—Valerie Vines
I think there was another side to her. I’m not saying she didn’t love Lyle. I’m just saying that he was her ticket out of that house way back when, and maybe she was looking for another ticket now.
—Lily De Luca
3.1 Maggie
Hurry, Maggie said to herself as she rushed down the prison steps in the evenings, and then she said it again as she took the bus to the shopping plaza to buy something for dinner, after which she waited impatiently in the parking lot for Lyle or he waited impatiently for her. Mornings, it was the same thing in reverse. She would arrive at the prison breathless, her head spinning with competing admonitions: Move a little faster! Haste makes waste! Nobody cares if you’re late or not! She shivered to think that defeat was lurking and might be inevitable. But late for what? And why defeat?
The prison was set on a rise, dwarfing the people who flocked every day from the employee parking lot up the long flight of granite steps and through a gauntlet of metal detectors and guards charged with keeping the prisoners in and contraband out. Every time Maggie stepped through the gate into the chilly welcome center, she winced as if she were guilty of something, as if the metal detector could see the image of the top-secret document that was squirreled away in her brain or as if the escaped one-eyed men with hooks for arms her father had invented to scare his children into obedience were watching her from wherever they were hiding. It was easy to imagine her father waiting in the shadows too, to shout at her for something she had done or not done—a shoe unlaced, a toy left carelessly on the stair instead of put away in a closet, for crying or not crying when he smacked her, or the only jam to be found in the cupboard was strawberry when didn’t he always like peach—or to chase the four of them into their rooms, bolting the doors from the outside as if order in the house, as in the world, depended upon incarceration.
And where was her mother while all of this was going on? By the age of thirty-nine, Mary Sterling had taken to the shadows too, her body shrunken inside her paisley dress. She sent the children for the shopping and rarely ventured out. Maggie had looked helplessly on as her mother was buffeted before the winds of her father’s rages. That will never happen to me, she promised herself, and it hadn’t. Lyle always asked her what she thought before voicing his own opinion, and even though her father was long gone by the time Lyle had come along, Lyle seemed to understand that paternal absence was a kind of presence, so he tiptoed around it and helped with the dishes and remembered not to slam the door.
Every morning, Maggie took off her bracelets and put her purse on a conveyor belt so it could be x-rayed and searched. Every morning, she smiled at the guards and wondered if they too shouted at their wives. The head of the morning detail was a narrow man with furrowed skin and furtive eyes whose name was Louis, but in the evenings, the burly Hugo was in charge. Hugo exuded an air of tense restraint, as if he was holding his manliness in check or training for some test of stamina and determination. He seemed to find the intimacy implied in searching Maggie’s purse or running a scanner over her body amusing, and their thirty-second interactions began to feel like aggressive physical encounters. Hugo would say, “We have to stop meeting like this,” in a way that could be interpreted as a joke or as something more serious disguised as a joke. Or he would scrutinize Maggie’s face or dress with a savage gleam in his eyes until she blushed and fumbled for just the right lighthearted comment that would acknowledge his superiority in terms of size and strength, while also reminding him that she had a family and that she wasn’t available now and never would be.
But something about her interactions with Hugo suited Maggie. The layers to their little conversations fit with a growing sense that she was leading a double life, and she wondered if Hugo also thought of himself as two people: as the determined warrior he was at work and as the virile masher she imagined him to be when he went out on the weekends with his friends. Occasionally she allowed herself to respond to him in a way that hinted at the dual roles both of them were playing. “I see you’re wearing your Schwarzenegger smile today,” she might say, or “Prison guard by day, lady-killer by night.” And then Hugo would smirk at her and reply, “I haven’t killed anybody yet.”
This wasn’t the kind of banter Maggie was used to, and she was shocked at her own boldness. But something about it meshed with an inner readiness, as if she had spent the last sixteen years not only mothering and keeping house, but also training for a clandestine project she didn’t yet understand.
“She’s too old for you,” Louis would say to Hugo if he was working a double shift, and Hugo’s face would become a cartoon of regret. Or Hugo would say, “Good morning, Momma,” and Maggie would reply, “So now they’re giving badges and guns to children—what is the world coming to?”
But most of the time Hugo and the other guards only leered silently as they pawed through her things, and then Maggie would give her best imitation of a sultry smile and call them heartbreakers before gathering up her belongings and hurrying along the corridor to another set of locked gates and a walkway that led past the prison yard to the office block where she worked and thinking only about practicalities and the logistics of her day.
3.2 Dolly
Dolly could smell whiskey on the doctor’s breath when he flicked his fingernail at the lab results for an underweight baby and thrust the folder back at her, saying, “Don’t you damn women know enough not to drink?”
Dolly knew he didn’t mean her. She knew she was only a convenient ear when the doctor complained about inadequate insurance reimbursements or working conditions at the big city hospital where he spent most of his time or when he told her about a vacation he was planning or about a task force he had been asked to chair. He had been divorced twice from the same woman. He had a daughter in San Francisco and a son in New York. Over the years Dolly had learned many things this way, while the doctor would have been astonished to find out that she came from a family of seven children, all born at home, that her boyfriend was a soldier in Iraq, that many of her clients paid her late or not at all, and that there was an entire consciousness ticking behind her eyes.
But the doctor also worked many cases for free, which was what convinced Dolly that underneath the gruff exterior a heart of gold was beating, trapped there like a caged bird and just waiting for something to free it. Each time she caught his eye over a swollen belly or a wriggling newborn, she thought she saw a window slide open, and sometimes she swore she could see right through the window to where the bird was flapping its wings against the bars and singing. But then he would cow a pair of anxiously waiting newlyweds into silence by barking, “While you’ve been sitting here reading magazines, I’ve been saving lives!” and she would go back to thinking he didn’t have a heart at all.
Dolly liked the feeling of lives in her hands too, but for her, it wasn’t the power she liked, but the mystery of new life springing from the very atoms of the earth, animated by love and the merest puff of grace. She could imagine vast potentials in the tiny curls of the fingers with their even tinier nails. “You can be anything you want to be,” she would whisper to the babies. Even though she knew that half of them would succumb to drugs, abuse, or lives of crime, she had to believe that each little life she brought into the world would be one of the lucky ones, that each word she whispered into its ear would make a difference, that each happy thought would help it beat the odds.
Mostly she only listened as the doctor talked, breathing out “Mm-hmm” or “Oh, my!” when a response seemed called for. Or she just hummed a song inside her head if the doctor waved his hand for silence. So she wasn’t quite sure what to think when he sought her out one afternoon and said, “What would you say if I told you they had altered a scientific report? What would you say if I told you the data had been fudged?”
The doctor’s eyes were wide and searching, but what Dolly saw in them now was more a mine shaft than a window.
“What report?” she asked him. “Does it have
to do with the damaged babies?”
Before the doctor could answer, the second-to-last patient of the day came into the waiting room, drenched from a pelting rain and calling out behind her, “Okay, Frankie. Come back for me in half an hour.”
The woman had suffered a miscarriage and seemed both teary and relieved. After assuring the doctor she was fine, she started sobbing. “It’s just that Frankie came back from the war without his feet. Some days it’s all I can do to take care of him. What would I do with a baby? And Frankie has trouble sleeping, so then I have trouble sleeping too. Can you give him something to help with that?”
“This is a women’s clinic,” said the doctor, but then he relented and took out his prescription pad.
“These pills are for you,” he said. “It’s against the law to share them.”
“Oh,” said the woman.
“However, I doubt anyone would find out if you did.”
“And he stopped going to physical therapy. He says there isn’t any point.”
“I can’t solve everything,” said the doctor, tearing the leaf off the pad and giving it to the woman. “He needs to see his own physician.
“I can’t solve everything,” he said again when Dolly put her hand on his arm and said, “You’re a good man.” Of course the doctor had hopes and dreams! Of course he had a beating heart!
“Tell me, then. What would a good man do if he knew what I know? Would he make that knowledge public even if it ended his career, or would he close his eyes and continue to help his patients the best he can?”
Dolly was certain the doctor was talking about the report on munitions safety he had mentioned several weeks before. She took a deep breath and asked, “Was it the report on birth defects and munitions safety that was altered?”
The doctor looked startled, as if he hadn’t meant to speak his thoughts aloud. “Oh, that,” he said. “Whatever caused the birth defects, it wasn’t the munitions. The revised report was absolutely clear on that.”
“The revised report,” said Dolly carefully. “What did the original say?”
But the window was closed now, closed and shuttered. And then the doctor was glancing at his watch and asking about the last patient—wherever had she gotten to? Did she think he had all night? While they waited for her to arrive, he talked pompously about the heroic things he had done, the influential people he knew, the exotic places he had traveled to, the new car he was going to buy. “So I really don’t have time to wait,” he said.
“Doctor,” whispered Dolly. “Do you have copies of both reports?”
“Do I have copies?” asked the doctor absently. His eyes had lost focus, and Dolly couldn’t tell if he had been drinking again or if he was merely lost in thought.
“Yes, of the two reports.”
The storm was turning the orange clay of the parking lot into an orange pond. The owner of the building had dumped a load of pea gravel in a corner of the lot, but no one had ever come to spread it, so it sat like a miniature mountain near the rusting trash receptacle. Dolly liked to imagine the improvements she would make if she were the owner of the facility: curtains at the windows instead of broken mini blinds, pots of geraniums at the entrance, a fresh coat of paint on the flaking stucco, and in the waiting room, a basket of magazines and comfortable upholstery rather than metal folding chairs like the one the second-to-last patient was sitting on while she waited for someone to pick her up.
“Do you have a ride?” asked Dolly.
“Yes,” said the woman. “We got the truck fitted out with hand controls. Frankie’s still getting used to them, so he says I’m not to worry if he’s a little late.”
“I guess she’s not coming,” Dolly said when fifteen minutes had passed and the last patient had failed to arrive.
The doctor put on his coat. “Who would have thought?” he muttered. “Who in tarnation would have thought?”
“What’s done in the dark always comes to the light,” said Dolly.
“Unless it doesn’t,” said the doctor.
“What about if we give it a teensy push?”
“No, no. I can’t afford to ruffle feathers,” said the doctor. “That would be disastrous.”
“But I can,” said Dolly. “What if I were the one…”
But the doctor was pulling a rain hat over his ears and she couldn’t tell if he was listening or not.
After he left, Dolly made her way through the rooms locking cabinets and making sure the bathroom was presentable. She had just finished, all except the lights, when a rusty pickup pulled into the parking lot and honked, the beams of its headlamps illuminating the heavy raindrops and the gravel pile. The woman who had had the miscarriage jumped up and ran out the door, slamming it behind her and holding a paper grocery sack over her head to protect her from the rain. Just when she reached the passenger-side door, the truck lurched forward, causing her to fall to her knees in a puddle.
Dolly opened the door and called out, “Are you all right?”
“It’s not Frankie’s fault!” the woman called back as she scrambled to her feet. “It’s the hand controls! They can be a little bit tricky at first!” The gears ground and caught. Then the truck shuddered backward until it was clear of the puddle, and she opened the door and climbed inside.
3.3 Will
The A students sat up front, their faces smug with knowledge. After school, they streamed out the doors to the waiting minivans, the waxed and buffed high-riders, the sleek four-doors and rusted rattletraps, taking their secrets with them while Will was left with the mystery: “Were the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw real or not? Explain.”
He had a 50 percent chance of getting the first part of the question right, but how could he explain what he did not know? And how did it make sense to ask if something in a made-up story was real, especially when that something couldn’t be real in reality. At first he thought it was a trick question, and after hesitating, he had written “No,” comforted that the letters, scratched out in soft pencil, were easily erased—something he quickly did. “Yes,” he then wrote. But “yes” was an answer he couldn’t explain, while “no” had years of experience to back it up, not to mention Sunday school instruction if he chose to get into that, a tactic that went over well with most of his teachers, but somehow not with Mr. Quick. Besides, the Y looked shaky, about to topple over on its stick, so he erased “Yes” and replaced it with the more solidly grounded “No,” which he made as bold and as black as graphite and his wavering conviction could make it.
“I’ll show you what a nice guy I am and give you ten more minutes,” Mr. Quick announced to Will and the three other students who had only slouched more deeply in their chairs and clutched their pens and pencils more tightly when the dismissal bell sounded.
The classroom window looked out onto the courtyard, where a line of cars snaked and waited for the students to emerge. In the distance, a stand of budding apple trees stretched their branches to the sun, and beyond the apple trees, the gentle slope to the ball field where Will’s team gathered every afternoon. If he stayed to finish the quiz, he would be late for practice and jeopardize his starting position, but if he didn’t stay, he’d get a failing grade.
Will scribbled the word “corruption,” which he knew was a euphemism for sex only because Mr. Quick had pointed it out to the class. He wrote quickly, finishing with a statement about how it was fear that was destructive, not corruption or ghosts. Then he hurried to the locker room and changed into his practice uniform before sprinting down the hill to the ball field.
“Hustle up,” called the coach, and after that, Will could breathe a little easier.
Because he’d been late, Will had to run extra laps, so it was after six when he walked up the hill to the courtyard. Most afternoons he could catch a ride with a teammate, but at that late hour the turnaround was deserted, leaving him to walk the two miles home. We should have cell phones, Will thought, but he knew it was hard enough to make ends meet without wasting money on
things they didn’t need.
It wasn’t until he was passing the Car Mart that he wished he’d put down “Yes” for the first part of the answer. Even if ghosts didn’t exist, the idea of them did, and besides, the word “ghosts” could refer to inner demons as well as outer ones. There were a lot of unexplained things in the world, so maybe the story was about how things were what you thought they were and what they really were didn’t come into it much.
Was it really wrong to think about sex multiple times a day? Was it really wrong to imagine Tula with no clothes on even though he liked her just as much when she was wrapped up from head to toe in tights and sweaters? Was it wrong to steal food if you were starving? Some people were forced into lives of crime by the way the world was—the way it really was. And then he decided that this whole line of inquiry was his mother talking—she had gotten inside his head somehow and was controlling it the way she had wanted to control Will and Lyle until she decided to go out and control the world.
When Mr. Quick passed back the quizzes the next day, he said that the most interesting answers came from the people who had answered “Both.”
“But that wasn’t an option!” Will blurted out. He started to raise his hand, but Mr. Quick was in speech mode, beaming down at the high-achieving front row, who were looking primly at their papers and trying not to gloat. Will could feel the pride radiating off of them, and when Mr. Quick said, “thinking outside the box,” Will could feel the bars of the box closing in on him, penning him in with the hicks and the stoners and the mainstreamed autistic girl who sat every day in the back of the classroom gently banging her head against the wall.
“The ghosts were both real and not real,” said Mr. Quick. “The genius of the story lies in its ambiguity and its open interpretation. Literature is meant to engage the reader, not present some unassailable truth.” And so on until Will thought his head was going to explode.
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