If men really were an endangered species destined for a future in zoos and on preserves, then her brother was ahead of the curve.
“Have you heard from Emilio?” Tess asked.
“He called me. A few weeks ago,” Layla said.
“Did you tell him he’s going to be an uncle?”
“I thought the news should come from you.”
The car was getting stuffy. Tess gave the keys back to her mother, and she started the engine running. Tess said, “Sometimes I think about going to visit him. Maybe when the kid’s old enough we can all go on vacation.”
“It’s a lovely notion,” Layla said. “I can’t honestly say I think he would enjoy it, though. It’s funny. I spent so much time when you were young worried about things that might hurt you. It never occurred to me to worry about how you’d hurt yourselves.”
“You don’t think Emilio’s happy where he is?”
“I think you can be happy and still hurt yourself.”
They sat a while longer watching cyclists and joggers pass on either side. When the thunder of their fight had died away it left a stillness, where cordiality was a comfort rather than a bore. Layla took them to her favorite shops of antiques and vintage knick knacks, where she looked at but didn’t buy a set of wrought iron drawer pulls. She insisted, though, that Tess buy herself some bookends that caught her eye.
After that they went home, back to Layla’s two story townhouse, pink brick with bars over the windows. They folded out and dressed the sofa bed in the living room, then Layla said goodnight and disappeared up the stairs. She’d always been an early to bed, early to rise type, and it had only gotten more severe with age. She said she’d try not to wake Tess up when she rose with the sun, but wouldn’t make any promises.
Tess sat on the bed an looked around. Her mother’s living room was a confetti contrast of artifacts and styles, like an anthropologist’s fever dream. Floral pattern couch. Calligraphy prints on the walls. Lurid santo from New Mexico. Decorative hookah from Morocco. A painted earthenware pot that Tess had given her, and a hand-carved gourd covered in Arabic script from Emilio. Layla had reasonable taste, but she never got rid of anything, and she cared more about individual objects than she did about combinations. Anything colorful, intricate, or recognizably ethnic was sure to catch her eye. The only thing that really looked out of place were the plain white sheets on the mattress.
Tess felt a buzzing alertness that meant the caffeine had hit her bloodstream. And there was a bar running across the middle of the bed frame that pressed up under her weight. Tonight, for once, her trouble sleeping would be due to externalities. She got out her computer and read the email from Candace’s attorney again. It was ridiculous, she decided, that everything should hinge on this one woman. There were so many. They were everywhere. And except for Candace, Tess knew them all.
She started a new email for Lynette.
LYNETTE,
Candace’s attorney says she is categorically uninterested in talking to the media. Since everything about her life is either locked up in court records or behind the fence at Kamp Kendall, I’m changing the plan for the final section. We can keep the rest the same though; open with Montross family, then general principles, and return to case studies. Just different case studies. Houston is home to plenty of Hock’s grand narcissists. Here are a few I know I could get:
Sophie Bryant — landscaper, caught GDS from her husband who caught it from another sexual partner. (They’re swingers.) Raising their three GDS daughters together, with the son and daughter they already had. She has topiaries of all the kids in the front yard, and lets them do seasonal decorations of themselves.
Kelli Fernandez — lawyer, caught GDS during a kidney transplant. Single, no children (she had a hormonal IUD), but does family law. A lot of custody work. Focuses on GDS cases now, and can speak very knowledgeably about them.
Christina Rickards — teenager who caught GDS from her boyfriend. Her dad beat her up and threw her out of the house after her second pregnancy. She’s on number three now, says she plans to have them all. Moved in with an aunt and graduated high school a year early, now in a pharmacy tech program.
Dorothea Velazquez — comatose after a scooter accident in San Antonio, now in long-term care in Houston. She got GDS from a blood transfusion, has had two babies that she’s never seen. Her family considers them miracles, a way for Dorothea to return to them. Devout Catholics. They are committed to raising the children as long as she keeps having them. Her older brother is a very caring, enthusiastic, and quotable kind of slightly insane.
Chloe Pitt — piano teacher at a conservatory and keyboard player in a succession of post-rock bands. She and her partner Steph, a CPA, decided to contract GDS intentionally. First couple I know who did that. They each had one kid, then opted for surgical birth control.
Intessar Mendoza — Me. I don’t have it probably. But I’m pregnant from an unknown sperm donor. I’ll be having a baby in about five months, and I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. But I do know that the whole generations-long history of social baggage, the whole framework for how we understand what having a boy means or having a girl means–that’s all irrelevant now. Everyone thought it was settled, but GDS has put what having a kid means up for renegotiation. There’ve always been precious few constants for the world to offer a new person, and now there are even fewer. The non-GDS perspective on parenthood in a GDS world has got to be of general interest. I’m willing to talk about it.
I could go on. That’s just in Houston. You want a humanizing face for GDS, take your pick. It’s the new human condition. We’re spoiled for choice.
– Tess
TESS SENT HER ideas for the new closing section the next day, emailing Lynette over expense-accounted wifi in the D.C. airport. On the plane she found that someone had pushed chewing gum into the powerpoint by her seat, and her old laptop’s battery gave out before she touched down in Dallas. She searched out a plug in the airport to recharge it during her short layover, then checked her phone. Lynette had already responded.
This isn’t supposed to be an op-ed. The feature standards of American Momentdo not admit the kind of authorial self-insertion you suggest. We publish investigative journalism, not meandering autobiographical rumination. Besides, when was the last time you saw a Pulitzer Prize winner that used the personal pronoun?
You got this contract and this deadline because you claimed to be able to write me a feature to capitalize on the attention of the Montross case. I could have gotten any of my normal writers to do general overview. I do not want an alternate case study from you, I want an article that follows your original outline. For that you need access to Ms. Montross. If you can’t get it, then your piece is irreparably broken.
Let me know when you have it. –LR
She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw her phone against a tall airport window and watch one or both of them shatter to rubble. She filtered down the jet bridge and onto her next plane, people in the aisle deferring to her belly. She was in the seat at the back, next to the engine, where the noise and vibration swamped everything save her own futile thoughts.
By the time she landed in Houston, she was disconsolate. She stood puffy-eyed and travel sick on the curb until Judy pulled up.
“How was your trip?” Judy asked as she climbed into the car.
“Apparently a complete waste of time!” She told Judy what had happened, then got out her phone and read Lynette’s response aloud, shouting the words meandering and normal and irreparably.
Judy asked, “Is that line about the Pulitzer supposed to be funny?”
“I don’t know what the fuck she expects me to do,” said Tess. “The court records are sealed, and her lawyer’s stonewalling. There’s no access. I’ve been tearing my heart out on this.”
“I think you should calm down,” said Judy, easing them out of the airport. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No it isn’t. Okay i
s meeting my deadline. Okay is not having the bottom drop out of everything right at the very end. This is not how we get to okay.”
But Judy was right. When they got home, she said to Tess, “I got you a present.” She went to the tall table by the door that they used for mail and keys, and removed from its small drawer a scrap of green construction paper, which she handed to Tess.
The paper had an address written on it, and above that, Florence Montross.
While Tess was out of town, Judy had continued her hunt for Houston’s greatest early childhood educators. Eventually her search took her to the kindergarten where Candace’s oldest daughter had been placed. Judy had recognized her from Tess’s pictures.
“I asked for some parent references, and the assistant principal just led me into the office and let me watch over her shoulder as she looked through the address book. I could have taken cell phone pictures of the whole thing if I’d wanted,” Judy said. “I wasn’t impressed by the professionalism there overall, frankly. I doubt I’ll hire any of them.”
Tess gaped. “And you were holding out on telling me all this why?”
“I was driving,” said Judy. “I couldn’t look at your face.”
The next day Tess made her way out to a sprawling complex of stucco apartments, some of the buildings five stories high. There were retirees and college students. There were towels hung from balcony railings, incensed dogs barking from behind front doors, and shrieking children jostling for space in a minuscule pool. Heat mirages shimmered off the cars in the vast parking lots.
Candace’s unit was on the third floor of building 22. For all the difficulty she had learning where to look, Candace’s place wasn’t hard to find. The numbers were screwed to the door over a dozen glossy coats of paint, bright and obvious. But there was no answer when Tess knocked.
She sat down next to the door, and felt a small relief that she could stall the meeting for a little while longer.
Ever since Kenny Kendall had said from across a pane of plexiglass, “I know who you are,” Tess had known she would have to confront Candace someday about their connection. But she felt no more ready to do so now than she had in the prison. And her first goal couldn’t be to apologize, anyway. She needed Candace to agree to the profile first. She needed Candace’s story. The other could come later.
Tess’s plan for what she would say when Candace showed up was only two layers deep. The first layer began and ended with “please.” “Please talk to me, even though you’ve been telling me for weeks with your silence that you don’t want to.” “Please let me do a thing that will help me immensely and you perhaps not at all.”
The second layer was basically a guilt trip. “If you tell your story, you’ll be protecting others. Even your own daughters.” Tess wasn’t sure she really believed in layer two, and though it might be effective, she didn’t want to use it.
After that, there was what. Begging? Tess feared that she would be just as easy to dismiss in person as she had been from afar. In that way, too, sitting and waiting was better than forcing the encounter. When she was rebuffed, it would be like falling from a lesser height.
People’s footsteps sounded on the concrete stairs with reverberating thumps. They passed by in both directions, but paid Tess very little mind. It seemed to be the sort of place where people didn’t concern themselves with their neighbors’ business. Maybe that’s why Candace was here. Tess wondered how many people in this complex read American Moment. Would her story upend Candace’s world again? Make her feel more singled out than she already did? What right did she have to do that, really? Only, she supposed, as much right as Candace was willing to give her. Tess continued to wait.
Candace arrived eventually, of course. Up the steps thumped a young woman with wispy blonde hair and doughy cheeks. She was in a loose-fitting dress and immensely pregnant. A plastic grocery sack dangled from the knuckles of one hand, and in the other she held the fingers of a small child. A little girl in pink overalls, with wispy blonde hair and tiny, doughy cheeks. When Candace saw Tess, she stopped.
“Who are you?” said Candace.
“My name is Tess Mendoza,” said Tess. She struggled back onto her feet, knees grown recalcitrant during her wait. “I’m a reporter. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a while.”
“You’re the one who keeps emailing Randy,” said Candace. “I told him I was done talking to reporters. I think all the others gave up already.”
“Well, I guess before I gave up, I wanted to hear it from you. Directly.”
Candace looked Tess over. Her daughter picked her nose bashfully and practiced standing on one foot. Candace asked, “Are you like me?”
“I’m pregnant,” said Tess. “Probably not like you though. Except sometimes I’m certain that it is. It’s scary. There’s no way to know for sure.”
Candace climbed the rest of the way up the stairs and fished in the grocery sack for her door key. “It’s not that scary. There are lots of scary things, but not that.”
“Maybe you can teach me.”
Candace’s daughter said in a small voice, “Momma, need to wee.”
“Justa second, honey,” Candace answered. She slid her key into the lock and turned back to Tess. “Do you have a car? I could use help picking up the other girls if you have a car.”
“I have a car.”
“Okay. I guess you should come in, then,” said Candace, and opened the door.
FOR A TIME after she was rescued from Camp Kendall, Candace lived alone. Her children were initially placed in a shelter, awaiting foster care. It took weeks for the attorneys general to determine that she was in no way complicit in the mutilation of her four daughters. But now the family is back together, living in an apartment on court-supplied housing vouchers.
Her oldest child, Florence (Johnnie Montross’s mother’s name), has started kindergarten. The two middle children, Lauren and Emily, spend their days in nursery school. Amanda, currently the youngest, stays with her mother. Amanda likes lizards and Band-aids, hates wearing socks, and expresses ambivalence about her younger sister, whom she doesn’t yet know, but who will be showing up in less than a month. Candace plans to name her newest daughter Hope, and the explanation she gives for why she chose the name, and what it means to her, is unimpeachably sincere.
“I’ll go on the pill after Hope is born,” she says. “I don’t know if for forever, but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”
It’s true. In the evening, as Florence fills a dinosaur coloring book and Lauren and Emily play an imagination game using dish towels and Amanda as props, Candace studies for her GED. She does this every night before she puts her daughters to bed. The family lives in a two bedroom apartment, and all the children sleep together in one of the rooms, on a pair of bunk beds. Candace is going to put a crib in her bedroom when Hope arrives.
Candace doesn’t agree with Representative Hock’s assessment that her daughters are merely younger versions of her. When asked about it, she doesn’t discuss epigenetics, or use the phrase “nature versus nurture.” She says, “No one’s gonna take them to church when they’re eleven and never let them leave. That happened to me, and it’s not gonna to them.” She puts her hand on her pregnant belly. “And there’s stuff happened to them that didn’t happen to me. And they have each other, but I only had myself. So it’s not the same at all.”
Candace doesn’t lose any of her day worrying that her children may fail to develop unique identities. She’s too busy keeping Amanda’s shoes tied, consoling Emily that not every night can be macaroni and cheese night, comforting Lauren when a pen leaks on her favorite shirt, and convincing Florence not to use the profanity she’s learning at school. “They look a lot alike, but not that much, because they’re different ages. I never confuse them. I bet it’s worse with twins.”
During the day, when three of her girls are at school, Candace does all of the same budgeting and cleaning and logistics that get done by single mothers everywher
e in the country. And when she’s not doing that, she’s meeting with attorneys and preparing to testify in court. Candace is a witness in two ongoing criminal trials.
She is a witness for the prosecution in the trial against Kenny Kendall, who made the decision to have her previous pregnancy aborted and her children sterilized. Since the surgeon among Kendall’s flock who actually performed the operations took his own life in the police raid on the compound, Kendall is the only one on trial for that crime. He is charged with five felony counts, and under Texas law he will face life in prison if convicted. “It’s what he wanted for me,” says Candace of Kendall’s potential fate. “Life in prison. I’m just trying to return the favor.”
The other trial Candace is involved in is that of her father. In her father’s trial, however, she is a witness for the defense.
“It’s not that I like him,” she explains, “That’s not the point.”
The point is that, of all the horrors Candace has experienced — in many of which her father was, in fact, complicit — the one he is charged with never actually happened.
The police, as a matter of course in a child abuse raid, took DNA samples from the suspects and victims. Candace’s children share her genetic code. As a result, a standard paternity test will identify Candace’s father as her children’s father as well. Remarkably, the district attorney has chosen, on the basis of this evidence, to charge Candace’s father with incest.
The case is ludicrous. It is an attempt to punish the guilty not through accountability, but by using legal precedent to subvert reality. But why is Candace, specifically, coming by choice to her father’s defense?
“It’s part he didn’t do it. There’s enough things that actually happened, why go making up ones that didn’t. But it’s also,” she pauses, looks for the words. “It’s also that he has no claim on them. On my girls. He doesn’t have a claim, and Johnnie doesn’t have a claim, and no one does. No one but me.”
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