Lenny stepped back, almost pressing herself to its doors.
Millie said, “I needed to find some way to occupy my time while you were looking for me.”
“You hid so well you were hard to find.”
Millie remembered waiting, and waiting, and then finally creeping up the stairs to the main level only to hear clattering in the kitchen, Lenny and her dad talking and laughing together. She remembered seeing that green bug on Lenny’s finger after having been folded up in the dryer for eighteen minutes. “I’m a carrier, now. What do you think about that?” she wanted to scream, but it wasn’t the time. However, it might be the time much sooner than it would have been now that it was obvious Lenny was desperate to hide some woman in her basement.
Millie whispered, “Is she in the bathroom?”
“Is who in the bathroom?”
The toe of a blue shoe was visible beneath the oversized chair. Millie made a point of kicking it before sitting down.
“Millie, don’t—Why don’t we go upstairs?” Lenny said. “Do you want a glass of wine?”
“No.”
“I’d like one. Come on. We’ll go upstairs, and—”
“Why? Who is she?”
“She’s no one, Millie. Just someone who needs a safe place and some privacy. Let’s let her have it. All right?”
The only reason a woman might need a safe place and privacy, Millie figured, was abuse. Millie couldn’t use abuse. For it to work, she’d have to manipulate Lenny into revealing the abuser’s name and contact information, and that could take weeks. She needed a place to hide now.
Millie covered her eyes and forced pressure to her head. She tried to think of something that would make her cry, but it had been a long time since tears. The redness in her face would have to suffice.
Millie blubbered, “You’re the only person I’ve ever truly trusted. I can hardly expect you to understand the significance of that. How could you?”
Her face once again in her hands, Millie accused Lenny of having had the advantage of a childhood with “insufferably present” parents, a solid support group in her Collector friends, and teenage love from Floyd, whose “simpering, spineless obsession” with Lenny had persisted year after y—
“That’s why?” Lenny said. “You wanted to break his loyalty to me?” She stepped away from the wardrobe to sit on the sofa.
Millie scrubbed at her eyes and peered through the burning dryness. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She made a show of standing up to retrieve a tissue and blew her nose in the middle of the room. She sat again, sniffed loudly, and leaned forward on the chair with her hands clasped tight together in an earnest, supplicating gesture.
Lenny watched her, waiting.
Millie asked herself what Lenny would say at a moment like this.
It would have to be something that sounded true.
Millie picked at her finger (it wasn’t yet time for a cigarette) and, feeling inexplicably bilious, explained that all she had wanted was to experience what it might be like to be Lenny, “if only for a minute or two.”
Lenny rested her chin in her hand and raised one dark eyebrow.
It was clear Lenny needed more, so, “I’m sorry,” Millie said around the sick feeling.
Lenny leaned forward and grazed Millie’s tangled fingers with her soft hand. “Thank you.”
That was finished, then.
The queasy feeling vanished.
Now all Millie had to do was allow the passage of exactly five seconds of silence. If she spoke too soon, she would seem eager, and Lenny would construe the apology as a ploy. If she waited too long, she would seem too calculated, and the result would be the same.
After two seconds, she lit a cigarette. By the time she exhaled, five seconds had passed.
“I’m a carrier.” Millie was aware of the great expanse of the smile on her face, but she had no control over it. Lenny was the first person to hear the words. Someone finally knew. “Me, Lenny!”
Many more seconds went by.
Lenny said, “Hugh’s?”
“Mine,” Millie said.
“I mean—”
“If you mean to ask whether Hugh will be involved, the answer is no.”
Hugh, Millie said, had moved to be on camera at a small Wisconsin station.
“Oh,” Lenny said. “I see. You’re not here to apologize, at all. You need me to replace him as your FCP. I already told you, Millie, I’m not—”
Millie said no, no, that was not the case at all. She explained the bureau’s analytics error and her resultant—and unjust!—dismissal from an evaluation process whose sole function, she suspected, was to burden people with the ever-present fear that they might someday have their licenses revoked. She extolled the generosity of strangers who didn’t believe that whether someone had a child should be determined by anything other than their whim or wish to have one.
“Those generous strangers, the kind people who allowed me this,” she rubbed her belly, “operated out of a house the police raided last month.”
All were arrested, Millie said, their data confiscated. She didn’t know when or whether they would discover her information, but caution dictated she could not live at the address the bureau had on file. Because Lenny was her best and lifelong friend, she could think of no safer—nor more welcoming—place to hide.
“I’m asking not because I want to…” Millie had allowed her cigarette to burn low. She brought it to the sink, wet it, and lit another. “But because I have to. I would induce a miscarriage myself and have you help me dispose of it, if—”
“Of course!” Lenny said. “Please. Let me help you do that.”
“I would have asked, I said, but I’m sure it will only take a month, possibly two, for the police to access my data, search my house, and move on. You’ll be free of me after that. In any case, it should take the same amount of time for this pregnancy to show, which means there’s no point in engaging with the public until then. It’s just as well that I hide myself here.”
The bathroom door opened. A tall, silky woman looked out with a face that made Millie think of childhood.
“Please put out your cigarette,” the woman said. “The smoke is coming through the door.”
Millie recommended she turn on the fan.
“Please,” the woman said. “Out of concern for your own fetus, if not for mine.”
“This is out of concern for my fetus.” Millie puzzled through the possible reasons another carrier would be hiding in Lenny’s basement. “A low birth weight will mitigate the strain of labor.” She put her cigarette between her lips.
Lenny swatted it out of her mouth and stomped it where it landed on the carpet.
Millie attempted a guess and asked the woman when her hacker was arrested.
“I have no hacker.”
“That must be a relief.”
It was an abuse situation, after all.
Millie devised a more immediate way to use the woman’s vulnerability to her advantage: she would offer something that would indebt Lenny to her. Millie told them she would do her best to keep the woman’s presence a secret from whoever her abuser might be. If he or she arrived at the house, Millie said, she would fight—
“Abuse!” Gabriella said. “I am Gabriella Dahl, president and CEO of World Cannabis. No one abuses me.”
Millie pulled out another cigarette. Gabriella’s eyes narrowed as she lit it. When Gabriella screamed at her to put it out, Millie handed it to Lenny, who took it to the kitchen.
“You obviously have no intention of keeping it,” Millie prodded. “What difference is it to you if your drop is a bit smaller than the others?”
“You don’t have to want to keep it to want it to be healthy,” Lenny said. She turned off the faucet and threw the butt away. “Millie, you can’t stay here. Gabriella is already here, and there’s only one bed.”
Millie looked at Gabriella, whose fingernail slid across her bottom lip as she watched—no, studied—Millie.
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br /> “Suppose they catch me?” Millie said. “Suppose they use methods that give me no choice but to reveal I was here? Suppose they discover what you’re doing?”
“You told me Exile it isn’t as bad as they say it is.”
“I did tell you that,” Millie said. “However, we—the evaluation class—witnessed a…a presentation. I’m not at liberty to share the details—they exile people for that—but I can tell you it’s nothing any one of us would want to survive.”
Lenny seemed unconcerned about hiding the silent “I’m sorry” she mouthed at Gabriella, who said, “Well, I understand it, now, at least.”
Millie stepped between the two women and faced Lenny. “Carrying is a mere inconvenience to her, but it means everything to me.” She petted her stomach. “I want it so very much. Please allow me to stay. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for an Exile or prison delivery, would you? Or for them putting my baby in one of the state shelters you’re well aware have created plenty of their own Chester Waltons?” She dropped to her knees and presented her hands pressed flat together. “I recognize your limitations and understand you cannot possibly safeguard my future, but I must beg you for one month. Possibly two.”
Gabriella, who technically held seniority in the refurbished basement, was granted the use of the only bed. Millie slept on the couch, which did not pull out, for two weeks before insisting on sharing the queen sized mattress with Gabriella. (At first she waited until she heard Gabriella’s even breathing before easing herself under the sheets, where she would promptly fall asleep to the sound of Gabriella’s dream sighs. If Gabriella awoke and tried to remove her, Millie clung to the mattress. The sneaking and wrestling went on for two weeks until Gabriella agreed to share—Millie sleeping on the sheet, Gabriella sleeping beneath it, and with a pillow between them.)
Because Gabriella screamed and screamed at any smoking in the basement, Millie climbed the stairs multiple times a day for her half-pack habit. She inspected the grounds, then stepped out the living room’s back door where she was shielded from everything but her abandoned property. The days passed so slowly that she sped up the hours by marking each ninety minute block with a single cigarette. She stood and she smoked, day after day, noting with disinterest the way the weeds colored the dry, dead field. The grass in the square lawn around her house gradually swallowed her stepping stone walkway, and thick spirals of that infernal, indomitable morning glory wrapped around one front porch column and reached across to the other, roping off her entry with the aid of spider webs that also spanned the width between the columns and swayed with the slightest breeze. There were so many webs that even from as far away as Lenny’s back yard, Millie could see them glinting in a certain hour of morning light.
The heat and humidity made Millie’s neck and back itch, but during the days she preferred to be where Gabriella wasn’t, and Gabriella was never outside. Because neither could leave the house, however, Millie couldn’t avoid her entirely, and the more she saw of Gabriella (who, incidentally, Millie discovered was having the occasional clandestine breakfast upstairs with Lenny while both thought Millie was asleep), the more bothered she was that she couldn’t identify what it was that bothered her about the woman. She did have an obnoxious habit of noticing herself sideways in the mirror, her months showing without the need for small shirts or clothes pulled tight, but that wasn’t it. Nor was it her floating walk or maternal aura, though both were indeed irritating.
Millie waited for whatever it was to come to her on its own while she stood and smoked and watched the vine turn brown with the leaves. The webs broke and withered, but the dried vines held their shape through the winter winds. Millie checked them daily, waiting to find them broken by the only people who would ever approach her front door.
THIRTY FOUR
Lenny squinted at the faint gray outline of Gabriella’s face in the dark. Her fine fingernails made short, light strokes on Lenny’s left cheek.
“Wake gently,” Gabriella whispered. “I’m a friend. Don’t be afraid. I’m a friend. Wake gently.”
“I’m awake.”
Gabriella whispered that she needed Lenny’s help finding Millie’s cigarettes. No, Millie wasn’t smoking in the basement, but Gabriella was just so worried about the fetus. She’d already looked in every bag and cabinet and drawer, and under every piece of furniture.
“They just keep coming, but from where?” she said.
Lenny climbed out of bed and put on socks.
She knew the basement well enough to search it blind, but after exploring every crevice and corner while Gabriella watched Millie for movement, Lenny couldn’t find the cigarettes.
Too wide awake afterward to go back to bed, Lenny and Gabriella tiptoed upstairs to the kitchen and ate lemon poppy seed scones at the island.
“You must think I’m a terrible hypocrite.” Gabriella spread butter on a bite. “So anxious about what she does to hers, but giving up my own.”
“I don’t think that.”
Gabriella rubbed crumbs from her fingers, then shaped her bathrobe around herself. She looked down at it. “It feels odd, now that I can’t help but see it.”
Lenny handed Gabriella a clean napkin for her eyes.
Gabriella said, “Do you think I should I keep it?”
Lenny said her opinion didn’t matter. The bureau made decisions like that.
“But what do you think?”
“Why, Gabi? Do you want to keep it?”
Gabriella bit her thumbnail and then wiped it on her thigh. She picked up the remainder of her scone and put it down again. She shrugged. She shook her hair over her shoulders. “I know. I’m foolish to think this now, only two months left. I never wanted this. As you know.” She laughed. “It was—Oh, those ads!” She put her hands on her hips and stared intently at Lenny. “‘Do you have carrier potential?’ And then…Do you know this one? Such happy faces on these fat-bellied carriers standing on the shore of a lovely, lovely beach, their bare sides all touching, here,” she said, tapping the sides of her own fat belly. “That one, I always remember: ‘Parenthood: the most inclusive exclusive club in the world. Do you qualify?’ I should want one to prove I belong, that I ‘qualify’? It made me crazy!” She laughed again. “But now, for so long, now, it’s just been me, and this,” she rubbed it, “and no commercials. I don’t hear the pressure, anymore.”
Lenny warned Gabriella that keeping it wouldn’t be easy. If she wanted to do it legally, she would have to register as soon as possible as an incidental carrier and explain to the authorities why she’d waited so long. (“You’ll have to lie. You’ll have to tell them you only figured out you were pregnant seconds before you decided to register,” she said to Gabriella’s shrug and nod.) She would also have to explain why she hadn’t replaced her chip. (“I’d find a way to use your past, maybe your mother, as an excuse, and not your feelings about the hormone,” Lenny said, to which Gabriella only replied, “Sure, of course.”) She would have to find FCP volunteers, too, and go through the evaluation process. And it would all have to work perfectly, Lenny said. A single failed component—failure to convince the board she didn’t know she was pregnant, for one—could mean Exile, at worst, and her baby in a state shelter.
“I think…” Gabriella tore her scone. “I think it could easily work if…Is there any reason to hope you might agree to be a secondary guar—”
“No. I’m sorry, Gabi.”
Gabriella tore her scone again and set the broken pieces on her napkin. Lenny had never seen a face so sad. She reached out for Gabriella’s hand and held it.
“I only wanted to ask,” Gabriella said quietly. “It can still be done. I know people who might agree. And I’ll do everything else you said.”
Lenny explained that it was a big risk to take, that her advice wasn’t a guarantee of success. All she had were ideas. To help Gabriella better understand exactly what she meant by “risk,” Lenny told her the worst story she’d heard since Chester Walton:
A woman whose neighbor turned her in for being an unlicensed carrier claimed she hadn’t meant to carry. She’d been hacked at random, she told the police, and her boyfriend had both raped and forcibly impregnated her before her hormone could be reactivated. The state’s attorney said the timing was too coincidental, too convenient, to be believable, and the jury agreed. The woman was exiled one week after giving birth.
Lenny waited for a nod and some version of “I don’t know what I could have been thinking.” Because Gabriella only stared at her napkin and poked at the scone dough she’d pressed into balls, Lenny reminded her of what Millie had been able to say about the conditions of Exile. She urged Gabriella to imagine being in a place so awful people would be sent there just for talking about it. If it was too hard to imagine a place she couldn’t imagine, Lenny said, she should at least try to picture herself in prison, where she would experience…whatever it was that went on there.
Gabriella nodded, but she said nothing.
Lenny looked politely past her, over the breakfast bar and through the living room windows. The sun was only just coming up, and Millie’s house was little more than a black peak against a faint purple sky.
“I have to try,” Gabriella said.
Lenny stood and grabbed her napkin, then swept up Gabriella’s, too, scone balls and all, and brought them to the trash.
Gabriella wrapped her hand around her water glass before Lenny could take it away. “Why are you discouraging me?”
Lenny didn’t answer. She understood that people who wanted children could be just as unreasonable as people who didn’t, putting anything and everything—including the children—at risk just to have them, but she didn’t like it, and the less she talked about it with Gabriella, the better she could pretend to be supportive for the sake of their friendship.
But it wasn’t her job to be supportive, she reminded herself. She was there to protect the born child, not Gabriella, who was a boarder, first. A carrier whose baby Lenny was there to protect.
The Age of the Child Page 28
