A Better World, page 32
“Oh, patients’ blankets,” Linda answered. “I took them back to clean them here but forgot.”
Sally made a sour face. “Are they used?”
“Yeah. Pretty dirty. We had some very sick patients. Do you want to have a look at them?”
Sally pulled the back door handle but didn’t open it.
“Sorry about the smell,” Josie said. “I think somebody puked on one of them. Was it norovirus, Mom?”
“Worse. Giardia. It’s a parasite,” she said to Sally. “We good to go? Sorry again about being so much trouble.”
Appalled by the thought of opening the door to so much sickness, Sally waved them on.
* * *
The roads were icy and black, the streetlights nonexistent. They crept impossibly slowly, like scenery-gawking Sunday drivers. The kids climbed out from under the blankets and buckled in. “You’re okay,” Linda reassured them, and then Josie, too. “We’re all okay.”
Twenty minutes later, they parked behind Danny’s truck at the halfway house, where they’d agreed to meet. Gal came racing out. The kids threw themselves at her and didn’t let go. All wept with happiness and emotion.
As Linda and Josie watched, their hands joined. My daughter, Linda thought. And then: But where are my husband and son?
Danny’s mother-in-law stayed shotgun while he opened the back door of his truck and Gal helped her kids climb onto either side of sleeping Carlos. “My babies. You’re cold. We’ll turn up the heat and get you all cozy.” Then, to Linda, “I didn’t think you’d do it. I was so scared you’d back out.”
“Me too,” Linda said. “I didn’t think I’d do it, either.”
“I lied. They’ll be mad at you.” Her voice had lost all childishness. She was a different Gal. At peace. “Crazy, scary, Jack Lust mad. Don’t go to the Winter Fest tomorrow.
“We’re leaving tonight,” Linda said. “Keep your room warm.”
“Be careful,” Gal told her.
“You too. I spoke to the people in Cleveland. They think the medicine’s been wrong and that you’ll see an improvement. Not every child responds, but a lot of them do. There’s a solid chance. They know your history, about the house fire, so I don’t know what’ll happen there. My guess is you’ll be in some trouble with whatever police have jurisdiction. I’m sorry. I know it may be overcautious, but I also instructed Danny and his mother-in-law not to leave you alone with Katie or Sebbie.”
“I don’t care if I get tarred and feathered so long as I can smooch on them this whole drive,” Gal said.
Despite her frailty, Gal hugged Linda hard. Then she hugged Josie. “Your mom’s fucking crazy,” she said, which Linda understood to be the highest of compliments. And then, suddenly, Linda was shaking Danny’s hand, touching her hand to Carlos’s forehead, and wishing them all the best. Then, the truck was gone.
* * *
They were back at 9 Sunset Heights by midmorning. Russell and Hip had left for work and school. “I think we should pack up,” Linda said. So, they did. Josie packed Hip’s things, too, and Linda figured what the hell, and packed a bag for Russell.
At first, she felt good. So did Josie. They’d done the right thing. Hopefully, Hip and Russell would believe them and come along. They’d get out before the Winter Festival and call this whole experience finished. But the hours passed. Neither Hip nor Russell answered their devices, and the bags stayed packed with no one to claim them.
* * *
Long past dark, Russell walked through the back door. He wore the disturbing rictus smile she’d come to associate with his PV persona. The longer they stayed there, the more it chafed, this persona, but he insisted on wearing it.
“What happened?” she asked.
“That’s my question,” he said.
The two of them passed the packed suitcases and took opposite seats at the formal dining room table. Josie followed.
“I need to talk to your mother alone,” Russell said.
Josie shot Linda a nervous glance, retreated. Linda didn’t imagine she’d retreated far.
Succinctly as she was able, Linda described escaping with the children and delivering them to Gal. They’d forgotten to turn on the overhead lights, so the room was dark.
“They told me. The whole board called me in once they found out. I thought they were joking, Linnie,” Russell said.
“I had to.”
“You gave those kids to a psychotic.”
“It’s not like that.”
Tears of indignation filled Russell’s eyes. “Jack explained everything. They were trying to save those kids. They were working on their own clinical trial. They were going to recommend best practices as soon as the patent expires. By pulling them out, you signed their death warrants.”
Emotions flooded Linda. None were confusion. “You believe them and not me. But all they do is lie.”
Russell surveyed the room, its nice furniture, its hand-painted wallpaper, its ribbon candy. He wasn’t hearing her. He was running dialogue from some imaginary conversation with an imaginary Linda that had already happened. “It’s a mess, but I fixed it. I had to beg,” he said, his voice going distant and soft. “I got down on my knees in front of Jack Lust. I was literally on my knees. For you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t. It’s just something you say, when you’re accused of something bad. An automatic response, as thoughtless as a heartbeat.
“We cut a deal. I’ll finish the next case and win it for them, but I won’t pass the first-year review. We’ll leave then. So long as it’s the full year, Jack and Lloyd promised to give our deposit back. We need that money. That means you play nice. We go to every festival, we follow every rule, we stop asking questions and sneaking around and breaking into places we don’t belong. Even your boss, Chernin, was there. He likes you. But he voted to kick you out. He wants you gone tonight.”
“I want that, too,” she said.
“If we leave now, with nothing, we won’t make it. People are dying out there.”
Dying. The word was a kind of warble in her chest, expanding and collapsing. “There’s a halfway house in PVE. I have a room for us. I’m your wife and I’m telling you we should go. Forget the deposit. Let’s cut our losses.”
Russell looked over. He was talking to her, but not really. He wasn’t seeing her. “We can still win. Unpack those bags. No one’s leaving.”
* * *
The thing about epiphanies, they don’t always lead to change. Sometimes you have them, and know they’re true, then forget about them because you’re not ready. In her darkest moments, she’d wondered whether she ought to have done everything in secret. Lied to the kids and fled with them, leaving Russell on his own. But epiphanies are easy to ignore. You think: Nothing’s an emergency. It can’t possibly be that bad. I’ll deal with that later when I have a cooler head. For now, I’ll pretend everything’s fine.
She knocked on Josie’s door. “We’re going.”
They packed all the suitcases into the car. From the locator on his device, Linda knew where to find her son. She drove to the Bennett house. Instead of a servant, Daniella came to the door, smiling carnivorous and shit-eating.
“Is Hip here?”
Daniella sighed, deep and theatrical. She was wearing those same tight blue coveralls as when they’d gone out to Sirin’s for the first time. “So much emotion. So much weeping.”
“Why’s that?”
Daniella looked at her sidelong. “You screwed the pooch. Your whole family’s in serious trouble. But these two idiots had their fifteen-year-old fantasies of getting married.”
Linda could tell that Daniella expected an apology. At the very least, an explanation. “Can you get my son?”
Daniella leaned into the doorway an extra beat, deciding. Then, catlike, she turned.
A minute later, Hip was at the door, his eyes deep red.
“I need you to come with me,” she said.
He lowered his voice. “Is it true, Mom? Did you kidnap kids from a clinical trial and give them to a crazy lady?”
“Yeah. Come on.”
He took a step deeper into the house. Linda noticed Cathy on the stairwell, eyes red and swollen. She stood under an altar of feathers and meat, the Geiger counter’s watch hand at a steady low level.
“Why would you do that?”
“For their own good,” Linda said.
“But they were getting better,” Hip said.
“I doubt that.”
He looked back, seemed ashamed that Cathy had to see this, that Cathy had to have a bad thing happen tangentially to her. Delicate little Cathy. “It reflects on me, Mom! It reflects on Cathy! We’ll never get universal golden tickets passed now. She’s been crying for hours.”
Linda didn’t mean to be so cold, but the discrepancy between fantasy and reality here was obscene. “I’m sorry, Hip. But that kid doesn’t know her ass from her elbow and neither do you. Now get in the car.”
He didn’t move.
“Now!” she yelled.
“Mom!” he said, his eyes ragged, his voice ragged, everything about him holding the stance of the betrayed.
By now, Josie had come to the door. “Come on, Hip,” she said.
He sneered an ugly sneer. “I knew you wouldn’t let me have this.”
“Have what?” Josie said.
“You liked it when I followed you around. When I had nobody else,” he answered. “Both of you. But I’m happy. I’m the one who belongs. And you couldn’t let me have it. You had to mess it up. I never ruined anything for you, Josie.”
“You mess your own shit up. You never needed my help,” Josie answered.
“I’m staying over here tonight. They said I could,” Hip said. Then he shut the door on them.
* * *
They drove to the border. Linda planned to set the luggage in the halfway house and leave Josie there, then head back and try to salvage what she could. But the gate was blocked. Sally, Cyrus, and Pratt all got out of the security booth.
“No passage!” Pratt said, genial and sympathetic, like he was sorry for the inconvenience.
“I just need to get something at my clinic,” Linda said.
“No, you don’t,” Sally answered, her thick brows knitted in fury.
“You’re right,” Linda agreed. “I want to leave. Let me out.”
Pratt leaned down into Linda’s window, made gratitude hands at her. “Hi! Sorry, but this is the site of an ongoing investigation. Until we clear things up, no one comes or goes.”
The Plymouth Valley Winter Festival
Fleeing through the mountains would never work. It was at least a three-day hike through winter cold to the next town and they had no supplies. The wall was impossible to climb. They drove back to 9 Sunset Heights. For Josie’s sake, Linda pretended none of this was serious. “We’ll be fine,” she reassured. “We’ll try again in the morning.”
“But the Winter Festival’s in the morning,” Josie answered.
“We’ll be fine,” Linda repeated.
They went to their separate bedrooms. Linda sat upright in her day clothing, heart beating hard as the hours ticked by. Russell came just before dawn. “My back hurts,” he said.
“So come here,” she told him.
He lay down, his side touching her thigh as she stayed upright.
“You didn’t leave,” he said.
“They barricaded the exit,” she told him. “And Hip wouldn’t come. It’s a clusterfuck.”
“You really think they were going to hurt those kids?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I only know they were lying.”
“Where are they now?”
“On their way to somewhere safe.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“No. You’ll tell Lloyd to cut us a deal and you’ll tell yourself it was the right thing.”
Lovingly and without denial, he squeezed her leg. What he said next frightened her deeply. “I talked to that guy, Percy Khoury, tonight while you were out. The nuclear engineer you told me about from the first soccer game.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“He lives across the street. Who knew? These houses are so big it’s hard to see the neighbors. Anyway, I saw him, so I came out. He had this huge tool belt… or I don’t know. He’s weird. I get the feeling the guy could go berserk any second.”
“He vibes that way, doesn’t he? Like a shooter? What happened? Did you talk?”
“He’s obviously crazy. I didn’t want to poke a tiger and ask him about his son. I just asked if something bad happens at this festival.”
Her body went stiff. She’d been asking that very question for a long time now, but was still afraid of the answer. “And?”
“He heard me. But he looked right through me. ‘Get out,’ he said, and then he shoved me and got into his car, which by the way, was loaded with power tools.”
“Huh. Did he mean ‘get out of the way,’ or ‘get out of town’?”
“It’s a coin flip. The guy’s a maniac. What’s the difference? The thing is, once I asked the question out loud, I had this bad feeling. I’ve heard you and the things you’ve been saying, Linda. But I haven’t been thinking them through. I haven’t compared the logic of the two arguments—yours and PV’s—because their foundations are rooted in such different premises.
“On the one hand, we have civic pride and a lot of unnecessary secrecy. The residents want to believe that they’re better than outsiders, otherwise they’d have to admit that they have an unfair allotment of wealth. It’s classic snobbery. On the other hand, we have a group of people so corrupted by their own complicity in polluting the earth while simultaneously hoarding its resources that they’ve invented a religion to exonerate themselves from guilt, from the literal thousands, maybe millions of people they’ve murdered indirectly. We have festivals that you might consider masses led by the founder and his board of directors, who are essentially henchmen with dimples. We even have gestures of prayer to clandestine gods. Who are these gods? We don’t know. But they’re represented by the very birds the town has engineered. It’s incredibly self-centered. They’re the creators, worshipping what they’ve created while also gorging themselves on it.
“Every historical precedent informs us that religious fanatics can be violent, particularly in the presence of a demagogue. Is Parson Junior that demagogue? Maybe. Frankly, I’ve spoken to him personally and he’s not very bright. I think, if anyone, his father was the demagogue and he’s just carrying on tradition. Lloyd and Rachel are reasonable people. They’re likely to shift this thing in a better direction. But Jack… he’s bad. I’ve heard things, Linda, that I’d rather not tell you about. He’s got notorious appetites.”
Goose pimples rolled all down Linda’s body from scalp to legs.
“Religious fanatics tend to believe that their violence is self-protective—they’re fighting an existential threat. In this case, the threat is nuclear disaster, or the end of Plymouth Valley, or possibly even the end of their own hegemony, once BetterWorld is finally indicted for its environmental crimes. They commit human sacrifice as a ritual, a superstitious admission of their own guilt, in the hopes that a higher being will cleanse and protect them from their own demise, only they are this higher being. It’s a screwed-up circle jerk that eats its own future.
“So, we have here, two arguments. One is mundane, if ugly. The other is malignant. I’ve been playing devil’s advocate with you for a long time, despite my private misgivings. I don’t know why. It just seemed like the right approach. We couldn’t both be standing out, asking questions, making scenes. But it occurred to me that these two arguments may coexist.
“What’s interesting is how it started. This town was just a corporate headquarters in the 1980s. They didn’t build the shelter until twenty years after that. Did Parson Senior begin these festivals as part of a corporate retreat? Did they evolve over time, along with the corporation, into something violent? There isn’t any real government here. No laws. For a very long time, they’ve been able to do whatever they’ve wanted.”
Russell liked big concepts and big words, especially when he was nervous. He liked talking big when he was avoiding feeling something, too. “What are you saying?” she asked.
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s real. Having never been to a Winter Festival, we can’t possibly know. Viewed under the lens of a particular kaleidoscope, the Parker children may have been in the path of harm. I would not have done what you did. You risked our family for the sake of another family and to me, that’s wrong. Your loyalty ought to be to us. But the act, itself, was rational. Brave, even. But that’s not surprising.”
“Yeah?” she asked, though she sensed by now where he was going.
“As you know, I draw conclusions with greater deliberation than you. This has been a benefit on occasion. My doggedness is what kept me employed for as long as I was on the outside. It’s also what got the attention of BetterWorld. I don’t think you’d ever have managed that kind of slow drudgery I performed at the EPA. That’s the work that fueled our livelihood.”
“True,” she said. She might have added that she could have gone back into medicine full time, and he could have helped more. Combined, they’d have made a little less money, but their lifestyle back home would have been about the same. But that regret was a buried conch washed away into the ocean. It was gone.
“Admitting fault is hard for me. People can be unkind. Sometimes, and I don’t want to start a fight, Linda, but you’ve been unkind.”
She felt a tightness in her throat. “I know. I remember some of the things I said to you and I feel sick about it. We had a bad dynamic.”
“Yes,” he said. “It might still be bad. I don’t know. I keep telling you I love you and I understand that it’s not enough. But I don’t know the answer to these problems we have.”
“What are you really saying, Russell?”
