“You do not deserve a child,” he said quietly. “Do you hear me? No one ‘deserves’ a child. A child isn’t a cookie or a gold star. You don’t ‘earn’ one.”
“Don’t be absurd, Hugh. Of course I des—”
“Somewhere inside you is the person you were before your parents got to you. Somewhere in there,” he poked her chest hard, “is a tender, pain-fully sensitive human being. If she weren’t in there, Katherine and Graham could never have done the damage they did. I wouldn’t have liked you from the start—back when you let me see it, back when we used to wrestle and your favorite thing was me putting you over my shoulder—and I wouldn’t like you in spite of yourself, now. It doesn’t have to be irreparable, Mil. You can be that person again. But when you are, if you ever are—and I really hope you someday are, because I miss that girl—you still won’t ‘deserve’ a child. The difference will be that you’ll understand that, and that’s the thing that’ll bring you closer to being the kind of person a child would be even a little bit lucky to call ‘Mom.’”
Millie yanked her arms free and rubbed them. She willed him to touch her gently, to pull her close and hold her head to his chest.
Instead, he sat there, his hands hanging uselessly over the arm rests.
She said, “Why, Hugh, how audacious of you to presume to have the requisite intellectual and emotional high ground to make that assessment.”
Hugh’s mouth turned down. He picked up his reader and turned it on.
For the next four minutes, Millie thought about what Hugh said. She was well aware that he may as well have just threatened to leave if she continued to be the person she was, but it was nothing she hadn’t been prepared for since the first time he’d smiled so beautifully at her. His even-tual disappearance was inevitable, but she’d become a natural at rejecting the effects of rejection.
“Hugh.—Hugh!”
“Yes, Millie.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
She was nervous about the evaluation, she said. Could he blame her for being unpleasant under such stress?
She said, “Please give me another chance.”
Without looking at her, he slid a hand under her chin to cup her jaw and cheek, guided her head closer to his, and kissed her temple.
It was the loveliest thing she had ever felt.
She turned away and looked at the ceiling, the lights.
He couldn’t have meant it. If he did, it hardly mattered. It would never last.
Millie only hoped he would stay until they’d completed the evaluation. After that, if he left while she was pregnant, she was confident she could persuade Lenny to sign on as a secondary guardian. How could she resist someone who was already carrying?
They sat in silence for thirty more seconds. When Donald, the plump-lipped receptionist Millie remembered from her first visit, slowly made his way to the center of the waiting room and with a ridiculous pretense of authority said, “Proceed,” the room as a whole got up and walked single-file through the door marked EVALUATION.
TWENTY SIX
Something wet and warm fell on Lenny’s lip. Without thinking, she licked it. Salty. She ran her fingers over Floyd’s face in the dark. She whispered, “Are you crying?”
“Crying? What, no. What do you think?”
She wrapped her arms around him (but not so tight his knees or elbows would scrape against the hard floor) and guided him deeper. She covered his mouth and giggled “Sh!” when he moaned. With the light off in the shelter’s lounge—originally the clinic’s reception office—it was impossible to see in, but it wasn’t sound-proof. The “interim parents,” as the residents called the staff (“interims” for short), knew what a locked door and dark room meant. They kept their distance, but the residents could sometimes get a little too close.
Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O,” Boris’s favorite song, played on a loop. It was Boris’s eighteenth birthday, and according to state and privately funded shelter guidelines, donor assistance to a resident ended on the resident’s eighteenth birthday or the resident’s adoption day, whichever came first. (Much of the funding at private shelters was distributed by shelter staff, but some donors tracked the progress of the residents and adjusted their donations according to who left and who stayed. Somehow, they chose favorites. Since resident profiles didn’t include pictures, Lenny assumed they decided by name, age, or sex. Biological sex preference used to make Lenny nervous, but licensing had, thankfully, limited access to the children by sex traffickers, pedophiles, and the occasional non-sex slave shopper.)
Floyd was lasting longer than usual. Lenny had heard “Day-O” three times, now, and she was missing more of Boris’s send-off than she’d counted on missing when Floyd had locked the door. Ordinarily, she’d have turned him down on a day like today. Send-offs were also naming days, an important rite of passage, but she got dizzy over sex with him and it had been too long. They’d been so busy.
She grabbed each of his cool, soft butt cheeks and pulled him against her. Over his shoulder she saw two or three young heads pass by the window. An interim named Harry urged them away and, even though all the staff members were technically equals, said, “Sorry, Ms. Mabary.” Years ago she’d have wanted to yell back, “Please just call me Lenny,” but they all knew (through no fault of Lenny’s) that her money kept the shelter running and their paychecks regular. After enough time being treated like their superior—which meant none of them wanted to be friends with her, either—she’d let it go and had learned not to bristle at the “Ms.”
A set of eyes peered in with small hands cupped to the mirrored side of the window. Lenny buried her face in Floyd’s neck, which smelled like a familiar coconut and lemon scent, and said “I love you” to help him along. He wouldn’t want to miss Boris’s event, either. Boris had always been his favorite.
Someone pounded the glass. “Miss Lenny! Miss Lenny!”
Floyd grunted and moved faster.
“Boris is…”
Floyd reached under her and pulled her where he wanted her, his confident assertiveness and other things filling her head with blood and such loud rushing air sounds that she almost didn’t hear the little girl say over Floyd’s expertly quiet orgasm, “…rubbing cake all over everything in his Independence Bag!”
“I’m really sorry,” Floyd said as Lenny cleaned up. He’d only pushed his pants down to his knees, so he was already dressed. He stood with his back to the vending machine and watched her until she was put together.
“What in the world would you be sorry for?” She crossed the room to kiss him on the cheek. “We only missed a little bit. He still has the naming and his speech, and he just delayed it all, anyway.” She kissed him again, near his ear, this time, and breathed him in. “You smell like Millie’s shampoo.”
“Oh, yeah,” Floyd said. “That’s just ‘cause we screwed this morning.”
Lenny was used to Floyd saying things to make her insecure—People stop loving, you know, People leave, People mess up—but he’d never pretended to confess to something. She took a step back, and Floyd laughed.
“I’m kidding, what do you think?” He pulled her to him and said into her hair, “She was going off to her eval and caught me in the truck. Said her shower drain was clogged, so I snaked it and got so much dredge and hair shit all over me I took a shower right then.”
He let go of her and smiled. His back and shoulders curled inward, closing his body around his chest. Fine, dirty-blond hair feathered across his wide forehead, the split ends framing large brown eyes that didn’t take the smile from his lips. They never had. Now and then, when he stopped trying to, Floyd could break her heart.
And she could have lived with his trying—for years, forever—if what he’d said about Millie didn’t feel like an escalation. How far would he go in the future to prove to himself that she loved him? It wasn’t only herself she was thinking of. Floyd had always been free, in her mind, to do what he wanted, to be himself, but now it felt like he wa
nted her to be responsible for his behavior. To tell him “no.” It would be selfish of her to play that role, and it wouldn’t be fair to him.
“If you and Millie did something,” she said, “if that’s what you want, you can tell me.”
“What?” He dug in his back pocket for his credit card and waved it at the vending machine’s payment window. “What’s that mean?” He pressed B-8 and a sugary, strawberry-like snack bar dropped from the top row.
“I mean I want you to be happy. If you don’t want to be with me, if you want to be with her or anybody else, I understand. It’s okay.”
He tore open the wrapper and jammed half the bar in his mouth. “Goddamn, Lenny. If you cared about me at all, don’t you think if something like that made me happy it could make you a little more unhappy?” He looked at her for a long time and then stuffed the rest of the strawberry sugar stick in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed. “You wouldn’t be so quick to let me go if I could get you pregnant, I bet.”
“What?”
“Huh?”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“I don’t know. I mean—Because it’d be a baby, or.”
She smoothed his hair across his tissue skin. “But you aren’t mine to let go, Floyd. You can always do what feels true to you.”
“And if true to me means it hurts you?”
She said the only thing that mattered was intent, and Floyd turned around to buy another sweet bar.
Lenny had heard that when her mom was young and there were condoms, people would secretly poke holes in the tips to let the sperm through. She’d thought more than once that in a moment of emotional weakness, and against his own sense of right and wrong, Floyd might consider tricking her into pregnancy if it were easier to do.
Then again, that it was hard didn’t mean it was impossible.
She counted back to when she’d last called InSystem’s monitoring line.
Friday. Six days.
Lenny wished they would implement the hormone interruption alert system politicians were debating. She wasn’t the only one who wanted it. The Main Street protesters had rallied around the idea, too, with one sign so big it had taken three people to hold it: WHAT GOOD IS A SECURITY SYSTEM WITHOUT AN ALARM?
According to a recent article Millie had written about “malicious hacking,” that kind of upgrade wouldn’t happen for a long time. It was the only one of Millie’s stories Lenny had saved. After cutting it out of the paper, she’d laid it on top of her underwear so she would see it every morning as a daily reminder to stay vigilant about calling.
…“Most often the people pay hackers to disable the hormone, but unfortunately we have also seen hacking into this profile or that profile by thrill-seeking hooligans,” InSystem public relations specialist Juanita Escallon said. She added, “As you can imagine, this has created many unexpected pregnancies. Ha ha, surprise! But this is no joking matter, is it? You must know we do take this seriously.”
Citing budget constraints, the government has repeatedly denied InSystem’s request for $185 million in government funding to offset the cost of 24-hour chip monitoring software or, alternatively, three thousand new employees to fill positions in monitoring stations around the country.
“There simply aren’t enough errors, or what have you, in the chipping program to warrant that kind of spending. Our current system of punishment is more than enough to dissuade the majority of people from having an unsanctioned child or fiddling with strangers’ hormones,” White House Press Secretary Sylvia Nan-gaard said. Escallon said InSystem has contacted citizen hackers with the hope of luring them into legitimate, albeit low-paid, monitoring work, but to no avail.
“They draw faces in reply, silly faces, and write rude messages,” Escallon said. She went on to say that while she suspects the hacker reaction is due in part to the proposed wages, she also believes they take issue with InSystem’s chip monitoring job description. Paid hackers would be required to identify and then pinpoint the location of outside hacker activity, in effect “ratting out” fellow hackers or underground hacking organizations. Escallon would not divulge for the record the hackers with whom she had made contact…
Lenny didn’t know whether Floyd could afford to hire a hacker. Since he’d taken over her dad’s renovation business, they hadn’t really talked about their separate finances.
What mattered more as he reached back to unlock the door, his nervous tooth showing over a strawberry stained lip and his left hand stroking the seam of his pants, was that she believed he might use his sperm against her. If it were an impulse, an act of spontaneous desperation, she could forgive it, but his casual threat to sabotage her made impregnating her sound too much like a plan he’d given more than passing thought.
She slapped him.
Floyd yelped, “Hell!” and rubbed his face, looking not at Lenny’s eyes.
Boris pushed through the conference room door elbows first, his cleaned and re-packed duffel bag appearing to have been plopped in his arms by the interim who’d had to scrape off the cake. (Residents were usually responsible for their own messes, but interims were lenient on release days.)
“It’s time, Miss Lenny, Mister Floyd.” Boris let the bag fall and caught it by its canvas handles. “You’re coming, right?”
“You bet,” Floyd said.
Lenny said nothing to Floyd as she passed by him to help gather and quiet the residents.
“Hi, everyone. Or—Wait a minute. Hello? Hello?” Boris lowered his mouth to the microphone clip on his t-shirt collar. “Or, I guess, bye, everyone. Anyway, it’s been fifteen great years…”
One of the girls squeaked a sob. Lenny searched until she found Minnie looking up at Boris with wide, wet eyes, her shiny nose bubbling mucus. Minnie was one of many residents who’d been drawn to big, clumsy, intentionally irresponsible (passive aggressive attention-seeking behavior), cuddly Boris. All of the residents stared from their chairs or from the floor, wherever and however they chose to sit, at the long-haired boy standing in front of them. No matter how uninspired the original portion of his going-away speech—“I’ll miss cookie Fridays and field trips to the star place” (“Observatory,” helped an interim named Linus)—the children were riveted and devastated, remembering to wipe their eyes and noses only when the lights dimmed to start the naming portion of the speech.
Boris stuck out his chest and held his hands behind his back. Rubber chair feet groaned on linoleum and sneaker soles chirped as every child in the room stood. Interims left their places against the walls to stand with the residents and signaled the holding of hands by reaching out for the person closest to them. Everyone was so practiced it took less than a minute for the forty-two residents (excluding Boris, who had made forty-three) and seven interims to link a single chain.
Floyd watched from the door to the lounge. He looked at Lenny with the pasty face she had adored since middle school, the face that had been part of every one of her days for seventeen years. She’d never known any-one more devoted than Floyd, no one (besides her parents) who was more concerned about her happiness.
She would apologize later. For now she smiled at him. His face lit and he smiled back.
“Now?” Boris said.
“Yes, Boris. Now,” an interim named Celeste called out.
Boris took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Before many of us in this room were born, there lived a hero named Chester Walton…”
Even when the residents were adopted and chose to take the last name of one or both of their adoptive parents, they gave the same core address. It had been repeated so many times—at ceremonies, as part of a memoriza-tion game, and sometimes as a peer-to-peer orientation ritual—that the chil-dren knew it by heart. Most added a new, creative detail here or there, but what the interims had started to call the Legend of Chester Walton hadn’t otherwise changed much over the years.
“Chester Walton began as a drop, just like me.” Boris paused here, as they all did, and dramatically added, �
�Just like you. Left on the sidewalk in the rain”—a new, and incorrect, detail—“until a well-meaning do-gooder came upon him and brought him home.” Pause. “To the enemy.”
Lenny glanced at Floyd. Floyd pursed his lips in a silent whistle and looked at the ceiling.
Boris went on, describing Chester’s mother as transforming into a monster with sharp teeth and wild, purple eyes in the moments just before the attack. He said, as they all did, that he would never make guesses about the details left out of the written record because they were sacred, meant to be known only to Chester Walton.
Lenny had heard all of them speculate about the attack into the late hours. Chester had “valiantly” and “silently” suffered anything from full-body burning by branding iron to being impaled by a family heirloom harpoon. (Both untrue.)
“…The identity of the confused Samaritan will forever be a mystery,” Boris said, “but we can thank that person for giving the world Chester Walton, who fought and died bravely”—not true, but only because he was much too young and small—“so that each and every one of us, and the children of the future, could live in peace.”
“Chester Walton!” the children shouted in their strongest, most powerful voices.
Boris raised a fist to the sky, and the children and the interims held their joined hands over their heads.
“My name,” Boris declared, “is Boris Walton.”
“Hello, Boris Walton!” the residents shouted. “Goodbye, Boris Walton!”
As soon as Boris left his post to join the crying residents, Lenny ran to a private office to make a call to InSystem’s monitoring department.
TWENTY SEVEN
“We’re caught in a trap,” Elvis sang into the orientation room. Before that, it had been “Build Me up Buttercup.” Before that, Millie couldn’t recall. They had been waiting since five minutes prior to the scheduled start time, and now an additional fifteen minutes. Short clips of parents performing parental duties played soundlessly on the projection wall: a couple helped a child with homework; a parent cleaned vomit from a little girl’s nightgown; a parent brushed a little boy’s hair; a parent wept over a short gray casket.
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