Quinn hugged her again, wishing she could tell her that the baby was here for a reason, that something good was going to come out of all of this. But Quinn needed to stop relying on that fantasy. “Neither do I, Lyddie,” she said. “Neither do I.”
The alarm was installed.
Quinn was trapped. It heightened all of the emotions that had already been consuming her: loneliness, powerlessness, anger . . .
Although she craved human contact, she avoided her parents as much as possible; the tension and guilt she felt in their presence were overwhelming. Things were better with Lydia, at least, but that didn’t make a difference during the long days when Lydia was with her tutor. She had no contact with friends, except Jesse, and seeing him still brought that aching emptiness in her chest.
He had given her something from Sadie the afternoon of her aborted escape, a note that said, “I’m sorry.” Quinn wasn’t sure what Sadie was sorry for, but she assumed it meant she hadn’t been able to find out any information about Marco. A moot point now, anyway.
She didn’t let herself look out at the crowd anymore, didn’t want to indulge that sort of thinking for even one more moment, even though it was still in the back of her mind, refusing to go away completely. Ecstasy, or some other form of that MDMA drug, made sense and was a realistic answer. So she spent hours and hours writing about that day on Southaven. Only that day. Waiting for the memory to surface.
And she took baths. Endless baths. Washing off the guilt and trying to soothe her skin and make it fit again. She didn’t know who it belonged to, but it wasn’t her own. She stared at her growing belly. Over five months now. When she was naked, it looked enormous to her. How was it possible that she still had a few months left? Was her body really going to be able to keep expanding? Sometimes, she found herself thinking evil thoughts. Blaming the baby. Wishing she could do something to get it out of there. The minute she caught herself, she always felt terrible. The baby was the innocent one in all of this.
She had to believe that. It was the only good thing she had left.
She was in the tub, barely awake, trying again to remember the words from that children’s book: “A still morning sea, deeply asleep . . .” All of a sudden, the sound of a sharp explosion rang through the air and then the blaring siren of the alarm. Wahh! Wahh! Wahh! Wahh!
Quinn sat up, stood too quickly, slipping, grabbed at the wall to stop from falling. Stepped out and fumbled to put on her robe and hurried into the hallway. Lydia was coming out of her room.
“What was that?” Quinn said. The baby fluttered inside her.
“Stay up there!” Katherine called from below.
Wahh! Wahh! Wahh! Wahh!
“Was that a bomb?” Lydia yelled down.
Wahh! Wahh! Wahh! Wahh!
“Stay where you are!” Katherine said again.
Wahh! Wahh! Wahh! Wahh!
Quinn and Lydia stood together. “It wasn’t a bomb,” Quinn said, wrapping her arm around her sister. “A bomb would have been much louder.” After a minute, they sat on the top stair. Finally, the incessant scream of the alarm was silenced. A police siren took its place for a moment, then that quieted, too.
“What’s going on?” Lydia called downstairs.
Footsteps sounded on the steps and Katherine appeared, face drawn. “Everything’s going to be fine,” she said, sitting below them. “Someone threw a biggish rock through one of the living room windows. I’m not sure why. But he didn’t run away. Your dad is out there with him and the police now. We need to just stay up here until it’s all settled.”
She rested one hand on Quinn’s knee and the other on Lydia’s. The air around them was especially still, in that way that follows a panic. Quinn closed her eyes, and with the warmth of her mother’s hand on her knee, Lydia’s body next to hers, and the baby moving inside her, for a moment, everything seemed okay.
Quinn sat with her parents in the kitchen. The crisis had been taken care of—the man arrested, the large window temporarily boarded up, a glass company called to come replace the broken pane. Gabe was explaining what had happened.
“He was agitated—I guess a bunch of them were—because they hadn’t seen Quinn recently.” His voice was even and measured. Tight.
Katherine got a confused look on her face. A sour taste rose in Quinn’s mouth.
“Apparently they’d been seeing you?” Gabe said. “In the window? Word spread and that’s what they’d come to expect. This man, I guess he’d traveled from somewhere and was angry because you didn’t make any appearances.”
“I don’t understand. What are they talking about?” Katherine asked her.
Quinn swallowed, not sure how serious this was. “I haven’t done it recently,” she said. “But sometimes I’d just look out for a minute. You know, out of curiosity. And boredom.” She realized how stupid that sounded.
“Oh, Quinn . . .” Her mother rested her head in her hands.
“I didn’t know something like this would happen,” Quinn said. “I really didn’t think it was that big a deal. I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the window.”
“I think you know this isn’t about the window,” her father said. “It’s about your recklessness. Looking at those people? And making plans to sneak out, god knows where? We haven’t even talked about that.”
“My plans?” she said. So . . . Lydia had told them?
“Sadie told us,” Gabe explained.
“She was worried,” Katherine added.
Sadie had gone to her parents? The note: I’m sorry. Right. Now it made sense. Although, her parents hadn’t mentioned Marco, so Sadie must not have told them everything.
“And maybe this . . . recklessness is our fault,” her father said. “We’ve tried to protect you from most of what people are saying. But maybe that’s been a mistake.”
“What do you mean?” Quinn said.
“Hold on.” Gabe left the room, went upstairs, and returned a minute later with a handful of envelopes. “These people aren’t . . . they aren’t in their right minds,” he said, putting the letters down on the table.
He didn’t realize that Quinn already knew the kinds of things the letters said. “Dad, just because they’re religious doesn’t mean—”
“Read it.” He handed her one of the envelopes. It had already been unsealed. She took out a folded piece of dingy paper. No Hallmark card here.
To The daughter of G. Cutler:
You are a disgrace and a Danger to all. How can you be so proud? How can you disgust Him and his people so low? Do you not know the child you carry is the Devils child? And you portray yourself as like the Holy Mother performing miracle’s. This is disgraceful and Disgusting. I for One pray that something happens to end this Blasphemous pregnancy before it brings the Devil’s spawn to life. God will see to this, I am sure. If He does not We Will. Those who clame you perform miracles are also following the Devils path.
We are watching. HE is watching.
Dennis Loring
Bile rose in her throat. Gabe had already opened another one and laid it out.
All it said was: LIAR! SLUT! SATAN’S WHORE!
And another: Punishment will come to this house. It’s a true sin what unnatural force is at work in this house and there will be hell to answer for it. We do not back down in the face of evil.
And another: It is sickening the way you are abusing people of faith, people who know the truth, when you know nothing but lies and deceit. You are a whore, as far away from our Mother of God as you are from the sun. May you burn in Hell with Satan’s baby.
“No,” Quinn said, shaking her head.
“No what?”
“This isn’t . . . this isn’t what they say, the people. I’ve read some. This . . . Where did you get these?”
“Where do you think? I go through all the letters people leave before I shred them. I share ones like this with the police in case anything raises real red flags. People who are going to believe something like this . . . they’re not s
ane. The ones who think it’s God’s baby and the ones who think this is Satan’s work. Both. And when you stand in the window and make it look like you’re offering your blessings or whatever, it just encourages them. On both sides.”
“But . . . I thought . . . I thought the religious people . . . I thought they think I’m good. That the baby and I are good.”
“Still, Quinn. What were you doing looking out at them like that? I told you so many times. I told you to be invisible. It shouldn’t have mattered what they think of you!”
Quinn’s lips were cold. She reached up and pressed her fingers against them, like she had after the kiss with Marco.
May you burn in Hell with Satan’s baby.
QUINN
The words crept under her skin and stayed there, crawling around like maggots. And what other things had people said? What else did they think about her and her baby? The curiosity worked up into a frenzy inside of her. She didn’t care if the people were insane. She needed to know what they were saying.
She asked her father if she could see the rest of the letters.
“No,” he said. “You’ve seen enough.”
But it wasn’t enough. When her father left the house to meet with a lawyer, she snuck into his office and shut the door quietly behind her. She didn’t know how much time she had, so needed to get out as quickly as possible. First, she scanned the small room in case the rest of the letters were out in the open, in a box or bag or whatever. But she didn’t find them. So she began methodically opening every cabinet and every file drawer—even though the room was tiny, her father was a packrat, and file cabinets were stacked on top of one another. Drawers were full to bursting with papers about taxes and mortgages and scrawled-on drafts of his books and articles and bank statements, and none of it mattered at all or held any answers.
Eventually she came to a drawer that held files about her and her brother and sister—medical records, financial aid applications for New Prospect, end-of-year teacher reports . . . No letters. She took out her report from second grade at P.S. 107: Withdrawn . . . completely silent . . . extreme difficulty making friends . . . What had her mother said? “It was understandable. You had trouble adjusting.” But it was more than that.
She turned to Gabe’s desk, opened those drawers, and found tape and staplers and checks and stationery and stamps and pens . . . Nothing. Except . . . her sea glass necklace, shoved all the way in the back. Her father had taken it and not told her? He had let her think she lost it. Because it reminded him of his mother, she was sure. Crazy, both of them. That was why he had taken it. She took a moment to attach it around her neck. Not like he could be any angrier with her than he already was, and she had missed it, her fingers still reaching for it all the time.
She glanced around the room once more, in case she’d overlooked a stack of envelopes out in the open, but she hadn’t. Maybe he’d given them to the police.
She was about to leave when she saw a pink Post-it note on the floor. She picked it up. Preston Brown - 11/1, it said in her father’s writing. The date was underlined with three angry slashes.
The Preston Brown Show? That horrible, sleazy talk show where people revealed intimate details of their lives and yelled at one another in front of an audience? Quinn’s lunch curdled in her stomach. Obviously, the episode couldn’t have been about her since she hadn’t been there and it was an interview thing. But why would her father even have been interested in it? For a split second, she envisioned her entire family on a talk show couch, being interviewed about her behind her back. But no . . . There was absolutely no way they’d ever have done that. If her father were going to be interviewed on TV, it would be by someone more serious, not Preston Brown. Still, the note meant something . . . Obviously.
She woke up her father’s computer, which still had regular Internet access. It was password protected, of course. She began trying anything that occurred to her: combinations of the kids’ names and pets’ names and birth years and phone numbers. Her mind churned, and with every second that passed, she became more convinced she had to see the show. She was wasting too much time, though. She didn’t have all day. Think, Quinn, think. What could it be? Book titles, ages, addresses . . . She typed and typed, her fingers hardly able to keep up with her brain, and then she realized that time was too short, and her father probably didn’t even have a password she’d ever guess, and even if she got in, she wouldn’t have time to watch. There had to be another way.
Only the windows on the ground and parlor floors were alarmed. Quinn’s fourth-floor bedroom window wasn’t, and her father had never made good on his threat to install an air conditioner. All that mattered was escaping unseen. She didn’t care if she got caught on the way back. What could they do to punish her now?
She raised the pane all the way and stepped out onto the fire escape landing, keeping her breath as steady as she could and whispering to the baby that she’d be careful. She climbed slowly down the ladder, hands gripping the rough, cold rungs, feet slipping now and then, causing her heart to leap up her throat. At the bottom, she cringed at the loud, metallic scrape of the extension easing its way down. When she hit the ground, she ducked as low as possible and scurried across the backyard.
She knocked on the apartment door to make sure no one was home, telling herself that it wasn’t that big a deal going into the Kalbitzers’ when none of them were there. It wasn’t like she was going to look through any of their stuff; she’d been alone in the apartment plenty of times. Hugo was barking on the other side of the door, and no one came to answer it, so she slid her dog-sitting key into the lock. Hugo was thrilled to see her—butt-waggy and kissy, shoving his snout into her hand. “Hello, my favorite boy,” she said, hugging him fiercely, pressing her face into his shaggy, damp-smelling fur. “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so much.” He followed her into Jesse’s room, where she found his computer asleep but not password-protected. She tried not to be distracted by the familiar smell—a combination of sandalwood, dog, and laundry—or the sight of all his film posters, the map of the world with the thumbtacks stuck on the islands they wanted to visit, the whale bank with their savings . . . She didn’t have time.
As she typed in the search terms, she had a moment of pause. Whatever she saw couldn’t be unseen. But the Post-it note couldn’t be unseen either, and she knew that her curiosity would just grow, that it would take over her brain. So she pressed Enter. The full episode was easy to find. November 1: Episode 308, Immaculate Deception: Help! My Daughter Thinks She’s a Pregnant Virgin!
Preston Brown leaned forward, elbows balanced on the arms of his chair, fingers interlocked. The camera closed in on him. His penny-copper face, sculpted silver hair, deadly serious expression . . .
Quinn found herself leaning forward as well, elbows on Jesse’s desk. Her palms were slick with sweat.
“It’s a parent’s worst nightmare,” Preston Brown said to the camera, “finding out a teenage daughter is pregnant. We’ve had many families on this show struggling to deal with the emotional, financial, and spiritual consequences of teen pregnancy. But now let’s add another element, one far more unusual and complex.” The camera zoomed in even closer.
“As a parent, what do you do when your pregnant teenage daughter believes that she’s still a virgin—and that the baby is the child of God?”
Quinn grabbed the arms of the chair to steady herself.
“Today,” Preston said, “we’re going to talk to several experts on adolescent psychology, a doctor, and a priest, as well, about this unbelievable situation. Of course, there is a case of this sort in the news these days. Unfortunately, the family didn’t wish to participate in our show, so we won’t have their direct input. However, we do have another mother and daughter—a daughter who insisted she was a virgin throughout her entire pregnancy. We’ll talk to them a little bit later, and you’ll hear that fascinating story. Let me introduce my first guests, who will shed some light on this topic from a medical and psyc
hological point of view.”
The camera panned over to show two women and a man sitting on a long beige couch. Preston introduced them and their credentials flashed on the screen. PhD, MD . . . Trust them! the labels shouted.
“Let’s start with a little refresher course,” he said, lightening his tone. “Dr. Osgood, can a virgin be pregnant?”
The doctor gave a half smile. “Well, I’m assuming our audience knows the basics. So all I’ll say is that yes, there can be a situation where that is possible, but only if the female’s genitals made contact with semen. That can definitely happen during intimate contact that doesn’t include intercourse. It’s not likely, but within the realm of possibility. And artificial insemination, of course, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about today.”
“So,” Preston said, “if a girl said she’d never been intimate at all, in any capacity, but she was still pregnant, that wouldn’t be possible? She couldn’t have sat on a toilet seat or been in a hot tub or swimming pool? We’ve all heard stories like that.”
“No. Some girls will insist that’s happened to them, but I promise, it’s not possible. Sperm can’t survive in that kind of environment.”
“Okay,” Preston said. “So, we’ve got that covered. Now, Dr. Osgood, have you ever treated a girl who claimed to be a virgin, even though she was pregnant?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “I have.” She went on to explain that in all of the cases, though, the girls were consciously lying.
“I just don’t remember,” Quinn said, as if they could hear her through time and the monitor.
But you’ve considered it, a voice inside her responded. You even asked Dr. Jacoby about it!
“So,” Preston said, turning to one of the other guests, “is that the only explanation in a case like this, Dr. Sarandon? That the girl is lying?”
“No,” he said. “It’s possible that the girl truly believes she is a virgin. That she’s not letting herself acknowledge the physical act that led to the pregnancy. In a situation like this, we have to assume that whatever happened was so traumatic that it caused a psychic rupture. Her brain has created a story to cover up what really happened because it was so painful.”
The Inconceivable Life of Quinn Page 23