by Cubed, Magen
“I see.” She shuffled through her stack of files and sighed again. “Well, you can rest easy at the moment. The only reason you’re not in solitary with your little buddy is I already advised Captain Harding on your case. I told him you’re not stupid enough to start a fistfight when you’re staring down a release in two months.”
“I’d like to think so, yeah.”
“I assume you’re not going to prove me wrong, right?”
“No, ma’am.”
“And I also assume you don’t have any ideas as to who put Tucker up to this?”
“Tucker?”
“Simon Tucker, the friendly, neighborhood meth addict who tried to carve you up at lunch.”
He shrugged. “Could’ve been anybody.”
“Captain Harding wants a name. He doesn’t want this to keep going on.”
“Maybe it was Strauss? I popped him on coke distribution three years ago. Or how about Delacroix? He came here for fifteen after the smuggling bust I put together in ‘09. Maybe Perez and his crew from D Block, or one of Cartier’s guys.”
She folded her hands on the table and nodded. “Lots of animals in the zoo.”
“Something like that.”
“So, is that it?”
“Looks that way.”
“You know, you’re not doing yourself any favors pulling this martyr shit.” Flipping through a file, she pulled out a page and put on her reading glasses. “This makes... six retaliations. Other than that, you’ve been the model prisoner. You’ve gone through your counseling, you’ve kept your nose clean, and yet you refuse to implicate any of your attackers. Instead, you just insist on soaking up taxpayer dollars with a big target on your back.”
He shook his head. “I’m just doing my time, trying not to rock the boat.”
“No, you’re punishing yourself even more than the system has already agreed to punish you, since the system’s been trying to toss you out of here the last eighteen months.”
“It’s my choice to make.”
She pulled off her glasses and tossed them aside before gesturing to the door. “Out. Or I’m going to request Captain Harding put you in a hole just for being so stubborn.”
He started to smirk, but thought better of it and got up to leave. He went down the corridor to his cubicle on D Block, where he toed off his shoes and sat on his bunk. He felt his ribs, pressing his fingers between the bones to check where the shank tried to draw blood and missed. It tore a hole in his scrub shirt big enough to wriggle his finger through. He sighed and stared at the wall beneath the barred window where the sunlight streamed through in cold, gray bands. Just two more months, if only to go through the ritual of it. Just two more months.
Six months later, he would be sitting at a dinner table to eat a meal with a family made of little more than strangers. Damon White would try to kill him twice and fail. For now, there was only his cubicle in a room that smelled of disinfectant and stale sweat where other men made the human sounds of living in close quarters and he spoke to no one.
II.
Clara had only seen the Blossfeldt Accelerator Laboratory on television and in magazine articles. It was home to the second-highest energy proton-antiproton collider in the world. Its inner workings were a candy-colored maze of tubes, wires, and detectors thousands of feet beneath the earth. Every year, top physics programs across the world assaulted the Blossfeldt with applications for the prestigious internship program. To spend a summer studying in Bern and interning at the labs would make her career. It would catapult her to the top of academia in the fields of theoretical physics and quantum theory. With the form now sitting on her and Padma’s coffee table, Clara’s entire body tingled.
Seated on the floor, Padma slurped the broth of her rice noodles. “So, what are your chances of getting into the program?”
Clara stared at the form and tapped her pen against her mouth. When she ran to Dr. Graham’s office after classes to grab her form, she hadn’t thought of the emotional ramifications of looking at it up close. It was a gatekeeper of her aspirations—a dragon at the mouth of the castle. She knew what to write down, how to formulate her personal essay, and what to wear at the candidacy interviews. Then, pen in hand, her mind drew a blank.
“Oh, I’m a shoo-in,” Clara answered flippantly. “I may have some competition with Yamagutchi because of his test scores, but his research is underwhelming at best. If he thinks fangirling for Dr. Onobe is enough to get him a spot, he’s sadly mistaken.”
Padma chuckled. “Okay, so, what’s the hold-up?”
“It’s just...” Clara furrowed her brow and waved her pen absently. “This is everything I’ve ever wanted, and it’s right here staring me in the face. And now that it’s here, it’s...”
“Intimidating?”
“No, it’s—it’s so huge. If I screw this up—if I don’t fill out every stupid box or make myself look every inch the freaking genius I am—I could lose.”
“So, you don’t always get what you want,” her roommate said with a shrug. “Welcome to the planet.”
“I mean, I’ve been planning for this my whole life. I’ve been learning German for the last two semesters so I can get around and everything.”
“Shouldn’t you be learning Spanish?”
“Why would I learn Spanish to go to Switzerland?”
Padma snorted. “Dude, wasn’t your dad Dominican or whatever?”
“My mom’s black and she didn’t teach me Spanish, so don’t put that on me.” After a moment, Clara sighed. “I haven’t had a boyfriend. I haven’t even been to a party in three years so I could have time to study. I just... I have to do this. I have to be the very best.”
“Like no one ever was?”
“Don’t give me that Pokémon anime club bullshit.”
Chewing her noodles, Padma laughed. “Hey, while you were enjoying your celibacy in high school, I was watching anime and getting laid.”
“Whatever.” Clara sagged back into the couch with a defeated huff and rubbed her eyes. The burden of growing fatigue made her arms useless and her legs heavy. “I’m lame.”
“You’re not lame. You’re human. It happens to all of us.”
“I don’t want to be human.”
“I know. You want to be Spock. So, fill out the form so you can get there.”
Clara sighed again. “Do you have any more pills?”
“Did you finish the Dexedrine I already gave you?”
“Yeah. I had two exams last week and three papers due.”
“I’ll have to call Jeremy.”
“Can you?”
Getting up from her cross-legged seat, Padma pushed the abandoned pen toward Clara on her way to the kitchen. “Fill out the form.”
Clara sat up from her sprawl to grab the paper. “Thanks, Mom.”
III.
The Harlow house sat on a shady block in the Southside with green flower boxes and shutters behind tall, broad bushes. Inside this fat, two-story house, Jim and Sarah Harlow raised their four planned children, Jamie, Carol, Shana and Deborah, followed by Adam, the runt of their litter. Adam was conceived one summer when Sarah miscounted the days of her cycle. He was a lovely accident that came into the world eight weeks premature with fluid in his underdeveloped lungs.
Adam was the very definition of unplanned. He caught his parents off-guard for the three weeks he spent in the hospital while his lungs grew and he put on sufficient weight. From then on, Adam took his rightful place in the Harlow family tree. He was his mother’s baby boy, his wily sisters’ dutiful minion, and his doting brother’s biggest fan. To his father, he was the surprise second heir, another chance at raising a boy to follow him into the family business when Jamie showed little interest in cars.
Jim owned an auto repair shop in the old neighborhood and served in the army. He hailed from a generation of men that valued honor and hard work. Jim lived in a man’s world where he put in long hours at the shop, had a beer or five at the bar before coming home to di
nner, and left the kids to his wife. Adam was the son who liked to help his dad in the shop and on weekend hunting trips with their faction of uncles and cousins. He liked to play football in high school, and he excelled in shop class while floundering in math and English. Anything Jamie could do he could do almost as well, except when it came to liking girls.
Adam liked boys since Ian Monaghan, a boy in the neighborhood who had three big dogs and liked racing his BMX bike around the block. Sarah told him it was all right, he could like whomever he wanted. Jim never said a word about Ian or any of the boys that followed, but he never looked Adam in the eye, either. It was the compromise they maintained to keep the peace.
If Adam had learned one thing from his father, it was how to be man. Jim had big, strong hands, made for salvaging cars and serving in the military until Deborah was born. Those hands were made to build things, and Adam wanted to make him proud. He wanted to restore an engine, hold a gun, be a man. So, when he graduated high school with a run-of-the-mill grade point average and run-of-the-mill college prospects, Adam enlisted in the army. As Sarah cried over the bodies of soldiers coming back from Iraq in a million unidentifiable pieces, he promised he would be careful and smart. He would go in as a mechanic and never see the front lines. His father knew better, of course, but Jim kept it between them.
In Afghanistan, Adam survived six years and two IEDs. The third left him too broken to keep going. Instead he tried to kill himself and was remanded to a 72-hour suicide watch, his arms bound to his hospital bed. When he came home, Sarah and Jim were waiting for him outside the terminal at East Brighton International, flanked by his siblings and their families. Sarah cried and held him and promised everything would be okay. Jim said nothing. Back in his childhood home, Adam never felt more alone. The house was huge, empty, and filled with his housewife mother’s shuffling by day and his distant father’s coughs and mutters by night. Every day, he joined them at their oversized table for breakfast before going out to stand in line at the VA office, go to his counseling sessions, fill his prescriptions and look for work. His father rarely spoke to him. Adam didn’t have to guess why.
It was Labor Day weekend when Adam stopped speaking to his family. Jamie was there with his wife and daughters. His sisters brought their husbands and children to fill the house with the laughter and screaming Adam remembered from his youth. They were crowded around the never-ending dining room table, all bumping elbows and knees while his brother and sisters passed plates and dishes from one side to the other. Carol’s husband, Bruce, was the one that spoke up as he filled his daughter’s plate with a hefty spoonful of steamed broccoli.
“So, how’ve you been settling in, Adam?” he asked politely even though he already knew. Carol had already told him. Carol was always on the phone with Sarah, and their predictable conversations carried through the walls.
Between two nephews, Adam feigned a smile. “I’ve been okay. I’m still looking for a job, but you know how it goes.”
“Yeah. Hey, Jim, don’t you have a position open at your shop? I thought you mentioned that the other day.”
In her seat at Jim’s side, Sarah flinched. Adam said nothing and looked at his plate. Jim just shook his head.
“It’s in the painting department. That’s not exactly Adam’s specialty.”
“Oh.” Bruce shrugged and poked at his steak. “I just figured you might need some more help at the shop.”
“Not his kind of help.”
Sarah set down her fork with a loud clank. “Jim.”
Jim continued eating with his head down and elbows spread out. Jamie looked his wife Shelby. Carol, Shana, and Deborah traded glances. From his side of the table, Adam pushed his plate back.
“No, Mom, let him say it.”
“Adam, honey, not here.”
“Just let him get it out of his system.”
“We’re having dinner. It can wait.”
“No, I insist. Maybe he’ll feel better once he just calls me a coward to my face.”
“Shut your mouth.” Jim slammed his knife and forked down. “You don’t speak to your mother like that, and you’re not going to speak to me like that. Not in my own home.”
Adam leveled a hard look at his father. “You don’t speak to me anymore, Dad, remember?”
Jim straightened to meet his eye. “You want to know why? Because a real man handles his business. A coward tries to kill himself.”
Wrath made Adam’s face hot and his voice quiet. “You have no idea what I’ve been through.”
“You did two tours greasing engines and babysitting supply convoys. You’ve never even seen the front lines, so don’t tell me shit about what you’ve been through.”
“What the fuck do you know? You were in Honduras for five minutes. I was on trucks getting fired on at security checkpoints for six years.”
“Stop it.” Sarah threw her napkin onto her plate. “Both of you, that’s enough.”
“No, I’m done with his moping around, acting like a victim. He did this to himself.”
“Do you think I wanted to be like this?” Anger propelled Adam to his feet. He stared his father down. “You think this is easy for me?”
“I think you’re coddled.”
“Well, you were too busy getting drunk when I was a kid to give a shit before. Why start now?”
“You shut your mouth. What do you know about a man’s business? All you’ve done since you got back is cry.”
“I wanted to die, Dad. Do you even get that?”
Jim stood. “Then you should’ve just finished the job.”
No one else spoke. Their eyes turned to their plates. Sarah put her face in her hands.
After a moment, Adam shook his head. “Of course none of you say anything.”
“Adam, it’s not that,” his mother said, tears reddening the corners of her eyes. “Just sit down. Please.”
Adam shoved his chair back and stormed away from the table. He gathered his car keys and left through the front door. Jim followed to slam and lock it behind him.
Adam didn’t answer his mother’s calls that night, or his brother’s or sisters’, either. He listened to Sarah’s tearful voicemail. She begged him to come home and forgive his father because he was just having a hard time and would come around.
He deleted the messages and found a hotel room for the night and a listing for a rat’s nest in Jonestown. Alone in a rented room, he contemplated how simple it would have been to take his father’s advice and do the job he couldn’t seem to do. His mind raced through romantic, almost erotic thoughts about how easy it would be to slit his wrists or jump off a bridge or take a bullet or swallow a bottle of pills—anything to stop feeling like such a waste. Once the ensuing panic attack passed over him in a hot and nauseating wave, he drank until he couldn’t think of anything at all.
In a week and a half, the VA office sent him an e-mail about a mechanic position at Bob’s Repair and Restoration. When Bob saw Adam’s veteran status, he offered him a job on the spot. Bob said he liked to give back to those who served whenever he could. Adam thanked him, shook his hand, and tried to smile even though he still wanted to die.
He put on a good face, found a locker in the employee break room for all his things, and deleted the day’s messages. That was his life for the next six months.
IV.
The bills were pink when Norah opened them that morning, but she couldn’t tell Hannah about that. She had thirty days to pay her balances in full or she would be turned over to collections. There were medical bills for the visits to Hannah’s doctors when the insurance dried up, bank statements for when she put the rest on credit to keep Hannah in glasses and physical therapy. In severe fonts and bureaucratic language, the papers all said failing to repay these debts would hurt her credit and result in legal action. There was no time to indulge the frustrated tears. She had to get Hannah to school and herself across town to work. Waving Hannah goodbye, she allowed herself two minutes to cry alone in her car b
efore she fixed her makeup and drove to Walsh Elementary to begin the day.
Norah had classes to teach and papers to grade. She had parent phone calls to field for fighting, inappropriate behavior, poor testing scores, and remedial classes. She had a playground to watch during recess, a bagged lunch to forget to eat, and a stack of assignments to prepare for. There was no time to cry or scream or rage at the bills piling up on her coffee table. If there were time, she would have gone into the women’s room, hidden in the back stall, and taken ten minutes to have the panic attack that constantly hammered just beneath her breastbone. It wouldn’t have helped, but she might have felt less like she was going to explode.
It wasn’t until 3:00 that the sea of frazzled and indignant parents arrived to collect their children and a light appeared at the end of Norah’s tunnel. Debbie was the last to arrive after her shift at the diner. She showed up to gather her three boys and herd them into the back of her minivan. It was Debbie who always stopped to chat while Norah cleaned up the classroom after art. That was why Debbie noticed the mascara smudges under Norah’s reddened eyes.
“Are you doing all right?” she asked once the kids disappeared to collect their backpacks and coats. “You look like you’ve had a shit day.”
Norah shook her head and wiped at her eye. “I’m okay. It’s just medical bills, you know. The usual thing.”
“Yeah, I get that. Caleb broke a tooth playing around in the bathtub and it cost a week’s pay at the diner to get it fixed.”
“No, it’s just.” The weight of it caught up with Norah, settling in her gut like a rock. Tears threatened to betray her. She grabbed a chair from a nearby art table and sunk into it. “My daughter has spina bifida, and I’m—I’m drowning. I used to be able to keep up with the bills, but there’s been these changes with our insurance and we fell off the eye plan. Which I can deal with, but her physical therapist is no longer covered and I haven’t had the time to find a new one under the plan.”
Debbie took the seat beside her and made a sympathetic, little sound. “Oh, god. Can you apply for state aid or something? You’re single, right?”
