“What about you?” Eli popped back up, having forgiven her, and fluttered in the water. “Do you want to go to that fancy school for gifties?”
Being labelled gifted meant Maddie had always been in classrooms down the hall from everyone else. “It’s a private school education in the public system,” she’d heard her mother say. But what was so good about being set apart? She remembered a tiny boy—he had some kind of disease, they said. He’d come to the gifted program for a month only, in Grade 6. See-through skin, eyes scooped. He was difficult to look at, and so, after the initial teacher-sanctioned niceties, no one had looked. When the boys played chess, he sat by the window silently, watching, feet not touching the ground. He murmured the occasional answer, but when they had tests, he didn’t lift a pencil. He seemed like an artefact of an earlier kind of human, something found, encased in ice.
Maddie wondered what had happened in the washroom that day. She was at the end of the hall, playing Speed with Emma, fast flipping playing cards. The boy came out of the bathroom door with his hair wet, his face slack, his skinny body twisted. He stopped. There was a rip in his thin T-shirt, at the neck. Maddie stopped flipping cards and he looked at her, maybe for the first time. His expression was wild, helpless. Maddie froze under his gaze, and he zigzagged, retreating down the back stairs fast, dripping. Three boys came out after him: a boy she knew, Matt, and two seventh graders. Matt glanced at Maddie with a look of defiance, and disappeared down the stairwell. Maddie went to the hall window and watched the boy walk across the parking lot and onto the boulevard, and down the sidewalk, until he was gone. Gone forever. Never came back. He didn’t even pick up his backpack.
Maddie wondered if there had been an investigation into the incident. Maybe people had been punished, but she never heard about it, if that was the case. You never really knew how bad the thing was. She had never said anything. They were little. She was only eleven. What could she have done?
“I don’t want to be special,” said Maddie. “I just want to be normal.”
“I don’t think you’re special,” announced Eli.
She laughed, and dunked her brother under the water, holding him lightly, one, two, three—just enough to feel him struggle, the way sisters do.
GWEN
Dear Mr. Kaplan,
I am not used to writing these kinds of letters, but I hope you can understand that I must. I write not for me, but for my daughter, who is fifteen years old (“before” photo enclosed) and was once very beautiful. Unfortunately, due to a terrible car accident last year (drunk driver) her face is horribly disfigured (after careful consideration, I have decided to spare you the “after”). My benefits have run out as I was laid off last winter, and because the plastic surgery my daughter requires in our society is not life threatening, we are faced with the difficult scenario of being unable to help her rebuild her face.
“What? No ‘after’ picture? Rip-off!” yelled Eli.
“Oh, this one is unbearable.” Gwen winced.
“I smell a scam. Put it in the scam pile,” said Eli.
“What if we’d won the eight-hundred-and-thirty-five-million-dollar jackpot? Imagine all the people who would have surfaced then.”
“We got off easy,” agreed Eli, and they both pondered the bigger win.
The first request had come at the old house, a call on the landline from Very Old Man Benwether. Gwen added a “very” because his nickname had been Old Man Benwether back on Gwen’s family street in Procter, Ontario, two decades ago. He needed just $1,500, he said, to pay for the final stage of some dentistry work. Where his teeth had been were now only raw, exposed nerves. He had lost the house, he told Gwen, and lived alone in a bachelor apartment, with no benefits since the downsizing, and barely any government pension. Gwen took his address, and his name—not “Mr. Benwether,” as he’d been for decades, but “Jonathan Benwether.” She wrote him a cheque, and on her way to the Goodwill with another load of clothes and dishes, she dropped it in the mailbox.
Gwen didn’t know why he was the first, or why she had thought he’d be the last, but soon after came the flood. Alumni associations. A great-uncle twice removed of Seth’s. Cousins and clerks. A woman who worked at the pharmacy in the strip mall with whom Gwen had been friendly (but not a friend) over the years. Gwen was shocked by the distance of these relationships; these were not people who occupied the corridors of their lives. They were shameless.
She changed her email, but Eli scoffed, “Don’t you know they’ll just scrape your address? There’s literally actually no email that can’t be found. I have Ronaldo’s address.”
Paper letters followed them, forwarded from their old house. Just the existence of these letters, the effort to lift pen to paper, to procure a stamp—that effort was the strongest signal of their need, the saddest part.
At night, Gwen asked Eli to sit at the dining room table with her and sift through the pleas. The six stacks of letters and printed emails were divided into piles: (1) personal appeals from people we know; (2) appeals from strangers; (3) charitable appeals from organizations we already support; (4) those we might support; (5) those we’ve never heard of; and (6) Eli’s favourite pile, marked with a yellow sticky: CRAZIES.
Dear Mr. Kaplan.
(They almost never approached her, Gwen noticed, going straight for the patriarch. But it was Gwen who handled the household finances, who knew where every penny was allocated and always kept to the budget.)
Have you ever heard of the Raelians? Well, let me tell you about the Elohim—very cool extraterrestrials!—who founded this planet and have sent us many prophets over the years, including Jesus and Buddha (ever heard of those guys?? I think so!). Google it! Anyway, we Raelians believe firmly that it is through the transmission of sexual energy that we can achieve radical self-reconstruction. They (we!) have awesome seminars in France every summer, where people get together and experiment with lots of stuff things, including each other. I would love to go but unfortunately, my current job (if you can call it that) doesn’t earn me the money to make the trip. All I need for my self-reconstruction in Nice, South of France, is $3,654.75.
“This guy wants us to pay for him to go have sex with a bunch of alien people in France,” said Eli admiringly.
Gwen noted that Eli was completely comfortable with their new financial circumstances. “When’s our cash coming?” he would ask happily. “We better think about parking our money in a savings account with high interest rates!”
Then, in a thin airmail envelope, a translucent sheet of paper in a cramped scrawl: Hello, Please please please please please I beg you please help me! I need just one million dollars and they will release me from this cellar!
“I’m calling the police about this one,” said Gwen.
“Mom, just toss it,” said Maddie, who had wandered in wearing a bikini, her bare feet padding across the hardwood floor. “If someone was really held hostage in a cellar, how would they write this letter?”
“With their Raelian MIND!” yelled Eli, who was now doing wobbly cartwheels around the empty dining room.
Seth wasn’t surprised. He told Gwen that there are Orthodox Jews who make a career of begging, and it’s not without holiness to live this way. He’d read about a man who travels from Jerusalem to New Jersey annually, hiring a driver to take him to the homes of the local ashirim, all the rich men, knocking on the doors and offering jokes in exchange for cash. The Talmud says to give a 10 percent tithe. Isn’t it better to just ask, Seth said, than suffer in silence or envy? Gwen listened and frowned. Seth was deft at pulling snippets of Jewish identity from the air when a life lesson was required, but Gwen wasn’t entirely sure where they came from. Isaac, Seth’s father, was a self-proclaimed “holiday Jew,” and his mother, Enid, was a Methodist, from Wales. Seth hadn’t gone to Hebrew school or even had a bar mitzvah. Early on, Gwen and Seth visited a synagogue in Montreal on day one of Rosh Hashana. Seth wore a keepah over his curls, looking handsome. The woman rabbi delivere
d a long sermon on interfaith peace. Afterwards, Seth spoke wistfully of the intimidating old rabbi at his grandparents’ synagogue, with the beard so long that Seth was always hopeful he’d pull a rabbit out of it. That was the end of synagogue. But Gwen liked this link, however faint, to a substantial past.
None of Gwen’s relatives came forward. She hadn’t had contact with them in years, and anyway, her married name was a shield. She had wondered if her father would surface, but he had ranted often about those people taking handouts, and prided himself on needing next to nothing. Gwen’s contact with her sister had dwindled to a Christmas card, and Nancy was rich enough already. Seth’s family, on the other hand, seemed to have a “It doesn’t hurt to ask!” policy, and many of his more distant relatives popped up with requests. The big ones were easy to turn down: No, third-cousin Elphie, we can’t buy you a new car. But the small ones were more of a nuisance: $150 here, $50 there. If Seth remembered the person at the asking end of the note, Gwen would send the money. There was so much need in the world, and so close by, and Gwen had tried not to feel its pull for many years. The B’nai Brith called. Planned Parenthood. Alzheimer’s Society. The Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. The Kaplans had left some footprint of their inclinations by their donation patterns over the years. Their soft, guilty places (which Seth accessed so well at tax time) were ripe for kneading and exploitation.
Gwen was overwhelmed. She flipped through the letters, unable to open another. What can we possibly do for so many?
Seth walked through the room, on his phone. Gwen could tell by his low pitch that he was talking to Tom, the young software developer he was courting. Gwen had met him last year at a Christmas party in Seth’s office. She hated Seth’s office, with its atmosphere of forced fun, stacks of Nerf guns and giant faux farm-tables where everyone sat shoulder to shoulder. Most demeaning was a wall where employees were encouraged to write slogans in chalk: “LET WHAT YOU LOVE BE WHAT YOU DO!” “DON’T SAY I WISH—SAY I WILL!” When visiting, Gwen was tempted to rub her body against the wall and erase every word.
At the Christmas party, Tom first looked at her with earnest intent, like a Mormon at the door, but when she explained that she was just a wife and mother, his concentration disintegrated and his eyes drifted to a point over her shoulder. Tom had a software idea that Seth wanted to turn into a business, a pitch that Seth’s company had passed on, quashing Seth’s recommendation for investment, yet again. Even though he was no longer just a corporate accountant but a financial manager, he joked that he did the books for people who didn’t read books, and anyway, they weren’t even books, they were spreadsheets. He’d been passed over for the CFO job twice.
But as he hovered in the doorway, murmuring, “Mmm-hmmm . . .” and “Exactly!” into this phone, Seth sounded happy and boyish. It was a voice Gwen associated with stories of Seth’s childhood, when he’d been a very good magician, hosting magic shows in his apartment building and tracking down older magicians from the phone book, showing up on their doorsteps to take in their wisdom. Gwen loved this detail of Seth’s life before her. Little Seth in a cape sewn by his mother. The image spoke to her husband’s inborn hopefulness; he was a bringer of joy, a kid who saved his money for a dove named Frederico when other kids were buying cigarettes.
In imitation of Seth, Gwen announced cheerfully that she would send money to three of the letter writers. She wanted to show Eli generosity. She wanted to model for her kids the person she wasn’t sure she was. That’s why she’d agreed to a house with a swimming pool. It was such a little, modest pool, Seth argued, and summers were so hot now. Gwen thought it was decadent and dangerous, its black mouth waiting in the yard to gobble her sleepwalking son. But Gwen wanted to be a person who wasn’t afraid, a person who had a pool. So she had agreed, and Seth had squeezed her shoulder. She would swim in it tomorrow to show herself it was okay.
“Mom,” said Eli, tossing a letter aside, exhaling with sudden boredom. “Can I play video games?”
MADDIE
The school spread over an entire city block, a squat Edwardian red-brick box, cut vertically by windows skinny and blank. Maddie stood at the crosswalk across the street and stared at the steady push of teenagers making their way up the small staircase to the arched entrance. It was ugly, she decided. An old-fashioned lunatic asylum. Maddie knew about Frances Farmer and how women got locked up and lobotomized; she’d had a Kurt Cobain phase a few years ago.
Kids called it the U—the University School—because it backed onto the campus of the city’s biggest university; a prestigious holding pen before the next one. At the interview, Gwen and Seth had pointed out the display cabinets holding trophies, and the alumni wall with the impressive accomplishments of a hundred years of students—CEOs, a prime minister, “industry leaders.” Victorious sports pennants dangled from the ceiling of the gym. Still, the whole building smelled of bananas, just like every school.
The school was a compromise: it was private, and affiliated with the university, but with many kids on scholarship. No uniforms. Co-ed. Yet it fulfilled her parents’ criteria, though Maddie had not known until they moved that any criteria existed. Apparently, her education up until this point had been just barely acceptable. The school was, Maddie overheard Gwen say on the phone, “exclusive” and “rigorous” with a “social justice component.” A private school in the private system! thought Maddie.
Maddie had heard of the U in Shadow Pines. She’d even come up against its students once at a debating tournament, and been crushed (topic: Does every citizen have a right to die at a time of choice? Commence!). To get in at this late stage, in the final year of high school when her marks mattered most, was very difficult, the dean had told her at the interview, shaking Maddie’s hand with her onion-skinned one. The U’s attrition rate was extremely low; most of the kids had been enrolled since sixth grade. You come, you never leave. Maddie was lucky, so lucky, she was told, the onion-hand now in her mother’s clutch. This made Maddie think: So who am I replacing? What happened to that student who left?
They were stupid, really, to let her in. They didn’t know her, and had only granted admission to the paper version of her, which had been curated over many years to impress. Maddie was a very good student, but she did not see herself as brilliant, the way so many kids were, the way her friend Raj was. Raj would sit quietly in the back row and listen to the history teacher ramble on and on (while glancing nervously at Raj, waiting for it) and then raise his hand, open his mouth and in one perfect paragraph—no “uh,” no “like”—explain that she had missed the single most crucial point, and that point was usually the cornerstone of some theory that no one had ever thought of before until Raj.
Maddie made sure she put up her hand just enough to get points for being called on, but really, she was wary of confrontation. She had joined the debate team because she should, and it seemed appealingly like fake conversation; every angle could be prepared for in advance (she was, subsequently, only a reserve in tournaments). Maddie liked facts, numbers, dates. She liked poetry, not novels. Poetry was bound by a little box, but novels were impossibly wide, like weather. Maddie could, after reading whatever else had already been written about a poem, construct a tidy analysis. But she couldn’t see through to the other side of the facts, or even the poem, which she examined for rhyme and structure, not feeling. Fighting with information made her stomach flutter. “Think critically!” the teachers would always say, but they didn’t mean it, really. They meant: Work harder. Do well. Get into a good university. Get going on the business of being old.
Because of this tingling certainty of her own fraudulence, Maddie had decided that her place was somewhere near the back of the pack, even if she got top-of-the-pack grades. Once a teacher had said, “Everyone believes they’re the main character,” but Maddie had never felt that. Maddie felt she was outside the story, moving sideways next to her genius friends, crablike.
Maddie adjusted her backpack, and pressed the button for
the light at the crosswalk.
She knew that if she turned quickly, she would see Gwen skulking somewhere behind her.
“How do you feel, honey?” Gwen had asked her as they came out of the subway together.
“Excited,” Maddie murmured.
“Not scared?”
“I should go.”
Gwen had leaned in for a hug, which Maddie accepted. Her mom was meant to walk east, to the subway that would take her back to the new house. But Maddie knew that if she looked back, Gwen would still be standing and watching. As long as she could remember, Gwen was in the hallways of her school, or if she was not present, Maddie would catch a glimpse of her through the classroom window, in the distance, walking across the field or sitting on a bench at the edge of the parking lot. It was weird, probably, and she never told her friends because sometimes it felt sweet to be craved like that. But last year it had bugged her so much that they’d had a family meeting, and Gwen had promised to back off.
Maddie didn’t know how she felt about the stalking today because she didn’t want to think about Gwen. She had no room for Gwen. Not today.
Maddie had been telling the truth: she wasn’t scared. There was curiosity, which she reported as excitement to appease her parents. She was ready to be done with all of it, these last months of her childhood. That ending was the only thing that felt real to her, looming and tangible. She crossed the street without looking back.
* * *
In the hallway, before the last period of the day, Maddie stood with her schedule in her hand, like a tourist checking a map. She had made it through her first four subjects, and lunch (a quiet corner of the cafeteria; a few pleasant enquiries from student council types—no trauma), and now she had to locate Advanced History: The West and the World. The room, once discovered, was underlit. Except for a few posters—Nelson Mandela and a world map—the walls were mostly empty. Students were already seated around a large oblong table. As Maddie walked in, they raised their heads, scanning her.
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