by Jess Lourey
I duck my head to hide my smirk. I will pay her back for her kindness. Oh yes, I will.
“Very good,” Ronald says. He gives me his full attention. “Do you pledge your loyalty to the Mothers, promising to always put the needs of others before your own?”
“I do.”
“Do you swear to help those who are suffering, and to never turn a child away from your door? To honor human life above all else, and to honor your sacred duty as a Mother?”
Hypocritical bastards. “I do.”
He fastens the pin to my robe. He kisses me on each cheek and then the mouth. “Then let the Fathers welcome you.”
He steps back so each man in the room can repeat his gesture: cheek, cheek, mouth. Some of them grip my stomach before they step away, a furtive rub, as if I’m a stone to massage for luck. Stanley—my true father, after all—doesn’t seem to recognize me. He’s chewing on something he should have swallowed long ago, I think, when I lean down so he can kiss me. He sniffs my neck, or simply twitches, and when he leans back into his wheelchair, I spot a flash of something alert in his eyes. But then they cloud over, and he’s gone.
I intend to pay him back, too. For Frances.
When all the Fathers have kissed me, the Mothers are guided to deliver three kisses of their own: cheek, cheek, forehead. Their closeness and breaths and the intimate way they’re handling me is starting to take a toll. I fight off waves of dizziness.
When I have been blessed by everyone, Ronald turns me, clasping one of my hands with his and raising them both in the air. “Let’s welcome our newest Mother!”
My eyes are dry as everyone cheers.
CHAPTER 61
I’m sprawled on the sofa of Dorothy and Stan’s house. Slow Henry is crashed out on his back, feet curled in the air, purring in his sleep. A quilt beneath me soaks up the worst of my perspiration. My engorged belly hides the lower half of my body from my eyes, but I know from the now-constant ache in my swollen calves that they’re still down there.
The sky rumbles, and I pray for relief in the form of rain. The heat has been oppressive, unrelenting. The radio tells me people are dying from it all across the Midwest.
It will not be much longer.
Dorothy is helping Stanley into bed. They were pleased with the initiation ceremony. Dorothy was, anyhow. Stanley is too far gone in his senility to know much. I wonder whether his state is reward or punishment for the life he’s lived.
The Mothers and Fathers and I celebrated after I was pinned. Initiation is the rare day of the month when the men and women rejoice together. I’m part of something bigger now. I belong to the people who make the rules.
The only way to be safe here is to pretend to be one of them, but it’s no life.
My baby is always moving now. Diving and turning and squirming. I can see it ripple my flesh, like a great sea creature roiling just below the surface. I want somebody to share it with, someone who’s not a Lily.
A branch scratches my window. There’s no breeze, despite the clouds rumbling. So many people have remarked what a good omen it was that the weather was still and cloudless for my initiation.
Heaven can see clearly.
Mildred had said that. Kind, passive, handmaid-of-evil Mildred.
I roll to my side, drop my feet to the floor, and sit up. I am now so big that it’s the only way I can stand from a prostrate position.
I lumber to the window.
Kris stands outside.
I shrink back. Dorothy could return to the living room any moment. Before I can decide how to react, I hear the kitchen door open. I hurry to it.
Kris has entered. He has a hard time looking at me, which I think is funny. He’s the one who sought me out.
“I’m leaving,” he says. His voice is low. He must realize Stan and Dorothy are near.
“Back to Siesta Key?”
He looks at me, surprised. We haven’t seen each other in weeks. “That’s right. I forgot I told you about that. That was the truth, how pretty it is.”
“The rest wasn’t.”
All his liquid confidence is gone. He seems smaller. His denim jacket is ill fitting and his fingernails dirty.
“No,” he says. “The rest wasn’t. Except for the part about hearing about Paulie from some army guy who passed through Lilydale in 1944. The story got stuck in the back of my head. When I wanted to check out a new place, I hitched here, and I said I was Paulie. Figured it wouldn’t hurt anyone, and it might be fun.”
I watch him. The Fathers and Mothers would not approve of him being here.
I am a Mother, technically. And I do not approve.
“They knew I wasn’t Paulie, all the old guys here, the ones who were at your house when Regina and I stopped by for dinner. I don’t know how, but they knew the second I stepped foot in Lilydale. Showed up at my motel room. I thought they were gonna beat the shit out of me, but instead, they told me to spend time with you. Said they’d kill me if I told you the truth, though.”
The baby is twisting in my belly. Furious.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have done that. These guys, man, they’re dangerous. They run everything here, you know that? Everything in the whole damn county, I think. You’re not safe here, Joan.”
Has he come to ask me to leave with him?
I’ll never know, because I open my mouth and scream as loud as I can.
CHAPTER 62
I am up early so I can apply makeup to walk to the grocery store with Rue.
They were so happy, the Mothers and Fathers, when I screamed. Deck appeared first, Clan on his heels, and they subdued Kris, led him out of the house.
“Dear,” Catherine said, coming to me. “It’s time for your baby shower. Tomorrow.”
I swallowed my smile. I’d passed another test.
I took advantage of it to get permission to shop for all the groceries for the party they’ll throw when my baby is born. The Mothers hesitated at first—I’ll likely be too tired to even attend the celebration, and the person who shops should always be the person who cooks so they have the right ingredients—but in the end, barely, I got them to agree to me purchasing steak and grilling supplies as well as staples for dessert. All of it will keep in the cupboard or the freezer, and the men can grill.
I’m overjoyed, but I hide it.
Being in charge of groceries was the first hurdle in my plan, and I’ve overcome it.
I was surprised when Rue volunteered to chaperone me to the grocery store. She’s always been so quiet, but I find that I prefer that to Mildred’s chattering and Dorothy’s doting and Catherine’s gloating and Barbara’s sighing as we make the slow, ponderous stroll to Wally’s. The weather hasn’t broken yet, for all last night’s rumbling. It’s going to, soon. The clouds are black and portentous, the heat so ominous, even at this hour, that it feels like being stalked.
My due date is in four weeks and three days. Soon, I’m going to hold my baby.
“Joan.”
I turn toward the quiet voice and see Regina leaning in the Little John’s alley, smoking. When did she start smoking?
“Hello, Regina.” I should feel guilty for how I treated her. Guilt is so familiar. “How are you?”
Her hair is lank and greasy, her chin a constellation of pimples. She keeps tugging at the hem of her too-short skirt, flashing glances at Rue. “Kris said he was going to spring you. I guess he didn’t.”
I smile broadly. “I guess not. You’re up early.”
She looks around as if surprised. “Yeah, got a lot on my mind. Joan—” She steps close to me, hesitates, turns as if to go, then spins back to face me. “I know why you did that, back at the café. Why you turned on me like that. It’s because I told Albert, the other bartender, about you seeing your mugger in town. I didn’t mean to. He was talking shit about you, is all, saying you were a crazy bitch who should be committed, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I told him that if it’s crazy to be jumpy when you run into the man who mu
gged you, then we’d all be insane.”
My neck aches to turn toward Rue, to promise her that this is in the past, nothing for her to worry about. I keep my smile pasted to my face, my eyes glued to Regina.
Her chin is quivering. “It got back to you, didn’t it? They made you pay, didn’t they? I’m so sorry, Joan. Can I ever make it up to you?”
“I’m going to the grocery store with my friend Rue,” I say. “We could use a ride home. We need a lot of food, grilling charcoal, and fluid. Can you help us?”
She laughs in disbelief. I keep staring at her. Finally, she shakes her head. “Fine. I’ll grab my car and pull it up in front of Wally’s.”
When Rue and I exit the grocery store twenty minutes later, the bagger following us, wheeling out a dozen boxes of chocolate pudding, eight pints of cream, four tubs of Cool Whip, all the steak in their meat department, two bags of charcoal, and a box of lighter fluid, she’s parked at the curb, waiting.
Regina’s eyes widen when the groceries are loaded in her back seat and trunk.
“I’ve never grilled before,” I say defensively. “I don’t know how many people will be over. I want to be prepared.”
Her car’s rear drops as the last bag is packed in, but she doesn’t say anything. I slide next to her, Rue in the back.
“Thank you,” I say when she takes off.
She lights a cigarette. “You want to drive straight to your house?”
She snaps open the ashtray. I think I see a flash of white enamel etched with red inside, the color of a Mother’s pin, and my flesh erupts in gooseflesh. I reach for it, frozen but for my hand.
It’s the ripped edge of a Marlboro box.
My breathing returns to normal.
“Do you want one?” she asks, opening her purse between us to indicate her cigarettes.
I shake my head, toss Rue a reassuring smile.
She looks distressed in the back seat.
“Hey,” Regina says, low and quiet. Her tone is different. For a second, I can almost hear her dimples in it. “It’s a wide world, you know. We could go anywhere. Just keep driving. I have five hundred dollars in tips saved up, hidden beneath the spare tire. That’s enough to get us far away.”
If she’s smart—and I think she is—she’ll be one of us soon.
“I want to go straight home,” I say, turning again to flash Rue a reassuring smile.
Regina continues to smoke as she drives away from the store. Now she’s the quiet one. She pulls up to my house, still silent. She stabs out her cigarette.
“Can you wait here while Rue and I go get help?” I ask.
I locate Deck inside the house where I used to live. We are not technically together anymore. It’s awkward to be alone in a room with him, this man whose baby I carry, who I slept curled next to for many nights, who I envisioned growing old with. He’s a handsome stranger.
“Hello,” I say. “Can you help Rue and me unload groceries for the party? For when the baby’s born?”
He follows us to the car. “Holy shit!” he says when he sees everything I’ve bought. “Did you leave anything in the store? There’s enough supplies here for a hundred barbecues.”
I duck my head. “I’ve never grilled before,” I say.
Regina stays in her car, smoking.
It takes Deck four trips to unload everything.
I have overcome the second hurdle.
CHAPTER 63
I know it’s not a baby shower they’re inviting me to.
It is their final test. If I pass it, I am free, finally and forever one of them, the watcher, not the watched. I only have to survive this one final test. We pull up in front of the nursing home, me squeezed in the back seat between Dorothy, my “mother,” and Barbara, my baby’s grandmother.
My baby.
I can feel it pushing, swirling, turning.
Insisting.
My stomach looks like something is constantly wrestling inside it. If the baby comes early, I am ready. My plan is in place.
We step out of the car. The cicadas are burring and buzzing, a hypnotic whirr that blends with the kiln-heat of the air. The Mothers are pulling me into the nursing home, Mildred putting her finger over her mouth (sssshhhhh) and giggling as we pass the nurse in the reception area. They are leading me toward a door, and it feels like it might actually be a surprise party until they open it and I see the stairs leading down and too late I remember Rosamund Grant’s warning when I came here to ask what she knew about Paulie Aandeg.
Whatever you do, don’t wander into the basement.
We step down the stairs.
The smell reaches me first. I think it’s the stench of an animal farm—close bodies, waste—but realize there’s something human about it, the smell of meat eaters, of bipeds, of creatures whose clothes are washed sometimes but not often enough.
Then Catherine opens the basement door, her eyes cutting into me, lips pulled back from sharp, strong teeth in an approximation of a smile.
She steps back.
A scream freezes in my mouth.
A dozen people, maybe more, stand inside, each of them terribly deformed, all with the same pin heads and jutting jaws. Some have stumps for arms, nubs of flesh where ears should be, appendages where there should be none.
I recognize the woman from the furniture store, the feral thing with the melting eyes. Mildred walks over to her, tentatively. When she stands behind her, the woman snarls, the sound matched by the two women next to her. They all have the eyes sliding down their faces.
Mildred’s three daughters.
The scream breaks free, but it’s a sob.
I know what I’m looking at. The cursed full-blood children of Lilydale, doomed to live these half lives because of their parents’ commitment to a pure bloodline.
My half siblings.
Dorothy hovers near the door, her hands clasped in front of her. Does she not have children in this basement? Can she not produce even this?
I notice the cots rimming the edges and realize Lilydale’s children must live and die in this facility, away from the questioning eyes of the world. Catherine is walking toward the shadowed edge of the cafeteria-size room, her steps mincing, as if she’s approaching a caged lion.
That’s when I spot him.
A hulking, shirtless man. He’s staring at me. His lips are belligerent, but his face disappears just beneath them, perched on a neck that’s impossibly wider than his head. What he’s missing in chin he makes up for in a slender, towering cranium speckled with bristly hair more animal than human. His ears stick out nearly as far as his sloping shoulders.
“Joan,” Catherine says, inching closer to the behemoth lurking in the shadows, not taking her eyes off him. “I’d like you to meet my son. Quill Brody. All the children like to escape, but none of them are as good at it as my boy.”
Is that a note of pride in her voice?
“Clan will take him home on occasion, for short visits, if he’s good. Isn’t that right, Quill?” The man makes no indication he’s heard. “Sometimes on those visits, he likes to get out and visit the neighborhood houses—play in the alleys, mess with the garbage, open and close windows. Maybe you’ve seen him? Clan covers for his son, as any father would.”
She’s abreast of him. Slowly, she steps back so she can face me while keeping an eye on him.
“Now you see why we need fresh blood. Why we needed you.” She points at my belly.
Quill shambles forward. Catherine flinches, but he’s not looking at her, only me. That’s when I notice his hand-wound music box. He begins to crank it. A hurdy-gurdy lullaby slithers out. When the music begins to slow, he cranks it again, never breaking eye contact. He’s so close I can feel his heat.
I look away, but not before I see the figure-eight scar on his left arm, identical to mine and Deck’s. Sometimes certain bloodlines will have a similar adverse reaction to a vaccination. It’s uncommon but not unheard of.
All of us Lily children likely have o
ne. It was Kris whose scar was a coincidence.
Quill is cranking the music box faster and faster.
“He played that for you when you were little,” Dorothy is saying from behind me. “Remember? He played with you during your only day at Lilydale kindergarten, visited you in the basement at Dorothy’s.”
I smile a crazy grin, my eyes spinning. I feel a rupture, and then my underpants grow so wet that moisture runs down my legs.
I drop to my knees.
Not now, baby, not now. Please don’t be born down here.
CHAPTER 64
The Mothers hurry me back to the lemon-yellow room. Call Dr. Krause, and then the men. Watch, as he gives me a shot, and then as my sweet baby is born. Cheer like they are watching a football game. Take my child, leaving me behind to drift in and out of consciousness.
As I suspected they would.
But here I am.
Clean. Rested. Hydrated. Fed. Propped up with Geritol and Pop-Tarts.
As strong as I’m going to get.
It’s time for me to join them.
It’s time for me to get my child (Frances, I will call the baby, boy or girl; God, what my mother sacrificed for me) and escape Lilydale, for real this time. Forever.
Barbara is the first person I encounter. She’s at the bottom of the stairs, knitting, but hurries to her feet when she spots me. “Oh, no, dear, you need to lie down.” She tries to guide me back to bed.
I seize her wrist. “Please tell me my baby’s all right.”
She pats my cheek. “Well, of course your baby’s fine, dear.”
I try to smile. “I want to see my child.”
“I’m afraid now isn’t a good time.”
I stagger to the nearest window, the one facing the driveway between this house and Deck’s. The neighbors have gathered. All the Mothers and the Fathers. My eyes devour them, hungry for sight of my child. My plan requires me to appear detached and stable, but I can’t help it. The desperation to hold my infant, to feed him, is primal.
Laughing gaily, Catherine looks over and spots me. She reaches out to Dorothy, who is holding a cocktail. They whisper and then scurry across the driveway and into the house.