Q

by Christina Dalcher

  Forty-Eight

  THEN:

  When I was pregnant with Anne, I’d waddle through the aisles of Safeway, filling my cart with every kind of forbidden food that would fit. I didn’t even bother looking at the calorie labels; at seven months, the only thing that mattered was the hungry baby in my belly, what she wanted.

  The store wasn’t too crowded on Saturday mornings, if I went early enough, and today there were the usual suspects: working moms, working singles, early-morning joggers who had stopped in for protein bars and Gatorade before running home. I was in the olive aisle because today Anne decided she was in an olive kind of mood.

  “Mommy,” a small voice said behind me.

  “Not now, sweetie. Mommy’s on the phone.” A larger voice, also behind me.

  “Mommy.”

  “I said be quiet, Cheryl.”

  “MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY!”

  I think I heard the slap before I saw it. When I turned around, the chubby toddler strapped into the grocery cart, little legs kicking air, stared at the back of her hand. I saw now she was in dirty leggings and a dirtier top, both splotched with blobs of dried baby food. Peas on one side, carrots or squash on the other, all held together with a full-body smear of something that might have been oatmeal. I didn’t want to think what else it might be.

  “Maybe you should dress her in clean clothes instead of slapping her,” I said. “What kind of a mother are you?” It was bold, even for me, and I blamed my outburst on late-pregnancy brain. Or I told myself that was my excuse.

  The woman looked more girl than woman, a baby-mama, and she had no ring on her left hand. She came back at me there in the middle of olives and pickles and condiments. “Who the hell are you? The kid police?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “I hope someone makes you get a license before you can have another one.” And I walked off, away from baby-mama and her wailing toddler, forgetting the olives.

  Forty-Nine

  If I had a list of rain-soaked states, Kansas would not be on it. Maybe they’ve saved up all their precipitation for today, when I need it the least. Maybe the heavens sense my distress and are crying with me, sharing my pain.

  Two pairs of Tweedledum and Tweedledee eyes follow me as I push through the main door of the faculty building and cross the small entryway toward the double doors. They take in my uniform code violation, start to say something, and then go back to being disinterested when they see the suitcase. It’s a short walk, a walk that should take only moments, but time does enjoy playing tricks, turning short walks into long ones. We’ve all been there: the nervous bride promenading down an aisle, hundreds of faces turned her way; the college girl picking a path back to her dorm, high heels and shame from the previous night making her feet and heart ache; a little girl trudging to school on an icy day, backpack heavy on her shoulders, knowing she will slip and fall, knowing the big kids will laugh at her. These are our walks of excitement and shame and fear, and we do them alone.

  I don’t know whether I’m relieved or not when I find the apartment empty, when I fold back the metal tongues on Malcolm’s envelope and slide the contents onto the kitchen table. Maybe some tasks, the most terrible ones, are best done alone, without witness.

  Three smaller envelopes stare up at me. I open the fattest one first because the printed name of a law firm in the upper left corner seems matter-of-fact, clinical. That, and I’ve already guessed what’s inside. You don’t need a doctorate in anything to know when your husband has served you divorce papers.

  I don’t bother reading through the pages of complaints and affidavits and notices of service. My signature is required on only a few of them, and my future action limited to appearing in court three weeks from now, an action I can avoid because Malcolm has very generously enabled the hearing to occur in absentia. My absentia.

  How kind of him.

  The other two envelopes, much thinner, bother me. One says To my mother in Anne’s handwriting. The other, Elena, in Malcolm’s pointy scrawl. I open Malcolm’s first.

  Inside it are two printed forms, nearly identical. Various-sized boxes on each contain my name, social security number, contact information, and medical data. Gestation, gravidity, maternal age—unhappily flagged as “advanced”—all match my own status on the day I went in for the prenatal Q test, which is also the day I walked out of the waiting room, leaving behind two women who thought of babies in terms of numbers on an intelligence quotient scale.

  But something’s wrong with the second copy.

  The first page, the page I created in an afternoon so I would have something to show Malcolm, has a bold 9.3 in the results box and a percentile graph just underneath the number. Of course it does, because I made it that way. On the second page, with all my identifying information, there are three words, even bolder, in place of the number:

  TEST NOT PERFORMED

  And no graph, only Malcolm’s pen asking Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I was stupid? The “stupid” is double underlined.

  I’m okay. The room and everything in it is a blur, but I’m okay. I know this because my mouth is forming each sound in the words, over and over. And over again.

  I’mokayI’mokayI’mokay.

  I should never have lied to Malcolm, but he left me with no choice. If Freddie’s prenatal Q number came in even a millionth of a point below nine, I know what Malcolm would have decided. I know what he would have made me decide.

  In the perverse game show I’m currently starring in, envelope number three stares up at me from the small Formica table. Anne’s handwriting, a perfect, practiced cursive, is centered on the front. I slit it open with a fingernail, unfold the cream-colored notepaper, and read. It doesn’t take long, and it burns.

  Anne’s letter has no salutation, no closing, and ends with a sentence that I’ll never be able to erase from my vision:

  I guess you made your choice. I don’t ever want to see you again.

  The “again” is double underlined.

  Fifty

  Minutes have gone by, or possibly hours. I’ve watched rain streak the window, pause, and start up again. I’ve listened to the repetitive noise of a distant machine, a generator maybe, and dull, thudding beats in my inner ear. I don’t think I’ve moved from my chair because my feet have begun to prickle with pins and needles.

  It’s a pleasure to focus on my feet right now. The pain blots out everything else—the paperwork on the table, Anne’s note.

  Through the open door to my apartment, the two Tweedles at the desk tell each other they deserve a break today. One of them—I don’t know which—says he’ll drive for the grub. The other comes back with a “Hell no, you won’t. Last time you ate half my fries. We both go. No one here to worry about anyway except those new ones down the hall. The doc will watch out for them. He’ll call us if they pull anything funny.”

  There’s a whisper and a laugh, a private joke shared between two men with nothing better to do than exchange idiocies. A whir of machinery sounds as the metal grate separating their domain from the rest of the entry closes, then heavy footsteps, then nothing. Silence.

  Silence, except for the scream inside me.

  The doc will watch out for them.

  Of course. Freddie needs to see a doctor.

  Quietly, I shut the door and head for the small bathroom, where I comb out the rat’s nest on my head, throw on jeans and a blouse, leaving the top buttons of the white cotton shirt undone just enough to look casual without it coming off as an invitation. It’s then I realize I’m making noise—the sounds coming out of me are all the sounds a human can make. Crying. Sobbing. Some animalistic guttural sound that can’t belong to me. Hissing and whistling and wheezing. But no words, only some primitive form of communication, some ancient way of putting thoughts into sounds.

  They work, those ancient ways. They calm me.

  I scribble a note to Lissa and Ruby Jo,
telling them I’ll be back before lunch, and I walk down the hall in the direction Alex went last night.

  He’s on his sofa writing when I reach the half-open door. His hand freezes, rich-boy Montblanc fountain pen in midair, and he looks up, throwing me that winning smile he’s always had for me, even when Malcolm is around.

  “Can I talk to you?” I say.

  “Come on in.”

  The apartment is at least double the size of the one I’m sharing with Ruby Jo and Lissa, and there’s not a hint of gray anywhere. These are the quarters for the staff who can come and go freely—the only decorations on Alex’s windows are curtains.

  “Anything wrong, Elena?” he says.

  Where do I start?

  I could tell him I’m in one of almost fifty state institutions, that I have bars on my windows instead of brocade curtains, that I haven’t said more than five words to my daughter since Monday morning, that Malcolm has filed for divorce and Anne wants nothing more to do with me. But I think Alex Cartmill might know most of this already.

  “You said you were the doctor here. Just wondering if you could maybe check up on Freddie.” I think back to a distant graduate course on blood pathology and make something up. “She looks like she’s developing sudden bruises, and I’m worried it might be a blood problem.”

  Alex puts the Montblanc down and invites me to sit in one of the Eames-like chairs facing him. “Can I get you a drink? I’ve got water, tea, and bourbon. Your pick.”

  “Water. Water would be great.” The bourbon sounds better.

  He’s in silk slacks and a white cotton shirt, and he moves from the sofa where he was sitting to the kitchenette in that way people do when they’re used to being looked at.

  “I know about you and Malcolm. I’m sorry,” he says, pouring two glasses of water. “Lemon? I’ve got lime, too, if you’d prefer that.”

  I know things, too. I know that when I look toward the coffee table and read the upside-down letterhead on his clipboard it spells Genics Institute. Underneath, Alexander Cartmill, M.D. “Um, lime. If it’s easy.”

  “No problem. I’ll just be a sec.”

  “I’m cool.” But I’m not cool at all. Heat rises inside me in heavy waves, the kind of waves that can pull you under, tumble your body like a rag doll, leaving you disoriented and gasping for air before you realize there’s no air to be had. I try to make light conversation—about tennis, of all things—while the rest of me strains to read the document on Alex’s clipboard. There’s time for only a few words before he hands me a glass of ice water, sits down, and oh-so-casually kicks his feet up onto the coffee table, obscuring the papers.

  For the next ten minutes I sip at my water and pretend to listen while he enumerates blood disease symptoms. The room starts to close in on me, all the walls at once. All of a sudden, his cologne is over-powering, sickening. He’s moved closer to me and he’s leaning in, a breath away from my face. His left hand presses on my knee with such force I can feel each one of his fingers, an independent pressure point boring into my skin. There’s a gold band I’ve never noticed on this hand, and I’m thinking “smarmy” might not be the right word for him.

  “So. We should talk more about Freddie,” he says. “How about you come back this afternoon. Say, four? We can discuss everything over a drink.”

  I feel myself smiling and nodding and saying yes, agreeing to whore myself to this mad scientist for my daughter’s sake.

  “Terrific. It’s a date, then,” he says. “But right now, I’ve got some work to do. Deadline in a few hours.” He pauses and avoids my eyes. “We’re rolling out flu shots before the season hits us.” Alex releases my knee and takes my hand, pulling me up with him. “I know things aren’t good with you and Malcolm right now, Elena. Maybe we can find a way to fix that, too.”

  The room suddenly fills with music, a familiar strain of trumpets and other brass I recognize from Apocalypse Now. It’s Alex’s phone.

  Of course. He would have his ringtone set to Wagner.

  “I have to take this,” he says, and I catch a quick flash of the photo on the phone’s screen before I let him turn me toward the door.

  I steal one final glance at the coffee table. The papers are gone.

  Fifty-One

  When I leave Alex’s apartment, it’s nearly noon. I’m high on adrenaline and low on morale as I jog back along the beige hallway to my own quarters with three phrases from Madeleine Sinclair’s speech last night echoing through me.

  Better America.

  Better families.

  Better humans.

  I think of the Genics Institute, really the Eugenics Institute, and break into a run, hoping Lissa or Ruby Jo will be in. There’s so much to tell them.

  I should be shocked, but I’m not. Appalled, maybe, and all the other words I can think of that go with it, but not shocked. We’ve always done this, we humans in our little societies. We categorize and compare and devise ways to separate ourselves into teams, not so differently from the rituals of a grade school gym class. I pick her, we say. But not him.

  Someone is always last; someone is always at the bottom of the barrel, the last to be chosen.

  You’d think we’d grow out of that nonsense.

  Ruby Jo listens while I give the digested version of Malcolm’s visit, the guards’ conversation, and the papers in Alex’s apartment. Lissa, curled up on the sofa and alert, scribbles notes on a pad of paper, only stopping to mutter something about a twenty-first-century Jim Crow state, only the dividing line of segregation isn’t skin color but Q scores.

  “Fucking Progressives,” Lissa says.

  I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “It’s a Progressive thing. Progressive with a capital P, that is. They were a big deal in the early 1900s with their Get-Rid-of-the-Idiots programs.”

  Ruby Jo shifts in her chair. “I hate that word.”

  “Progressive? Or idiot?” Lissa says.

  No one laughs.

  “There were two doctors hanging about near Underwood’s office today,” I say.

  Lissa’s head jerks up from her notepad. “M or PH?”

  “I don’t know.” The men outside Underwood’s office weren’t wearing white coats and stethoscopes, but they didn’t have the tweed-and-Birkenstock mien of career academics. “Medical doctors, maybe.” Of course they’d have more doctors here. With over a hundred kids crammed together in dormitories, colds and flu would spread, well, like a virus. And the chill air today is a harsh reminder that we’re about to start another round of flu season, just as Alex said. The entire school will need shots, especially the younger ones.

  “You okay, Elena?” Ruby Jo says.

  No. Yes. I have no idea. “Sure. Fine.”

  Click. Click. Click.

  “Lissa? What is it with you and that pen?” I say finally.

  She grins at me, and the grin takes twenty-five years off her face. “It’s a camera, honey. I used to be a teacher until I retired,” she says. “History. Now I work as a reporter. Freelance, but it keeps me busy. The only question is how I’m going to get enough credible information to expose these assholes. Well, make that two questions. I don’t know how I’ll get that information out of here without a phone. Tricky. What else did you see in his apartment?” Her tone is sharp, and she softens it. “Sorry, I can’t help being brusque when I’m in reporter mode.”

  I shrug and think back to the sights and smells. “Coffee. Good Scotch. A pipe on one of the shelves, tucked back behind something else.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Oh—when I was leaving, his phone rang. The lock screen had a shot of him with a woman and two boys. She seemed familiar. I don’t know—the way she stood or something.” I try like hell to conjure it up in the space before my eyes, but I can’t; it happened too quickly. “She was wearing a hat. That’s all I saw before I got the hell out of there. He’s married, but he was coming on strong.”

  Lissa’s eyebrows waggle up and down and up
once, and stay high on her forehead.

  “Told you I didn’t like him,” Ruby Jo says.

  What matters, according to Lissa, isn’t that any of us like or don’t like Alex. What matters is that he seems to like me.

  Two sets of eyes are on mine now, reminding me of a childhood playground game. In Ruby Jo’s and Lissa’s stares, I hear three words.

  Tag. You’re it.

  Fifty-Two

  We leave for lunch, filing in past the lines of children walking into the dining hall. I stay close enough to them to brush my hand against Freddie and whisper, “It’s going to be all right, baby girl. Trust me.” Freddie looks up with wide, frightened eyes, and I wonder if she can hear the uncertainty in my voice.

  The next-to-last girl in line turns hard, accusing eyes at me. I recognize her as Sabrina Fox, the girl whose mother was practically dragging her into a car, insisting they go home at the same time Sabrina insisted the opposite. She nudges the girl next to her. They’re close enough that I can hear Judy Green’s words spoken so softly they sound like sighs.

  “It’s her fault. She’s a monster. And you know I should have crushed that test last week.”

  Judy and Sabrina continue to whisper. I get every poisonous syllable they say.

  Only a week ago, I watched Judy’s mother, Sarah, pull yellow flowers from the beds in front of their house. I don’t want to revisit that place, but not wanting to isn’t enough to prevent me from going there, from hearing Sarah scream at me while a yellow bus took her daughter away.

  Every single report we got said her Q was almost perfect.

  Did you know something? Did you hold anything back from me?

  How did she lose the Q points? Tell me that, El.

  I guess you’ll have more time for your top two percent now, El. Good luck with them.

  And a few days after that, Jolene Fox blowing smoke in my face, calling Malcolm an asshole, wondering why her girl dropped from a silver school to here in the blink of an eye.