I love that Lissa and Ruby Jo will both return to teaching and found a different kind of school, the one I’ll insist shouldn’t be called Fairchild Academy but the New School. Simple is better, I’ll tell them, even if I have to make the funding conditional and tell them that in legalese.
The hashtags #NeverAgain and #NoMoreYellow will do what all hashtags do. They will trend, and then not trend, and then be replaced by other, more timely hashtags. Anne will keep them pinned on her social pages, though. She’s set on taking a journalism course next year, and Bonita Hamilton is going to offer her an internship. I think maybe Columbia University is where Anne will end up. Unless she turns to hacking and cryptography. Who knows?
And Oma, my lovely Oma, will still paint. She might switch from fences to doors, but they will still be strange, abstract things that ask more questions than they give answers.
Seventy-Seven
My parents run in a constant upstairs and downstairs routine, checking on me with blood pressure cuffs and thermometers, bringing me blankets or ice water, depending on my state. One afternoon, Oma comes in.
“You haven’t been sleeping.” She fixes the covers I’ve thrown off, pulling them up to my chin and tucking them in between the mattress and the box spring. “Were you cold again, Leni?”
I nod. Dad brought up the portable oil heaters and put one on either side of the bed. He’s fit for a sixty-five-year-old man, but his shoulders don’t square themselves on their own. If he’s not thinking about it, they curve down in two sad arcs. He doesn’t realize I notice, but I do.
Oma sits beside me on the bed and reads the cards that arrived in today’s mail. “I didn’t know there were this many people in the world, Leni.” When she gets to one from Ruby Jo, I ask her to read it again. The words say something about the most amazing woman ever. Funny, I don’t feel so amazing right now.
Then Oma gets to the point.
“Do you remember the time I struck you? When you were in high school?”
“Barely,” I lie.
“I have never forgiven myself for that,” she says, choking back the words. “It was a cruel thing.”
I reach out to take her free hand, and she squeezes mine gently.
She continues, “It was cruel, but that is not the point. I struck you because that day when you came home and told me about your school friend, that Irish girl from the poor family, I did not see you. I saw me.”
“I really don’t remember, Oma.”
But I do.
She pats my hand now and holds the cup of water to my lips. After two sips, I lie back, exhausted from the effort. I think she stays with me while I sleep; I don’t know, but I hear myself saying I forgive her. Oma’s slap might have been cruel, but what I did and said that day was worse.
While I’m out, I’m seventeen again. I’ve showered the sweat of three volleyball matches off me, combed through my hair, and taken my usual place on the locker room benches. I’m thinking of Malcolm and homecoming, of what color I’ll paint my nails, of whether I’ll wear strappy silver sandals or black patent pumps next Saturday night. Becky and Nicole are mercilessly teasing Susan about her date, about whether she’ll go all the way, whether Billy Baxter or whoever is Susan’s flavor of the month will finally score a home run.
Another Wednesday afternoon, another post-gym-class chin-wag among us girls before we head off to biology, English, trig.
It’s the Wednesday when Mary Ripley bumps into me.
And I don’t want to be here, but I am. I need to be.
We teased Mary differently than we teased Susan. Susan was a friend; our words made her laugh, and we laughed along with her. Mary, though, Mary we ripped into, digging for the bone and sinew and nerve, finding the tender spots that would sing with pain when we touched them with our stupid adolescent tongues. We did it because we could, because it was funny as hell, because Mary wasn’t worth a second thought. Or a first thought.
Nothing happens when Mary walks into me (you walked into her, El), nothing more catastrophic than a few wrinkled pages of geometry notes when I knock them off the bench, a tube of Soft Sienna lipstick tumbling to the floor and rolling until inertia forces it to stop somewhere in the middle of the room. It’s a bump. An accident. It isn’t North Korea deciding to go nuclear on its southern neighbor.
And still, I open my mouth.
Language plays little tricks on you. Our words don’t mean what we think they mean. An “I love you” is an all-purpose response to the friend who lends you her scarlet sandals; an “I hate you” works just as well when she aces her physics final without studying. We go to extremes to make a point.
I’m on the floor of the locker room, picking myself up, collecting spilled purse contents, and rubbing my elbow where it hit the edge of the bench. And I look up at Mary Ripley while she blubs a weak apology and offers a hand to help me up. I swat her hand away. And I speak.
“You’re too stupid to live,” I say.
There. I’ve remembered.
Seventy-Eight
It might be night. Or it might be day. I might be awake or asleep. Opening my eyes is the hardest work I’ve ever done; they want to stay closed. They demand darkness.
Freddie is here; I can smell her soap, and her bubble gum–mint toothpaste, and the No More Tears stuff I’ve put in her hair—although not lately. So maybe this is morning. I want to tell her to draw me a picture, to make my old studio her own, but my mouth seems to be stuck together. I can feel my tongue moving, forming the sounds of words, but the sounds hit a barrier and stay locked inside. Trapped.
A quiet, familiar voice takes the place of hers, one I haven’t heard in twenty years. “I saw the papers and flew in late last night,” the familiar voice says. His words are far away at first, then closer as a chair scrapes over the floor and a hand wraps itself around my own. “Got my own plane and license now, El. How about we go for a ride?”
Sure, I think. Up, up, and away. So Joe traded cars for airplanes. He always was good with machines, but I don’t think he’ll be able to fix the one lying in this bed. This one’s what we call totaled.
Mom comes in next, followed by Dad and Oma. Anne, who has been with me all night, squeezes over to make room, and my mother perches on the edge of the narrow bed. She takes my other hand, and she turns her back to me, as if this were enough to fool me into thinking she isn’t crying.
“Elena,” she says.
The hand holding mine is cool, but the contrast lasts no more than a moment. Soon, my heat transfers to her. There’s a law about this, about energy not dissipating, only being transferable from one entity to another. In the darkness of this hellish sweat I imagine some part of myself leaving, moving along, changing form.
Voices talk around me and over me.
Is she …?
Can they …?
Did the doctor …?
How long will …?
I close my eyes.
A door swings open. Two doors, actually. One of them is in my room. The other, the one I see but don’t hear, leads somewhere else. Beyond it, there are pictures.
In my dreams beyond that open door, I’m teaching high school art instead of biology. I’m married to a man who loves when I wear red lace to bed as much as he loves everything else about me. I’m pushing swings in playgrounds and taking the kids out of school on sunny days—to hell with rules. Someone like Ruby Jo would call me happier than a pig in shit.
The hospice nurse puts something on my arm, a balloon that inflates. I think of the Child Catcher from that old movie, the one with the pretty balloons and the too-sweet smile.
My nurse says words that sound like “shock” and “immeasurable.” And there is another sound, a chorus of weeping.
But I don’t weep. When my eyes flick open again, there’s that door, yawning its welcome. In five steps, I’m there. My pulse stops racing and I’m out of the heat, into a place of cool and calm. I look back once before the door closes, and I see all their faces. I see my parent
s bringing the girls to visit me on Sundays, Oma teaching Freddie how to mix colors, and Joe speaking quietly to my daughters, telling them he’ll take them up in the plane as soon as he can—if Freddie’s okay with that. She says she isn’t nervous at all. Freddie and Joe’s twins act like siblings, even though they’re not. Anne has decided to change tracks, to go into teaching instead of journalism, but she’ll change her mind again at least five times.
There are other faces, too, clear at first, then quickly dissolving and fading. One by one, the ghosts of Mary Ripley and Rosaria Delgado and that old trickster the Child Catcher drift away until they’re all gone.
My last thought is about the letter Q. It doesn’t stand for quotient or question.
It stands for quiet, and that brings a smile to my face.
Author’s Notes
This book is a work of fiction. The characters are wholly a product of my imagination. The historical events mentioned in the preceding pages, however, are very real.
I haven’t sat in a history class for several decades, but I remember the material. I can tell you about who invented barbed wire and the cotton gin, the assassination that catalyzed World War I, and the details of the first televised presidential debate. None of my textbooks included a word on the American eugenics movement, on the practice of forcibly sterilizing men and women, or on the harsh realities of state institutions for the so-called feebleminded (many of whose inmates were children).
If the references in this novel disturb you, then I have done my job. Because these events are disturbing. For a deeper understanding of how we, as a nation, came to sanction the labeling and mistreatment of tens of thousands of individuals, I encourage you to look at various eugenics archives, which are widely available on the Internet. For an enlightening account of the state school system, I highly recommend Michael D’Antonio’s excellent The State Boys Rebellion.
Patriotism does not require turning a blind eye to the darker chapters of our country’s history; if anything, the opposite.
Christina Dalcher
October 2019
Acknowledgments
Of the hundreds of pages in this book, this is the most important. It’s also the hardest to write because finding the right words to thank the legions of people who took this project from concept to shelf-ready isn’t easy. That’s a hell of a place for a writer to be, so I’ll invite you to insert as many superlatives and qualifiers as you can conjure in front of my expressions of gratitude.
Thanks to:
Literary agent extraordinaire Laura Bradford for her constant support, hand-holding, and words of reassurance. Laura, you’re the best.
My US editor, Cindy Hwang, who gently told me the book could be better—and helped me make it so.
Charlotte Mursell, my editor across the pond, for her unlimited enthusiasm.
First readers and critique partners and sob sisters Stephanie Hutton, Sophie van Llewyn, and Kayla Pongrac. It’s a privilege to count these ladies as friends. Also, they rock the hell out of the writing world.
#TeamDarkness in the Twittersphere (including a certain doughnut-eating rat bastard named Aeryn Rudel) for setting the bar high and then raising it higher.
The publicists and the graphic designers and the copy editors and everyone else who works hard to make a book happen.
Michael D’Antonio for his helpful correspondence and sharing of data. The book you are about to read would not exist if I hadn’t come across Michael’s excellent The State Boys Rebellion. You can thank him yourself by picking up a copy.
And my husband, Bruce Dalcher, who reads everything with a sharp eye and responds with an honest tongue. Everyone deserves a partner like him. I hope I do.
About the Publisher
Australia
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United Kingdom
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United States
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