The Nobody People
Page 17
“Your daughter is powerful,” Bishop says.
“Is she going to blow up churches?”
Bishop folds his hands and rests them on the table. “Avi’s talked to you about Owen Curry.”
“That’s his name?”
Bishop nods. “The young man is strong and badly damaged. But the ability to destroy matter at whatever level is something we can manage. It’s within our purview. There’s something different about Emmeline. If we had a scale for these things, I would say she is off it. She is also very young. Do you understand why this combination made me nervous?”
Avi glances over his shoulder and sees Kay shaking her head. He digs through the silverware drawer, looking for a long stirring spoon they don’t have. He can see what one would look like, but they don’t own one.
Try a butter knife, says a voice in his head that doesn’t sound like his own.
“A child is a creature made of will and want,” Bishop says. “The world provides or denies them what they want. Think about a child’s demands for ice cream or television. They don’t respond to reason. They are pure desire butting up against the limits of their own agency.”
“You’re talking the long way around the barn,” Kay says. Avi tosses the ice out of the martini glasses into the sink. He drizzles vermouth into each one and carefully swirls it. It coats the inside of the glass. It’s the residual sugar in the vermouth that does it. This is a thing he knows now.
“Imagine that same child with those limits removed,” Bishop says. “Imagine a child with the power to shape the world into the thing the child wants it to be without ever realizing they’re doing it. The world complies with the way they believe it should be, instantly, with the tiniest exertion of effort. Imagine a world shaped by the whims of an all-powerful child god.”
“ ‘It’s a Good Life,’ ” says Kay.
“I’m sorry?”
“Twilight Zone episode,” Kay explains. “A kid isolates his whole town from the rest of the world, holds them hostage because he can read their minds and turn them into jack-in-the-boxes and whatever.”
“And in the end he makes it snow,” says Bishop. “I remember that one.”
“And that’s Emmeline?” Kay asks. “She’ll be able to read minds? Send anyone she doesn’t like to the cornfield?” Avi stirs the drinks, counting each revolution of the knife in his head.
“No, but I was concerned it could be,” Bishop says. “When an ability manifests in a younger child, it’s important that the child’s home life is stable. We approach the parent the child feels more bonded to so they can be there for the child. A support.”
Avi pauses, shaker over the glass, tilted but not pouring. He was the second choice. Not just Bishop’s. Emmeline’s.
“With the two of you there to support her and with our guidance, Emmeline is going to be something wonderful,” Bishop says. “As a parent, you might feel there’s no place for you in our world. I wanted to create that space. A way for you to be an integral part of Emmeline’s life even as she goes through these changes. I can’t literally make you one of us. But I have a role for you that will make you feel a part of who we are.”
Three olives plop into each drink. Avi takes two glasses and sets them on the table in front of Bishop and Kay. Bishop looks up at him, surprised. “I forgot you were there,” he says. It’s a lie. This conversation is for Avi’s benefit as much as Kay’s. Bishop wants him to know he’s important only as he relates to Emmeline. Even then, he’s not that important. “This is very good,” Bishop says, smiling over the rim of his glass. “Well done.” Always susceptible to praise from the teacher, Avi blushes.
“I’m going to take mine to the living room,” he says. It’s like hearing himself say it. He watches himself pick up the last of the three martinis, the one that poured short, and walk out of the kitchen. He sits on the living room couch and sips the drink. It tastes awful and leaves a cold burn going down. He tries to hear them in the next room, but he can’t. He has no urge to read, to turn on the television. He sits, waiting, like a child put in a time-out. Grown-ups are talking.
He’s finishing his martini when they come out. Kay doesn’t look any happier than when Bishop arrived. Her drink, barely touched except for the olives, dangles from her hand; she’s gripping it by the rim, fingers spread.
“Take a look at the literature about the academy,” he says. “And promise me you’ll think about my offer.”
“You going to make me think about it?” she says.
Bishop smiles at her, abashed. “The work matters,” says Bishop. “The things I said to you in your office, I stand by them. I think you’d be excellent.”
“I’ll think about it,” she says. He shows himself out without saying good-bye to Avi.
Kay sloshes her drink into Avi’s empty glass and heads to the kitchen to wash hers. “Tastes like chilled paint,” she says over her shoulder.
“What did he want you to do?”
“He wants to teach me the secret handshake, like he did with you,” Kay says. “Little late for it.”
“He’s a good person,” says Avi.
“He’s a fucking liar,” Kay says. “Same as you. If I take his job, it won’t be for him. It’ll be for her.”
There’s a thread hanging from this, a loose bit of yarn. Avi’s smart enough not to tug at it. The gin sluices through his brain, moving him forward when he knows better. He pulls.
“Will you stay with me?” he says. “For her?”
It’s cheap and low. As soon as the words are out, he wants them back. Kay shakes her head.
“Not even for her,” she says.
* * *
—
They never have a conversation about it. The literature Bishop left with her disappears from the kitchen counter. It included not just the glossy bullshit meant to comfort parents and hide what their children had become but stuff Avi believed he’d been given special access to for his work. Once it’s gone, he expects they’ll have the talk. He looks forward to it. He and Kay have so much in common now. So many of the same fears. Together, they can weigh the dangers of sending her to Bishop against the dangers of not sending her. They can assess what they can give her and what they’re able to protect her from. She’ll have to forgive me now that we’re both terrified, he thinks.
But they don’t talk. Avi gets caught up with interviews and other things. There is an entirely new world to explore and report back from. People look to him to tell them what to think and how to feel. And Kay’s work is ceaseless. He remembers when she was deciding whether to take the job at a firm that handled immigration cases. Shouldn’t I pick a fight I can win? she asked him. He loved that about her, her willingness to engage in a never-ending battle.
One day he gets home and finds a letter on the kitchen counter in with the bills and the mortgage statement and every other insignificant thing that shows up in the mailbox like trash pitched up on shore by the tides. It’s open, addressed to Emmeline: “Dear Miss Hirsch. We are thrilled to welcome you.”
Kay comes into the kitchen and watches as he reads it. Her glass of wine is half empty. They have nothing to say to each other. It’s already done.
Bright winter sun through the hotel blinds casts a ladder of shadow and light across them, and the Hirsches take their waking slowly. Avi stares at the ceiling, listening to his wife and daughter breathe. It’s like a race: Emmeline a constant step behind. Kay slips out of the bed she and Emmeline slept in and sneaks into the bathroom. When the door shuts, Avi puts on his prosthetic. Emmeline rolls onto her elbow and watches from the other bed. She studies him, a little Buddha. Avi thinks of father-son stereotypes, the things you’re supposed to teach a boy-child. If Emmeline had been a boy, would she have stood next to him, examining his reflection as he shaved? Would Avi have shown her how to tie a tie, struggling to mirror the ingrained motions as
he formed the knot around her neck? When Emmeline was two days old, lying between them in the bed, Avi whispered to Kay, “There’s nothing she can learn from me.” Kay assured him it wasn’t true. But Avi’s been proved right. There’s so much she needs to know and so little Avi can give her except to leave her in the hands of those more capable.
“You ready for this?” he asks her.
“No,” she says. “I want to go home.”
They haven’t told her how impossible that is. She doesn’t know the negotiations that went on while she spent her last few days at her old school in Rogers Park. The house on Jarvis Avenue is up for rent. Neither Avi nor Kay can afford to buy the other out, and Avi refuses to sell. His refusal isn’t based in faith that this will work out so much as inability to accept that it won’t. His dreams are haunted by bombs in reverse: fiery shrapnel reassembles itself into a car, broken bones knit, and rent skin heals, scarless. He called Fahima in the middle of the night to ask if it would be possible for a Resonant to move time backward.
“That’s not how time works,” she said. “Everything that’s happened has happened.” He could hear her girlfriend breathing in the background. Whatever fight they’d needed to have had been weathered. At least some wounds could heal.
Avi crosses the divide between the beds. The prosthetic gives an extra click, the leg setting into the socket at an angle that’s not quite right. He ignores it and sits down next to Emmeline. He promised Kay he won’t tell her anything. They haven’t sat down to talk with Emmeline together. Kay insists that Avi wants to tell her so he can seem like the one who’s open and honest when he’s been lying the whole time. She’s right. The saddest part is that their marriage is reduced to winning and losing. Their language now is silences and secrets.
“You’ll make friends,” he says.
“You always say that, and I never do.”
“You’ll be with kids like you,” Avi says. He wonders if Emmeline will have things in common with the students at Bishop because they all have abilities. The other kids may not read as often or as deeply as Emmeline. They may not love to draw. Regardless of the fact that they can move objects with their minds or create protective shells around themselves, the girls may be into dolls or makeup, things in which Emmeline’s never shown interest. What keeps Emmeline apart from her peers may not be her abilities but the person she is, the million ways she’s different. Everything Avi loves about her may make her a target. Bishop Academy may be full of kids with fantastic abilities who are otherwise dull as paint, perfectly normal.
“Maybe my ability will be I can fix everything,” she says. This stabs at Avi. He’s hoped Bishop Academy might teach her to repair the broken marriage, the broken trust. The last manifestation of her ability could be to let itself go, a djinn freed by a generous third wish, leaving only their daughter, never normal but not special like she is. Special to them, not to the whole world.
Avi hugs his daughter tightly because it’s a way to hide his face from her as it trembles and falls apart.
* * *
—
Kay suggests they spend the morning in Central Park. Avi can’t help thinking that proposing a long walk is a move on her part: a way to physically hurt him. Kay’s mind doesn’t work that way, but the idea is there, thrown on the pile of awful things between them. Before Kay and her mother moved to Chicago, they lived in New York, and Kay loves Central Park. She wants to be somewhere she feels safe now as all possibility of safety falls away.
By the time they get to the entrance on Fifth and 79th, the low friction of the prosthetic’s cup chafes against his leg. Despite his best intentions, he thinks of it as Kay’s fault. She links arms with Avi, leans into him a little. Emmeline runs ahead to investigate a yellow drift of ginkgo leaves. She approaches a klatch of geese. All of this feels scripted. They’re putting on a play for Emmeline. Tomorrow they strike the sets. They abandon the roles of people they used to be. The performance is important. They don’t have the classic divorcing parent line to fall back on. They can’t tell Emmeline it’s not about her when it so obviously is. The ossification of their marriage was gradual: it took time to reach the point where it could shatter under one hard strike. But there’s no question what the blow was. Kay won’t allow this. She won’t let Emmeline know it’s her fault.
Kay’s phone buzzes in the pocket between them. She frees her arm and checks the screen too quickly for him to read the caller’s name.
“I have to take this,” she says. She walks down the path. Her shoulders relax as she starts talking. The burden of faking affection for him drops away. Avi wonders if she’s having an affair. Or if the possibility of an affair is becoming actual as a result of all of this. After the hospital, in the worst depths of his depression, he told her she should. “It would make me feel better,” he said. “I’d know you’re getting what you need even if you’re not getting it from me.” He could see how badly the offer hurt her even if, in his emotional state, he couldn’t bring himself to care. It was an attempt to push her away, no different from swatting her hands as she helped ease his stump into the cup of his prosthesis. He felt like a terrible person, and her refusal to see him as terrible made him angry, determined to convince her how awful he was. If he could have left, he would have for Kay’s own good. Maybe it would have made things better. What of their last year was worth having him around? Who benefited except for him?
Emmeline buys feed from a coin op dispenser by the lake. It pours pellets into her cupped hands, and the geese take a sudden interest. They’re as big as she is, Avi thinks as they encircle Emmeline. He is ready to step in, battle them off to protect her. When she was born, he started seeing the whole world as a threat. Emmeline throws the handful of pellets into the air so they rain down on her and the geese. Avi expects a melee, Emmeline pecked and nipped bloody by creatures with brains the size of a spun dime. They froth and fight around her in a perfect circle, a hurricane with Emmeline at its eye. Avi wonders if Emmeline holds them back, keeping herself safe with her ability. Or if luck cast the pellets up in exact arcs so not a single one lands on her coat to tempt their lizard brains. Emmeline spins at the center of them, laughing. Kay rejoins Avi, slips her arm back into his. For a moment they are exactly who they’re pretending to be: two parents walking in the park, desperate in their love for their daughter.
Emmeline stops, looking across the lake at the city. The geese pause, leaving a slew of pellets on the ground. Avi thinks they’re following Emmeline’s gaze, but then they scatter. She shakes her head, her hand raising up to point to something on the skyline. Avi and Kay rush to her. Avi reaches her a second late and ends up holding on to Kay, who is holding Emmeline.
“Why is it here now?” Emmeline says. “How did they build it already?”
Avi and Kay look where Emmeline is pointing. Blocks away, rising over all the other buildings, is a shining tower, an obsidian spire stabbing into the sky.
“Can you hear it?” Emmeline asks. “It’s talking to all of them at once. It’s sending out hurt.”
Avi looks at Kay, and the horror on her face tells him she can see it, too. He thinks about newspaper photos of the New York skyline after the attacks. The absence of the World Trade Center buildings made it feel like they’d never been there, like he’d been remembering the city wrong the entire time. This tower has the same effect: it threatens to become a permanent part of the way he sees New York. He tries to orient himself within a map of the city to understand where the tower is. It’s where we’re going, he thinks. It’s the Bishop Academy.
Then it’s gone.
Emmeline’s breathing returns to normal. He can feel it slowing through Kay’s body, which rises and falls with every breath. The image of the tower becomes vague in his mind until he can summon only the words he attached to it, not the image itself. Shining tower. Obsidian spire. The fear, too, fades quickly with nothing to hold it in place.
Kay lets go of Emmeline as if the girl is red hot.
Avi’s relieved there isn’t a throng of reporters in front of the academy. They’ll be here soon, but they respected the details in the press release. They’ll wait to be let in. If they rush the doors, they’ll be locked out forever.
Sarah is there to meet them in the lobby. Emmeline runs to Cortex the second she sees him, nuzzling into the deep fur of the dog’s neck. Avi introduces Sarah to Kay. He wishes it were Bishop or Patrick meeting them rather than an attractive young white woman. The optics of who he’s been spending his time with are bad. Kay’s beyond caring.
“I’m sorry everything’s so disorganized,” Sarah says. “It’s a weird day here.”
“You get normal days?” Kay says flatly.
Sarah smiles patiently at her. “I was thinking you’d want to see the place.”
“I want to get Emmeline set up,” Kay says. Her hand rests on Emmeline’s head, fingers lost, twined into her curls. “Get her all squared away.”
“Of course,” Sarah says. “First-year residences are up on the eighth floor. Follow me.” Shen nods at Avi and smiles broadly at Emmeline as they head to the elevator.
Emmeline’s room is in a hallway of identical rooms. Her soon-to-be roommate’s bed is overpopulated with stuffed animals that spill onto the floor. She’s papered her side with pictures of movie stars and boy bands. This decoration ends abruptly at the room’s midline, where it gives way to bare cream-colored walls. There’s a desk for Emmeline and a twin bed made up with crisp hospital corners and a thick comforter folded at the foot.