Master Class

by Christina Dalcher

  * * *

  —

  From the Washington Post, Wednesday, November 13

  FAMILIES REUNITED—BUT AT WHAT COST?

  by Bonita Hamilton

  Sixteen-year-old Anne Fairchild should be planning for a homecoming dance this Saturday. Instead, she holds vigil in a hospital room while her mother lies in a critical state. “I knew something was wrong,” Fairchild says, wiping a tear from her eye. “So I installed a key tracker on my father’s laptop. When he found out, he sent me to Petra Peller’s house. All I wanted was to bring my mom and my sister back.” Also in the room is Anne’s great-grandmother, Maria Fischer. “I hope nothing like this happens again,” Fischer says. “But, of course, that is what we said the last time.” During this bittersweet family reunion, Fischer, who emigrated from Germany in her twenties and still works as an artist, explains . . .

  * * *

  —

  From CNN, Wednesday, November 13, 8:22 AM EST

  BREAKING: SECRETARY OF EDUCATION RESIGNS

  * * *

  —

  From Twitter, Wednesday, November 13, 8:23 AM EST

  Ding, dong, the bitch resigned! #BringThemBack #NoMoreYellow #NeverAgain

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame, and I’ve slept through all of them. Dad reads me the headlines from three days, hitting all the high points, while Mom tries to get micro sips of water into my body. I don’t know what withering sounds like, but it’s how I feel—dry, weakened, cracking into parts.

  Oma’s got Freddie on her lap in the love seat near the window. She’s rocking her back and forth, singing lullabies in German. Freddie has tried to wriggle away a dozen times, but Oma holds her back. It’s been like this since my parents came in with both girls early this morning.

  “Let her come if she wants to,” I say.

  Freddie nearly flings herself on me, like she used to do as a toddler. Anne tries, and fails, to keep her off the bed. I used to push them away when they got too clingy, too needy, when I had paperwork sprawled over my lap and my patience had run out after a day of mothering. It wasn’t that I didn’t love them, but I could only love so much and for so long. Now, I wish I could love forever.

  I don’t push Freddie off the way I used to do. I hold her and rock her and smooth her hair with unsteady hands. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” I tell her, but it doesn’t seem like enough to make up for any of the past week, or for any of the past years.

  “You have the flu, Mommy?” she says.

  “Maybe just a little fever,” I lie. My body is a furnace. When it gets tired of being a furnace, it becomes an icebox.

  I wish for more time. I wish for a body that could hug back and walk out of this room. I wish I’d run screaming from Malcolm Fairchild twenty years ago and married a regular guy named Joe. I wish all these things, but the genie in the bottle is fresh out of wishes.

  Besides, without Malcolm there would be no Anne and no Freddie, and I don’t wish that.

  Freddie smooths my hair back with her small hand. “You’re going to get better soon, right?”

  “Sure, baby girl. Sure I am.”

  “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,” she whispers in my ear. “And I’ll make everyone perfect.”

  I smile at this, but it’s a thin line of a smile, forced and dry. “You can be anything you want.”

  “Promise?” Freddie says, still close.

  “Cross my heart.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s all, Frederica. Cross my heart.” I’m not interested in the second half of the promise.

  My mother locks eyes with me, then turns to the nurse who has just walked in to sponge me off and dab my lips with some oily substance that keeps them from cracking. She mouths a silent question to the woman. The woman mouths something back. It looks like “Soon.”

  “I want to go home,” I say.

  The nurse nods, understanding. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then, to Freddie: “How about we go get some hot cocoa? I’ve got the good kind, lots of marshmallows.” Freddie follows her out, one tiny hand holding on. I think this woman in white must be some kind of genius.

  I’ve never thought much about what my girls would do without me, where they would live, who would take the parent baton if I had to pass it along. Malcolm’s and my wills name my parents as guardians, but only in the far-fetched case of both of us dying at the same time. Malcolm, as far as I know, isn’t going to die, but I imagine the place he is going won’t be somewhere he can take his children. So, my parents. Tag. You’re it, Mom.

  Still, this reality is fresh. My mother’s eyes tell me so.

  Dad signs the papers while two orderlies work on shifting my body to a gurney, my temporary bed until I reach the one in my parents’ house, and then, later, a more permanent bed. My body feels light in their arms, ghost-like. The gown falls away, revealing skin stretched over bones. I think I hear my mother let out a horrified gasp.

  While I continue to be in this lucid state, various people visit. My doctor. A social worker. The representative from our local hospice. Papers get signed, and instructions are recited while another nurse disconnects me from the monitors. I feel naked without all that plastic. There’s no arguing about who rides in which car; Dad announces he’ll drive Oma and Freddie home while my mother and Anne ride along in the ambulance. No sirens this time, no need for them. Sirens are for situations that can be fixed.

  One final document needs my signature, and I scratch it out as if I’m signing a check, or the receipt for a delivery of groceries.

  This, I suppose, is the dull and dry business of dying.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  SOON:

  Bright hospital lights and the constant bleep of the machinery that has been keeping me alive are gone. In their place, a white ceiling and the rustle of leaves outside my window keep me company while I dream.

  I can’t know what will happen in these next days and weeks and months, but I can speculate. My mind is still very much at work, even if my body has started to power down.

  Madeleine Sinclair, convicted of multiple charges of misappropriation of funds, perjury, fraud, and every other type of political death sentence, will trade her tailored blue suit for a new look: institutional gray, which is a perfect match for the one Malcolm will be wearing when my father takes the girls to see him on visiting days. The Genics Institute’s stockholders will be left with worthless paper, and Petra Peller—according to the rumors—will attempt to leave the country with whatever remains in the coffers. I think she’ll get caught at the border.

  Handsome Alex Cartmill, convicted of the kinds of crimes for which there is no excuse, will take the most sensible way out. A suicide befitting a war criminal—likely a steel barrel in the mouth. No one will care when the note he leaves claims he was only following orders. He actually calls my parents to say he’s sorry before he eats the gun. I hear Dad swearing in German at him.

  Martha Underwood, and others like her, will be reunited with her boy, forgiven when she says she was only doing what she was told. The forgiveness will be official only. Martha will find this out on trips to Safeway when she feels the stares of fathers and when she hears mothers whisper. She’ll move to a new state before long.

  I think it will be a good Thanksgiving, and the weeks before Christmas promise to be even better. My parents will have a full house again, both the old and the young to take care of. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, they’ll have a ton to be thankful for. On her tenth birthday, which happens to fall on the same date as the demolition of five buildings formerly known as Kansas State School 46, Freddie will celebrate by wearing her Wonder Woman costume for a solid week. She’ll stop taking her anti-anxiety meds at the same time, and nothing horrible will happen. Anne will meet a boy, a nice boy, who will take her to the winter dance. She won’t get as far as asking him what h
is Q was, but she’ll probably let him get to first base. The papers will report a rash of divorces, of which I would have been a happy statistic. Everything will be different, and I love it this way.

  I love that Lissa and Ruby Jo will both return to teaching and found a different kind of school, the one I’ll insist shouldn’t be called Fairchild Academy but the New School. Simple is better, I’ll tell them, even if I have to make the funding conditional and tell them that in legalese.

  The hashtags #NeverAgain and #NoMoreYellow will do what all hashtags do. They will trend, and then not trend, and then be replaced by other, more timely hashtags. Anne will keep them pinned on her social pages, though. She’s set on taking a journalism course next year, and Bonita Hamilton is going to offer her an internship. I think maybe Columbia University is where Anne will end up. Unless she turns to hacking and cryptography. Who knows?

  And Oma, my lovely Oma, will still paint. She might switch from fences to doors, but they will still be strange, abstract things that ask more questions than they give answers.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  My parents run in a constant upstairs and downstairs routine, checking on me with blood pressure cuffs and thermometers, bringing me blankets or ice water, depending on my state. One afternoon, Oma comes in.

  “You haven’t been sleeping.” She fixes the covers I’ve thrown off, pulling them up to my chin and tucking them in between the mattress and the box spring. “Were you cold again, Leni?”

  I nod. Dad brought up the portable oil heaters and put one on either side of the bed. He’s fit for a sixty-five-year-old man, but his shoulders don’t square themselves on their own. If he’s not thinking about it, they curve down in two sad arcs. He doesn’t realize I notice, but I do.

  Oma sits beside me on the bed and reads the cards that arrived in today’s mail. “I didn’t know there were this many people in the world, Leni.” When she gets to one from Ruby Jo, I ask her to read it again. The words say something about the most amazing woman ever. Funny, I don’t feel so amazing right now.

  Then Oma gets to the point.

  “Do you remember the time I struck you? When you were in high school?”

  “Barely,” I lie.

  “I have never forgiven myself for that,” she says, choking back the words. “It was a cruel thing.”

  I reach out to take her free hand, and she squeezes mine gently.

  She continues, “It was cruel, but that is not the point. I struck you because that day when you came home and told me about your school friend, that Irish girl from the poor family, I did not see you. I saw me.”

  “I really don’t remember, Oma.”

  But I do.

  She pats my hand now and holds the cup of water to my lips. After two sips, I lie back, exhausted from the effort. I think she stays with me while I sleep; I don’t know, but I hear myself saying I forgive her. Oma’s slap might have been cruel, but what I did and said that day was worse.

  While I’m out, I’m seventeen again. I’ve showered the sweat of three volleyball matches off me, combed through my hair, and taken my usual place on the locker room benches. I’m thinking of Malcolm and homecoming, of what color I’ll paint my nails, of whether I’ll wear strappy silver sandals or black patent pumps next Saturday night. Becky and Nicole are mercilessly teasing Susan about her date, about whether she’ll go all the way, whether Billy Baxter or whoever is Susan’s flavor of the month will finally score a home run.

  Another Wednesday afternoon, another post-gym-class chin-wag among us girls before we head off to biology, English, trig.

  It’s the Wednesday when Mary Ripley bumps into me.

  And I don’t want to be here, but I am. I need to be.

  We teased Mary differently than we teased Susan. Susan was a friend; our words made her laugh, and we laughed along with her. Mary, though, Mary we ripped into, digging for the bone and sinew and nerve, finding the tender spots that would sing with pain when we touched them with our stupid adolescent tongues. We did it because we could, because it was funny as hell, because Mary wasn’t worth a second thought. Or a first thought.

  Nothing happens when Mary walks into me (you walked into her, El), nothing more catastrophic than a few wrinkled pages of geometry notes when I knock them off the bench, a tube of Soft Sienna lipstick tumbling to the floor and rolling until inertia forces it to stop somewhere in the middle of the room. It’s a bump. An accident. It isn’t North Korea deciding to go nuclear on its southern neighbor.

  And still, I open my mouth.

  Language plays little tricks on you. Our words don’t mean what we think they mean. An “I love you” is an all-purpose response to the friend who lends you her scarlet sandals; an “I hate you” works just as well when she aces her physics final without studying. We go to extremes to make a point.

  I’m on the floor of the locker room, picking myself up, collecting spilled purse contents, and rubbing my elbow where it hit the edge of the bench. And I look up at Mary Ripley while she blubs a weak apology and offers a hand to help me up. I swat her hand away. And I speak.

  “You’re too stupid to live,” I say.

  There. I’ve remembered.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  It might be night. Or it might be day. I might be awake or asleep. Opening my eyes is the hardest work I’ve ever done; they want to stay closed. They demand darkness.

  Freddie is here; I can smell her soap, and her bubble gum–mint toothpaste, and the No More Tears stuff I’ve put in her hair—although not lately. So maybe this is morning. I want to tell her to draw me a picture, to make my old studio her own, but my mouth seems to be stuck together. I can feel my tongue moving, forming the sounds of words, but the sounds hit a barrier and stay locked inside. Trapped.

  A quiet, familiar voice takes the place of hers, one I haven’t heard in twenty years. “I saw the papers and flew in late last night,” the familiar voice says. His words are far away at first, then closer as a chair scrapes over the floor and a hand wraps itself around my own. “Got my own plane and license now, El. How about we go for a ride?”

  Sure, I think. Up, up, and away. So Joe traded cars for airplanes. He always was good with machines, but I don’t think he’ll be able to fix the one lying in this bed. This one’s what we call totaled.

  Mom comes in next, followed by Dad and Oma. Anne, who has been with me all night, squeezes over to make room, and my mother perches on the edge of the narrow bed. She takes my other hand, and she turns her back to me, as if this were enough to fool me into thinking she isn’t crying.

  “Elena,” she says.

  The hand holding mine is cool, but the contrast lasts no more than a moment. Soon, my heat transfers to her. There’s a law about this, about energy not dissipating, only being transferable from one entity to another. In the darkness of this hellish sweat I imagine some part of myself leaving, moving along, changing form.

  Voices talk around me and over me.

  Is she . . . ?

  Can they . . . ?

  Did the doctor . . . ?

  How long will . . . ?

  I close my eyes.

  A door swings open. Two doors, actually. One of them is in my room. The other, the one I see but don’t hear, leads somewhere else. Beyond it, there are pictures.

  In my dreams beyond that open door, I’m teaching high school art instead of biology. I’m married to a man who loves when I wear red lace to bed as much as he loves everything else about me. I’m pushing swings in playgrounds and taking the kids out of school on sunny days—to hell with rules. Someone like Ruby Jo would call me happier than a pig in shit.

  The hospice nurse puts something on my arm, a balloon that inflates. I think of the Child Catcher from that old movie, the one with the pretty balloons and the too-sweet smile.

  My nurse says words that sound like “shock” and “immeasurable.” And the
re is another sound, a chorus of weeping.

  But I don’t weep. When my eyes flick open again, there’s that door, yawning its welcome. In five steps, I’m there. My pulse stops racing and I’m out of the heat, into a place of cool and calm. I look back once before the door closes, and I see all their faces. I see my parents bringing the girls to visit me on Sundays, Oma teaching Freddie how to mix colors, and Joe speaking quietly to my daughters, telling them he’ll take them up in the plane as soon as he can—if Freddie’s okay with that. She says she isn’t nervous at all. Freddie and Joe’s twins act like siblings, even though they’re not. Anne has decided to change tracks, to go into teaching instead of journalism, but she’ll change her mind again at least five times.

  There are other faces, too, clear at first, then quickly dissolving and fading. One by one, the ghosts of Mary Ripley and Rosaria Delgado and that old trickster the Child Catcher drift away until they’re all gone.

  My last thought is about the letter Q. It doesn’t stand for quotient or question.

  It stands for quiet, and that brings a smile to my face.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters are wholly a product of my imagination. The historical events mentioned in the preceding pages, however, are very real.

  I haven’t sat in a history class for several decades, but I remember the material. I can tell you about who invented barbed wire and the cotton gin, the assassination that catalyzed World War I, and the details of the first televised presidential debate. None of my textbooks included a word on the American eugenics movement, on the practice of forcibly sterilizing men and women, or on the harsh realities of state institutions for the so-called feebleminded (many of whose inmates were children).