The Breeders

by Matthew J. Beier

  It was snowing hard that day. Karen had claimed the lipstick was just an experiment to see if they could make Principal Doty raise his bushy eyebrows, but Molly had noticed her eyeing Jacob Jenkins the whole time they were putting it on. This had stung in a way that made her want to put on makeup, too, because Jacob was her next-door neighbor and best friend. The thought of Karen trying to swoop in felt slimy.

  And suddenly Molly’s foot caught the patch of hidden ice. She tumbled to the ground and hit her head on a stretch of cracked pavement. Everything went black, and as it does in dreams, time stopped.

  She was in a garden.

  “Molly . . .”

  A voice. Warm and familiar. Her mother?

  “Wake up, Molly.”

  She looked around, but the garden was empty. Tulips dazzled; the aroma of roses enveloped her. And there, fluttering from lily to daffodil, was a—

  “Come on, honey, open your eyes!”

  Then Molly was rushing toward the sky. Or was she falling to the ground? It was hard to tell, but she knew the feeling well, knew what it meant. In the split second it took for consciousness to dawn, a gentle rush moved through her. Like a butterfly, she would later remember thinking. It felt like a butterfly was flying right through me.

  “Molly, wake—”

  So soft . . .

  “—up!”

  Snowflakes hit her eyes like frozen pins. She was on her back. Mrs. Stone was kneeling over her, probably hating the lipstick Karen had so carefully applied just a few minutes before. The woman’s greenstone necklace—the one she wore every day—had fallen out of her jacket and was dangling over Molly’s eyes like some hypnotic pendant. The schoolyard’s lone pine tree crept into her peripheral vision; the falling snow made it look gray. Karen Young was standing off to the left, behind Mrs. Stone, who was snapping her fingers. “Honey, are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  Molly moved her neck. No, not hurt. Stars in her vision, maybe, but everything was coming back into focus. Mrs. Stone ignored the lipstick.

  “I’m going to check if your head is bleeding, okay?” Mrs. Stone cradled Molly’s head and lifted, patting the back of it with her fluffy white mittens before pulling away. “No blood. But we need to have Mrs. Hexible look you over. You could have a concussion.”

  There were tears in Mrs. Stone’s eyes. Something was wrong. It wasn’t just the wipeout.

  “Jesus Christ . . . such perfect goddamned timing,” the woman whispered to herself.

  Molly was alert enough by that point to look at Karen with a raised eyebrow. Karen raised one back. Swearing like that at Saint Andrew’s School was most likely a mortal sin.

  “Molly, honey, after we make sure you’re all right, your dad’ll be taking you out for the rest of the afternoon. Something happened.”

  Molly wobbled to her feet. Mrs. Stone seemed to pick up on the question she had not yet uttered aloud.

  “Maybe it’ll be best if we do your checkup in Principal Doty’s office, okay? I’ll have Mrs. Hexible come down there.” Mrs. Stone ushered Molly toward the front steps of Saint Andrew’s School, then stopped at their base and turned to Karen, who had followed along like a forgotten pup. “Karen, I’ve got to take Molly now. We’ll all meet back in class after the bell, okay? I’m going to wait with her until her dad gets here. If it takes me a while, please tell everyone to read quietly.”

  Her friend did not ask, “Why is her dad coming?” She simply nodded. Molly’s last view before walking into the school was of Karen, her dark-skinned face dazzling in red lipstick, standing alone under the falling snow.

  SIX AND A HALF YEARS LATER, the morning Andrew Butler found Molly’s journal with “THE GHOST HUNT” blocked in on the first page, his immediate reaction was that he had failed as a father. As he made his way through the journal’s entries, it became obvious he had overlooked something incredibly important, something that had irrevocably changed his daughter’s life in 2004, long before her near-drowning on Spinner’s Lake, her Gateway Project volunteering in Blue Hill, or her brain tumor diagnosis. This had been the summer following her mother’s car accident, when she was just eleven.

  The first entry was dated June 5.

  Here is the official journal about the ghost hunt! I’m actually writing this in July, but I should have started back in June. That’s why the dates are off. Last night Jacob and I finally had something weird happen. Our first four ghost hunts were boring and pointless. The first was Old Mill Road. Then it was the reservoir, the cemetery (not mom’s), that creepy bookstore on Main Street, and then that empty house by Heart Park. But we think Saint Andrew’s Grotto was something real. Nobody will believe it though. They’ll think we’re crazy. I’m going to go back and write about all the ghost hunts, even the ones where nothing happened.

  Jacob had the idea for it when we were walking to Mrs. Grime’s library in March. Mrs. Stone took us there to get resources for our final reports. (!!! Mrs. Stone loves the word “resources.”) We were at the back of the line. He was whispering that he had an idea for summer. He said he was going to spend it hunting for ghosts, because his dad saw one once out by the Moon Woods. I laughed at first and made fun of him. He got all mad. He didn’t talk to me until after we got our resources. We both tied at Mrs. Grime’s contest.

  Andrew’s hands shook as he read the journal. At what point had he failed to notice his daughter becoming an independent human being?

  I don’t really remember the walk back to school. I just know that when I was at the library I wondered if Mrs. Grime had any books about ghosts and I wondered about all the books she had in the grown-up section upstairs. I decided I wanted to do the ghost hunt. I told Jacob so, and he was still mad but said he’d think about it. That’s how it started. I’ll write about different days on other pages.

  For the first time, Andrew heard how quiet his house really was now. No giggles from Molly, no text tones, no rolls of Monopoly dice. He racked his brain for memories of the summer of 2004 and felt a sting behind his eyes when he found a few. He remembered Molly talking vaguely about bike rides with Jacob, how they went out late a couple of times, and, hell, how they had even mentioned looking for ghosts at one point. At the time, he had been so lost in grief that he had embraced it as child’s play simply to cope. But there seemed to be more in this notebook. Much more.

  Molly and Jacob hadn’t just gone on blind searches for ghosts. For at least three of the hunts, they had done research and rationally chosen the spots to conduct their investigations. They had become friends—close friends, by the sound of it—with Mrs. Grime, the old woman who had owned the nameless library on Lemon Avenue. And by the way Molly’s descriptions and words began to descend toward the macabre and metaphysical, it was clear she thought they had experienced things. Frightening things. Things Andrew didn’t even believe in.

  A bird call from outside Molly’s open bedroom window rattled him back to the present. After a few aimless seconds, he stood up, marched through the living room and out the front door, and turned left, across his yard, toward the Jenkins house. It was already sweltering, and the last of the morning’s dew made the fresh-cut grass stick to Andrew’s bare feet. When he reached his neighbors’ front porch, he knocked on the screen door.

  A shadow moved inside, then gained color as it neared. Jacob. The deadbolt rolled, and there he was again, the boy who was no longer a boy. Six inches of height one year, muscles the next. Now, according to an offhand comment from Molly a few weeks ago, he would soon be leaving for JROTC summer camp in the Twin Cities. His strawberry-blond hair was already buzzed short.

  Jacob’s eyes were wide, waiting. “Did you hear anything?”

  Instead of forming a coherent answer, Andrew held up the pink notebook. “Do you know what this is?” He opened its cover to show the journal’s title page. There, big and bold, were Molly’s blocky letters.

  Jacob flushed red in the face.

  “It seems my daughter was under the impression that you guys saw ghosts way
back when.”

  Another bird tweeted from somewhere in the yard. A Cessna buzzed overhead. A car, somewhere off toward Main Street, honked its horn.

  “I never saw any ghosts,” Jacob said. He glanced over his shoulder when a toilet flushed somewhere in his house.

  “But you heard them? It says here you heard them.”

  Jacob teetered on his feet. He was a little boy once again. “That was Molly. Mostly.” His gaze flitted away from Andrew’s, to somewhere (anywhere) beyond, out in the neighborhood. After a few moments, he said, “Nothing ever came of it.” In the dingy house behind him, his father Jim staggered with his usual hangover toward the kitchen.

  With tears in his eyes and a sputter in his throat, Andrew whispered, “Was my daughter out of her mind?”

  Jacob straightened his posture but let the screen door close between them. “It was just a summer thing,” he said, finally looking Andrew in the eyes now that there was a barrier. “Molly ended up making a bigger deal of it than I did. I think because she was dealing with Mrs. Butler dying. But I don’t think she was crazy.” Strain colored Jacob’s face, and he looked over his shoulder. “I’m about to go for my run. Let me know when you find her. Right away. I was hoping I’d get a chance to say good-bye before camp. Just in case . . . you know.”

  When Jacob didn’t cry, all Andrew could do was contort his face, squint against the tears forming in his own eyes, and give Jacob a mixture of a nod and a head shake. He turned around and walked back across the wet grass.

  FOR WHATEVER REASON, fifteen-year-old Mason Witzel shivered whenever he saw the old “missing person” image of Molly Butler. He hadn’t paid attention to the Idle County Seven the first time he heard NBC 10 connecting them to the so-called nurse killer, but on June 24, 2036, the day he arrived at Crescent Rehabilitation Center and actually met Jonathan Flite, he started researching them. And it was Molly’s picture posted first on all the websites—always the same one, most likely her last high school portrait. Her black hair was just a shade darker than Mason’s, and her skin was slightly more pale. The very fact that he was suddenly connected to her through the nurse killer left him with a sense of exhilaration he couldn’t quite explain.

  He had received word of his acceptance into Crescent the Wednesday prior, and when it was finally time to leave the Rhode Island Training School, it happened in an old, empty bus owned by the state. Bumping south along Harrison Avenue in Newport, he imagined that the smell reaching his nose might actually be the sea, and he might soon be able to see the water every day, maybe even from his locked bedroom window.

  As he rolled into Crescent’s freshly paved parking lot, his heart raced with luck. He gaped at the facility’s finely kept lawn, its main round turret, and the American flag flying majestically in its rear yard. Could it even be real? All his life he had dreamed of escaping his rage-fisted father, even if it meant shooting him in the head; never would he have imagined living out the punishment in a place like this. Despite the low, gray clouds rolling in the sky, it seemed like a soft haven compared to the Training School. It was clearly a place for people with money. Mason had none, not even a dollar to his name, and here he suddenly was, because his Uncle Ned had pitied him after hearing about the shooting—and the lifetime of abuse, hunger, and neglect. Uncle Ned was rich and gay and wore suits, and even though he lived in London, the state of Rhode Island had allowed him to intervene and enroll Mason at Crescent. Only once since the shooting had Mason actually seen his uncle, but the man’s casual posture and unhurried smile—he had actually taken the time to talk with his nephew—had been enough to let the boy know he had, for the first time in his life, an ally.

  Sissy McFarlane, the therapist who doubled as Crescent’s welcome staff, had been no-nonsense as she checked Mason in, introduced him to a muscular, stoic-faced guard named Paul, and brought him to the nurse’s office for the insertion of a security nanochip in his leg. It would, they explained, activate a GPS alarm if he crossed the underground electric fence that bordered Crescent’s grounds.

  “This won’t hurt at all,” a nurse named Kent assured him. “It’s just a quick local anesthetic because of the needle, which is a little big. Works best if you just look away and think about your favorite place in the world.”

  Mason, who had no favorite place, simply suffered through the shot.

  Sissy gave him a pat on the shoulder. “We’re medium-security here. The chip won’t hurt if you cross the fence, but it’ll send an alarm to the police station and track you. Nobody has felt the need to test how well it works, at least not yet. Our residents love living here.”

  She exchanged a raised eyebrow with Kent, who seemed to take it as a prompt for agreement. “Pretty much the truth,” he said with a wink. With a wave of his arm, he gave them permission to leave his mini medical chamber.

  Pretty much the truth.

  Mason wasn’t smart, and he had trouble reading, but he could feel things in his gut. That’s why, when he saw a dirty-blond-haired boy sitting alone during lunch, he knew it was the resident who had warranted the raised eyebrow from Sissy. All the other boys were clustered together around tables, but not this one—he was sitting unaccompanied near the window at a table much too big for him. Mason’s options were to sit at his own table and risk being made fun of by the other boys, or look as if he belonged with somebody.

  He carefully set his lunch tray on the blond boy’s table, aligning it to the square corner at first, waiting for permission to move it further. The boy looked up. Their eyes met, bored into each other, and found something like recognition.

  “Hi,” the blond boy said with a polite smile.

  Mason watched the news. He had seen this kid before. It was the nurse killer, the one people said was crazy. Instead of saying anything back, because he couldn’t quite coax words past the ever-existing feeling of shame and embarrassment that lived under his skin for no good reason, Mason simply slid his tray forward and started eating his chicken lo mein.

  When the nurse killer finished his own lunch, he quickly stood up, grabbed his tray, and then dropped a fortune cookie in front of Mason. “Here,” he said. “I don’t really like these.”

  Mason, whose dad had always eaten both fortune cookies whenever they got cheap takeout, accepted it with a blush and a smile. When he opened the fortune, it was simple enough to read, even for him:

  Friends make life better.

  THAT AFTERNOON, Mason spent much of his online time reading about Jonathan Flite and the Idle County Seven. He still had to sound out some words by whispering them to himself, but he found out quickly that Craig Graber, who had been entitled to copies of the Rhode Island Family Court records, had broken confidentiality regulations and gone to the press with details of his wife’s murder. He had also shared why the judge, Barry Wallace, had ultimately favored Jonathan’s defense.

  It seemed Jonathan had convinced the judge that he knew things he couldn’t possibly know—details that seemed too random to be imagined, like the supposed shooting star Molly Butler saw the night of her mother’s funeral, her visit to the cemetery later that year (and the butterfly carved into the flat headstone), and the interior description of what he called the Lemon Avenue Library, which had been torn down in 2009, just nine months before the Idle County Seven disappeared. Craig Graber, who had shared these smaller details on his public ActoVid page, was still calling for a higher court to intervene in Barry Wallace’s “insane” decision. Jonathan Flite, tried as a juvenile, was set to begin his reintegration into society on his eighteenth birthday. It would be a one-year process.

  Mason ate lunch with him every day after that first fortune cookie. At first they barely spoke, except about their tutors and lessons. While Mason was still studying algebra, Jonathan had already started studying trigonometry, physics, chemistry, and biology—subjects Mason knew he would never be smart enough to learn. He had enough trouble with basic equations.

  A month into Mason’s residency at Crescent, Jonathan c
ame to lunch with a scowl, briskly placing his tray on the table and launching into an apple.

  “They keep wanting me to make progress, but they won’t listen to anything I say,” he growled with a full mouth.

  “You mean Dr. Freede?” Mason didn’t mind Dr. Freede. For some reason, the man’s voice made him feel like a feather.

  “And my mom. I sit there and try to tell them stuff, and they keep hinting that it’d all be better if I stopped lying. But I haven’t ever lied. Ever in my life.”

  Following that conversation (and subsequent ones), Mason continued to spend his online time looking at those Idle County Seven websites, and every time, the most striking thing was that school photo of Molly Butler—her black hair, her dark eyes, her troubled smile. Jonathan said he had Molly’s memories, that he remembered them like a movie. As Mason looked into the girl’s eyes, he wondered how the memories they created back in the early 2000s could possibly have been transferred to his new friend. It did sound pretty crazy, but it also made Mason wonder, for the first time ever, what his own life really was.

  WHAT HAD COME NEXT FOR MOLLY BUTLER on that snowy day in 2004 was a slow drive to Saint Mary’s Hospital with her father, where a doctor gently told them that her mother Miriam was dead. A man named Carl Logger had slid east through the intersection of Main Street and Hunter Avenue, hitting her car square on the driver’s side as she was heading north, toward the local Supervalu. Ribs had punctured her lungs and heart, and she was dead by the time Molly and Andrew arrived at the emergency room.

  And that was that. It was all there was. They were to go home, eat dinner, and keep waking up in the days to come as if their lives hadn’t shattered into a million pieces. And the most awful, unspeakable part? Molly’s last words to her mother had been, “God, you’re the worst mom in the world!”