“I can’t look at my face. It is a physical impossibility. You got a tissue or something?” I settle against the seat back, carefully, carefully. The upholstery is plush, calming, accepting my weight. The machine curls around me. I’m surrounded by an almost unbearably exquisite sense of peace, or money.
“What, all women carry tissues around? It’s our job to carry tissues around in case we see a guy who needs his nose or his ass wiped?” But Fred is digging in her bag, a bag so supple and tasteful I probably wouldn’t mind carrying it myself, if I had anything to put in it. “I never have fucking tissues. Would you look at this?” She pulls out a plastic-wrapped packet and stares at it like she’s just found a human head in her bag. “Someone must have put that in there.”
“Thank you.” I take them from her, clumsily unwrap the delicate things. My fingers have never seemed so freakishly huge as in my sister’s car. I’m anxious about bleeding on something in here.
“Oh, now he’s thanking me.”
I dab at my stinging lip. “I mean it. Thank you. Not just for the tissues.”
“Fifteen thousand dollars for disabling a Security drone. Fif. Teen. Thousand. Dollars. I would laugh if I didn’t think you’d actually join in, you fucker.” Fred sighs, reflexively looks at her wearable, but it’s clear she’s not really seeing anything there. Sourly she intones, “If Ken Walker could legally call this whole thing off he probably would, and I wouldn’t blame him. You have no fucking idea what I’m going to have to do to make up for this.”
The air conditioning is delicious. I can’t feel my face. It’s for the best. “I’m sorry, Fred. It probably sounds hard to believe, but I had to do it. I couldn’t have that thing tailing me.”
Fred still doesn’t look at me. “I know where you were,” she says flatly. She’s quiet for a moment, long enough for me to notice how tired she looks. Otherwise flawless, of course, but tired. She adds, “I suppose I even know why you think you had to do what you did. You found out that place is a secret. Didn’t you? Gard’s clinic, all the stuff that happens there, that’s some back-alley, top secret, black-market shit. Am I right?”
I don’t like the jealous bitterness in her voice. And I don’t know how to answer her anyway. “Can you give me a ride back to Pop’s house?”
“What do you think I’m here for, fartfucker? I could have just left you in the road; it’s not like I wanted to see you after paying your gigantic fucking fine.”
“Thanks. Again. Seriously. What made you come?”
“Your med status. And the fact that your geo status didn’t change for like an hour. You were obviously unconscious. And your autobus wasn’t gonna come for, like, years.” Fred swipes a control in the dash and the autocar glides away from the curb and begins to shush us back toward home, toward the parts of town where people still live. I can admit I’m relieved. I’ve spent enough time out in the unrehabbed blocks for a day. “So you’re welcome.”
Fred doesn’t often make me feel ashamed—I usually try to be the best version of myself that I can be when I’m around her, even if that’s not saying much. My sisters both have that effect on me. I admire them, I want to live up to them: Fred, carrying all our family bullshit on her shoulders and trying to sort it out and make it right, and Gard, carrying the rest of the whole messed-up unfixable world’s. I’m ashamed now, though. I can dimly imagine what I must look like to her.
“I’m sorry, Fred. I really sincerely am. I’m sorry about the money, and I’ll try to pay you back—no, listen, I will. And I’m really sorry about the party, for missing half of it, and not getting to meet Ken. And for hitting on your party planner. I think she liked me. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ve been such a fuckup since I got back.”
She shakes her head. The bit about Sophie made her laugh, and there’s still the slightest vapor trail of a smile across her face, but it’s already vanishing into the slipstream that’s following behind her as she’s pulling away into her own future, too fast. Here inside the car, her belly looks huger and more uncomfortable than ever. As usual, it’s hard for me to remember there’s a real about-to-be-a-person-if-all-goes-well inside there. The belly. The belly of the Fredbeast.
“You know, baby brother, I’m going to tell you something. You might not believe this, but it’s the truth: I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit about any of it.” Fred shifts in her seat, swallows a burp. “Fucking heartburn.”
“I’m sorry anyway.” I lean one swollen eye against the cool passenger window glass.
“You know where I came from today? Just now?”
“Where.”
“My final meeting with my final client. From my practice. I sold it to a shell investment company. I made a fucking killing on it, but then I had to do all these handoff meetings for the clients whose platforms we built up and ran. Today was my last one. So now I’ve been set free. Officially. I packed up my office. The contract’s executed. I have no business anymore.”
“Oh. Congratulations? That’s good?”
“I guess? I don’t know. It doesn’t feel so good.” She sniffs, looks out the window at all the ugliness crawling past outside. I’m not sure she even knows what she’s looking at. Fred in the cocoon. A shell is where she seems most at home, really. The inside of a well-constructed thing, that’s Fred’s natural habitat. “I loved working. Or I mean, I don’t love working—who does?—but I loved making money. I loved helping with your college and Gard’s nursing school. I did. I loved showing up at Christmas with presents for everybody. I loved my place I just moved out of; I loved my office and my freelancers. I even used to love coding, although now not so much, I don’t have the energy for the late nights anymore. I’m not sure I even have the skills after being management for so long.” Fred drums her fingers on her knee, watches the streets unspooling on the other side of the windshield. We’re in a marginally nicer part of town now, lights in the windows. I roll my forehead an inch forward on the window glass, find a cool spot for my cheekbone. My eyes are trying to close.
Fred goes on, mostly to herself, it seems to me: “I won’t have a fucking clue what’s going on by the time I go back to work. Sixteen fucking years. The Family Protection Laws may change by the time this one’s a little older”—she lays one long finger over her belly—“but in my Care Circle they’re all saying the courts are going to extend the Completion period all the way to eighteen years, not cut it. More time at home with the baby, they’re all in favor, the righteous cows. By year eighteen? That’s not a baby. When I was eighteen, I was working my way through school and Mom had been dead for eleven years and I hardly even saw my family—not that you missed me, you little shit,” she adds irritably, then catches sight of my expression, which I’m guessing is as blank and banged-up as I think it is. “Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? Are you even paying attention? Did you ever even read anything I sent you over there?”
“Um. Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Bullshit you did. Bullshit. But you know what? I’m not surprised. No one’s paying attention to the fucking Family Protection Laws. The fertility rate’s so low hardly anyone knows anyone who’s affected by them. Everybody’s just trying to ignore how much sanifoam and engineered food and engineered beer all fucking suck and they’re trying to just, like, stay alive until somebody solves the world’s fucking resource problems.” Fred fiddles with the dashboard controls, her expression moody, until she finds a way to turn the air conditioning up even higher. “Thank Christ. I’m boiling like a heretical nun. Listen, Carter, I’m not asking for sympathy, but you could fucking listen to me after I just paid fifteen thousand dollars to keep you out of a Security pen.”
“I’m listening. I am.” I sit up and lean forward into the sweet-smelling cool air coming from the car’s dash vents.
“Sure you are. Sure you are.” Fred smirks at me. “Let me give you a little update on the fucking fertility crisis, CQ. As a guy who’s spent the last two years guarding H2.0 convoys, I know you must be particula
rly interested in what we’d call the ‘downstream implications’ of our dependence on engineered water. But not for everybody. Just for a lucky, lucky few. Just for walking miracles like myself.”
“I was over there two and a half years,” I say, and I can’t believe how humble I sound. This is what it’s like to have an older sister, if you didn’t know.
“Two and a half years, yes, certainly. Listen. Mothers? Pregnant women like me, just starting the Completion? We’re supposed to give up everything, for sixteen years. Everything we used to do, just as, like, crazy fucking normal women, is illegal, or if it’s not illegal it might as well be. You’re not supposed to work; you’re not supposed to have friends outside of your Care Circle—which, I probably never even told you, but you don’t even get to pick it, when you register your pregnancy you get assigned to a Care Circle based on your address and your income level. No foods they don’t want you eating. No drinking, obviously—you probably already know that if you’re a woman between twenty-one and forty, you pay five times the list price for booze even if you’re not pregnant. Just in case.”
“I haven’t asked a woman out for drinks in about three years.”
“Save up, motherfucker. Anyway. More about my problems. Listen. I have to breastfeed—everyone in my Care Circle has to breastfeed—until the kid goes to kindergarten. And then, this is the best part, there’s a fucking ‘weaning period’ that you go through with your Care Circle, where you all sit around and weep and moo together, I can’t wait for that pungent hairy ass. And this is all, of course, talked about like it’s an honor and a privilege, not a sequence of sacrifices. I had to give up my whole business! I had to give up a fucking twenty-million-dollar company! And my question is, like, who benefits? Who benefits from these ‘family protections,’ I’m asking you? Certainly not my kid—you think he-she-it wouldn’t have been better off with a mom who made a shit-ton of money? You don’t think it benefits a kid to have a mom who’s so independently rich any kid of hers sneezes fucking quarters? You know who benefits? The fucking guys who bought my fucking company. And you better believe I made sure they fucking paid me for it, but that thing is going to be throwing off money for years, and I’m not going to be part of it.”
Here Fred laughs, one unlovely bark.
“You know what I can do, you know what most women do, after the Completion period is over and our Care Hours quota goes down enough that we can do something with our lives other than obsessively, preemptively take care of our kid’s every need? We’re Completionists. Not professionally trained Nurse Completionists, like Gard, just Completionists, running Care Circles for other women. Once a woman’s children are all grown and in school, then we can cycle into being Completionists and help other women figure out how to forget what they had.”
“Fuck that,” I say loyally.
“Fuck yes, fuck that. But I’m lucky. You know that? That’s what fucking kills me, is, I’m lucky. I’m not poor, in fact, on my own I’m doing pretty fucking good, and even I can barely afford what it’s going to cost me not to work for sixteen years.”
“So don’t do it.” I’m aware even as I say it of how stupid I probably sound. “Why don’t you just say fuck it and do what you want? Eat what you want; go back to work if you want; be friends with whoever you want. Do that instead. Your kid’s going to be fine. We didn’t even have a mom,” I point out, although it seems to make something in the sweet air inside the car flinch or pinch, and I don’t like saying it like it’s an accusation of some kind. But now it’s out, there it is, pulsing just like a wound does: she wasn’t there. I don’t even really remember her. “And look at us. We—we’re fine. Besides, what are they going to do, throw you in a cell? You’re pregnant, you’re a walking miracle; they can’t hurt you. They can’t touch you.”
“No. But they can fine me.” She checks my face, and apparently sees just what she expected to. “You really don’t have a clue, do you? Men usually don’t. Although to be fair, I didn’t, either, until this happened. The penalty structure is insane. You know how much I was fined because my med status showed I drank a fucking coffee in my first trimester?”
“You’re not supposed to drink coffee?”
“Seriously? If I could throw you out of the car right now I would so do it. I wouldn’t even miss you.”
“Sorry. Sorry. Just—I’m catching up, here. I’ve been gone awhile.”
“I know you have,” Fred bites out. Then she’s quiet.
I know what she’s thinking about. Who she’s thinking about.
“I’m sorry I haven’t found Gard yet, Fred. I’m trying. I’m really trying.”
Fred looks down at her lap, then back at me, her eyes shining with regret. “Me too.”
“I haven’t given up.”
“I know,” she says, and we’re both quiet for a moment.
“Didn’t Gard have any advice for you about—I don’t know, all this? She’s a Completionist, isn’t that her job?”
Fred smiles sadly, and for a change, it sticks. “Gard. Well. She’s good for perspective, I’ll say that much. Gard knew all about it, of course—the penalties, the rules, everything. It’s why she worked herself ragged at that second job. You saw, today—you were in that place.” Fred looks at me, expecting some sign of recognition, understanding. I try to look wiser than I feel. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it can get, how those women are subject to all these fines and . . . and . . . technological embarrassments, for not being able to meet Care Standard. Gard was—” Fred pauses, her jaw sets. “Well. You know how she always wanted to help people.”
“Wants.”
“Pardon?”
“She wants to help people. I’m sure wherever she is, that’s exactly what she’s doing. Still.” I can hear in my own voice an echo of little-brother stubbornness from twenty years ago, digging in and half-truthing: “I’ll find her. I’m close, I think. After today.” You should go home and ask your father. Something makes me do a little involuntary shudder in the car seat, like a dead hand just slipped into my pocket. Or maybe the AC is too high. “I just have to talk to Pop about something.”
Fred’s staring at me now, her eyes measuring. “Really? Pop? Why? What do you mean you’re close?”
Even I’m not sure what I mean, but I can see that it’s too late to walk it back, or make up an explanation, or even tell the rest of the truth: Someone told me we should ask Pop where she is. And I have to admit, the way he acts since I’ve been back, he makes me wonder. Sometimes. I can’t bring myself to say it; it’s too strange and half-formed. “Fred . . . listen.” I lick my lips, taste blood, try again. I am harmless. I am harmless. “You know what Pop said to me last night, after the party? We’re sitting at his kitchen table, just drinking some beers, talking over the night. And he asked if I thought about what it would mean for you if Gardner were found. What does that mean?”
She shrugs.
“If Gard were found . . . I mean, Fred, you were the only one even looking for her until I got home. If Gard were found you’d be . . . you’d be—”
“Saved,” Fred says simply. She leans toward me, urgent. “What did you mean when you said you were getting close? Close to finding Gard? How?”
I can’t tell her half of what I’m thinking. I can’t even properly think half of what I’m thinking.
My hand is suddenly under hers, clutched up in those long, cold fingers. We’re not an affectionate family. It means something. “What did you find out? Carter, you’ve got to tell me. Please.”
I’m just sitting there, fish-mouthing. Finally, I fall back into well-defended territory, the role I always play with Fred when I know I’m outgunned: Kid brother, here to make you question whether the miracle of birth is really that miraculous.
“Fred, I gotta tell you. Part of me was just hoping I’d find Gard in time for her to talk you out of getting married to Ken fucking Walker.”
Fred ignores my grin. She releases my hand, sits back and glares. “Ken Walker just kep
t you out of jail, you ungrateful snotcock. Fine, you don’t want to tell me whatever it is you think you know? Fine.” She shakes her head, treats me to some heinous side-eye. “I thought we were on the same fucking side, Carter.”
“Jesus God. We are, Fred.” I’m so exhausted. Rafiq’s meds must be wearing off. I lean my head back against the window.
However angry I make her now, I know I’ve already done the worst thing to Fred I could possibly do. I’ll never make her angrier with me, sadder with me, more hopelessly disgusted by me, than she was when I told her I was dropping out of school to fight in the Wars. No, let me back that up: dropping out of the school she was paying for me to attend, in order to fight in the Wars. I was about fifteen credits shy of graduation when I went.
She didn’t even swear at me. She just turned her face to the wall and made this sound, this rrrrrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAAH! like a wild outraged animal. She scared me, if I’m being honest.
So I laughed at her, and she got up and hit me (hard, on the shoulder) and left. She didn’t want to talk to me or look at me. The day I left for recruit training, though, she was there. A driverless came to pick me up at Pop’s house early, right after dawn. Seeing me off out on the sidewalk, Gard was weeping but still talking normally and even smiling a little, just unaware that she was weeping. Pop was typical Pop: inscrutable angel of death in a threadbare brown shirt like a janitor’s, looking about eight feet tall as he stood next to Gard with his arm around her shoulders. And Fred stood a bit apart from them, glaring at the driverless car like she wanted to blow it up with her eyes.
I knew then, just like I know now, that trying to explain to Fred why I couldn’t stay in school wasn’t likely to satisfy either of us. I didn’t do her the courtesy of talking to her about it before I dropped out, which I admit I only felt bad about later, but the fact is I was wasting her money, and I couldn’t stand myself anymore. It was mostly her money, even though I’d worked for New Cities Reconstruction on and off since high school. I had a bit of my own. A bit. Not much. Certainly not enough for school. Fred had made that happen, just through the sheer force of her will.
The Completionist Page 12
