by Isla Morley
None of this seems to make any impression. “How about any live births since Adam?” She peers at me as though she’s trying to thread a needle and finding difficulty with the focal point. “What I mean is, Mrs. Hallowell, are you capable of bearing children?”
If my life depended on it, I couldn’t say when last I had my period. And I can’t think why she still needs to be corrected on the issue of marital status. Only in Dobbs’s mind were we ever married, and now that mind is no more. “It’s ‘Miss,’ ” I snap. “And no.”
“I see.” Whatever piqued her curiosity is now gone. Her attention shifts again to Adam, who, having gone as far as the twine will allow, is reeling himself back to his bed. “As I said, the testing won’t take long. A couple of hours, at the most. What do you say, Adam? Are you ready to come with me?”
You’d have to be blind to mistake Adam’s frozen posture as the go-ahead. So that Harriet Fletcher will drop the matter, I say, “No more tests.”
She approaches me as though having to penetrate an unbearable stench. “I understand your hesitation about being separated from your son. I know you think you are protecting him, and I am not saying you haven’t done an admirable job of it in the past.”
Admirable job. Protecting my son. I’ve lied to my son, is what I’ve done. I’ve prepared him not at all for the ways people can deceive and manipulate.
“But if you can put aside your own needs and wishes for a moment and think about what is best for Adam—”
I leap out of bed. “You know what? I think Adam and I will find our own way from here.” Adam’s jaw drops when I tell him to change into his clothes. I pack the bottled water that came on our lunch trays into the suitcase. Six miles is the distance from here to Eudora. If Adam and I put our backs into it, we can be there in a couple of hours.
Harriet Fletcher is pinching the bridge of her nose and looking up at the ceiling when I grab the extra bandages from the bedside table drawer. It is to Adam she speaks. “Your mother intends to leave our compound. Is that what you want, Adam?”
Adam’s head flicks from me to her to me again.
“I don’t know what she has led you to believe about the world, Adam, but it can be a very dangerous place. She intends to take you out there without a gun, without any ammunition, without any knowledge of the safe passages. And to what end? Except for a few old people and a herd of buffalo, Eudora isn’t anything but a ghost town. Is that where you want to go, Adam?”
What she says frightens me as much as it does Adam. Nevertheless, I throw the backpack over my shoulder. Better out there than in here, where people don’t seem to respect free will. First free, I tell myself. Now, will. “Adam wants to go where I want to go.”
“You, my dear, want to go home, and it is my fault for not having been straight with you sooner. What I am trying to say is that your home is not how you left it.”
She is choosing her words, being careful with the truth. Still, I don’t care for her use of one word—left—as though my absence was somehow my own choosing. Who would choose to be hidden? To be kept underground for all these years? I have denied the question for two days, but now it comes begging: Has Dobbs, who did my choosing for me, saved us from a terrible trial?
Adam is thinking along the same lines. “So there was some kind of disaster.”
She pulls out what looks to be a handmade booklet from her pocket and gives it to Adam. “I brought this for you to read. It is certainly a more complete account than what I could give. I suggest you read it before making any hasty decisions.”
“I’ll take that.” Adam hands me the book as four people stomp into the infirmary. Recoiling in fright, Adam jumps into bed, throws the covers over his head, and cinches the edges. The ball of twine falls to the floor and unravels as fast as Adam pulls on the string.
From under his sheets comes a static voice. “Adam, are you there? Over.” Harriet Fletcher has her walkie-talkie pressed against her mouth and is signaling the four men to be still. The room is hollow-quiet.
When the last of the twine is gathered under the sheet, Adam’s tiny whisper is amplified on Harriet’s transmitter. “Yes, I’m here.”
Smiling, Harriet pushes the button and tells Adam some very important people have come to see him. Has he ever met a scientist before? No, is Adam’s tentative answer. Well, wouldn’t he like to meet one? Adam doesn’t answer, but he does lower the sheet. He assesses the men as if they were specters, not men of science. And they certainly are peculiar-looking. Their skin seems raw and has a sheen to it. They stoop like stacks of boxes piled too high and have the same odor about them, too, like they are in need of a good airing.
“I have asked a few colleagues to join me today, Adam. They have traveled a considerable distance to be here. They are very excited to meet you.”
Adam shields his eyes with one hand, clenches the walkie-talkie with the other.
“Hello, young man.” A man steps forward and extends his hand, a gesture Adam mistakes as being required to give back his walkie-talkie.
He tucks it under his arm.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you, Adam. This is just an evaluation. Okay?”
It has taken as little as a gadget for Adam to let Harriet Fletcher treat him like something under a microscope. He looks my way. Everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?
I muster a smile. Everything’s fine.
All the same, I keep the backpack on my shoulder and the suitcase in my hand and wait for Harriet Fletcher to finish talking about the knife wound and presenting symptoms of dehydration and anemia. She asks Adam to pull his garment down a little in the front. It’s my fault, the way he does her bidding. Haven’t I taught him that sometimes the best resistance is to give way?
“A mild case of rickets, the beginning of a rachitic rosary.” She points to Adam’s chest, which has recently sprouted soft blond chest hair, an asset of which he is extremely proud. “Deficiencies in vitamin D, calcium, and iron would suggest a limited diet and limited exposure to light, which would correspond with his pigmentation. A somewhat abnormal response to touch. It’s possible he has some kind of autistic disorder, Kanner’s syndrome perhaps, judging by the poor social and communication skills, the high sensitivity to bright lights and noises.”
Adam does not have poor communication skills. There are times he’ll talk your ear off. If he’s quiet, it means he’s working on something in his head. Lord only knows what he’s trying to work out now.
One from the crowd raises his pen. “You said he’d been confined?”
“According to the mother, since birth.” Harriet Fletcher looks over at me and lowers her voice so I cannot hear what she says next, but all heads turn to me, faces without expression.
“There seems to be some unwillingness to cooperate fully.”
Cooperate fully? I’ve given that woman fact after fact, and what I’ve received in return is an offer to separate me and Adam.
One of the scientists asks me about Adam’s upbringing. Did I keep a journal of his development? What illnesses has he had? How often does he get sick? How long does it take for him to recover from an illness? At what age did he start puberty?
“Has he ever had intercourse?”
“Excuse me?” What kind of question is that of a kid who has been confined his entire life? And then the lightbulb goes on. They’re insinuating I’ve slept with him.
There is but the tiniest pause before Harriet Fletcher resumes her rundown. “No goiter, normal thyroid functioning, no cutaneous ulcerations or necrosis. In summary, no visible signs of exposure.”
“How old are you, son?” one of them asks.
“Seventy-eight,” Adam answers. Going by birthdays, he’s right, but they misread him and crack up. One has a laugh that sounds exactly like the squeaky door between the lower level and the silo tunnel.
“Intact sense of humor.” Harriet Fletcher smiles proudly. “At first, we put him around twelve or thirteen because of his muscle tone; however
, genital development is definitely that of a postpubertal male.”
“I told you, he’s fifteen!” All this time I’ve waited for them, and this is what we end up with: stupid people. How can they look and look at my boy, at me, and not see? They scribble on their notebooks what they can’t see, and then they come back again to make sure their looking hasn’t changed into something else. If there was any doubt before, I know now with certainty that they are not, as Dobbs used to categorized a very small portion of the people he encountered, Friendlies. There is something about this place that is not entirely on the up-and-up. Their scrutiny of Adam, for one. It is Dobbs’s voice in my head, clear as a bell: Get him out of here.
“And the bioassays?” one asks.
Harriet Fletcher can’t resist touching Adam. She gives his arm a little pat. “Labs came back clean as a whistle.”
As one, the group folds toward Adam in a bow. It’s not evaluation. It’s veneration.
Get him out of here.
HARRIET FLETCHER DOESN’T come right out and say we’re being held against our will, just as she doesn’t say when exactly the police are arriving, only that they are on their way. She suggests we bathe before they arrive, and because it is critical we make a good impression, I agree. When we follow her outside, the sky is a menacing stew of grays, the air balmy and the mist a soft, sheer curtain. Something in me breaks open. No matter what the weather is doing—giant balls of ice could be falling, for all I care—the simple act of stepping outside is exalting. I tug on the string so Adam will look at me, but he, too, is stunned, though apparently for different reasons. Lowering the umbrella, he cocks his head to the side. Can we can hear it, he wants to know.
“Hear what, Adam?” Harriet Fletcher asks.
I can hear it—a groaning sound, or humming, perhaps. Adam holds his walkie-talkie in front of him and pushes the button.
“Oh, that’s just the generators. Come along.”
On either side of us is a row of Quonset huts. Each is fronted with an overhang, a number, and a porch light. There isn’t a soul in sight, and yet I have the distinct feeling we are being watched.
“Are other people here?” I ask.
Harriet Fletcher makes a flicking motion with her head that could be construed either way. As she leads us past the huts, the fine mist turns to a drizzle. Instantly, the ground turns to slop. Adam stops. Instead of opening his umbrella, Adam lifts his palm and watches tiny droplets land on it. He lifts his face to the heavens, shutters his eyes against the drops, and sticks out his tongue. He has fallen under the spell of rain.
Harriet Fletcher lifts her coat over her head and insists Adam take cover under the umbrella. She tries to hurry him, but he scuffs his feet against the ground. “I get it, Mom. I get it!” He’s remembering the time I mixed up a batch of flour and water and chocolate powder, and ordered him to unwrap his feet and stick his toes in the gooey mixture. “Mud,” I told him, insisting he make footprints all over my clean floor. He was quite unsure of me that day. Now, he stoops to get his hands dirty, and I can’t bring myself to tell him no. I open my arms. Maybe if the rain soaks in, something in me will be renewed.
Harriet Fletcher shoos us to a hut with a sign of a shower painted on its door. “The bathhouse,” she announces. Inside, the building is draped with black plastic sheets except for a window covered with burlap. Instead of the cold glare from our quarters, the lamps strung at each end of the hut give off a warm yellow haze. It’s humid inside and smells faintly of chemicals. An enormous plastic pool, the kind people put up in their backyards, takes up almost half the space. It’s filled with liquid so green it is almost neon. The other side of the Quonset hut is trussed with pipes. At evenly spaced intervals about two feet above the floor are a faucet, a hose with a showerhead, and a step stool. The black rubber floor is dappled with puddles, and the water in the giant tub is still eddying from recent use.
Harriet points to a wooden cubicle near the entrance and explains that I am to wait in it until it is my turn to bathe. Adam, she says, will go first. Adam unties the string from his waist and hands it to me. Gathering up the twine, I take a seat on the bench, but as soon as she aims to close the door, I stand up. “I’m not good with confined spaces.”
“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Hallowell, a man needs his privacy,” she insists, all but putting her hand against my chest.
Adam hardly qualifies as a man, I do not say, deciding to keep my quarrel for what counts. “It’s ‘Miss,’ ” I mumble through the slats, as she closes the door on my protest.
I listen to her giving Adam instructions, listen to her helping him out of his clothes. And then comes the sound of Adam entering the water, and the sharp intake of breath that accompanies it. I have not heard her steps retreat, so I imagine she is doing what she has deprived me of: seeing Adam take his first bath.
“It’s warm,” he says, before giving a satisfied moan.
“You take as long as you like.”
There is some splashing and then much sloshing about, as though Adam is doing laps.
Of all the things I liked to tell Adam about, water was my favorite subject. It was a watery globe, I taught him. Even when you stood on dry ground, water was running under your feet. Dig down deep enough and it would go spurting into the air. Below, water came in a big tank and with a warning from Dobbs about using too much. You could lick the floor and have a drink of water and not taste the difference. Above, water came from heaven, I told him. The cleverest thing anybody had ever done was find a way to put it into pipes so people could turn a faucet on and have it run all day if they wanted.
Heaven’s what gave me the idea to baptize him. When I emptied the water over him, I pictured him in a river, floating across county lines, emptying first into the great Pottawamie, and then into the kingdom of found souls. I knew I’d secured for him some kind of salvation with that water.
Now here he is, submerged. Free. But not quite.
After a while, I hear Adam get out of the pool. Harriet Fletcher invites him to move over to the wall with the pipes so he can shower off. When she offers to help him do what he is perfectly capable of doing himself, I can take no more. I barge out of the wooden shed. Adam is seated on the footstool, his head tipped forward, a small towel draped over his lap. Harriet Fletcher is holding the showerhead so water can cascade over his shoulders and down his back. The deaf women and their staring, the visiting doctors and their valuating, and now Harriet Fletcher tending my son as though an unearthed treasure, like she is laying a claim to him—it no longer makes me uneasy. It makes me afraid.
“Get your hands off my son!” I shout.
* * *
We return to the Quonset hut, and still the police have not arrived. We eat lunch, and they have not arrived. We wait for three hours more, until Harriet Fletcher makes an unconvincing speech about how she can’t imagine what has held them up, but that they will surely arrive in the morning. And then when the day is drawing to a close, I say, “They aren’t coming, are they?”
Choosing not to answer my question, she bids us good night and leaves the Quonset hut. Adam comes over to my bed. Through gritted teeth, he says, “Mom! You are going to get us into a lot of trouble.”
I don’t tell him we are in a lot of trouble. Instead, I tell him to get ready. The moment the rain lets up, we’re leaving.
“We’re not going back out there.”
“Yes, we are. I’m taking you home.”
“There is no home; didn’t you hear what she said?”
“Our home is with each other.”
He looks at his walkie-talkie, as though he might just need to consult the woman on this issue.
I snatch it from him. “We do not belong here. With these people. They aim to separate us. Probably tonight, when we fall asleep.”
“These are nice people. You said so.” He grabs the walkie-talkie from me, scowling.
I try a different tack. “We’re free now, Adam. We get to do what we want.”
/> “What I want is to stay here.”
“We’re leaving, and that’s the end of it.”
I pack the leftover dinner in the backpack. Which is another thing that bugs me—they’ve been through our belongings. I am glad we buried Charlie; who knows what they would’ve held against us if they found a bundle of bones. They’re a bunch of thieves, too—the bolt cutter is missing. It’s only fair, then, that I take the inhaler.
I am pacing in front of the windows, glaring at those rain clouds, willing them to part, when the door opens. The others are a heavy-handed bunch, but this one takes my hand gently and shakes it.
“Marcus Hill, at your service.” His toe catches the edge of the suitcase. “You planning on heading out?”
I don’t say anything, but he responds as if I do.
“I don’t blame you none.” And I can weep for the way he says it, full of tenderness. I try to size him up—he’s larger than the others, and darker. His head is shiny, and his lips are the size of thumbs. Only one of his black eyes looks at me; the other settles off to the side.
Adam is mesmerized. “Are you a policeman?”
He laughs and says, “No, son, that I ain’t. I’m a sitter. That means whatever you want, for the next twelve hours, you just ask me.” He speaks as though he has hot butter beans in his mouth.
I fold my arms in response. A sitter? Someone to keep us from running off, more like.
Adam, who has up to this point retreated from strangers, now volunteers his name and shows him the walkie-talkie. He is delighted when the sitter pulls out his own transmitter. The sitter tells him that unless he wants to transmit to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, he better change the channel. Thirteen is what they decide on, but this sounds very unlucky to me.
“Adam won’t be transmitting anything,” I clarify.
Not at all put off by my tone, the sitter asks again my name.
I do my deaf-nurse impression.
Adam makes his eyes go wide at me, then apologizes. “My mother’s not in a talking mood right now.”