All Good Children

by Catherine Austen

  “What’s their power source?” Dallas asks.

  Mom shrugs. “Solar?”

  “It could be fish oil for all we know,” I mutter. “Do they have guns?”

  The streets are wide and clear. We’re the only car moving. A few ancient vehicles are parked at the curb as if someone might hop in them to deliver pizza at any moment. No one does. You’d think it was three in the morning instead of ten thirty at night.

  There are no joggers, no partiers, no criminals, no one.

  “Where are all the freaks?” Dallas asks.

  “We must be in the wrong part of town,” Mom says.

  “Wrong for those who want to find freaks?” I ask. “Or wrong for those who want to stay alive much longer?”

  Mom ignores me. Dallas rolls his eyes like he really is my father. I don’t like sitting in the backseat.

  “There’s something going on ahead,” Mom whispers.

  We’re in the heart of town now. The alleys are strung with colored lights, doorways hung with wreaths of vines and dried apples, stumps of old telephone poles topped with straw dolls shaped into angels and steel wires bent into stars.

  People emerge from a building up ahead, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They pour out of massive double doors onto the sidewalk, pushing strollers and wheelchairs into the street fifty yards ahead of us.

  “Were they waiting for us?” I ask.

  “It’s a church,” Dallas says. I don’t know if that’s an answer.

  They keep coming out, some on crutches, some carrying babies, some with their arms draped around others. They look more united than any people I have ever seen. They fan out along the road and turn to us, caught in our headlights.

  Mom idles in front of the church. I stick my face to the window.

  Two men in long ministerial robes follow their congregation outside. They stop when they see us, their hands lifted halfway up to their neighbors’ shoulders and held there as if they’re waving. Beside them is a nativity scene made of painted wood and a white sign that lists the hours of Christmas sermons in English, Spanish, Mandarin.

  Blankets cover the strollers and wheelchairs and some of the people on their feet. Others wear bulky coats with scarves wrapped around their heads. It’s hard to tell who’s normal and who’s freakish. They don’t look like Freakshow contestants. They just look poor and sick.

  They stare at us like they’re scared, like they’ve been caught in headlights before. They don’t scream or surround the car. They don’t beg or steal our stuff. They just stare in silence. And then they step aside. An old woman close to the car waves her arm with a graceful flourish and everyone clears a path for us to travel.

  Mom drives so slowly that I make eye contact with people as we pass them. A mother bends over her stroller and raises the enormous head of her deformed child, murmuring soft words and pointing at our car. A girl Ally’s age with bulging eyes lifts her straw angel to my window and makes it dance. I give her a thumbs-up and she smiles. I smile back at her and wave. Suddenly everyone I pass smiles and waves at me, and I hear a hundred shouts of “Merry Christmas!”

  “It’s just a town,” I mutter as we leave the crowd behind with their rundown storefronts and heaps of garbage and recycled decorations. “I don’t think the world is exactly what we’ve been told.”

  Ally wakes up when we get to the border, like there’s a tracking device in her patch and she’s alerted to the fact that she’s leaving zombie territory.

  We glance at her nervously. She looks around but says nothing, asks nothing.

  There isn’t one other car at the border. I was expecting long lines of people pacing beside their vehicles, babies crying and moms hushing toddlers, old people asking what’s going on, police ushering suspicious drivers inside for strip searches. But there’s just an empty road blocked off by metal gates with two armed guards standing directly in front of them, staring at our car. A squat brown building to our left houses more police officers, computer networks, jail cells.

  “All right, everyone,” Mom says as she pulls into the light. “Someone will ask us questions now. Just answer them calmly.”

  Dallas bounces his leg up and down, twists in his seat, scratches at his wig. Mom lays a hand on his shoulder. “Just do what you’ve been doing for the past two months. You’re Patrick Connors. You’re taking your family out of the country. Understand?”

  He takes a deep breath and stills. He flips down his visor and catches my eye in the mirror. I watch with amazement as my father’s face says, “Here we go.”

  There’s a knock at Mom’s window. She rolls it down.

  “Good evening, ma’am.” The guard has a thick accent I can’t place, some part of the world where the income is low. He takes us in with big brown eyes fringed in lashes so thick he looks like he’s wearing mascara.

  “Good evening,” Mom says.

  “Passports please.”

  She passes him all four. “We have these too,” she says, holding up our id cards. He looks at the cards curiously. “These are first issue,” he says. “We just got ours up here. They’re a little different.”

  “Really?” Mom asks.

  He nods. “You’ll get the new ones when you renew, I expect.” He hands back the cards and looks through our passports so thoroughly I assume we’re the only car that’s passed his way today and he’s short on reading material. He opens each one and stares from the picture to the person three times, reads the description and stares back at the person, then flips through the passport to see where each person has been, which in all our cases is nowhere.

  “Do you understand that you’re about to leave the country?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Mom says.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “We’re going to visit my niece.” Mom clears her throat and forces a casual tone. “We have some papers for her from her mother. She died. My sister, I mean. Not my niece.”

  The guard’s eyes move while Mom speaks, passing over each of us. “Do you understand that this is a one-way border at the present time?” he asks as he stares at Dallas.

  “I do,” Mom says.

  “And the only means of returning to this country is via your embassy through a reintegration process that takes ten to twelve weeks?”

  “Okay.”

  “And you are responsible for your food and lodging during the entire ten-to-twelve-week waiting period?”

  “That’s fine.”

  He taps our passports against his palm and says, “I have to run these against a criminal database and then you’re free to go. You have your car registration?”

  Mom tugs the paper from her visor and hands it to him, still folded.

  “Thank you.” He disappears into the building.

  “I think he’s a zombie,” I whisper. “Did you see his eyes?”

  “It’s hard to tell with adults,” Dallas says. “But he didn’t search the car.”

  “No one cares if you take problems out of a country,” Mom says. “It’s smuggling them in that’s hard.”

  “Do we have to do this again on the other side?” I ask.

  She nods. “Just past those gates is another set of gates.”

  “And past them?”

  “We’ll see when we get there.”

  The guard is back and he’s brought two friends, a tall black man with a pencil mustache and a stocky white woman with cropped blond hair. They stand with their hands clasped behind their backs while the mascara man approaches. “Mrs. Connors? Mr. Connors? We have reason to believe you’re harboring a minor who is not your child.”

  Mom stares at him, dumfounded.

  “You must mean Dallas Richmond,” Dallas says.

  “Yes, sir. Is he in this vehicle?”

  “No. Our son wanted to bring him, but he didn’t want to come.”

  “Do you know his whereabouts?”

  “I believe he went to Texas.”

  “Step out of the car, please.”

  They don’
t take us into a room and shine lights in our faces, ask questions, check our stress levels. They stand us up at the side of the road, cold and isolated. It feels like they’re going to shoot us.

  The tall guard and the woman search the car—under it, on top of it, inside it. They remove our bags and open each one, shift the contents around with gloved hands. They unroll my tent, pat it down, roll it back up. They flip down the backseats of the car and lift up the floor of the trunk to reveal a spare tire no one knew was there. They even check under the hood, as if we might have a six-foot kid curled around the engine.

  The mascara man asks us about Dallas.

  “I told him he’d have to leave with his own parents,” Mom says.

  “He didn’t want to come,” Dallas adds. “It was our son who wanted to bring him.”

  “He said Coach Emery told him to try out for the Dallas football team,” I say. “He’s been confused since his vaccination.”

  “He’s a very troubled young man,” Dallas says. “I hope you find him because I honestly don’t know what he’ll do out there on his own.”

  The guard steps in front of Ally, leans over to look her in the eye. He smiles and bats his lashes. “Do you know where Dallas Richmond is, sweetie?”

  We hold our breath and try not to stare too hard.

  She shakes her head. “He left when Daddy got home.”

  “What time was that?” the guard asks.

  “Six o’clock.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Did he say he would meet you somewhere soon?”

  “No. He just disappeared.”

  He nods, glances at his colleagues who are checking our tires, turns back to us and nods again. He heads into the office building while the others place our belongings back in the trunk. The vinyl cover won’t stretch over top this time. My tent sticks up too high. They try to ram it down.

  “Just leave it,” Mom says. “It’s fine.”

  The mascara man returns with his orders. “The boy’s father suspects he’ll follow you on foot. It’s imperative that you understand this boy is a minor and he is not allowed to leave the country without his legal guardians. He will not get across this bridge or any other border crossing. You understand that if you’re waiting for him he will not be leaving and you will not see him again.”

  “Yes, we understand,” Mom says.

  “He’s not coming this way,” Dallas says. “He’s going south, to Dallas.”

  The guard sighs. “You’re free to go.” He passes Mom the car registration and passports. She checks to make sure they’re all there. “Keep them handy,” he says. “You’re going to need them in a minute. You’ll also need your birth certificates and immunization records. Do you have those?”

  Mom nods. “We have everything.”

  The guard shrugs. “Once they pass you on, I can’t let you back in.”

  “That’s what we’re hoping,” I say.

  The metal gates swing closed behind us. We drive slowly across a thousand feet of two-lane suspension bridge that hasn’t been repaired for decades. The headlights barely penetrate the fog.

  Although I know how overbuilt old bridges are—it’ll be centuries before the bolts rust out—it smells like decay, and I can’t help fearing that the steel deck might collapse beneath us.

  Mom rolls down her window as if it’ll help her see. The bridge is lined with streetlights that burned out ages ago and no one from either side of the border is willing to replace. The air is cold and wet with the scents of the poisoned river and the damp concrete suicide barriers. I wish it were daytime so I could step out and look at the world we’re heading into.

  My fear doesn’t lessen when we reach the border crossing near the end of the bridge. There’s a tiny building not much bigger than a toll booth with a swinging metal arm barring the road. No spotlights glare at us, no armed guards survey us. It’s unsettling because it implies a serious lack of financing in this country. There’s no room to turn around and we’re still a hundred feet in the air, so if they don’t let us in I can’t see what they’ll do with us except throw us over and steal the car.

  Three guards are crammed into the one little booth, visible through a window that takes up half of one wall. They’re smoking cigarettes and drinking from thermoses and talking like they’re friends. It’s jarring because since the vaccinations I haven’t seen anyone talk like this, just shooting the breeze, laughing, passing time. It’s not the sort of behavior I expected from border guards. They’re all in their thirties, all white men with short hair under blue caps. They wear blue uniforms with silver badges like police officers. But they don’t act like police. They act like we’re not even here. They smile at each other and speak loudly, happily, like they’re in the stands of a ball game. One cuffs another on the shoulder and the third rolls his eyes.

  “Should I honk?” Mom asks.

  “Are you crazy?” I say.

  “Just wait,” Dallas says. “This might be some kind of test.”

  “It smells funny,” Ally says.

  I reach out and pat her head, but she gives me a look like I’m defective, so I curl back into myself and stare out the window.

  One of the guards sticks his head out and shouts, “Just a second!” He ducks out of view. Spotlights flicker and blaze around us. We’re momentarily blinded. I feel like we’ve been ambushed by trigger-happy soldiers. The guard steps out of the booth with a metal rod that he stuffs in a holster. He takes off his cap and smoothes back his hair. It shines red in the bright light. He puts the cap back on and smiles. “You’re the first car we’ve seen since morning.” He holds out his hand. “Passports please.”

  Mom hands them off.

  He nods. “Connors. Yeah. Hang on.”

  He goes back into the building and says something to his colleagues who nod and get busy on their RIGs.

  “I’ve never seen such happy police officers in my life,” I say. “You think they’re drugged with something better than our guys get?”

  Dallas shrugs. “They’re not very intimidating.”

  They’re all smiling inside, like there’s nowhere they’d rather be in the world than stuck in isolation on this decaying bridge in the dead of night. One of the guards waves at us through the window while he talks on a RIG.

  “They knew our name,” Mom says. “Why would they know our name?”

  The redhead returns, smiles, says, “You’ve got some friends coming. They’ve been waiting all week, hoping you’d get here for Christmas.” He checks his watch and smiles. “You’re cutting it close.” He points past the spotlights to some vast unknown. “They’re not allowed any nearer, but you’ll see them in a minute if all goes well.”

  Mom nods.

  “Karenna Connors?” he asks. “Where were you born?”

  Dallas fidgets in the passenger seat while Mom answers a long list of questions. I hope he memorized Dad’s vital statistics or we’re screwed.

  “Last place of employment?” the guard asks.

  “New Middletown Manor Heights,” Mom says.

  The man’s face creases like a foul smell hit his nostrils, and he pulls away from the window.

  “It’s a geriatric center,” Mom explains.

  “I know what it is.” He stares at her with a whole new face, one that makes it easy to see he’s a cop. “Are you a doctor there? A janitor? What?”

  “I’m a nurse.”

  “A nurse.” He looks at her so coldly I have to suppose that his mother was killed by a nurse in his infancy. “What about you?” he asks Dallas. “What do you do for a living?”

  “I was a doctor.” Dallas coughs, lowers his voice, explains, “I’ve been unemployed for three years but before that I was a doctor.”

  “And where did you work?”

  “New Middletown Manor Heights.”

  “You were a doctor at that place?”

  “Yes.”

  The guard nods, turns to the buil
ding, waves his colleagues out, turns back to us. “You know what we call the places you call geriatric centers? We call them totalitarian medical facilities. You know what we call what goes on there? Unethical experiments on helpless populations. And you know what we call the doctors and nurses who work there? We call you monsters.”

  Mom’s mouth hangs open in disbelief.

  “We’re going to search your vehicle now.” He says it like there’s no doubt they’ll find contraband because they are never letting us into their country. “Get out. Get your children out.”

  So once again we’re standing on the side of a lonely road afraid of being shot. The redhead keeps his eye on us, his hand on his holster, while the other two open the trunk. He likes to talk, this guy. He talks at Mom and Dallas, glances at me and Ally every now and then and shakes his head like it’s always the kids who suffer. He feels inside our pockets, drops our coats on the road, pats down our shivering bodies, tells us how it is.

  “You think you’re all closed up down there, watching everybody. You never stop to think that maybe somebody’s watching you. We know what goes on in your cities and your hospitals. Nobody’s buying your story about self-protection and how you’re leading the way for the rest of the world.” And on and on he preaches from his moral high ground while his buddies throw the contents of our bags onto the dirty bridge.

  “That’s why we’re leaving,” Mom says. “We don’t like what’s going on at home.”

  The redhead laughs at her. “Took you a while.”

  Dallas stands tall and clears his throat. “I quit my job because of it, years ago.” He looks indignant and ashamed at the same time, a disgusted doctor, man against society. “And now we’re leaving the country, risking everything we have, risking our children’s futures because we don’t want to be part of it anymore.”