Comforting.
The only personal touch in this room is a small framed photograph of a younger Martha Underwood sitting on a beach towel with a boy of about ten. She’s nearly unrecognizable—thinner, smiling, tan. Nothing like the sour-faced matron sitting across from me.
“Is that you?” I say, nodding toward the photograph.
“Yes.” Underwood folds her hands on her desk.
“Your son?”
She nods, and squeezes her hands until the knuckles turn pale.
“Where is he?”
“Somewhere else.”
Part of the anger I’ve felt toward her melts into sympathy; part of it stays intact. I don’t press on with questions, but I make up my own story, which may or may not be true. Unfit single mother, kid taken away, downward spiral to demotion and bitterness. It makes more sense to believe this.
I don’t know whether she senses my questions, but she answers. “It’s a job, Dr. Fairchild. I get paid to do what I’m told. Exactly like your husband gets paid to do his work. There are rules, and I follow them.”
Rules. Orders. What’s the difference? I think.
She unfolds her hands and wills herself back into administrator mode. Cold, matter-of-fact. “Anyway, I received a call from your husband this morning. He took the early flight from Reagan National.” She checks her watch. “He’ll be here in an hour, so you might want to get ready.”
I expected Malcolm would come to make me return home. I just didn’t expect it would be today. Now. In an hour, which is, more or less, my immediate future.
“Thanks,” I say, and I stand up.
Before I leave her office, she says, “We all do what we have to, Dr. Fairchild. Best advice I have is to try and get along.”
I want to tell her that if getting along means going back to Maryland to live with Malcolm, I’d rather not, but I only nod before shutting the door and running back to the faculty residences, weaving my way between brick buildings and dodging the tree roots that have turned the paths into obstacle courses. The only humans in sight are small, distant figures out in the cornfields. Farm help, I guess.
I need to talk this out before Malcolm arrives so I know how to play it.
Ruby Jo and Lissa aren’t in the apartment when I arrive. The note stuck to the fridge says Gone for a walk before they lock us up again with a smiley face drawn instead of a signature.
In a normal world, I’d call my mother. A neighbor. Dr. Chen, the chemistry teacher in my old silver school. Anyone with an ear and a mouth. In a normal world, I’d have a phone and a laptop and Wi-Fi at the nearest Starbucks. I’d tweet and Instagram and FaceTime until someone, somewhere, answered. What the hell, I’d grab the closest bike courier on the street and force-feed him my story.
The problem with my current port of call is that I’ve seen exactly one telephone since I arrived, and it’s snugged up between a pencil sharpener and a stapler on Martha Underwood’s desk.
Also, I do not look my finest.
The gray shirt-and-skirt combo has more wrinkles in it than a shar-pei, and there’s a yellowish blotch of I don’t know what on my collar. My breakfast, most likely. After changing back into my blue dress and throwing the rest of my clothes into my suitcase, I twist my hair into a horse’s tail, splash my face with icy water from the kitchen tap, and leave the apartment with my bags, taking the outside path around the admin building to give my heart a chance to downgrade to something like a regular beat.
As soon as I see the taxi idling near the front entrance, I paint a smile on, straighten myself out, and rehearse the now, now, Elena, what in the world am I going to do with you? scene. I’ve already decided to make the best of it, to play along, as Mrs. Underwood said, until I can convince my husband to bring Freddie home.
Malcolm is still in the backseat of the car, making no sign of either getting out or opening it for me, so I walk through weeds and puddles to the taxi, reaching out with my free hand to open the rear door. It cracks a few inches, and then Malcolm pulls it closed again.
My smile twitches, straightens, and reverses itself into a confused frown as he shakes his head. Right, left, right, middle.
Then he pulls a legal-sized envelope from his briefcase and passes it to me through the window.
“You’re not getting out?” I say, even though I already know the answer.
“My flight leaves Kansas City in three hours.” My flight. Not our flight. “I came to give you that,” he says, nodding at the envelope.
“Long way to come to deliver a letter,” I say. The rain has started again. Fat drops fall on the label, smearing my name, blurring me. I tuck the envelope inside my coat before the name on it has a chance to disappear completely.
“It’s quicker this way, Elena.”
“How’s Anne?”
“I need to go.”
I say it again. “How’s my daughter?”
Smug is the best word I can think of to describe him right now. Smug and superior and severe and every other goddamned S word. When Malcolm shakes his head this time, there’s no smile, no parental mock-impatience, nothing.
“Elena,” he says, “you’re not fit to be Anne’s mother. You’re not fit to be anyone’s mother.”
The taxi drives away, throwing back gravel and flecks of mud onto my shoes. I don’t see it make the turn toward the main gate, and I can’t tell whether the rain has blinded me or whether I’m unable to see through my tears.
FORTY-EIGHT
THEN:
When I was pregnant with Anne, I’d waddle through the aisles of Safeway, filling my cart with every kind of forbidden food that would fit. I didn’t even bother looking at the calorie labels; at seven months, the only thing that mattered was the hungry baby in my belly, what she wanted.
The store wasn’t too crowded on Saturday mornings, if I went early enough, and today there were the usual suspects: working moms, working singles, early-morning joggers who had stopped in for protein bars and Gatorade before running home. I was in the olive aisle because today Anne decided she was in an olive kind of mood.
“Mommy,” a small voice said behind me.
“Not now, sweetie. Mommy’s on the phone.” A larger voice, also behind me.
“Mommy.”
“I said be quiet, Cheryl.”
“MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY!”
I think I heard the slap before I saw it. When I turned around, the chubby toddler strapped into the grocery cart, little legs kicking air, stared at the back of her hand. I saw now she was in dirty leggings and a dirtier top, both splotched with blobs of dried baby food. Peas on one side, carrots or squash on the other, all held together with a full-body smear of something that might have been oatmeal. I didn’t want to think what else it might be.
“Maybe you should dress her in clean clothes instead of slapping her,” I said. “What kind of a mother are you?” It was bold, even for me, and I blamed my outburst on late-pregnancy brain. Or I told myself that was my excuse.
The woman looked more girl than woman, a baby-mama, and she had no ring on her left hand. She came back at me there in the middle of olives and pickles and condiments. “Who the hell are you? The kid police?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “I hope someone makes you get a license before you can have another one.” And I walked off, away from baby-mama and her wailing toddler, forgetting the olives.
FORTY-NINE
If I had a list of rain-soaked states, Kansas would not be on it. Maybe they’ve saved up all their precipitation for today, when I need it the least. Maybe the heavens sense my distress and are crying with me, sharing my pain.
Two pairs of Tweedledum and Tweedledee eyes follow me as I push through the main door of the faculty building and cross the small entryway toward the double doors. They take in my un
iform code violation, start to say something, and then go back to being disinterested when they see the suitcase. It’s a short walk, a walk that should take only moments, but time does enjoy playing tricks, turning short walks into long ones. We’ve all been there: the nervous bride promenading down an aisle, hundreds of faces turned her way; the college girl picking a path back to her dorm, high heels and shame from the previous night making her feet and heart ache; a little girl trudging to school on an icy day, backpack heavy on her shoulders, knowing she will slip and fall, knowing the big kids will laugh at her. These are our walks of excitement and shame and fear, and we do them alone.
I don’t know whether I’m relieved or not when I find the apartment empty, when I fold back the metal tongues on Malcolm’s envelope and slide the contents onto the kitchen table. Maybe some tasks, the most terrible ones, are best done alone, without witness.
Three smaller envelopes stare up at me. I open the fattest one first because the printed name of a law firm in the upper left corner seems matter-of-fact, clinical. That, and I’ve already guessed what’s inside. You don’t need a doctorate in anything to know when your husband has served you divorce papers.
I don’t bother reading through the pages of complaints and affidavits and notices of service. My signature is required on only a few of them, and my future action limited to appearing in court three weeks from now, an action I can avoid because Malcolm has very generously enabled the hearing to occur in absentia. My absentia.
How kind of him.
The other two envelopes, much thinner, bother me. One says To my mother in Anne’s handwriting. The other, Elena, in Malcolm’s pointy scrawl. I open Malcolm’s first.
Inside it are two printed forms, nearly identical. Various-sized boxes on each contain my name, social security number, contact information, and medical data. Gestation, gravidity, maternal age—unhappily flagged as “advanced”—all match my own status on the day I went in for the prenatal Q test, which is also the day I walked out of the waiting room, leaving behind two women who thought of babies in terms of numbers on an intelligence quotient scale.
But something’s wrong with the second copy.
The first page, the page I created in an afternoon so I would have something to show Malcolm, has a bold 9.3 in the results box and a percentile graph just underneath the number. Of course it does, because I made it that way. On the second page, with all my identifying information, there are three words, even bolder, in place of the number:
TEST NOT PERFORMED
And no graph, only Malcolm’s pen asking Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I was stupid? The “stupid” is double underlined.
I’m okay. The room and everything in it is a blur, but I’m okay. I know this because my mouth is forming each sound in the words, over and over. And over again.
I’mokayI’mokayI’mokay.
I should never have lied to Malcolm, but he left me with no choice. If Freddie’s prenatal Q number came in even a millionth of a point below nine, I know what Malcolm would have decided. I know what he would have made me decide.
In the perverse game show I’m currently starring in, envelope number three stares up at me from the small Formica table. Anne’s handwriting, a perfect, practiced cursive, is centered on the front. I slit it open with a fingernail, unfold the cream-colored notepaper, and read. It doesn’t take long, and it burns.
Anne’s letter has no salutation, no closing, and ends with a sentence that I’ll never be able to erase from my vision:
I guess you made your choice. I don’t ever want to see you again.
The “again” is double underlined.
FIFTY
Minutes have gone by, or possibly hours. I’ve watched rain streak the window, pause, and start up again. I’ve listened to the repetitive noise of a distant machine, a generator maybe, and dull, thudding beats in my inner ear. I don’t think I’ve moved from my chair because my feet have begun to prickle with pins and needles.
It’s a pleasure to focus on my feet right now. The pain blots out everything else—the paperwork on the table, Anne’s note.
Through the open door to my apartment, the two Tweedles at the desk tell each other they deserve a break today. One of them—I don’t know which—says he’ll drive for the grub. The other comes back with a “Hell no, you won’t. Last time you ate half my fries. We both go. No one here to worry about anyway except those new ones down the hall. The doc will watch out for them. He’ll call us if they pull anything funny.”
There’s a whisper and a laugh, a private joke shared between two men with nothing better to do than exchange idiocies. A whir of machinery sounds as the metal grate separating their domain from the rest of the entry closes, then heavy footsteps, then nothing. Silence.
Silence, except for the scream inside me.
The doc will watch out for them.
Of course. Freddie needs to see a doctor.
Quietly, I shut the door and head for the small bathroom, where I comb out the rat’s nest on my head, throw on jeans and a blouse, leaving the top buttons of the white cotton shirt undone just enough to look casual without it coming off as an invitation. It’s then I realize I’m making noise—the sounds coming out of me are all the sounds a human can make. Crying. Sobbing. Some animalistic guttural sound that can’t belong to me. Hissing and whistling and wheezing. But no words, only some primitive form of communication, some ancient way of putting thoughts into sounds.
They work, those ancient ways. They calm me.
I scribble a note to Lissa and Ruby Jo, telling them I’ll be back before lunch, and I walk down the hall in the direction Alex went last night.
He’s on his sofa writing when I reach the half-open door. His hand freezes, rich-boy Montblanc fountain pen in midair, and he looks up, throwing me that winning smile he’s always had for me, even when Malcolm is around.
“Can I talk to you?” I say.
“Come on in.”
The apartment is at least double the size of the one I’m sharing with Ruby Jo and Lissa, and there’s not a hint of gray anywhere. These are the quarters for the staff who can come and go freely—the only decorations on Alex’s windows are curtains.
“Anything wrong, Elena?” he says.
Where do I start?
I could tell him I’m in one of almost fifty state institutions, that I have bars on my windows instead of brocade curtains, that I haven’t said more than five words to my daughter since Monday morning, that Malcolm has filed for divorce and Anne wants nothing more to do with me. But I think Alex Cartmill might know most of this already.
“You said you were the doctor here. Just wondering if you could maybe check up on Freddie.” I think back to a distant graduate course on blood pathology and make something up. “She looks like she’s developing sudden bruises, and I’m worried it might be a blood problem.”
Alex puts the Montblanc down and invites me to sit in one of the Eames-like chairs facing him. “Can I get you a drink? I’ve got water, tea, and bourbon. Your pick.”
“Water. Water would be great.” The bourbon sounds better.
He’s in silk slacks and a white cotton shirt, and he moves from the sofa where he was sitting to the kitchenette in that way people do when they’re used to being looked at.
“I know about you and Malcolm. I’m sorry,” he says, pouring two glasses of water. “Lemon? I’ve got lime, too, if you’d prefer that.”
I know things, too. I know that when I look toward the coffee table and read the upside-down letterhead on his clipboard it spells Genics Institute. Underneath, Alexander Cartmill, M.D. “Um, lime. If it’s easy.”
“No problem. I’ll just be a sec.”
“I’m cool.” But I’m not cool at all. Heat rises inside me in heavy waves, the kind of waves that can pull you under, tumble your body like a rag doll, leaving yo
u disoriented and gasping for air before you realize there’s no air to be had. I try to make light conversation—about tennis, of all things—while the rest of me strains to read the document on Alex’s clipboard. There’s time for only a few words before he hands me a glass of ice water, sits down, and oh-so-casually kicks his feet up onto the coffee table, obscuring the papers.
For the next ten minutes I sip at my water and pretend to listen while he enumerates blood disease symptoms. The room starts to close in on me, all the walls at once. All of a sudden, his cologne is overpowering, sickening. He’s moved closer to me and he’s leaning in, a breath away from my face. His left hand presses on my knee with such force I can feel each one of his fingers, an independent pressure point boring into my skin. There’s a gold band I’ve never noticed on this hand, and I’m thinking “smarmy” might not be the right word for him.
“So. We should talk more about Freddie,” he says. “How about you come back this afternoon. Say, four? We can discuss everything over a drink.”
I feel myself smiling and nodding and saying yes, agreeing to whore myself to this mad scientist for my daughter’s sake.
“Terrific. It’s a date, then,” he says. “But right now, I’ve got some work to do. Deadline in a few hours.” He pauses and avoids my eyes. “We’re rolling out flu shots before the season hits us.” Alex releases my knee and takes my hand, pulling me up with him. “I know things aren’t good with you and Malcolm right now, Elena. Maybe we can find a way to fix that, too.”
The room suddenly fills with music, a familiar strain of trumpets and other brass I recognize from Apocalypse Now. It’s Alex’s phone.
Master Class Page 19