The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  It occurred to her that Lenny had seen the ring but hadn’t asked Millie to return it.

  Millie would take it with her, as well.

  She ran down the stairs, the towel a bunched-up bundle in her arm. The door was fewer than six feet from her reach when she looked out the window and stopped short, dropped the towel, and rapidly compiled a visual list of every possible hiding place in her insufficiently labyrinthine home, the spot she would choose if she and Lenny were playing hide and seek.

  Millie had been so skilled at being invisible as a child.

  _____

  From where she watched in the living room’s darkest corner, Lenny saw the gray car speed down Millie’s driveway and brake hard in front of her small, covered porch. (Floyd had said everyone needed a covered place to sit in front of a house, whether the house was a four-room box or a fourteen-bathroom mansion.) The detectives—well, one detective, Merriweather—kicked in Millie’s door. She and Davis went inside.

  Because Lenny expected Millie to save herself by telling the detectives about Gabriella, she hadn’t bothered locking the front door. If they came to her house next, they might as well walk right in. Lenny had enough pills stuffed in her pocket to kill her before her exile, and Margaret, just fed, freshly diapered, and surrounded by pillows in the basement, would be safe until Lenny used her one phone call on Pauline, who was waiting to hear from her.

  Millie came out to the porch with Merriweather behind her, but no Davis. Lenny backed against the wall. Merriweather looked over her shoulder, then kicked Millie’s back so hard she launched chest first into the brown grass. Merriweather kneeled and put her face to Millie’s ear before jerking her arms to stand her up. She turned to Davis as he stepped out the door. She flailed her arms and pretended to fall.

  Davis shook his head at her and walked ahead to open the car door. Merriweather shoved Millie into the back seat.

  At the kitchen window, Lenny leaned against the counter and bent over the sink to watch the long driveway. She stopped breathing until she saw the car’s grille, and then the blue sky reflected in the windshield. Davis’s purple left elbow poked out the open window. He didn’t seem to be slowing down the way he would if Lenny’s house were next.

  Lenny almost didn’t see Millie slouched low in the back seat, looking up at her as the detective’s car passed the kitchen window. Lenny gave her a little wave. She didn’t know why. To thank her for not saying anything, or to help her decide not to? To let her know she was there? Millie turned away.

  Lenny stood on her toes and stretched over the faucet to keep an eye on the car until it reached the end of Millie’s driveway. The brake lights lit and the car stopped. No turn signal blinked.

  Had she counted out enough pills? She wondered why she hadn’t just dumped the whole bottle in her pocket. It would have been impossible to take too many.

  Her hip bones ached from being pressed to the counter, and the balls of her hands stung from holding her weight.

  The brake lights flashed off. Lenny waited for the white reverse lights. She made a note to spread the pills around to her other pockets so the bulge wouldn’t get Davis and Merriweather’s attention.

  The car pulled forward and turned right toward Forest Lane.

  Margaret was sleeping when Lenny stepped over her for the phone. The plush ball Lenny had left with her was wedged between her bent, bare knees, and her t-shirt, decorated with little red hermit crabs, was bunched up under her arms. Lenny pulled the fabric straight before dialing, thinking it must be frustrating to be a baby, sometimes.

  Pauline answered on the first ring with, “That was quick. I guess you’re not in jail.”

  “It’ll take me twenty minutes to get her into place.” Lenny stroked Margaret’s cheek and tried to remember where she’d last seen the note pad. She hadn’t planned to write a message, but she couldn’t stand to let her go without at least a name. “Can you be there in twenty-two?”

  _____

  Davis drove slowly. Five miles per hour, Millie saw on the speedometer. She looked up at the kitchen window as the car finally approached Lenny’s house. She expected her to be there—Lenny had always been watching from her windows—but even so, there was a palpable release of anxious tension the moment Millie glimpsed Lenny’s face behind the glass.

  She was contemplating the safest way to interact—a wave? a nod?—when a story on the dashboard monitor distracted her. She turned forward to watch the screen.

  “…briella Dahl, whose alleged intent to abandon an unsanctioned child inspired protests both for and against her release, has died after being shot in front of her home. Police have taken the alleged shooter, former police officer Matthew Fence, into custody.”

  “Ha! He finally got one,” Merriweather said. She sighed.

  “Witnesses saying—What’s that?” The anchor held up a finger. “As it happens, a witness, a tourist, got some video that we—we’re showing it as is? I guess we’re showing it as is. Warning: this is the first time any of us at the station are seeing this raw footage, so please be advised that some of what you see might be upsetting.”

  In the tourist’s exceptionally clear recording, Matthew Fence screamed inches from the back of Gabriella’s head as she walked from her car to her front door with a baby in her arms. A crowd of protesters followed several feet behind. It was difficult to decipher above all the shouting what the protesters hoped to communicate, but it appeared they both agreed and disagreed with Matthew Fence’s assault on Gabriella, which only escalated when she reached her door. Before Gabriella could enter her code’s first character, Matthew Fence used one arm to wrestle away her baby while, with the other, he pulled a handgun from a hip holster and shot her in the chest. As she fell, Gabriella clutched at the air, not quite managing to make contact with the baby in Matthew Fence’s arms.

  “Look at—Look at her face,” the anchor said. “Did you see that? Did everyone see that? Such despair. Can we go back and slo-mo that, please? Back, back, back. There! Stop. Play.”

  Gabriella fell again, grasped again, slowly. Millie thought her reaction to Matthew Fence holding her baby resembled horror more than despair, but whatever it was transformed into something else entirely as Matthew Fence spun on his heel and tossed the baby at the crowd behind him. Gracefully it sailed, out of his hands and over what appeared to be a holly bush, directly toward at least fifty people who in uncanny synchronicity took one long, slow-motion step backward.

  “Oh, I can’t—We can’t do this part slow, like this. Can we? No. No, we really shouldn’t. Should we? No, no, speed it up. Speed it up, please. Now. Now! What are you jackasses doing back there?”

  The slow-motion baby glided with delicate, brutal force head-first onto the sidewalk as Gabriella watched from where she lay crumpled on her front stairs, blood spreading a wide stain into her shirt. She struggled to sit up when Matthew Fence ran toward the motionless baby, lifting only her head. It appeared she was focusing not on the police officer, but on the little body on the ground, when her initial horror—despair, Millie still thought the anchor should have said—gave way to an intense stare, the rest of her face blank as she watched Matthew Fence press a finger to the baby’s neck. When it was clear there was no pulse, Gabriella smiled slightly, closed her eyes, and lowered her head to the stone step.

  “Well,” the anchor said. “That was…That was definitely…”

  Davis turned off the monitor and flipped to music.

  Merriweather said, her face half turned toward the back seat, “And she didn’t even manipulate her chip.”

  Millie said, “Someone hacked me.”

  “You got scanned,” Davis said. “We have the readout.”

  Millie spun Lenny’s ring around her finger. The sharp petals jabbed her thumb. A ball of blood the size of a pin head rose to the surface.

  “What’d you do with the baby?” Merriweather turned all the way around.

  “I never had a baby.”

  Merriweather shrugge
d and faced forward. “Doctor’ll be the judge of that, I guess.”

  Millie wiped her thumb on her pants. She wanted to ask whether Exile inmates were permitted to retain any personal possessions, but she knew the answer. Eugene had had nothing on his person but clothes that clearly weren’t his own. She took off the ring, then slid it back on. She carefully pressed the band against the joint on the underside of her finger, and then against the puffy flesh on top, harder and harder until she could see the circular impression. The skin would reform, but she would always be able to recall the sensation of the ring’s presence.

  She took it off again only when they’d driven far enough away from Forest Retreat Estates for Davis and Merriweather to, she hoped, dismiss as “inconvenient” any thoughts of turning back to question Lenny, who Millie suspected needed a little time. She offered the ring between the front seats as they passed the crumbling remains of Oxford Spirits I, asking Merri-weather to please deliver it to Lenny.

  “It was a gift from my mother for my first article published in the Daily Fact,” she lied, and because Lenny was the last person alive who had known her mother personally, she should be the one to have it. (That she should be the one to have it was true, at least.)

  Merriweather took the ring and dropped it into her suit jacket’s inside pocket. “She’s a good friend to help you out.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “She hid you. Somehow, some way. Right?”

  Millie said it had been months since she’d last seen Lenny.

  “Mm.”

  Davis stopped at a stop sign. Merriweather looked at Davis. Davis con-tinued looking straight ahead, but he changed his signal direction and turned right when, if they were going to the police station, they should have turned left.

  “You know,” Merriweather said, “I like Exile. As a system, I mean. I respect it.” They followed a narrow dirt road toward the cannabis fields. “I’ve taken the tour. All us bureau employees have.” She turned to Davis, who confirmed with a single nod. “And, I don’t know. I think they’re a little too lenient.” She twisted in her seat to look at Millie. “Not on what they call the ‘worst’ abusers, but, you know, on people like you. Now, people like you, you still have a hard time, don’t get me wrong, but compared to what the others get…” She shook her head. “You’d be lucky to go there.” At a split in the road, she pointed Davis left. Left went beyond the cannabis farm, into a dense expanse of trees leaving only enough room for a single car to pass. “You’d be damn lucky,” she said again. “And you can go if you want. We’ll take you there. All you have to do is tell me something that’ll make it easier for us to do our job. Something that’ll tell me you want to do the right thing. Something like, ‘Yes ma’am, Lenny Mabary helped me subvert the one system in place that’s designed to protect the welfare of innocent children.’ You tell me that, and Davis’ll turn this car around.”

  Millie looked at the dashboard clock. They’d been driving for nearly an hour. If Lenny were as predictable as Millie believed her to be, she had every reason to believe the baby would have been dropped by this time, and that Lenny would already have removed all evidence of Millie and the baby from her house.

  She ran her thumb over her ring finger. The impression was already gone.

  Millie told Merriweather the same thing she had told her earlier. She and Lenny hadn’t seen each other in months.

  “What if I told you she was the one that turned you in, called us just before we came to get you?”

  Then Merriweather would be telling a preposterous lie, Millie didn’t say. Lenny was the most loyal person she had ever known.

  She told Merriweather she was sorry, but that whatever Lenny might or might not have said or done didn’t change Millie’s stateme… testimony.

  Merriweather shrugged and turned to Davis. He pulled over into brush and leaves. Merriweather retrieved the ring from her inside pocket and positioned her hand so that Millie could see her trying it on each finger until she found the one it fit, her sleeve pulling back to reveal a small tattoo on her wrist: Guardian.

  Davis looked out his side window as Merriweather stepped out of the car and gestured for Millie to join her.

  Benny Goodman’s “Get Happy” played through the open doors.

  Kristen Tsetsi lives in Connecticut with her husband Ian, cats Hoser, Simon, and Sampson, and dog Lenny.

  Her previous novels, Pretty Much True and The Year of Dan Palace, are published under the name Chris Jane.

  More information: kristenjtsetsi.com