“For what?” Fayza asked.
“The whole thing. A new chemjet, and a full set of ingredient packs.”
“And you are receiving these when?”
“Tomorrow night. In Cornwall.”
Dr. Gloria said, “Here is where we make her part of the solution.” She told me what to say next, and I almost rebelled. “Trust me,” Gloria said.
Fortunately, my hesitation could be interpreted as shame. “There’s only one problem,” I said. “They want forty-thousand Yuan.”
“And you don’t have this money?”
I shook my head. It felt so heavy from the water. “Not yet.”
Fayza leaned in, squinting, as if she didn’t hear me correctly: one of the library of power moves that adults used to signal that other adults were fucking idiots. “You arranged to buy from these people,” she said, “and you don’t have the money?”
“I was going to call everyone I knew,” I said. “Uncles, cousins, old friends. Open credit lines. Go in with loan sharks if I had to.”
“Unbelievable,” Fayza said. She walked away from me, thinking. After thirty seconds of silence she turned and said, “Hootan and Aaqila will go with you. And if you’re lying, they will kill you. You know this to be true, yes?”
Aaqila stared at me. She seemed to be already imagining it.
“I understand,” I said. I didn’t need any prompting from Gloria.
“Good,” Fayza said. “Until we leave, you’ll be staying with Aaqila.”
“What? No. I’m not—”
“Do not press me, Lyda.”
Dr. Gloria bristled. “We are so going to smite her ass,” she said. “At the first Goddamn opportunity.”
My angel. My protector. Keeper of my rage.
* * *
Aaqila lived in one of the two-story houses on Tyndall Avenue. The drive over in Hootan’s car was ridiculously short, like a golf cart ride from green to tee. Hootan didn’t have time to ask about my wet hair or what had happened inside the salon. Or maybe he didn’t dare; he seemed in awe of Aaqila, or maybe infatuated with her. Aaqila barely acknowledged him.
The house was dark, and Aaqila didn’t turn on any lights. In a distant room, someone snored vigorously. I imagined sleeping parents and grandparents, rooms crowded with immigrant cousins. But in the dimness it was difficult to make out any details of the home. Dr. Gloria walked with me, but her artificial glow was no help because we hadn’t been in this house before. Fauxtons, I called them; they could not illuminate what I hadn’t already seen.
Aaqila led me up to a bedroom, unlocked the door, and woke up a little girl who was sleeping inside. The child was dressed in pink nylon pajamas, and her hair was long and frizzy, almost an afro.
My chest tightened. I stepped back, but Aaqila didn’t notice.
“Sleep in my room,” Aaqila told the girl. She climbed out of bed without a fuss and walked sleepily past us.
“How old is she?” I asked. “Nine? Ten?”
“None of your business,” Aaqila said.
Inside the room, Aaqila patted me down and told me to empty my pockets. I complied as automatically as the little girl, handing over my nylon wallet, a wad of bills, some change. When I touched the pen I hesitated. I needed that to get in touch with Ollie. If we didn’t talk before tomorrow night, the plan would fall apart, and they would kill me.
Aaqila took the pen. “Now your boots.”
“You’re kidding me,” Dr. Gloria said.
She wasn’t. Aaqila dumped the smaller articles into one of the boots and stepped out of the room with the pair. Then she shut the door and locked it.
I thought, who locks a kids’ bedroom door from the outside? What about fires? I went to the single window and opened the drapes. They were blocked by steel bars, like the grates that had sealed off the Elegant Lady salon. So either the parents were afraid of the little girls running away, or were terrified of rapists. Or maybe the Millies required that every house in the neighborhood included a room that could double as a cell.
The girl’s taste in décor indicated a future as an Elegant Lady; the walls and the bedclothes all vibrated in the same annoying end of the spectrum as the salon. The covers of the twin bed were pulled back, leaving an empty space where the girl had slept in a nest of stuffed animals.
Dr. G said, “Have you noticed there are no electronics? No screens, no pens. Even the stuffed animals are nonrobotic. And look, books! Paper books.” She was trying to distract me.
“That little girl,” I said. “She was so pretty.”
“I didn’t notice. Now, about tomorrow—”
“Please, just … stop talking.” I lay down in the bed. It was still warm.
Dr. Gloria took a seat across the room. My personal night-light. I rolled away from her and pulled one of the pillows to my belly.
THE PARABLE OF
the Million Bad Mothers
There was a woman who gave birth to a beautiful child, and after the nurse washed and bundled the infant in new blankets she came to the mother and said, “Would you like to hold the baby?”
The woman noticed that the nurse did not say your baby or your daughter. The staff had been informed of the situation, and were careful to avoid possessive nouns.
The woman ached to hold the child. But should she? What cascade of effects would result from that act? This was the first decision she would have to make in the next seventy-two hours, and it paralyzed her.
The fetus had been exposed to a massive amount of NME 110. No one knew what effect the dose had already had on the child’s developing brain or what the prognosis would be. The mother knew firsthand what permanent damage the drug could inflict on adult tissue, and neither she nor the doctors had any right to expect a mentally healthy child. Initial tests were inconclusive. The girl had low APGAR scores, but she was also born four weeks premature. Only time would tell.
On the bedside table was a multipage form labeled “Final and Irrevocable Surrenders for Adoption.” Not one surrender, the mother thought, but an unknowable number of them, a surrender for every day of the rest of her life.
It would be her decision to sign the form or not. She did not want to make this decision, and was surprised that anyone in her mental condition would be allowed to. She was clearly not sane. On the other hand, the law made it clear that insanity did not automatically render you unfit for parenthood (see: Everyone v. Their Parents).
There were other complicating factors. The mother was a dual citizen of the United States and Canada; the other legal parent, though dead, was survived by a wealthy family who might sue for custody; and the newborn herself was American. Any adoption forced upon the mother by DCFS would be jurisdictionally murky. So: It would be the mother’s signature, and hers alone, that would deliver the child unto strangers.
But not yet. The state of Illinois mandated a waiting period after the child’s birth, and the mother could not take that final, irrevocable step until the time had elapsed.
Three days. Seventy-two hours. 259,200 seconds.
The woman considered the waiting period to be a punishment. Social services did not realize that being forced to make the decision was itself a life sentence. No, more than that: the sentence of an infinite number of lifetimes. The number of variables she had to consider created not some branching tree, but a node diagram like those models of the human mind created by naïve computer scientists, each node connected to the others by input and output lines, some strong, some weak. The number of paths through those nodes was impossible for her to calculate. Almost any result could come out of a system that complicated.
In some lifetimes, the girl exhibited no effects from the drug. Her IQ was high, her emotions stable, her grasp on reality as firm as any child’s.
In other lifetimes, a doctor found a drug to make the mother sane, and she was released from the hospital. The mother, who had refused to sign the adoption papers, was reunited with her daughter before the girl was old enough to remember the absence.