Maggie goes to the kitchen cabin. Her dad is making pancakes for lunch because she asked him to. She asks him if he knows what.
He says, “No, what?”
“There’s a new family.”
“Did we leave the door unlocked for them?”
She says they did. She asks, “What’s wrong with the fifth kid?”
“I don’t know, Maggie. I’ll find out if you promise not to be a rude little creature and ask.” He thinks a moment. “The fifth kid, did it look like he was the oldest?”
“Don’t think so,” says Maggie. “His dad carried him in. He was kind of big though.”
Maggie’s dad tells her to play outside until lunch time. She does. Cousin Matthew finds her and they play together; hide and seek. He always likes to be the hider, so, as always, she is the seeker, which is okay because she likes to seek. She is good at finding her cousin. He always leaves a clue for her. He’ll hide everything except his hat and let it peek out over the well, or whatever he’s hiding behind, like if he’s inside the car he’ll let his hat show through the car window, but it’s not always his hat. Sometimes he’ll cough or sneeze. It has to be a realistic clue—something that really might happen—or she’ll refuse to find him and he’ll have to stay hidden all day.
She finds him hiding in an outhouse. This time the clue is that he leaves his shoes hanging by their laces on the doorknob. “Found me. Just like a bloodhound.”
The lunch bell rings. Cousin Matthew says he’ll eat them all if he gets there first. Maggie hits him and laughs when he pouts like she hurt his feelings. She pretends not to believe him about his feelings. One time she made him cry and her mom wouldn’t let her have dinner. Her dad kept saying he was fine, he needed to toughen up, it wasn’t her fault Cousin Matthew took everything so damn serious. Her mom said she had to learn sensitivity. So it makes her mad when Cousin Matthew acts hurt because she knows it could put her in trouble. Cousin Matthew says, “You shouldn’t hit your cousin.” She wants to tell him not to take it so damn serious.
Everybody eats together.
Cousin Matthew says, “Magnolia has to sit with her mother today.”
Her mom asks was she mean to Cousin Matthew. Maggie says they played hide and seek. She says, “Cousin Matthew is tired, and sore I found him hiding in the outhouse.”
“Gross, Cousin Matthew,” says Rosie. She wrinkles up her face and sticks out her tongue. He fakes a smile the same way he fakes being upset. The only problem with Cousin Matthew is he’s such a faker.
Rosie puts blueberries and strawberry circles and raspberries on Maggie’s pancakes, with a little powdered sugar. The berry juices together make a kind of light syrup.
The new family’s mom says it’s nice to see Maggie’s dad again, and her mom. She says, “This hotel has turned out very well. You would never know it used to be a prison.”
“Thank you Francine,” says Maggie’s mom, who says she doesn’t like to think about the prison anymore—“not since I had Maggie.”
The new dad says, “What a pretty little girl you’ve got, too.”
“Thank you,” says Maggie, the way that she’s been taught. She does a big smile.
The grownups say about how pretty the hotel is and how the cabins don’t seem like what they were, and they say about how hard it was to deal with the mud, and her mom recommends the museum her dad keeps. They ask what kind of museum. “In honor of the prisoners,” says Rosie.
Maggie’s mother also says about the international library. She says about knowing four languages and how it can bring anyone peace, and the world. Her voice lights up the way it does when she says about these things.
“How many languages do you know?” asks her mom.
“Rather less than four,” says the new mom. “I know French and English. Albert only speaks the one.”
“People learn very quickly here. We can improve your English, Francine, and Albert can learn his first words. Unless you’d rather expand into German.”
“They might not want to at all,” says Maggie’s dad. “Not everybody wants to.”
“I know French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian,” says Maggie.
Her dad says, “You know French and English, darling. You only know zoo animals and numbers in the other three.”
Her mom says, “Her generation will be the first to keep the peace.”
Her dad says, “I heard from our little scout here you had five children. Where’s the fifth? Not that these four aren’t cute enough.”
Maggie doesn’t think they’re very cute, but nobody asked her. She pulls something out of her nose. It’s green, but with a little blood. She rolls it between her fingers until the stickiness dries up and what’s left is hard, a duller green, sort of gray, like a rock.
“We have six, actually,” says Francine.
“Our two eldest like to eat alone,” says Albert. He shrugs as if to say, What can I do?
Francine tells the rest to introduce themselves. Rosie catches Maggie pinching her snot and stretching her fingers apart, making the little snot rock stretch to fill the gap. Her mom takes it roughly with a napkin. She balls up the napkin tight and slaps Maggie’s hand. “None of your nonsense. Not tonight. I don’t have the energy.”
Maggie says she never has the energy. She says to please let her eat her pancakes in peace for once. Her dad stares her down. She eats her pancakes in silence, which is like peace, but not as good.
After the meal Maggie is watching her dad and Cousin Matthew do the dishes. Albert, the new dad, comes up and murmurs, “Did those two police come to see you?”
“Years ago,” says her dad, after a long pause. “Did they come to you too?”
“A month back,” says Albert. “I thought they were done with us.”
“Mm,” says her dad. He wipes his forehead, leaving a puff of soap bubbles.
What if her dad’s hair was all bubbles? That would be wild.
At night her dad likes to sit outside with Albert and drink beers once it gets late and the crickets are practicing choir. Cousin Matthew sits with them too, though he doesn’t talk much and they don’t seem to want him. He drinks milk, because it makes your bones strong and it makes a body grow. Sometimes he holds Maggie on his lap. Sometimes she sits on her dad’s lap. They barely seem to notice when she climbs up. She plays with her dad’s neck fat, slapping it so it wiggles while he talks, and his voice wiggles too, like a jump rope if you wave one end around but not the other.
One night her dad asks Albert what he’s doing there if they’ve already got six kids. Albert leans back and pats his gut. “We’re trying for a seventh. Seven dwarfs for my princess, or something like that.”
“Seven,” says Maggie’s dad. “Wow. Just these two have kept me busy.”
Cousin Matthew laughs weird.
Albert says, “You know I couldn’t stand the thought of kids. I did everything I could to avoid them. Once I got started, though, I couldn’t stop. Francine kept popping them out. It was terrifying, but by the time she was starting to deflate from the last one I wanted another. It was like I was hungry. She wanted another one too. It’s destroyed her body, of course. Mine too. I look awful with this beard, I know, but I feel obligated. It hides a little of the bloat. Have you ever grown one?”
“I’m not sure I can,” says Maggie’s dad.
She slaps his neck fat. It wiggles.
“We’re both worn out but she wants one more. To my horror, so do I. We know this place has a reputation. Something in the water, right?”
Another night, late, Maggie counts the beer bottles on the grass. Some are fallen over, some are standing up, it gets confusing. She thinks it has to be eleven or twenty. There’s a caterpillar inching up the side of one, a little green guy. She wants to squish him but it makes her dad upset when she hurts a bug. She kicks over the bottle with her foot as if
it was an accident.
“I still haven’t met your oldest two,” says her dad. His talking is a little slurred, which, according to her mom, means he’s had enough. “The twins.”
“They like to stay inside,” says Albert. His talking’s slurred too. “They’re shy.”
“I’m a nice boy,” says Maggie’s dad. Cousin Matthew snorts. Her dad insists, “I am!”
“They’ve had it rough,” says Albert. “If I bring them out, you have to prepare yourself for it now. You can’t laugh at them or get scared. They like meeting new people but they hate when they scare new people.”
“Why should I be scared?” says her dad. “Why should a couple kids scare me? Is there something wrong with them?”
“They’re beautiful,” says Albert, and off he goes.
He comes back with the fifth kid in his arms, waving its legs, arms wrapped around his neck like a scarf.
Francine is following him. “Not now, Albert. Tomorrow. Please, Albert, tomorrow when you’re sober and they’re more awake.”
“If we refuse him we’re denying them,” says Albert. “I will not deny my sons.”
He sets the fifth kid down on his seat. Maggie’s dad squeezes her close and puts a hand over her mouth—not for the first time; it means he doesn’t trust her not to say something unbelievably rude.
“This is Dorian,” says Albert, “and this is Pierrot.” He’s pointing at the same kid.
Maggie crosses and un-crosses her eyes. The fifth kid blurs and comes clear, splits and recombines. He has two heads joined at their backs just behind their inward-facing ears. These ears look like clay. They are too smooth, only half formed. The heads are turned one quarter away from each other, the faces facing opposite directions. One head’s jaw hangs open. The other head keeps its mouth closed. The necks beneath the heads arch away from each other and then back inward, nearly meeting in a long, wide clavicle with two parallel horseshoe-shaped indentations in two open collars—collars raised as if to make a wall between their necks, to keep them from joining as their heads have. There is an egg of open space between their necks, through which Maggie can see part of the moon.
Maggie understands she is looking at two kids.
Their shirt is wide, aqua-green, with uneven shapes hidden beneath it. Down the center of the trunk, a ridge like the leading end of a wedge. An arm comes out on each side. They wear shorts with three legs, their outward facing legs very far from each other. Their middle leg has a gap above its knee where two thinner legs seem to separate like a cleft in the roots of a tree. Further down the leg, a second, smaller shoe hangs off the ankle at an angle, a baby boot, like a white rosebud or a hanging bell, resting limply on the larger, leather shoe. The other feet kick a little, like Maggie when she tries to swim, though more slowly, in coordinated circles.
“They share a little bit of brain,” explains Francine, speaking in English, “and some other organs. The doctors wanted to separate them, though the odds weren’t good they would live. They said it wasn’t worth living like this. I told them all to go to hell.”
Maggie nips her father’s hand because she wants to talk. He squeezes harder.
“These are the ones you were pregnant with when we left?” he says.
“They developed too quickly. They were born only a little after you left. The doctors were bewildered, though they said there had been a few cases that year. There haven’t been any since. They think maybe the Germans,” she trails off. “I don’t know. But we love them, don’t we?” She repeats it in French.
Albert says, “Of course.”
Dorian and Pierrot struggle to angle their eyes so they can see Maggie. They each have to gaze sidelong to look dead ahead. It makes her think of lizards. The one on the right closes his mouth. The one on the left says, “Hello.”
“Hello,” says Maggie’s dad. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”
“This is Uncle John,” says Francine.
“Hello,” says the one on the left. He reaches across himself to offer his hand. Maggie’s dad leans forward to shake it, finally releasing her mouth.
“Hello,” says her dad.
Dorian and Pierrot smile, closing their eyes in a way that says they feel happy. Then the one on the right—is he Pierrot?—begins to cry.
“They never feel the same thing at the same time,” says Francine. “Something about the brain parts they share. Only one of them ever gets to be happy. More and more often it’s Dorian. Pierrot is getting used to it.”
Cousin Matthew stands up. He goes for Pierrot’s hand. “It’s good to meet you,” he says. “You remind me of me. Maybe I can be your uncle.”
“Sure,” says Albert. “Uncle Matthew.”
Pierrot, holding Cousin Uncle Matthew’s hand, rolls his eyes up to look at his face, while Maggie’s dad continues to shake Dorian’s hand, and Dorian stares back at Maggie’s dad. Pierrot smiles. Dorian begins to weep.
“Good for Pierrot,” says Cousin Matthew.
“Too bad for Dorian,” says Maggie’s dad.
Soon the fifth kid is put back to bed. Maggie sees him three more times before the new family leaves. Pierrot never smiles again. Once, he looks very angry. Dorian is delighted.
CHILDREN OF THE ATOM
Picture Hollywood, summer 1956. The spindle palm trees with their leaves all shiver-shivering. All the highway tangles. Here are the beggars and the street performers—guitar, harmonica, kettle drum, saxophone, tap shoes—hats upside-down, weighed down with change and petty cash, sidewalks littered with cardboard fried chicken buckets, popsicle sticks or tongue depressors, chewing gum wrappers, cigarette butts with ash trail smears punctuated by dirt imprints of half a boot’s tread, tough guy toothpicks, and a part of somebody’s tire. Here’s the idling cop car parked up against the curb, right next to that fire hydrant. Maybe he’s getting his hair cut at the barber. Here are men and women, young and old, coming out of the barber’s, most of them sporting the same seven haircuts, and half the guys with Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned down the top third, curls of chest hair. If someone smokes a marijuana cigarette in an alley, leaning up against a dumpster, what they’re saying is leave me alone. If someone stands in that same alley though, just at the edge of the shadows, fluffing her bleached-blonde hair and waving a purple boa, wearing a pink polka-dot skirt with the hemline raised well past the point of modesty, clicking her heels on the pavement—if someone’s dressed like this and she blows a bubble of Doublemint, and she lets it pop so it hits her nose, and she sucks that back up in—then what she’s saying is don’t let me spend the night alone. Here’s the newcomer who has to learn to tell the difference, standing center-sidewalk, one hand on his gut, the other checking the umpteenth time for his wallet. His wife is at a shop window looking at exotic belts. His brother, his nephew, his son, Little Boy, is standing beside him, his daughter’s hand—Maggie’s—squeezed tight.
Little Boy says, “Don’t you dare leave my sight, Magnolia. Don’t you dare leave my sight.”
Fat Man says, “We should find somewhere to eat.”
Rosie says she isn’t hungry yet. She says they can wait to find somewhere nice.
“Do you know how long it’s been since I had a real American burger?” says Fat Man. Which is, implicitly, a lie—fact is he’s never had one. He adjusts his shirt.
Rosie says, “You like them?”
“What’s not to like?”
“Where do you want to go then?” says Rosie.
“What about there?” He points down another street, the word “BURGER” glowing red, though the rest of the sign is obscured. “Something-Burger,” he says. “Sounds great. It’s always the little places that blow your socks off with a sandwich.” He totters in the Something-Burger’s direction. “Come on,” he says. “I’m starved.”
A streetcar rolls by briskly. It is in fine condition. Everyone inside is alive. He
remembers the ones that he saw in Japan, rolled over on their sides, warped and impacted, full of the dead. This one makes a cheerful chiming. A boy hangs off the back.
It’s been a month since Francine and Albert came to Hotel Gurs. Two weeks after they left for home, Francine called a nearby restaurant, offering the waiter who answered a small fortune if he would have Fat Man on the line the same time the next day. The hotel itself does not, of course, have phone service. Fat Man dreaded the call until it came. It was almost a relief to hear Francine’s voice, even as she delivered terrible news.
“The fake cops, Bruce and Rousseau, came with real cops,” she said. “They arrested Albert. Took him away. I’ve got no idea what the charges are, they wouldn’t explain it. They said they’d been watching us—that coming to see us again when they did, before we came down to the hotel, was a feint. They wanted to see what we’d do. They said we went running to you. They called you the mastermind. I don’t understand. They said it wasn’t about the Blanc woman anymore, it’s much more than that now. I think they’ll come for you next. They want to bring you in, I think. I think they’ll come very soon.” She cried into the phone. It made the line crackle. “He’ll probably look guilty if you run but at least I know he’s been a scum. You were always kind to me. I think you should leave the country for a while, until we can figure out what’s happening.”
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