Q

by Christina Dalcher

  Sixty-Seven

  I have dreams tonight.

  I’m in a small room that smells of burnt coffee and medicine while men in white coats pull at my limbs, stretching and contorting me until my muscles scream high notes. On my right and left, girls in pleated blue skirts dance together, arm in arm. One of them is Oma. The others are my daughters, Judy Green, Rosaria Delgado, Mary Ripley. Everyone has the face of a human and the body of a fox. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

  There’s a door at the far end of the room, half-open and half-closed. Is the glass half-empty or half-full? the old question goes. I think “full,” and the other part of me says “empty.” I think “closed,” and the other part, the mother part, says “open.” Freddie begins to cry, while Judy Green holds something to my throat, something shiny and sharp.

  Lissa and Ruby Jo walk into this room, one on each side. They take turns leaning down to me, whispering.

  It wasn’t all coercion.

  There was consent, too.

  Most people don’t know.

  And the ones who know don’t care.

  Now, Judy leaves the parade of girls and steps forward, accusation in her eyes. You knew about the tests being swapped out, didn’t you?

  No. No, I did not. My lips and tongue form the words, but no sound comes out. Someone has taken out the piece of me that makes sound.

  They hurt us in there. They hurt me, and they’ll hurt your daughter soon, too.

  I see ugly pictures forming in my mind. I see the fat guard at the state school. I see a key in a lock, and bolts tumbling out of their chambers. I see boots, heavy and black, moving across a wooden floor. I see dirty hands fumbling with zippers, buttons.

  And I hear things, too: guttural sounds, feral grunts; the whimper of a no silenced by a cupped palm; rustling sheets and the sharp crack of a slap that turns everything still.

  I hear no and No and NO! And then, nothing. Only pillow-stifled cries and that single word everyone says when things get too black to bear. Mommy. Not God, not Jesus, not any spirit from above, but Mommy. And then my own voice, stronger now, saying, Don’t you dare touch my little girl.

  Everything hurts when I wake up, squeezing my eyes to a bright November sun. The tray on the side table is still there with its book and crossword puzzle and fresh bottle of water. Instead of quiche, there’s a cold grilled cheese sandwich. Somewhere outside, church bells ring. Sunday morning is here.

  I’ve been asleep—or unconscious—for sixteen hours.

  I could do the crossword puzzle, I guess. No. Too much mental effort. I pick up the Styron book from the tray and decide to read a few pages. At least the beginning isn’t depressing, and it may take my mind off the fact that I’m closed inside this room while the rest of the world dresses for Sunday services and goes to all-you-can-drink champagne brunches.

  Styron rests in my lap for a few minutes while I let my body rest and recover. Who knew it would require so much effort for such a trivial task as picking up a book? Reach, pick up object, retract arm. Each action saps my strength, and I have so little left.

  I think I might be dying. No. Dying is a passive experience. Someone is killing me.

  The rubber band, dry and brittle, snaps when I try to slide it off. No wonder, it’s been holding these pages between their covers for too many years now. I really should have replaced it and given Anne a fresh copy of her own when she told me she wanted to read it. I really should go back to sleep.

  Oh no, you shouldn’t. It’s Mother Voice again. I’ve begun to hate her.

  My book is not a book anymore. When the spine shifts at its weakest point, dividing it into two separate volumes, its guts are missing, sliced out clean to form a cavity in the middle, as if someone has carved out the heart of this story and replaced it with a new one.

  Mother Voice speaks to me, urging me on.

  Stay awake, El.

  I read Anne’s note five times, and each time it brings fresh tears.

  Mom,

  Dad made me write that stuff. I’m sorry. I saw something on his computer. Hope you find this and bring Freddie back. I love you.

  Anne

  “Bastard” isn’t a good enough word for what my husband is.

  Underneath her note is a slip of paper with a string of letters and numbers. That’s one key. My problem right now is that I need a different one, a metal key that will unlock my door and get me out of here. Also, I need a new body, a body that doesn’t hurt and vomit and sweat, but I’m stuck with a password to Malcolm’s laptop and a fucking bobby pin. So I start to work, hoping Malcolm’s car doesn’t come purring up the driveway.

  This time, I last more than five minutes with the bobby pin, my ears straining for any foreign sound, anything other than the distant bark of a dog or the pealing of Sunday-morning bells. When I’m tired, that other voice, that Mother Voice, tells me to get up and start all over again. She’s like some sick cheering squad. One more try, one more wiggle of the straightened bobby pin and desperate turn of the door now. If it doesn’t open, I’ll rest. To hell with Mother Voice.

  But the knob turns in one glorious, hallelujah-worthy twist. Expecting the resistance, I turn with it, slamming my shoulder into the wall as the door swings open.

  I’m out of this room.

  My house has none of me in it anymore. No wedding photographs, no pictures of me with the girls, no piles of mail or notepads or shopping lists, nothing that says Elena Fischer Fairchild. It’s an odd thing to realize I don’t exist. When I manage to climb the stairs and reach the office, everything of mine is gone. This is okay. I don’t want anything of mine; I want something of Malcolm’s.

  I yank the power cord from his laptop and dash downstairs, tearing past Anne’s and Freddie’s rooms at the slow speed my limbs allow, stumbling back into my bedroom for the book and Lissa’s pen, which I stuffed into the downy insides of my pillow on Friday night. I wish the next stop could be this bed, this soft down pillow, but I ignore their temptation and race back to the kitchen, to the junk drawer in the corner where we keep spare keys.

  Please let the Acura key be here. I’ll trade my soul if it’s here. I try not to think about the fact that I may have already traded said soul, that I have nothing left to bargain with.

  The key is here.

  There’s a thirty-second delay when I leave the house through the back door, the November cold hitting me like a punishing slap on my cheeks and bare arms and shoeless feet. I throw everything into the front seat of the car before falling into it myself and making another trade with fate in exchange for the Acura starting up. When it finally rumbles to life, I reverse out of the driveway, just as the alarms begin their screaming.

  Sixty-Eight

  If I turn to the right, I can reach Sarah Green’s house in a matter of seconds. If I turn left, I’ll reach Chain Bridge Road and face another choice. Right, hospital. Left, city. House, hospital, city. My brain weighs the probabilities.

  Sarah Green may be home or she may not be. A drive-by won’t tell me which is true; her car is religiously garaged. If home, then no problem. If not home, then I’m wasting time I don’t have.

  Because I don’t know where Malcolm is.

  Maybe I’ll be gone an hour; maybe ten minutes. Maybe I’ll park down the street and get some paperwork done. I’m going to stay close to you. Just in case you need me.

  So I turn left toward Chain Bridge Road, and I start the process all over again. If right, hospital. Drugs, bed, sleep. If left, city. Newspaper, scandal, daughter.

  In my mind lurks a single question: Which do I want more?

  A computer would calculate the input, the output, and the consequences. It would do this coldly, in the same way a bank of computers measures each of my daughters’ test scores and birth weight and the combined income of her parents. A computer would work in a series of zeros and ones, and it would spit out a new number, a different number, a quotient. Its product would be invariable.

  I’m also calculating. I
’m counting the numbers of phone calls to nearby hospitals, and how many transfers will be necessary before the right nurse answers with a cheery, “Oh, yes. She’s here. Are you the next of kin?” I’m counting the ways Malcolm will find to corrupt my story, and the lies he will tell to doctors before assuring them he’ll keep my belongings safe. I’m counting on him to use everything he has to discredit me.

  So I turn left. Toward the city. Toward Bonita Hamilton and Jay Jackson and an end to all of this.

  Thirty minutes later, I’m at the intersection of Thirteenth and K Streets, in time to watch a crowd of people pour out from the Methodist church a half block away from where I’ve parked. They’re pouring out because they aren’t working. Today is Sunday, Washington’s day of rest. Time to pray up and eat pastries.

  The District of Columbia doesn’t have the landmass or the population of New York, so I count on anonymity while I wait. That, and the probability that Malcolm will be checking out neighbors and hospitals instead of newspaper offices. With the Acura still running and the heat at full throttle, I wait, watching for signs of life at the entrance to 1301 K Street.

  There isn’t any. Not for the first half hour, and not for the second. Or the third.

  But I’ve kept busy. I’ve been playing inside Malcolm’s computer.

  Sixty-Nine

  I turned off the Acura’s engine at eleven, and an old blanket from the trunk is the only thing between me and the chilly air that’s seeped into the car. But this isn’t what turns my blood cold. I’ve just read the first line of Malcolm’s email from the end of September.

  Maddie,

  Happy to hear the project is a go. Am waiting for complete list of undesirables to be compiled. Will send over when ready. So you know, I have five teams working on the decoy tests for history, math, physics, chemistry, and life sciences. We should be ready to roll by the late October exam date.

  Malc

  Monster.

  His file system has more layers than the goddamned Pentagon, and the first dozen documents I open are nothing more than bureaucrat-speak, memos, and dry reports. Until I get to the folder labeled Tests. These are new. I open three of them, their cover pages familiar because I’ve been handing them out on a monthly basis for a few years now, right before I read my students the rules.

  You have one hour.

  You may not speak to any student.

  You may not leave the room for any reason.

  When time is called, put down any and all writing implements. If you do not, ten points will be automatically deducted from your score.

  Further along, when I get to the meat of the monthly exams, everything is different. The math essay questions demand knowledge of at least five instances of false proofs of Fermat’s last theorem; the chemistry tests want in-depth information on Nobel Prize–winning research from a century ago. And the anatomy and bio I couldn’t ace if I had a year to study. It’s doctoral-level subject matter, and it was given to kids.

  No one could pass this, I think. No one.

  I keep the Word documents up and start moving through spreadsheets. My fingers are icy, not always registering on the trackpad. In a folder within a folder within a folder, I find an Excel sheet called SpecPop, very un-Malcolm-like in its snappiness, but then I remember a phrase Bonita Hamilton used. Special Populations.

  A list of names and addresses and Q scores fills the small screen. They’re all off the charts, these numbers, all Qs anyone would be thrilled to have.

  Each one is color coded, including Freddie’s.

  From the spreadsheets, Malcolm’s preferences are clear. He hates immigrants and minorities; Catholics, Muslims, and Jews; anyone with a middle-class income or lower; the entire LGBTQIA crowd; and about thirty-seven flavors of differently abled human beings.

  He doesn’t seem to have any negative feelings where Madeleine Sinclair is concerned, though.

  I scan another batch of emails. Madeleine became “Maddie” sometime last year. And, this past summer, “Maddie” became “Darling.”

  Motherfucker.

  It isn’t hard to see why. Madeleine is six feet tall in heels, blond, and gorgeous. And, according to the Wikipedia bio I read a few weeks ago, she’s thirty-six years old. Not what I’d call a spring chicken, but the woman has eight years on me—eight years of better skin and better ovaries. A hot flash of fever rolls through me, a reminder that as of yesterday, Madeleine Sinclair has more than better plumbing. She’s still functional. She’s still cool and smooth. I feel a furnace starting up inside me and go back to Malcolm’s emails, looking for hard evidence of what I know he’s done.

  I stop cold when I see the email from acartmill@genics.com.

  It’s probably nothing. Just some Fitter Family–Genics Institute–Department of Education bureaucratic bullshit. I run the back of my hand over my forehead, wiping away a trickle of sweat, and I click the email open.

  Very little of it is bureaucratic.

  Malc,

  She’s in Kansas. Showed up yesterday. I’ll see what I can do, and you shouldn’t have any problems with the divorce.

  Cheers,

  A

  Bastard. I don’t know which of them I mean, and I don’t care. But I get it. I can wrap my head around a man who doesn’t want me for a wife. I can understand Malcolm ditching me for Madeleine Sinclair. The numbers, though. The numbers I read in the SpecPop table and in all the other files, these are the workings of a sick mind, a monster.

  You should know, Elena.

  Seventy

  THEN:

  Two weeks after the new ID card system went through, I was sitting in the cafeteria with the same old group—Malcolm, Roy, Candice, and the others. We were still pariahs, but we were pariahs who got first dibs on lunch, discounts at the bookstore, and free tickets to football games. Not that any of us gave a shit about football, but we went anyway, piling into whichever car could be borrowed from a parent, flashing our gold cards at the gate on Friday afternoons. It was worth the boredom just to see the looks on the faces of kids who had to stand in the white card line and fork over their allowance money.

  I’d stopped buying up the last salads. Margie Miller never got her first choice anyway, and that was good enough for me.

  “There she is,” Malcolm said. “Little Miss Brainless.”

  He said it in a stage whisper, loud enough for most of the tables near ours to hear. Margie flushed, shook herself out of it, and pushed her chair back. She was on her way over to us.

  I felt sorry for Margie just then; I don’t know why. Maybe being the odd girl out for most of my school career did it; maybe I just thought Malcolm didn’t need to be so obviously nasty. Aside from acting as if I didn’t exist, Margie Miller hadn’t ever been truly mean to me.

  “Saw your name in the paper, Elena,” she said.

  I went cold. The newspaper article had been Malcolm’s idea. He’d said something about credit where credit was due, and I let the reporter interview me, answering her questions with simple one-word responses, not really wanting the word to get out about my spontaneous brainchild of merit-based cards and separate lunch lines and free tickets to Friday games. I nearly blurted out an apology to Margie right there and then, in front of a hundred pairs of eyes and ears.

  She beat me to the punch. “Here’s what I think of your stupid idea.”

  Now I really did go cold, even though my face was hot with embarrassment. Margie had been taking delicate little sips of juice from a bottle. She wasn’t drinking anymore; she was pouring it on me. My hair absorbed most of it, but didn’t stop the sticky liquid from streaking my white blouse, from staining me from head to toe.

  “There. Now you look like a Creamsicle, you stinking Kraut.” She marched off, back to her table, and the cafeteria exploded around me with laughter.

  I’d been called names before. Four-Eyes in grade school. Miss Know-It-All later on. Foul-Ball Fischer in gym class. All of them were at least based on something. But Kraut? I’d never heard that
one, and it stung, mostly because it wasn’t true. My parents were Americans, as was I.

  In the hall bathroom, I changed my yellow-stained blouse for a T-shirt from my gym bag, and I thought of how much I hated Margie Miller and the rest of her stupid, snooty friends. I didn’t want to be like them, I decided. I would never be like them.

  Margie Miller ended up with a three-day suspension, during which she sat in a library carrel polishing her nails. I ended up with a new nickname that I didn’t shake until my senior year, when my parents transferred me to a private school an hour’s drive away. It reached a point where I stopped buying anything in the cafeteria, if only to avoid the notoriety of the gold-and-green-card line. I made excuses to avoid football games and dances, anything that set me apart.

  None of my actions did one bit of good. Margie seemed to be ever present in locker rooms and hallways. If I took a shower after gym, eyes squeezed shut against soap, someone would turn off the hot water, giggling as I scrambled to find the tap or ran out from the stall covered in suds. The frogs and worms and crawfish from biology lab would mysteriously make their way into my lunch bag. One Monday morning, I opened my locker to find a spray-painted swastika on the inside of the door.

  “They’re stupid pranks,” Malcolm said after each occasion. “Ignore them.”

  I tried, and I couldn’t. “They’re stupid people,” I said. Margie waggled her manicured nails at me from her table with the pretty/rich/jock people.

  And then, I said something without thinking, something I’d one day regret.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if all the people we hated could carry their crappy GPAs around for life?”

  Malcolm agreed. And he smiled.

  Seventy-One

  After another early-afternoon crowd crosses from the Methodist church to Patisserie Paul, it dawns on me that I haven’t eaten since Friday. I’ve been living on sparkling water since Malcolm brought me home. The fact is, even the thought of water brings a fresh wave of nausea, but Patisserie Paul will have Wi-Fi. And happy, pastry-munching churchgoers with cell phones, the kind of people who read stories about good Samaritans.