Pick the Lock, page 21
Make sure the bank account that is linked to your account is under your name. Any bank accounts that do not match will not be charged or credited.
Here’s side two:
Offering Tips
Log into your account, click on Offering in the menu, and then List Your Offering.
Know the worth of your product. The most sought-after women in the System, outside of Love Needs, are tutors, cooks (foreign cuisines +1), nannies, cleaners, and shoppers.
You may not offer women under age 16 to suitors. See Rules for Suitors link in the menu for more information.
Women over age 17 are high value to both suitors and families and are often in short supply.
If your offering is harmed in any way by a customer, you are entitled to compensation. Click on File a Claim and follow instructions. Most claims are processed within five days. If the claim involves criminal behavior, it could be ten days.
Use common sense. If your offering is damaged or defective, do not list them as an offering. After five consecutive returns, your product will be examined and future offerings must be approved on an order-by-order basis.
I flip the card over several times. My heart is pounding, and I am suddenly hot. I feel like getting sick again. Downstairs, Vernon entertains my suitor and Henry with more stories while the fire roars in the sitting room. Marta serves dessert and coffee. Vernon probably offers cognac or whatever. I feel like writing a scene in the opera, but I don’t even know what to write, so I look through Mother’s other records in my room, stopping at Run, Jane, Run. The sleeve art. I see it clearly—the white industrial steampunk cover is simply a picture of the ceiling in Station Six. It’s what we see as we’re shuttled on our backs.
Jane’s Reprise
At 5:00 a.m. on Friday, I grab the iPad from the en suite, walk to the tube in the corner of my bedroom, and press the Call button for a capsule. The whir might wake Vernon, but I doubt it. I didn’t hear his bedroom door close until three. The capsule arrives quickly, and I let myself into the System. I press the green button, same as last night. The capsule drops below basement level, same as last time. But this time, once the capsule goes horizontal, I am moving a lot faster. So fast, I almost feel like throwing up again.
I arrive in the station. It’s bright white, same as last time. Sterile. New. Sparkling. Everything about it is the future, but when I look to the high ceiling, the conduit and pipework are sprayed white. It’s totally the album cover for Run, Jane, Run, which means I must be in the right place. Jane has run.
A recording of a woman’s voice comes from the speakers in the capsule upon entry to the chutes. “Welcome to Station Six.”
A station guide appears outside my capsule. I smile at her. She smiles back.
“Where are you going?”
“I want to see my mother,” I answer.
“She’s sleeping now, Jane.”
“I need to see her.”
“She wakes at six.”
“Do you know when everyone wakes up?” I ask.
She looks at me and cocks her head to the right. Says nothing. Walks away and lets me lie here. From behind I can see a tattoo she has on her right calf. It seems to be a hunk of cheese inside of a heart.
When she returns ten minutes later, I am breathing so slowly I must appear dead.
I open my eyes when I hear her say “Jane!”—as if me being alive was a shock.
“Do you love cheese?” I ask.
“Who doesn’t?” she replies.
We stare at each other.
“I’m going to send you to your mother now,” she says, and taps the screen of her little tablet. “Next time we’ll get you all registered and checked in.”
She waits for me to ask. But I know not to ask. I don’t want to be registered. I don’t want to be checked in. I don’t want any part of this bullshit. None of it. Same as the koi fish in Gretchen Brown’s foyer pond should be free to swim in a lake and not stuck in a tiny pool of filtered water and smooth jazz in the foyer of an ultramodern prefab in Pennsylvania.
Sorry to Break It to You
I arrive in the main room of Safe House again; this time the dining room is empty, the table has two vases of fresh-cut flowers, and the false windows have night scenes. Aurora borealis. A sky packed with stars.
I release myself from the capsule and follow the smell of coffee.
There’s a room beyond the kitchen with sunlight, which is impossible. I walk in, and Mother says, “Good morning, Jane!” before I spot her sitting on the floor in the corner, on a meditation pad, bathed in morning light.
“Hi!” I look up at the fake-sky ceiling.
“My boyfriend from college invented those.” She points to the ceiling light, which looks like a huge skylight but isn’t one because we are many meters underground. “He gave me a huge deal on account of him regretting some stuff. Bad boyfriend, decent businessman.”
I sit down on the sofa in the room. It’s yellow. Everything in the room is either yellow or white. It’s like being inside an egg. But fresher.
“What do you know? About this place? About me?” she asks.
“Well,” I say and let out a sigh. “I now know that Vernon’s been pimping me out to boys all year like it was some great rite of passage when really he’s been getting paid for it.” I gesture wildly because that’s some bullshit. “But other than that, I know so little, I don’t even know how to answer that question.”
She gets up and sits on the chair facing me. We both put our feet on the mod coffee table. “Let’s start here. I am what’s left of your mother. And I’m pretty sure you hate me.”
I nod. “Except I don’t hate you.”
“Mmm.”
“I acted like I hate you. But I don’t hate you. I’m actually more like you than anyone else. But I can’t say that…At home, I mean.”
“I worry about you and Henry so much,” she says. “Marta updates me daily.”
“He won’t even let me take walks.”
“I know.”
“I have some things to show you,” I say while I pull out the iPad.
“So…you don’t hate me?”
I look into her eyes. “Not at all. I love you,” I say. “I’m sorry for all the things I said and did. I have to show you some stuff so you understand why I did that.”
“I don’t care about why,” she says.
“No, no. You have to let me tell you. You don’t know what’s been going on at home all these years.”
She says, “I have to talk to you about the System and what’s really happening out here. Everywhere in the world, really.”
“I know I’m next.”
“That’s what I’m trying to change,” she says. “I want to rescue you and your generation from this.”
“And I want to rescue you. Right now.”
We laugh and she points out how our feet are the same—flat arches and wide at the ball. “Let’s figure out how to do that, yes? How to rescue Mina Placenta, part one.”
“You could just not go back on tour and open the door on the capsule and walk out like I just did.”
She frowns. “He has it locked for me. Otherwise, I’d have walked out long ago.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe we should back up. You probably need more information.”
I sigh. A trillion-pound weight on my chest lifts when I say, “I think I know more than you do now. A lot more—like I just said.”
Her eyebrows raise. I hold up the iPad.
“Vernon keeps all the security footage in a local storage cloud. I’ve been watching it.”
“The cameras,” she says.
“Mmm.”
“How far back?” she asks.
“Since 1999.”
She looks intrigued. “Do you want hot chocolate?”
“Sure.”
She motions for me to follow her, and we walk through the hallway and back into the kitchen. It’s bigger than I expected. Everything here is. She puts the teakettle on and fixes a French press for her coffee and fills another mug with cocoa mix. With marshmallows. Because she’s my mother and even though she lives in a System of tubes and capsules and dinner chairs and shitty husbands, she knows I love cocoa with marshmallows.
“Between the two of us, I’d say we have a lot of information,” she says.
I don’t know what to say. She’s making cocoa and coffee like it’s totally normal, and she’s walking around free in a pair of flowy pants and a loose tank top that reads What’s More Punk Than Your Public Library?
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“You’re…you.”
She nods. I nod. We look at each other.
“I don’t want to make you cry,” she says.
“You’re not making me cry. I’m making me cry!” I cry. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was going on.”
She puts her coffee down and hugs me. I stop crying.
“None of us know what’s going on,” she says. “It changes day-to-day. That’s why it’s so effective.”
“Oh.”
“It’s why I built this place. Or—rebuilt. My great-aunt Lily built it and used to come down here, too.”
“So, you’re not on tour?”
“I was on tour,” she says. “I just get in a day or two early sometimes. Safe House is my center of operations, really. From here I’ll eventually reclaim the System.”
I’m nodding but I don’t even know why. “It’s like I was born inside a mystery novel,” I say. “And I’m some kind of detective of my own life. I’m tired of figuring things out. I want one thing to be easy.”
“Do you want me to explain?”
I nod.
This is what she tells me. There is a System of tubes that goes far beyond our house, far beyond Station Six, and it shuttles women around to places where they’re needed. “By men, naturally,” she adds.
“Henry’s dancing tutor,” I say.
“Harriet, yes,” she confirms. “And Gemma and the cleaning ladies and the woman who sets up the pool every spring.”
“How do they know where they’re needed?” I ask.
“Men order them. On the app. So Harriet was ordered by Vernon.”
“Huh,” I say. “Wait. So all women who work? Are they all in the System?”
She pinches her lips together. “Technically, yes. But most don’t know it? Seems odd, I know, but it’s how it’s always worked.”
“You’d think they’d know if they’ve been ordered and have to get into a tube, right?”
“Not all of us use the tubes. Some are out there in their own cars or taking the subway or whatever. I mean, even I take the subway when I’m near one. Out there we have the choice.”
“Is Marta in the System?” I ask.
“Marta has a special role in minding you and Henry,” she answers. “But she also has a role in the reclaiming and the work we do here at Safe House. She can’t talk about it because she had to sign an agreement with Vernon about not telling anyone what happens in the house.”
I have so many questions. “I heard the System whir in the high school office. Does it have stops like a subway?”
“Good question. I can’t answer it, though. Because none of us know how the System really runs,” she says. “Station guides seem to know how to shuttle us around and we just go from there.”
“Back up. My teachers are ordered?”
“Not quite.” She shakes her head. “But teachers are some of our biggest recruiters.”
“Recruiters?” I am so tired of being a detective.
“Best place to find out where the abuse is.” She leans over the table and takes my hands. “See, this isn’t just a System to move women around. We’re—well—we’re making improvements. So, a lot of the women use the tubes for escape—from homes that were not safe for them.”
I am looking at her now as if she’s a bit insane and also an angel, just like Rolling Stone said. “You help other women escape? While—like—while you’re locked up by Vernon?”
She nods, reaches to the table next to her, and hands me a small booklet. On the front, it reads For the Useful.
“Before you read that, let’s talk about suitors,” Mother says.
“Okay.”
A frown appears on Mother’s brow. “Since your last birthday, how many suitors has Vernon arranged?”
“Twenty-five or so?”
Mother raises her chin and nods, impressed. “Do you know how much he’s charging?”
“No.” I don’t know what to say after it. I must look pained. I feel pained.
Mother makes a sound like what she’s about to say causes her pain. “I didn’t know if Vernon told you the truth, but I suspected he didn’t.”
“He even lies to God.”
“He does, indeed,” she says.
I drink the last of my hot chocolate and clean the marshmallow off my lips with a napkin. “So the System isn’t, like—prison?”
She looks down first, then looks me right in the eye. “It’s all in there,” she says, pointing to the pamphlet. “It was made to be a prison. By my great-aunt Lily’s husband, Rodney. The house was Lily’s parents’ house, but they both died in mysterious circumstances in 1935, only two years after Lily and Rodney got married.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, indeed,” she says. “So, then the house was left to Lily—my grandmother’s sister. Rodney built the System during the Second World War, and Lily lived as a prisoner inside of it from about 1955 until Rodney died in 1987. She lived here freely after that, and I would visit her weekly until she died, also mysteriously, in 2001, just after I married your father. She was the one who built Safe House.” She gestures around her.
“Are you going to die in mysterious circumstances, too?”
“I should hope not,” she says. “I aim to get out of here soon, regardless.”
The whir sounds. I look at the sunflower clock on the wall above the doorway.
“I thought you were the only one in there,” I say.
“Of course you did.”
“Why don’t you just make Vernon leave?”
“It’s not that simple.” She shakes her head, but looks down, as if she’s ashamed. “Now he has my sister involved and that’s messy.”
“She’s trying to get the deed to the house.” I feel the weight of the iPad on my lap. “I have things to show you.”
“She’s always been trying to get the house. And him. And you. And he’s always been trying to get the house, and her and you. It’s a game that no one else is playing but the two of them.” She looks at me.
“I feel like I was lied to my whole life.”
“You were lied to all your life,” Mother says. “I’ll feel guilt for that forever, even if I didn’t know what was going on at the time. I’m so sorry. Lying for men is what women do, it seems.”
“He had you brainwashed.” I hold up the iPad. “I’ve seen it.”
“Show me,” she says.
I look at the clock. I’ve got five minutes. I find the “Clorox” mixtape, and we sit and watch all three minutes of it.
Clorox Mixtape (Chronological Order)
01.21.2002 / Dining Room / Mother is eating her dinner. Vernon is across the table, and he suddenly screams, “What is wrong with you?!” Mother jumps. “Vernon, you scared me,” she says. He smiles. “Just keeping you on your toes.”
04.05.2005 / Study / Mother asks warmly, “How did the job interview go yesterday?” Vernon kicks the leg of a chair and sends it scooting across the room. “You only ever want me to feel like shit,” he says. Mother answers meekly, “That’s not true.” Vernon replies, “Stop crying. You’re just manipulating me.” He paces. “I didn’t even go to that interview because if I actually got a job, can you imagine how miserable you’d make me?”
10.31.2007 / Sitting Room / Vernon is in a pair of pajama pants standing above Mother, who is dressed in a red-sequined maternity dress and a pair of combat boots. “You’re not going anywhere,” Vernon says. “But we RSVPed,” Mother says. “You’re feeling poorly, and I can represent us as a family.” She points to her small bump. “You’re not leaving this house,” he says.
12.12.2007 / Dining Room / Mother sits in the armchair by the fire, pregnant, and Vernon leans over her, his hands on the arms of the chair, trapping her in. Mother says, “I thought you said you’d stop being abusive if I had a baby.” Vernon laughs. “I never said that. Plus, this baby will love me way more than it ever loves you. I’m going to make sure of that.”
The Postpartum Chorus Collection
03.15.2008 / Sitting Room / “I never said that!” (Right after he said exactly that.)
04.01.2008 / Foyer / “I never said that!” (Right after he said exactly that.)
04.11.2008 / Study / “I never said that!” (Right after he said exactly that.)
04.19.2008 / Study / “I never said that!” (Right after he said exactly that.)
05.18.2008 / Foyer / “I never said that!” (Right after he said exactly that.)
Ten Years Later
09.13.2018 / Patio via FaceTime video / Mother says she knows what’s going on at the house between him and Finch. Vernon laughs and says, “I think your work is driving you mad. Much as it pains me, the children hate you and I hate you. You’re just such a pain in the ass.”
I forgot how harsh mixtapes can be because they’re stitched together so tightly. I wish I had enough time to show her the “Vernon’s Pie Crust Apologies” mixtape. It’s a perfect pairing with the Clorox.
