over my head bangs again, I shrink, trying to become smaller, trying to become invisible.

  A voice, filtered and fuzzy, calls my name once, then speaks slowly.

  “I am Bonita Hamilton. You called me.”

  Go away.

  Mother Voice drowns me out. Even she sounds defeated right now, but she answers. Her fingers find the edges of the shroud and she unveils me. When I open my eyes, a face, framed by two hands to shield the sun, is pressed against the window.

  Seventy-Two

  Hospital.

  I hear the word “hospital.” It sounds like a place I’d like to go.

  But I have work to do first.

  Bonita has her phone in one hand, and my wrist in the other, the pressure of two fingers hard against my veins. I hear words, questions, a female voice counting. And another voice, maybe my own, saying laptop, password, pen, calling for Freddie. Someone asks me who the president is. I think I say Malcolm. Right now, I can’t think of anyone else who has that much power.

  I’m on a bed, or a sofa, a softness that I want to sink into and let absorb me. My limbs are so heavy, so tired, and there’s pain. Each move, even the smallest twist of my neck or the flex of my fingers as I point to the stolen laptop, requires superhuman force. I close my eyes to the lights above me, and even that hurts. It should not hurt to close my eyes.

  Someone says, “Four hundred photos. Jesus.”

  Someone says, “I can’t believe this shit.”

  Someone says, “Call the Kansas City office.”

  A hand rests on my cheek, cool and dry until it absorbs some of the heat I seem to be putting out. “Honey? You still with me? Elena? If you can hear me, I’m Bonita Hamilton, and that’s Jay Jackson over at the desk. I’ve called for help, and you’re going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Thank you,” I say, slurring the two syllables.

  “No, honey. Thank you.”

  And then all the someones, in a chorus, say, “Where’s the goddamned ambulance?”

  Mother Voice tells me it’s okay to go to sleep.

  Seventy-Three

  My mother is here. And other shapes. A bright light, blinding in its whiteness, shines into my right eye and then my left. I sense it without seeing it, that whiteness. It’s no more a thing than the needle under the skin of my right hand, or the bag of clear liquid hanging at the side of my bed. Light and steel and liquid have all melted together into a series of textures, all these objects trying to keep me alive.

  “Happy birthday, sweetie.” This is my mother. She can only be my mother, that much I know. Mothers seem to be there, always. The first and the last people you call for, from the beginning until the end. She lowers her voice, thinking I won’t be able to tell. “How much time do we have?”

  Another voice. “All you want.”

  And then a door shuts.

  Happy birthday. I’ve had forty-four of them, but these are the ones I remember.

  Oma, spry and sixty, holding me on her lap, helping me blow out the four candles on a chocolate cake.

  My father lifting me high, putting me on a horse twice as tall as I was at eight years old.

  Joe, sending me a box of carnations in my first year at college. The note said, Sorry I can’t afford roses.

  And, more recently, Anne and Freddie and Malcolm storming into my room the morning of my fortieth birthday with a tray of coffee, fruit chopped in chunks that looked like the pieces in a game of Tetris, and a single rose from the garden in a bud vase. Three voices, two high and one low, sang me awake. A good start to the day. Good starts set you up for a fall, though.

  Later that day, in class, I watched a few of the girls giggling over pictures on their phones. It hadn’t been that many years ago I was one of them, stealing Mom’s lipstick when I thought she wouldn’t notice, passing notes about the new boy in school—Do you like him? Do you think he likes me? The technology changed, but girls are girls, new women, life stretching out before them, futures unplanned and uncertain. What killed my birthday buzz was that old sonofabitch called time.

  I know I’m running out of it.

  The Mother Voice whispers one word.

  Wait.

  Seventy-Four

  From the Washington Post, Monday, November 11

  SILVER SCHOOL TEACHER BLOWS WHISTLE ON COVERT DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION PROGRAM

  by Bonita Hamilton

  In what may soon unravel as the scandal of the decade, Dr. Elena Fischer Fairchild, a life sciences teacher from the Davenport Silver School, has supplied heretofore unobtainable evidence concerning the DoE’s current practices. Photographs, voice recordings, and other documents point to a …

  Dr. Fairchild, the wife of Deputy Secretary Malcolm Fairchild, was taken to Sibley Hospital early yesterday afternoon and remains in critical condition. No comments have been made by her family or by the attending doctors, but …

  From CNN, Monday, November 11, 1:04 PM EST

  BREAKING: SECRETARY OF EDUCATION MADELEINE SINCLAIR RESPONDS TO OUTRAGE

  “I had no idea,” Secretary Sinclair said as she emerged from her offices earlier today. “This is a faction that has regretfully gone unnoticed, and on behalf of this department, I want to extend my gratitude to Dr. Fairchild for bringing it to light.” Sinclair, in her signature blue suit, has denied any knowledge of …

  From Twitter, Monday, November 11, 2:53 PM EST

  @Sec_Ed_Sinclair You stole my children and I hope you go to hell. #BringThemBack #NoMoreYellow

  From the New York Times, Tuesday, November 12

  LAST OF 46 YELLOW SCHOOLS RAIDED

  As the hashtag #BringThemBack, started by an actress-turned-activist, continues to trend in the social media sphere, an emergency team of federal authorities has announced the removal of over one hundred minors from a state boarding school in Winfield, Kansas. The late-nineteenth-century building and its grounds were once used as the site of the Kansas State Asylum for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecile Youth prior to changing its name to the State Training School in 1930. From 1998, the facility was used as a co
rrectional facility before being condemned. Roy Tolliver, who led the operation in Winfield, has released a statement attesting to the substandard conditions at the institution. Judith (Judy) Green and high school classmate Sabrina Fox both gave interviews. “It wasn’t a school,” Green says. “Maybe we got an hour or two of actual class time in the mornings. The rest of the day, we were in the cornfields.” Fox, who has been taking care of nine-year-old Frederica Fairchild (daughter of Deputy Secretary of Education Malcolm Fairchild) since her arrival last week, adds, “This little girl was picking corn. Can you believe it? Picking corn. Like we don’t have machines for that.” Fox holds up the girl’s wrist. “You don’t pick fast enough, they make you. They have guards, see, and …”

  From Forbes Online, Tuesday, November 12, 10:00 AM EST

  Spokespeople for the federal wonder-contractors Genics Institute, Inc., and its subsidiary WomanHealth, Inc., confirm that the companies will seek refuge under Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules. Earlier this year, Genics acquired the prenatal services company in what now appears to be a calculated effort to consolidate genetic testing and abortion services in accordance with the Fitter Family Campaign, a grassroots movement that many experts are now analogizing to the eugenics craze of the early twentieth century. Petra Peller, chairwoman and CEO of the Genics Institute, could not be reached for comment, but a source close to her says …

  From Sarah Green’s Facebook feed, Tuesday, November 12, 5:16 PM EST

  I’ve had death threats and hate mail. I want them to stop. I am no longer associated in any way with the Fitter Family Campaign. This will be my last post. Thank you for bringing my daughter home.

  From the Washington Post, Wednesday, November 13

  FAMILIES REUNITED—BUT AT WHAT COST?

  by Bonita Hamilton

  Sixteen-year-old Anne Fairchild should be planning for a homecoming dance this Saturday. Instead, she holds vigil in a hospital room while her mother lies in a critical state. “I knew something was wrong,” Fairchild says, wiping a tear from her eye. “So I installed a key tracker on my father’s laptop. When he found out, he sent me to Petra Peller’s house. All I wanted was to bring my mom and my sister back.” Also in the room is Anne’s great-grandmother, Maria Fischer. “I hope nothing like this happens again,” Fischer says. “But, of course, that is what we said the last time.” During this bittersweet family reunion, Fischer, who emigrated from Germany in her twenties and still works as an artist, explains …

  From CNN, Wednesday, November 13, 8:22 AM EST

  BREAKING: SECRETARY OF EDUCATION RESIGNS

  From Twitter, Wednesday, November 13, 8:23 AM EST

  Ding, dong, the bitch resigned! #BringThemBack #NoMoreYellow #NeverAgain

  Seventy-Five

  I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame, and I’ve slept through all of them. Dad reads me the headlines from three days, hitting all the high points, while Mom tries to get micro sips of water into my body. I don’t know what withering sounds like, but it’s how I feel—dry, weakened, cracking into parts.

  Oma’s got Freddie on her lap in the love seat near the window. She’s rocking her back and forth, singing lullabies in German. Freddie has tried to wriggle away a dozen times, but Oma holds her back. It’s been like this since my parents came in with both girls early this morning.

  “Let her come if she wants to,” I say.

  Freddie nearly flings herself on me, like she used to do as a toddler. Anne tries, and fails, to keep her off the bed. I used to push them away when they got too clingy, too needy, when I had paperwork sprawled over my lap and my patience had run out after a day of mothering. It wasn’t that I didn’t love them, but I could only love so much and for so long. Now, I wish I could love forever.

  I don’t push Freddie off the way I used to do. I hold her and rock her and smooth her hair with unsteady hands. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” I tell her, but it doesn’t seem like enough to make up for any of the past week, or for any of the past years.

  “You have the flu, Mommy?” she says.

  “Maybe just a little fever,” I lie. My body is a furnace. When it gets tired of being a furnace, it becomes an icebox.

  I wish for more time. I wish for a body that could hug back and walk out of this room. I wish I’d run screaming from Malcolm Fairchild twenty years ago and married a regular guy named Joe. I wish all these things, but the genie in the bottle is fresh out of wishes.

  Besides, without Malcolm there would be no Anne and no Freddie, and I don’t wish that.

  Freddie smooths my hair back with her small hand. “You’re going to get better soon, right?”

  “Sure, baby girl. Sure I am.”

  “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,” she whispers in my ear. “And I’ll make everyone perfect.”

  I smile at this, but it’s a thin line of a smile, forced and dry. “You can be anything you want.”

  “Promise?” Freddie says, still close.

  “Cross my heart.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s all, Frederica. Cross my heart.” I’m not interested in the second half of the promise.

  My mother locks eyes with me, then turns to the nurse who has just walked in to sponge me off and dab my lips with some oily substance that keeps them from cracking. She mouths a silent question to the woman. The woman mouths something back. It looks like “Soon.”

  “I want to go home,” I say.

  The nurse nods, understanding. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then, to Freddie: “How about we go get some hot cocoa? I’ve got the good kind, lots of marshmallows.” Freddie follows her out, one tiny hand holding on. I think this woman in white must be some kind of genius.

  I’ve never thought much about what my girls would do without me, where they would live, who would take the parent baton if I had to pass it along. Malcolm’s and my wills name my parents as guardians, but only in the far-fetched case of both of us dying at the same time. Malcolm, as far as I know, isn’t going to die, but I imagine the place he is going won’t be somewhere he can take his children. So, my parents. Tag. You’re it, Mom.

  Still, this reality is fresh. My mother’s eyes tell me so.

  Dad signs the papers while two orderlies work on shifting my body to a gurney, my temporary bed until I reach the one in my parents’ house, and then, later, a more permanent bed. My body feels light in their arms, ghost-like. The gown falls away, revealing skin stretched over bones. I think I hear my mother let out a horrified gasp.

  While I continue to be in this lucid state, various people visit. My doctor. A social worker. The representative from our local hospice. Papers get signed, and instructions are recited while another nurse disconnects me from the monitors. I feel naked without all that plastic. There’s no arguing about who rides in which car; Dad announces he’ll drive Oma and Freddie home while my mother and Anne ride along in the ambulance. No sirens this time, no need for them. Sirens are for situations that can be fixed.

  One final document needs my signature, and I scratch it out as if I’m signing a check, or the receipt for a delivery of groceries.

  This, I suppose, is the dull and dry business of dying.

  Seventy-Six

  SOON:

  Bright hospital lights and the constant bleep of the machinery that has been keeping me alive are gone. In their place, a white ceiling and the rustle of leaves outside my window keep me company while I dream.

  I can’t know what will happen in these next days and weeks and months, but I can speculate. My mind is still very much at work, even if my body has started to power down.

  Madeleine Sinclair, convicted of multiple charges of misappropriation of funds, perjury, fraud, and every other type of political death sentence, will trade her tailored blue suit for a new look: institutional gray, which is a perfect match for the one Malcolm will be wearing when my father takes the girls to see him on visiting days. The Genics Institute’s stockholders will be left with worthless paper, and Petra Peller—according to the
rumors—will attempt to leave the country with whatever remains in the coffers. I think she’ll get caught at the border.

  Handsome Alex Cartmill, convicted of the kinds of crimes for which there is no excuse, will take the most sensible way out. A suicide befitting a war criminal—likely a steel barrel in the mouth. No one will care when the note he leaves claims he was only following orders. He actually calls my parents to say he’s sorry before he eats the gun. I hear Dad swearing in German at him.

  Martha Underwood, and others like her, will be reunited with her boy, forgiven when she says she was only doing what she was told. The forgiveness will be official only. Martha will find this out on trips to Safeway when she feels the stares of fathers and when she hears mothers whisper. She’ll move to a new state before long.

  I think it will be a good Thanksgiving, and the weeks before Christmas promise to be even better. My parents will have a full house again, both the old and the young to take care of. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, they’ll have a ton to be thankful for. On her tenth birthday, which happens to fall on the same date as the demolition of five buildings formerly known as Kansas State School 46, Freddie will celebrate by wearing her Wonder Woman costume for a solid week. She’ll stop taking her anti-anxiety meds at the same time, and nothing horrible will happen. Anne will meet a boy, a nice boy, who will take her to the winter dance. She won’t get as far as asking him what his Q was, but she’ll probably let him get to first base. The papers will report a rash of divorces, of which I would have been a happy statistic. Everything will be different, and I love it this way.