The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

Lenny read the short passage.

  A premier recruit is a citizen of established and verified selflessness. A citizen whose attentiveness to and interest in children indicates an innate nurturing tendency. A citizen whose finances and maintenance of a personal residence are evidence of an ability to more than adequately provide a child with a safe, permanent shelter. A citizen whose lifestyle and day to day actions demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice.

  “You’re recruiters?” Lenny said. The sprigs tickled as she relaxed.

  “You all right?” Xavier said.

  Lenny smiled. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Premier recruits receive very special privileges,” Edna said.

  “Insignificant extras,” Xavier said. “The true privilege is to be counted among the honored ranks of this nation’s licensed parents. All Edna meant was that we try to make it less of a…well, less of a hassle for people like yourself. That’s why we let you sidestep the evaluation pr—”

  “People like myself?”

  Edna waved Lenny closer and held out her hand. Lenny gave one of her own over the island, and Edna patted it. Her nails matched the purple of her suit.

  “Ms. Mabary,” she said. “Premier recruits are people who, should I say, haven’t exactly gone out of their way to show an interest in obtaining a license.”

  “Oh, I see!” Lenny said. “I haven’t, no, but that’s because I don’t want children.”

  “Yes…” Xavier said.

  “And believe me, Ms. Mabary, the last people—well, not necessarily the last people, but perhaps the second-to-last people—the bureau wants having children are people who think they don’t want them. However, you might be surprised to learn how many change their minds as soon as they learn they won’t have to sit through an unnecessary—for them, that is—evaluation. Even people who are sure they won’t fail are awfully afraid they will, and that alone can turn someone away from not only pursuing a child, but from thinking they want one.”

  “I’ve never really thought about it,” Lenny said.

  “It’s a natural insecurity.” Edna squeezed Lenny’s fingers.

  “No, I mean I haven’t thought about the evaluation process at all.” She shrugged and smiled.

  “Nor need you!” Xavier chimed. “As I mentioned, premier recruits who show promise that they’re willing to make a sacrifice to adopt or have a biological child—”

  “But I don’t want a child. Any child.”

  “Well, there you go! If you wanted one, what would the sacrifice be? What we’re talking about here is civic duty. Ms. Mabary, your reputation is unassailable.” Xavier gave her an A-OK sign. “They sent us as soon as they received word from you of your inactive status.”

  “But I don’t have a plan,” Lenny said, “so, even if I wanted—”

  “No problem!” Edna said.

  Premier recruits, Xavier explained, didn’t have to worry about arranging their own Family Care Plans because the bureau provided them.

  “You may choose your guardian from among the bureau’s surrogate pool, if you want to go to all the trouble, but the bureau does an exception-al job of matching surrogates with premier recruits,” he said.

  Lenny made a show of looking at her watch. “Oh, my. I’m fixin’ to be late for something! I up and lost track of the time.” She slid her hand out of Edna’s and closed the booklet. “May I?” She grabbed both of their glasses and poured their water in the sink.

  “I can appreciate your hesitation, Ms. Mabary,” Xavier said. “Choosing pare—”

  “Thank you ever so much for thinking of me.” Lenny led Edna and Xavier, their folders under their arms, to the foyer.

  “Ms. Mabary,” Edna said, “I don’t think you understand what an honor it is to—”

  “Thank you so much,” Lenny said, opening the front door.

  Xavier exited first with the tip of an invisible hat, and Edna followed, tossing the USPLB materials inside before Lenny could close the door, “In case you change your mind,” she called.

  When their car was gone, Lenny stuffed the folder to the bottom of the trash can and hurried down to the basement for another dose of vitamin C before calling the monitoring department.

  “Hormone status is inactive,” the representative said. “Your command is in queue.”

  TWENTY NINE

  After having been excused early from stage three of testing for her disquali-fying scores on the empathy and decision-making assessments, Millie had persuaded May Cheney to arrange an emergency meeting. Twenty minutes later, she was sitting on a metal folding chair in a small, blue room. A panel of five members of the licensing center’s Board of Approvals, Willard and Maxine among them, appraised Millie from behind a long wood table.

  “I’m a trained journalist.” Millie thought it only logical to use on the board what had persuaded May Cheney. “Of course a wounded child would eventually affect me deeply, but my first instinct is to determine how best to describe the wound and the conditions surrounding the event. What your analysts perceived as apathy was, in truth, ingrained professional distance.”

  “It’s an exceptional skill, indeed,” Maxine said to the rest of the panel.

  “But how, then, can we know whether she has nurturing tendencies?” a different board member said.

  “You checked the ‘unemployed’ box on your sign-in form,” Willard said. “You don’t work for the paper anymore?”

  “As of last week, no. I wanted to devote myself entirely to this process. But,” Millie added quickly, “habits don’t break immediately.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Willard scratched his ear. “I guess we’ll just have to give her the dog.”

  “We don’t have to do anything of the kind,” Maxine said. “We reject applicants every day. Would it be fair to the animal to subject it to a test?”

  Another member hissed, “This is Katherine Oxford’s daughter.”

  Maxine pursed her lips at Millie. “Yes,” she conceded. “A true boon to our community in her time. However, she and her businesses are dead.”

  Another board member sighed. “Millicent M. Oxford.”

  Shrugs and frowns.

  “She broke the Chester Walton story.”

  “Oh,” Willard said. “Oh! How did we not know that?”

  “Fascinating,” Maxine said.

  Millie, too, often forgot that it had been her story about Chester Wal-ton that had served as the impetus for the creation of the Parent Licensing Bureau. Perhaps because it had failed to benefit her personally.

  She presented them with what she hoped passed as a nurturing smile.

  “I can never have children because of you, Ms. Oxford,” said a woman sitting in the far right chair. “I was six months into trying to impregnate when the law passed, and I was disqualified. The rest of the board may find it easy to overlook your ‘professional indifference,’ but I’ll want more before I agree to send you home with our blessing to create and influence a brand new life.”

  “Such sanctimony from a woman willing to risk orphaning or severely disfiguring a baby in her selfish pursuit to reproduce,” Maxine said.

  “The risks were minimal, and you know it, Max—”

  “I see, Lois. When it’s the to-be child who will suffer the lifelong consequences, ‘minimal’ risk to a non-consenting individual is more than acceptable, is that it? If you so desperately wanted children, why did I not see you in line to adopt when biological was taken off the table?”

  “Climb a razor rope, Maxine.” Lois leaned over the table to address the members. “My position stands. I demand more.”

  “I agree,” Maxine said.

  Willard said, “Conference,” and the board members slid their chairs into a tight circle, lowered their heads into a huddle, and murmured. After several moments, they began nodding. Someone said, “Yes, brilliant.”

  When they returned their chairs to their places at the table, Willard announced that the board would overlook Millie’s abysmal scores if she would agree t
o reveal the details of the assault on Chester Walton.

  “We’re curious, like anyone else,” he said. “And since we’re all members of the licensing board, who but we should get to know what put us here? Agree?”

  Millie studied their faces.

  But for Maxine’s, they were unreadable.

  Maxine wasn’t merely expectant, as the others seemed to be, but waited with an unnerving air of satisfaction.

  Lois said, “Ms. Oxford?”

  “We’re asking her to unveil the greatest mystery in recent popular culture history, Lois. Let’s allow her a minute,” Maxine said.

  “All right, then.”

  Millie considered possible reasons for the board’s offer. The first was that they did indeed intend to trade poor score forgiveness for information. Second, they planned to evaluate Millie’s emotional response to the mem-ory. Third, they were assessing her character.

  Millie usually tried to avoid comparing herself to Lenny or using Lenny’s sensibilities as a guide, but this particular case required her to be prudent. She had no doubt Lenny would qualify for a license, and so she had to ask herself, even if it went against her most evolved instincts, what Lenny would do.

  She had no doubt that Lenny would want to “protect” the board from such “brutal” imagery. However, they didn’t strike Millie as average mem-bers of the profoundly sensitive public.

  Millie said, “When we arrived—”

  It wasn’t Maxine’s hopeful straightening in her chair that gave Millie pause, but the sudden and absolute knowledge that if Lenny were sitting beside Millie at this moment, she would whisper in her ear, “How do you think the board would feel about someone using a child’s tragedy for personal gain (again)?”

  Her throat pulsing and a cigarette craving curling her fingers—what if Lenny had it wrong?—, Millie said she was very sorry, but that it would be unconscionable and inhumane to burden them with the dreadful account of Chester Walton’s demise.

  Maxine deflated in her chair, but the board voted unanimously to advance Millie to the final stage of the evaluation. Pending verification of Hugh’s licensing status, of course.

  The next day, Millie and Hugh stayed out in the yard while teams from USPLB CANID TRANSPORT and USPLB TECHNOLOGIES installed surveillance inside (and did whatever was necessary to prepare the home for the evaluation dog). Millie smoked in a spot of dry grass that positioned one of the licensing bureau’s black vans between her and the house. From there, she could also see Lenny’s driveway.

  Floyd’s pickup truck had been parked there for half an hour.

  Behind Millie, Hugh taunted the evaluation dog’s snout with the end of a knotted rope. “Take it, girl! You wanna take it? Bubbles! Take it! Take the rope!”

  Floyd finally appeared, his weak arms circling a box he carried to the truck bed.

  Millie almost called to him. Hugh was obsessed with the “cattle dog and pointer cross,” the bureau’s canid team had for some reason informed them, and it hadn’t noticed her once outside of the time she’d held out the treat Hugh had given her. (“Dogs almost always need people to give them treats, first,” he’d said between slaps of the dog’s tongue on his mouth.) Flirting with Floyd would get Hugh’s attention.

  But Hugh was aggressively impatient with her, lately. She didn’t think it was a coincidence that his suitcase, once out of the way in the back of the closet, was now the first thing she saw when she opened the folding door every morning, and correcting his inattentiveness couldn’t take precedence over achieving carrier status.

  However. She was more than curious to know whether Floyd had taken advantage of Lenny’s temporary vulnerability. Not only had Millie had to use off-the-record information from a Daily Fact interview with Juanita Escallon to find the small team of hackers, but in exchange for their service, they expected Millie or another reporter to investigate a rival hacking organization. Millie had risked her standing as a trusted member of the press (all for Floyd, if only incidentally), and she wanted something valuable in return.

  “By the way,” Millie twisted to face Hugh, who was jumping around with the dog, “please tell Zelda she might want to take a look at the top floor of the collections building on First Avenue. I believe the hackers call themselves ‘Gut Checkers.’”

  “By the way of what?” Hugh pulled the rope. The dog pulled back.

  “Of my thoughts.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  She turned back to check on Floyd. He finished arranging things in the back of the truck and looked up at the second floor of the Mabary house with his hands on his hips. Millie put out her cigarette on the hard dirt and watched as a tall, sturdy figure, each shoulder supporting a large box, joined Floyd at the back of the truck. When the two boxes were loaded, Floyd and the guest returned to the house. Six trips (and no hint of noticing Millie) later, they climbed in and set off, Millie assumed, to deliver the items to a shelter, whether Lenny’s own or one of her favorites.

  “Good to go,” a voice said.

  Hugh jumped up and reached for Millie’s hand. She stood and concealed her cigarette butt with her sandal.

  The tech team’s instructions were brief: “The cameras are all visible. Don’t move them,” said one whose red hair clashed with the purple of the team’s uniforms. “There’s no camera in the bathroom, but there’s a mic on the corner shelf. Hope you don’t mind, we had to dust there. Anyway, don’t get the mic wet. Any destruction of licensing bureau surveillance property will be considered intentional sabotage. They’ll fine you the inflated cost of the damaged items, send us to collect the stuff and Bubbles, and both of you lose your approval ratings. Always assume the cameras are recording. Always assume the mics are on. Secret: They are. Good luck.”

  Millie knew reaching the dog stage of the evaluation should have elated her—she was so close to the end—but six months seemed like a tiresomely long time to take care of a strange animal to prove she could commit to a child (it was an even longer time to have to sneak cigarettes outside).

  An animal was also not comparable to a child, which made the dog trial a nonsensical exercise. Their assigned animal, in particular, had clearly been trained to defy the humans being evaluated. It was nothing like Murphy, a fluffy, quiet dog that had sat when told and had otherwise occupied itself. This dog, when not following, leaning against, or licking Hugh, sat its first night in their home some distance from Millie’s feet, its eyes averted. At one point it decided to stand on all fours in the middle of the already cramped living room and stare at the front door.

  Millie asked what it was doing.

  Hugh said, “Just call her ‘her,’ will you? She’s a girl. ‘Her’ or ‘Bubbles.’”

  “I think she needs to piddle,” Hugh said from his desk on the third evening as Bubbles watched the door. (Millie had been ignoring her since that morning. Twice before breakfast she’d crouched with her arms out to receive affection only to have Bubbles look at her sideways, slink past her, and launch into a tongue-flapping gallop at Hugh’s, “C’mere, Bubbles! Who’s a pretty Bubbles?”)

  Millie understood, of course, that if Bubbles had to urinate, she should let her out. However, Bubbles had so consistently—and so pointedly!—dismissed her that she had no desire to put down the newspaper, get up, open the door, wait for her to finish, and let her back inside when the only gratitude Bubbles would express would be to run straight to Hugh.

  “She could be watching a squirrel,” Millie said and went on reading the Fact. Samuel Buford had taken over her beat when she’d resigned, and his story about weekend protesters demanding that the IVF ban be lifted was nearly as accomplished as something she’d have written. (That he’d neglect-ed to secure a comment from a protester that addressed the number of children presently available for adoption gratified her more than it annoyed her. She’d have closed that hole.)

  Hugh pushed back his chair so hard that it toppled on the tile and scared Bu
bbles’s feet out from under her. He coddled her, cursed himself aloud for doing so, and guided her outside.

  “See?” he argued at Millie as he watched the dog from the window. “Piddling.”

  Millie didn’t know why any dog should require so much effort. She didn’t remember Lenny having to go out of her way for Murphy.

  “Try bonding exercises,” Hugh said after a bite of a peanut-buttered English muffin at the beginning of day six.

  It was a Monday, and he was leaving for work again. Millie was suddenly ready to return to the Fact. Days in a row, the only company she’d had was a judgmental animal. She was impatient with being at home and exhausted by the dog’s unknown and decidedly unknowable demands.

  “I have no idea what bonding exercises are,” she said.

  Hugh shrugged while rubbing muffin dust from his fingers into the sink. “Play fetch with her. Teach her something.”

  “I’ve tried. She’s neither playful nor capable of learning. This dog is unnatural, and the bureau gave it to me on purpose. They want me to fail, Hugh. If I fail the dog trial, that failure reinforces the unjust scores I received on the flawed sections of the evaluation, thereby obviating the need to revise the whole system.”

  Hugh slid the peanut butter jar off the counter and turned away to screw on the top before putting it in the cabinet. He picked up his briefcase from the kitchen chair and kissed Millie’s forehead, touched her waist. “You just have to relax,” he said. He bent to pet the dog, who sniffed around at his hand and licked his fingers. “They can sense your feelings, you know. The more you sit around thinking she doesn’t like you, the more she senses how uncomfortable she makes you. It’s not you she doesn’t like. It’s all the negativity and insecurity.”

  “I don’t sit around thinking this dog doesn’t like me. I hardly think about her at all.”

  “Well, then.” He stood. “Maybe it is you.”

  More than once after Hugh left that day, Bubbles inched closer to Millie, even throwing her paws up on Millie’s ribs at one point, nearly knocking her down. Millie laughed and sat down for all the licking and pawing Bubbles had given Hugh, but the dog jerked its snout away from Millie’s hands and dodged to her side. When Millie reached out for the dog again—“It’s all right! Come here! I only want to pet you!”—it jumped away and sat at a distance, eyes looking to the left and right of Millie, alternating eyebrows lifting and lowering.