Shouldn’t the Inspectors have been able to see that J had read more than he said he did? Shouldn’t D.A.D. have seen it? What did spoiled rotten mean, then, if they couldn’t?
J took the hall back to his bedroom. He lay down and tried to sleep, even succeeded for ten minutes. He was emotionally exhausted from the day. He did not dream, though Q once said that everybody dreams and sometimes they just don’t remember them. Q bled today. Outside J’s bedroom window, the wind sighed, then sobbed; the icy branches of the pines crackled. The ice sculptures in the Yard creaked as they were tested.
It sounded like music down there. A very cold song. Possibly one Warren Bratt would’ve known how to describe.
J got out of bed again, feeling more than a little crazed. More than a little afraid.
The carpet was warm against his feet, contrasting with the world outside his window. In the bathroom it was even warmer, the space being smaller than his bedroom. J basked in the heat rising from the vent. He thought of a person seated at a bar in Milwaukee. Thought of a man named Robert needing to confess something to that person.
Her.
Nonsense. Made-up words.
The relief of peeing was welcome, as though all the bad feelings and fears flowed from him and splashed into the toilet.
He could almost make out D.A.D.’s speech swirling below.
Finished, J stepped to the sink and washed his hands. A palm print, his own, on the mirror glass reminded him of the handprints he, D, Q, and L made as toddlers in the snowy Yard in winters past. He imagined his younger self now. He spoke to him.
J? Where are you? Have you grown up? Have you changed? Let’s do the things we used to do, when we trusted the Parenthood and looked to D.A.D. for guidance. Can you find that place again, J? Can you find me? Where are you?
He dried his hands and stepped from the mirror. Outside the bathroom, the wind beyond the window was much louder. He’d heard this song many times, last winter and the winter before, but now it sounded like it might accompany Warren Bratt’s Robert as he confessed to the woman at the bar.
We created a false reality, built entirely of misinformation…
J was surprised to find he was standing in the hall, staring at a picture of himself as a baby, in the arms of D.A.D.
How innocent J looked. How easy to fool.
“Don’t do that,” he told himself. “Stop thinking like that.”
But what other way was there to think? The Parenthood had lost its collective mind over a book. The author of which D.A.D., in the frightening pop Inspection, had referred to as a fucking troll.
In one of Luxley’s books, a troll granted a boy three wishes.
From the hole in your face to the one in my ear, three wishes you’ll speak and three wishes I’ll hear!
J felt a momentary wave of stability. Luxley’s books were still a place he could go to without wondering why.
In this way, fiction, for J, had become more trustworthy than fact.
Three wishes. From the hole in J’s mouth to the one in Warren’s ear.
First, I want your book back.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Okay.
Secondly, I’d like to know what D.A.D. is so afraid of.
Are you sure? The truth is frightening.
Yes.
Okay.
And thirdly…I’d like to meet you.
Are you sure?
The reflection of J’s face in the glass overlapped the image of his face as a baby.
Oh, how things had changed.
There was no knowledge in the face of that baby. No suspicion at all.
He tore himself from the photo.
Oh, D.A.D.’s voice today. In the first-floor Check-Up room. Blood on his knuckles. In the Body Hall, too.
The sound a man makes when the one thing that could unravel his life’s work shows up at his rooms, knocks on his door.
Someone was knocking on J’s door.
J stopped at the entrance to the living room. Stared across to the door. Who? Who was here so late at night?
A second knock, more forceful than the first, told him it was not the door. It was coming from the wide window to his right.
J looked.
Someone was gripping the top of Q’s ladder with one hand, knocking on the glass with the other. Someone had placed Q’s ladder back up against the window.
“Oh!” J cried, stepping back into the hall, out of view again. He couldn’t breathe right, couldn’t find the strength to stop his legs from shaking.
More knocking. J thought of the long hair he’d seen blown by the winter wind. The pale skin. The small fist that knocked on the glass.
A voice now, added to the cold song.
“Please! I need help!”
It spoke. It spoke! And its voice was like none J knew.
“Who…” He repeated the word many times, still out of view.
“Please! Hurry!”
J flattened himself to the hall wall. He shook his head no. No, whatever this was would go away. No. He was not going to look at the person at his window again.
But after another desperate knock, J peered around the corner.
What he saw at the glass chilled him colder than the ice of the ladder it’d used to reach him.
Long hair, yes. A skinny body, yes. Small hands.
Wide eyes. An unhappy face. Lips in a square, teeth bared.
What kind of boy was this?
The kind that Robert followed into a neighborhood bar in Milwaukee.
“Go away!” J shouted.
But the thing knocked again.
“Please!”
J couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing. The Turret lights that lit the sculptures below lit the thing at his window, too. And the face that spoke to him was like no face J had ever seen.
“Go away!” he cried again.
The wind wailed, the Turret creaked, and the person outside trembled for balance on the ladder.
It’s one thing to read about it in a book, J thought. But to see it…
But what did that mean? Who was this?
Was it death? Was it disease?
“J!” the person said. “LET ME IN!”
J. It knew his name.
spoiled rotten spoiled rotten you’re going to be spoiled rotten
Feeling as though nothing was real anymore, that he knew nothing at all, J stepped fully out of the hall and approached the living room window.
“Hurry,” the person said.
J hurried.
“Open the window, please! I’m so cold.”
J went to the glass. The window did not shatter upon him. The person did not break it.
Placasores did not come screeching into his room.
J unlocked the latch.
He thought of Robert walking into that neighborhood bar. He thought of Robert confessing.
We created a false reality, built entirely of misinformation…
Why would you take part in such a thing?
J held the side of the window, still too afraid to open it, to let in the storm, to let in the…
“Her,” he said. But he wished he hadn’t.
“Please.”
“She.”
Shivering, crying. “Let me in.”
“Woman.”
“I can tell you the truth about the Parenthood.” Smart eyes. Kind eyes. “The Turret. The Corner. Your D.A.D. I have those answers.”
The words from the book crawled up J’s throat like the many-legged bugs in the Orchard. Crawled all over his mind. Threatened to drive him mad.
“Please,” it said.
J opened the window.
&n
bsp; And the person who so resembled Warren Bratt’s mystery in Milwaukee, the long-haired thing at the bar, at his window, at the threshold of his sanity, climbed in.
A woman lowered herself into his living room.
And into his life.
The World as It Looks Whizzing Past You
It wasn’t only that K liked to draw, it was that she showed an incredible propensity for the craft at a very young age. At four years old, her rendering of the Turret was so precise that Inspector Krantz had thought it was a photo and brought it to Marilyn, concerned that someone had been photographing the Parenthood. Marilyn, having seen K’s work before, wasn’t fooled for long. But there was a beat, an unhappy jolt of fear she hadn’t felt in many years, as Krantz held the drawing up from across the room and said, What do we do about this?
Marilyn—M.O.M. to her girls—did not show her prized Inspector the fear she felt inside. Rather, she sat stoic and said in a steady voice, K. My K.
Photos of the towers were not allowed. Neither were photos of the acres of pines that separated the two towers. No evidence, she and Richard had agreed upon from the start. No photos, no videos, no tape recorders. If someone were to discover what was going on here in the deep woods of northern Michigan, it would not be by any errant proof the Parenthood had overlooked. It would have to be word against word. Theirs against them.
The long-married couple believed that their denials, bolstered by their money, would be louder in the end.
These were the thoughts that rose in Marilyn’s mind as Krantz waddled across her office and handed her the image that had looked so fabulously realistic from across the room. But up close, she recognized the tiny inconsistencies that marked it as a drawing after all. And there was only one Letter Girl in the Parenthood who could pull that off.
Marilyn smiled, not only because it was often easy to thwart Krantz’s concerns, but because one of her girls was indeed showing early signs that the experiment was going to be an unparalleled success.
How many children in the real world could draw like this? More so, how many four-year-olds actually had the capability but were lacking the tutelage to do so?
The real world was a constant waste of potential.
* * *
—
K HAD BECOME so fond of drawing that by six she was allowed alone time in the Yard, as B and V picked teams for soccer or Yellow Ball, as F and L ran races from the tower to the far end of the cherry Orchard. Yes, K got some exercise in by way of long walks through that same Orchard, but M.O.M. knew that wasn’t quite enough. If K chose to sit and draw her sisters in the Yard, she would have to take the stairs to her seventh-floor room, a floor she shared with B, V, and Y. She’d take them at least twice a day. The elevator was firmly denied her.
At first, the agreement felt odd, of course, as K told B she’d see her downstairs for breakfast, but K quickly became aware of how much downtime there was in a day at the Parenthood. Yes, breakfast started at eight A.M., but when did it really start? How much time did the Letter Girls spend discussing their dreams and studies before the actual food was brought out? This was true of every event, daily or otherwise, from Film Night to Free Swim, story time to class.
The only thing a girl absolutely had to be on time for was the Inspections.
K didn’t miss a thing. And by age eight she was rather fond of the daily up and down. On the way down, she liked imagining how her day would go, and later, on the way up again, she enjoyed comparing those morning thoughts with how the day actually went. Rarely did they mirror one another.
This was, in effect, K’s first reward for dedicating herself to art.
More would come.
Drawing pictures distinguished her from her sisters, not only physically (by way of stairs), but it provided her with a unique identity: No other Letter Girl took to drawing, took to art, like K. For this, she was asked by all her sisters and even some Inspectors to draw their likeness. As gifts. As presents. Inside the Turret, outside in the Yard. By sun during the day, lanternlight at night. Until the walls of K’s bedroom were covered with her own drawings, photo-realistic renderings of each of the Letter Girls and the faces of the Parenthood staff watching over her as she fell contentedly to sleep.
All but M.O.M., who had kindly asked that her face not be drawn. Ever.
K complied, as all the girls complied with everything M.O.M. and the Parenthood decreed. All but one. One unfortunate seven-year-old girl who had been spoiled rotten and sent to the Corner.
J.
K had been particularly fond of her drawing of J and felt great sorrow while removing the tape and taking it down from her bedroom wall. It had hung there for over a year, the drawing having been done in the Yard when the girls were both six, and the space it left behind was glaring, as if it were a frightening facsimile of the Corner door itself.
Am I easy to draw? J had asked, seated on a wicker chair near the boundary of lush pines. A spring wind tousled the girl’s hair. K had tucked it back behind J’s ear many times that day.
Nobody is easy to draw, K said. But I especially enjoy the challenge you present.
J frowned. I hadn’t thought of myself like that. A challenge.
When she took the drawing down, when the Parenthood told her she had to, K saw that she had captured more than just J in the drawing. She’d also captured the look of someone with a secret. To answer J’s original question much later, K thought that J was, indeed, difficult to draw after all. Most girls wore their thoughts at the front of their eyes, but J’s were kept much deeper in her head. And the day K folded the drawing of her sister, now gone, was the day she realized her own potential: She was able to capture not only the surface details, the angles and shading, of those she shared the world with, but what lived inside each of them, too.
Maybe that was why M.O.M. refused to be drawn.
By the time K was ten, the routine of the Yard (in all seasons) included her seated upon a wicker chair, drawing photo-realistic pictures of her sisters, the arms of the chair, the grass, her own fingers, her own knees, her snow boots, snowstorms, and the unfathomably inventive sculptures her sisters created during the Effigy Meet.
Including B’s brilliant slide.
In the winter of their tenth year, B built a slide that wrapped around the entire Turret, with just enough declination to uniformly run from a third-floor window—O’s living room—to the Yard below. The Letter Girls took turns riding it without the use of their hands, their feet, or even a push. K, like everybody else, was very excited to experience it. She stood in line as M took her turn, then L, then U, until, having been sufficiently riled by the seemingly endless screams of her sisters, K stepped to the window and climbed upon B’s creation herself. She lay flat on her back, arms folded as her sister advised, legs straight ahead, her boots pressed to the sides, waiting for the word to go.
You’re gonna love it, B said, justifiably proud. And don’t forget your number one sister made this thing.
How could I forget, K said, her eyes on the winter sky, with you around to tell me?
It was frightening being outside a Turret window, three stories high.
After a characteristic theatrical pause, B said, Go, K brought her boots together, and go she went.
She moved much faster than she thought she would. And the slide walls felt too short. The rush was something close to scary as she zipped toward the first turn, where the ice wrapped around the Turret bricks. It didn’t look wide enough to hold her. K, like her sisters before her, screamed, sure that she was going to go straight off the edge and drop to the hard-packed snow. Instead, she took the turn with enough velocity to give the sensation of being shot from a cannon (something a girl named Susan had done in the most recent Judith Nancy book, A Circus in the Yard) before settling in again between the icy walls and the cold smooth groove B had designed so well. Sisters cheered from ever
y window she passed. And by the time her scream dissipated into the frosty sky, K had taken a second turn, putting her on the opposite side of the tower from where she’d started, on the backside, where she saw an Inspector high up in a leafless tree, pulling aside the branches of another, reaching for a mitten shot there by a catapult of ice. K didn’t realize it at the time, but while eyeing the Inspector, she saw, through the split pines, a spire showing among the many barren treetops. A spire not unlike the one that crowned the very Turret she traveled around so quickly.
K wouldn’t know she’d seen this until much later, when the mysterious spire showed up in her art.
But first, the end of the slide, as it took her at last to the snowy Yard, as her sisters were there to greet her, and as M.O.M., dressed in her formfitting red snowsuit, her black hair peppered with flakes, knelt down to her, reached out a hand to help her up, and said, Maybe you can draw the world as it looked whizzing past you.
THE BURT REPORT: JULY 1, 2018
To Be Read upon Waking
The Letter Girls are eleven years old now.
Please, take a moment to let that sink in.
More than a decade has passed since you and Richard hatched the mutual plan for an unprecedented experiment in which boys and girls would be raised without the knowledge of each other’s existence. Broad, bold, and (some would certainly say) controversial. Nevertheless, here we stand, eleven years deep.
And what have we learned?
First, Marilyn, I thank you for allowing me to address you directly in my monthly reports, a thing your husband still does not permit. One can only assume it is because either 1) he is attempting to sustain a veil of scientific research or 2) it makes him uncomfortable reading about his own faults and foibles. NOTE: It is my job to provide legitimate analysis of you both. I say that in the event Richard argues my termination upon reading the lines above.
For me, it is much easier speaking directly to you. Feels more like a conversation. Or, perhaps, like my opinion is not peripheral but rather examined head-on.
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