Gabe had bought every copy in the neighborhood and sat in his office shredding and shredding. As if shredding a couple hundred copies would make any difference. And he couldn’t shred the website.
“There are journalistic standards,” he’d kept saying. “You’re a minor. This isn’t news.” Every other phrase out of his mouth had been “legal action.”
Taylor had explained to the whole family that the best thing to do was nothing. “Let it die a quick and natural death. It’s not like anyone really believes she’s a virgin.” So Quinn’s parents hadn’t released any statement or response. To friends and family and people at school, the family brushed it off as ridiculous tabloid lies spurred by her costume.
But they’d never find out whether it would have died a natural death. Not after what happened yesterday.
Quinn had woken to a buzz in the house, a sense of more activity than usual. Downstairs, she found Taylor and a few other vaguely familiar people in the kitchen drinking coffee, talking on phones, and typing on laptops. The room smelled like cologne, coffee, and sweat, like they’d been there a long time.
Quinn had adjusted her robe so her belly was less obvious. “What’s going on?”
“Quinn,” her father said from behind her. “Let’s talk in private.”
She followed him up to the living room, which felt unusually stuffy and confined. Her mother sat on the couch in the light of a small lamp, reading a tabloid instead of the Times. Katherine handed the paper to Quinn, saying, “I wish you didn’t have to see this.”
The tone of her mother’s voice iced Quinn’s blood before she’d even looked.
“VIRGIN MOM MIRACLE!” the Herald headline shouted in big letters on the front page. Underneath, there was almost a full-page blowup of a better photo from the party. In this one, Quinn was gazing directly into the camera, a serene smile on her face. It seemed as if they’d even manipulated the photo to create a subtle, ethereal glow around her. It took Quinn a moment of shocked paralysis—her own face staring back from the front page!—to notice that inset into that photo was a smaller one, one Quinn didn’t recognize: a grainy image of her reaching toward a stroller.
“Wait, is that . . .” Quinn said, pointing at it. Too stunned to speak.
Her father handed Quinn a tablet and tapped the screen. A video on the Herald’s website began to play—a couple being interviewed outside the Cutlers’ house. The moment the woman started talking, the ice in Quinn’s blood needled its way into her bones.
“I just picked up his cup,” Quinn told her father. “I didn’t touch him.”
Her father rubbed his eyes. “It’s that woman?”
Quinn nodded. She’d pulled away from the woman that night on the street, after Sadie’s party, muttering a shocked, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and had hurried inside. Her parents hadn’t gotten home until the couple and baby were gone. There’d been no way to follow up or find out what the woman had meant or where she’d heard it.
“So, is this a big problem?” Quinn said, handing the tablet back to her father. She knew how dumb a question it was.
“Take a look.” She followed him across the room to the windows, registering that the reason the room was uncharacteristically dark was because the drapes were closed. He pulled aside one curtain enough for Quinn to see. A small group of people stood gathered on the sidewalk, behind the low fence, which had bouquets of flowers resting on it, among other things. White news vans sat in the street, like sharks hovering near a colony of seals.
“What do they want?” Quinn had asked, staring at the people, her body frozen with horror.
Gabe shut the curtain. “They want you.”
Now, only one day later, people and offerings had multiplied with scary speed. While her father was upstairs shredding letters, Quinn peeked out the living room window again. His speech didn’t seem to have made a difference; the people weren’t leaving. They stared up at the house, all with the same expression on their faces: a sort of . . . hunger. Press photographers with huge-lens cameras and video cameras with raised microphones had turned their attention from Quinn’s father to the group.
Because the story and the rumors had spread so fast yesterday, her parents had been forced to issue a written statement: “No one in the Cutler family, including our daughter, believes that there is anything unusual about her pregnancy. We haven’t released any specific information about it because there is absolutely no reason the public has a need for that knowledge. Comments attributed to our daughter and others are being presented out of context, as are photographs from a costume party. Quinn is healthy and has the full support of our family—that’s all the public needs to know. Our children’s private lives are just that—private—especially when involving something of such a personal nature. We insist that our daughter be given the privacy she deserves and that people resist spreading inaccurate information and salacious rumors.”
Quinn kept staring out the window now, wondering if any of these people—either the reporters or the religious ones—knew what the word privacy meant. She wondered why they were choosing to believe some random couple, who were obviously lying, over her father.
When she heard Gabe’s steps coming down from his office, she let the curtain close. He took his jacket from the hook by the hall mirror and shrugged it on. Katherine came up from the kitchen, holding a travel coffee mug.
“They’re all still there,” Quinn said. “What should I do?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Gabe said, straightening his tie, a striped one, over a plain white shirt. Quinn didn’t know where he was going; he was busy all the time, at meetings both around the city and in the house. During the rare times Quinn saw him, he got an almost constant barrage of calls and texts and emails. Quinn had, too—tabloid reporters began calling after the first small article—but her parents had taken her phone away almost immediately. Supposedly, they were getting her a new one that could only make and receive calls to preprogrammed numbers, like you give to a little kid. As if that weren’t humiliating enough, they’d also changed the Wi-Fi password in the house and disconnected the cable. “People are saying things that we don’t want in your head,” they’d explained. She’d had endless fights about it with them. None of which she had won. She was surprised they hadn’t cocooned her in bubble wrap.
Her father looked in the mirror and brushed something off his lapel.
“Should I tell them I didn’t touch that baby?” Quinn asked. “That I just gave him the cup?”
“No!” Gabe said. It was more of a bark than a word. “I’ve told you—I don’t want you to have any contact with them. Not the press or those . . . people.”
“So, what should I do?” She had to do something.
“Aside from going back in time and not wearing that costume?” he said. “Or not going through with the pregnancy at all?”
Katherine held out the travel mug. “You’re running late.”
He took the coffee in one hand and pinched the bridge of his nose with the other. Then he took a deep breath and looked at Quinn.
“Invisible,” he said. “Be invisible. That’s what you can do.”
NICOLE ANDERSON
Outside the Cutlers’ house, Nicole Anderson’s heart was lit up like Times Square.
The girl—Quinn—was right there, inside those walls. Almost close enough to touch.
Yesterday, when Nicole saw the Herald at the newsstand on Fourteenth Street, she felt like she’d been hit by lightning. After the initial shock, it felt more like pure light. Like the lightning had turned into a warm, glowing presence inside of her.
She’d bought the paper with trembling hands and had to read it over several times to believe it. That girl. From the doctor’s office. That girl. A pregnant virgin. Normally, she’d have ignored a trashy tabloid like the Herald, but the fact that it was that girl changed everything—it was too big a coincidence to be a coincidence at all. The fertility treatments—they’d been the call to New Yo
rk City, but not the true call. They’d simply gotten her where she needed to be. It was no coincidence, of that, Nicole was sure.
Nicole had knelt down, right there on the dirty sidewalk in front of the newsstand, and begun to cry.
Since then, everyone back home in Michigan—her husband, her friends, other members of the Church of the Next Shepherds—wanted to know if God had told Nicole what to do, if she had a plan; they’d all been waiting for this moment, not just Nicole. But He hadn’t, and she didn’t.
Not yet, at least.
QUINN
Quinn paced the house, up and down the stairs. A rising and falling white noise of chatter could be heard from all the rooms at the front. It was like being near the scene of an accident: She was compelled to look, but when she did, queasiness shivered through her body.
They want you.
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She zipped up her hoodie and escaped into the crisp, cool air of the backyard, putting an entire building between her and the people. The garden hadn’t been tended in a while—unheard of for her mother. Fallen ginkgo leaves smothered low plants. Quinn got a trash bag from the kitchen and began scooping handfuls of damp leaves and twigs into it.
A flash of blue peeked out from under a yellow pile. She reached down, pulled out a hard rubber ball. Jesse’s dog Hugo’s.
Quinn sat forward onto her knees.
The ache she felt when she thought about Jesse was almost unbearable. Like her heart and lungs had been torn out, and her ribs were collapsing into the empty space.
Since the party, he hadn’t been acting angry or even giving her the silent treatment; the way he was treating her was almost worse than that. Complete indifference, like he didn’t even care enough to be angry or silent. “Are you okay?” was said like, “Can you pass the butter?”
His eyes never met hers for more than a brief moment.
And no matter where she was, not more than five minutes could go by without something reminding her of him, or something happening that she wanted to tell him. Sure, the Dubs were her friends, but Jesse was her . . . person. Her other half. Everything was related to a discussion they’d had, to a private joke, an obscure movie he’d made her watch . . . A common library of references built up over the six years of their friendship. And it wasn’t just about the past, it was about the future, all their plans . . . As she tried to not dwell on that aching emptiness, something was always bringing it back to her attention. The pigeon sitting on his window ledge had gutted her. An ad on the subway for Tahiti was worse.
She didn’t blame him, not at all. It was her fault. But that only made the pain stronger. She deserved it.
And where had the information about Marco, and about her own behavior that night, gotten her?
She’d told Dr. Jacoby the whole story, told her that she’d been considering the possibility that someone had done something to her there on the beach. “I know it’s possible that I might have been raped,” Quinn said, “either by Marco or someone else, but I can’t understand why my memories of that night are so . . . happy. And Jesse said I seemed excited when I got back to the cabin that night. So, I’m wondering if you can repress something that you . . . that you did voluntarily. Could I have done something willingly with Marco, either before or after swimming, and not remember for some reason? Maybe he’s lying because he’s worried, even though it wasn’t rape?” It didn’t make any sense, but it was the only thing she could come up with.
“Well,” Dr. Jacoby had said, “if you felt extremely guilty about something you’d done, guilty about enjoying something you deeply believed was wrong, you might repress it. You’d have to have very strong feelings about it. Very deep guilt.”
It was Dr. Jacoby’s usual type of answer. Open-ended.
Then she’d added, “It’s definitely worth discussing why you hadn’t talked about that night to me in more detail before. Both what happened with Marco and an impulsive midnight swim in the ocean seem like important, unusual events.”
“Because they were unusual I remembered them really clearly,” Quinn said, hearing the defensiveness in her own voice. “I didn’t think there was any point.” Of course, saying it she realized how guilty it made her seem that she hadn’t mentioned that night to Dr. Jacoby before. It was true that she’d thought the clarity of her memory meant nothing had happened to her, but she also knew that she hadn’t wanted to admit to anyone what she’d done with Marco. She did feel enormous guilt about that kiss. Imagine if she’d slept with him! She wondered if the memory could be buried under such a huge pile of guilt that she couldn’t find it even though she was digging in the right place.
“So what should I do?” Quinn had asked Dr. Jacoby.
“Let’s keep exploring it, keep talking about that night, about Marco . . . Your history with him . . . What your mindset was about it over the summer . . .”
Quinn wanted to do more.
She thought about trying to talk to Marco, but she couldn’t see any reason he’d give her a different story than he gave Ben. (Not to mention that Ben had told Marco he was asking about it because Quinn herself wouldn’t talk. But how could Quinn explain her own questions? She absolutely couldn’t tell Marco that she didn’t know how she got pregnant. She couldn’t take the chance that he’d go to the press.) She wished she could tap Marco’s phone or bug his room, so she could hear his private conversations with Foley. They had to be talking about what was going on with her, what with all the publicity. Or she wished she could go back in time and see what he told Foley that weekend in Maine.
Go back in time. Fantastic plan, Quinn.
She tossed Hugo’s ball into Jesse’s yard and went back inside.
Later that night, after the people and news vans were mostly gone and the frantic energy in the house had turned into simmering tension, Quinn lay in the bathtub and prepared to start her ritual. She was still writing down everything she could remember about those two weeks, trying to coax out the truth—either in the actual writing or in later dreams. Since the party, she’d concentrated on that night in Maine, but the same old memories came up every time. Nothing about lying on the rock. No memory of seeing Marco’s flashlight.
A couple of times, she’d tried making things up—stories about what might have happened. Her creative writing teacher had said that writers often don’t even know they’re writing about their own lives until the story is done and they step back and see it. But none of the stories Quinn wrote felt like anything other than grasping at straws when she went back and read them. Also, the whole exercise made her uneasy, like she might accidentally convince herself that something she made up was true. So she’d gone back to sticking with the facts. Or, at least, the facts as her brain remembered them.
None of the writing—fact or fiction—had led her to any sort of helpful dream yet. If anything, it had had the opposite effect. She’d begun to have a recurring dream, one that seemed to mock her efforts at finding the truth.
In the dream she was always outside—sometimes in the park, sometimes at the beach—and her body trilled with anticipation. A voice called her name, but she couldn’t tell who it was. Suddenly, there was water surrounding her feet—a deep, velvety darkness, as if the universe had spilled a sea of liquid outer space all around her. She lowered herself into it, swimming down, down, down, her path lit by those illuminated deep-sea creatures, glowing like stars. And she always knew that somewhere among the dancing lights, Jesse was waiting for her. She knew he was there because he loved her. He was there because he needed her.
And every time, she woke up with a feeling of intense happiness thrumming in her chest.
But as she came to full consciousness, guilt and confusion and anger stormed in. She wasn’t trying to remember something beautiful, and Jesse hadn’t been in that water with her. And he wasn’t the father of the baby. And he didn’t love her or need her. And happy? Who was she to be happy?
Her brain was taunting her: You think you can trick me into telling
you what happened? That I’ll let down my guard when you’re asleep and reveal the truth? Ha! If you could handle it, you’d already know.
The dreams made her feel like she was her own worst enemy.
QUINN
Monday morning brought damp, cold, and school. Outside the kitchen door, the gray sky hung low; the trees looked exhausted from holding it up. Quinn had worried that her parents wouldn’t want her to go to school at all because of the Herald article and the crowds out front—that she’d be stuck here like a prisoner—but she’d overheard her father telling someone on the phone that keeping her at home made it seem like they’d done something wrong. “Why should we let these people dictate our lives?” he’d said. “Why should their insanity compromise our daughter’s education?”
Thank god. She couldn’t wait to not be trapped here with that constant crowd chatter coming from outside, the honking as cars tried to pass, the whoot each time a police car drove by, phones ringing nonstop.
Be invisible. As far as she could figure, the best way to be invisible would be to slip into her usual routine: going to classes, hanging out with the Dubs. Being as close to her pre-pregnancy self as possible. (Except . . . how could she ever be close to that self without Jesse?) Because her parents had taken her phone—and had only just given her the ridiculous preprogrammed one, which only had numbers for Katherine and Gabe, emergency, and doctors on it—she hadn’t been in touch with anyone for days. Being without her real phone or Internet access was driving her as crazy as the crowd out front.
The Inconceivable Life of Quinn Page 16