Or, the mother signed and the girl was adopted by a loving family with all the emotional and financial resources to deal with a brain-damaged child.
In other lifetimes, the girl exhibited no symptoms of Numinous until the age of twelve, when she developed early-onset schizophrenia. There were incidents of violence. The adoptive parents—good people, but unprepared for such a destructive child—institutionalized the girl.
In yet other lifetimes the mother refused to give up custody, and so when she failed to get better—in fact, got worse year by year—the daughter was shuffled from one foster home to another, never knowing the love of parents, never knowing a permanent home.
In some lifetimes, the institution the daughter found herself in was full of highly trained, caring people, who knew how to help the girl achieve her potential. She managed her mental disorder and went on to public high school, where she excelled in science and math.
In some lifetimes, the mother insisted upon a closed adoption, and the daughter, confused and terrified by the strange workings of her mind, unable to tell the difference between reality and hallucination, and unable to reach out to her biological mother for explanations, stole a box cutter from her adopted father’s toolbox and carved her own kind of sense into her skin. Pain was real. Pain was something she could hold onto.
In the lifetimes in which the mother allowed for an open adoption, the precocious daughter Googled her mother’s name and was horrified; the girl’s own anxieties, which she had been told were experienced by lots of other children, suddenly seemed more sinister, not normal at all, the symptoms of a latent defect that would cause her to live in fear of her own mind for the rest of her life.
And so on. Each node that was touched sent a ripple across the web of possibilities.
The nurse asked a second time, “Would you like to hold her?”
Again the mother could not answer. Her bones felt as fragile as balsa wood. If the nurse placed the baby in her arms, the mother would split and shatter, and if she did not fall apart she would not be able to let the child go.
It was then that an angel of the Lord who had been watching nearby spoke. “You’ve got to stop this,” she said. The mother’s mind was filled with nodes and glowing lines, the dreams and nightmares multiplying by the second.
The angel removed her glasses and said, “Listen to me. What the child needs in this moment is to be held.”
The mother shouted, “You don’t know that! I don’t know that, so you don’t!” She said this aloud. She had not yet learned the skill of talking silently to her angel. Yet immediately she realized the mistake. The nurse stepped back from the bed and turned aside, an unconscious movement to protect the baby. Then she left the room.
“Goddamn it!” the mother shouted. She picked up the plastic water bottle and threw it at her angel. The IV tube ripped from her arm. The bottle clattered against the far wall.
The mother put her hand to her bleeding arm. She was dehydrated and did not have tears to waste, but still she wept. She was delusional. She knew that this was the way schizophrenics thought. This was the way her own mother had behaved before they took her away. All her life she’d been on guard, watching for signs of her mind twisting toward its genetic predisposition. She’d armed herself with advanced degrees. She was determined that she would not become her mother. And she prayed, as only an atheist can pray, that her own daughter would not inherit the damage.
The angel of the Lord waited for perhaps a minute, then went to the mother’s bedside and placed an arm around her shoulders.
“You’re imaginary,” the mother said.
“It’s true,” the angel said.
Still, the woman was grateful for that cool touch. Proof, if any more was needed, that she was unfit to be a mother.
“I’m a murderer,” she said to the angel.
“You did not kill Mikala,” the angel said, but the woman could not trust her. The angel’s job, the mother believed, was to comfort her, to tell her things she wanted to hear, and show her what she needed to see.
She decided to sign the form. Her daughter deserved a real mother, a loving mother, who had not committed terrible crimes.
She held fast to that decision for several minutes. Then she thought, But what if…?
There were 71 hours and 30 minutes to go.
—G.I.E.D.
CHAPTER TWELVE
East of the city the 401 rode the lip of Lake Ontario like a dare until it lost courage and angled north into farmland. I’d grown up in a small town an hour north of that highway, and I’d traveled a good chunk of the road from Windsor to Quebec. It was a boring drive, and I was exhausted. Despite the fact that I was traveling against my will with armed gangsters, the trip would be a five-hour exercise in maintaining consciousness.
Throughout the night I’d dreamed of white corridors, then awoke suffocating, unable to catch my breath. For the rest of the day I’d been kept prisoner in the family living room by Aaqila’s mother, a woman only a few years older than me who spoke adequate English. I never caught her name. She fed me microwave lasagna and orange soda and forced us to watch a marathon rebroadcast of her favorite reality show, Beam Me Up! Each episode, a wealthy first-world family switched places for a month with a third-world one. It was evidently a huge hit. Half the show, the audience could chuckle warm-heartedly at yokels from Darfur oohing and aahing over the Albertson’s produce section; the other half they could laugh out loud at white Republicans from Ohio pulling ticks off their asses.
Aaqila came in and out of the living room, but spent most of the time in another part of the house, playing the sulky babysitter. Dr. Gloria and I talked about running away. We were pretty sure I wouldn’t get far in this neighborhood. Plus Aaqila still had my boots and other belongings, including the pen. God, I itched for a phone. All I wanted was two minutes with a keypad. If I couldn’t reach Ollie, I was never going to get out of Canada, at least not breathing. Fayza would find out soon enough that there was no chemjet coming by boat from America, and I’d find out soon enough what it was like to be dead.
Just before episode nine of Beam Me Up!—“The Mackenzies of Colorado are arrested by North Korean police!”—Aaqila’s mother paused the screen and went into the kitchen to make us a snack. Something glimmered at the edge of my vision, and Dr. Gloria said, “The writing is on the wall.”
Red letters flickered across the striped wallpaper. It said: Been listening.
“Are you doing that?” I said to Gloria.
Gloria put up her hands. “Don’t look at me.”
The words changed—a longer sentence. I jumped from my seat, and my body obstructed some of the message. I turned toward the living room window. There was a two-foot gap between the curtains, and through it I could see a few people on the street. One of them, standing directly across from the window, was a figure in a baseball cap and heavy jacket who could have been a twelve-year-old boy.
I stepped back. The message changed again. Three more sentences written in flickering laser light appeared. Dr. Gloria studied them with me, memorizing them.
Aaqila’s mother walked into the room. “Ready?” she asked.
The words were still glowing on the wall. I jumped toward the woman and took the bowl she was carrying. It was full of assorted nuts mixed with a spice that smelled like rosemary.
“Are these an Afghan snack?” I asked, trying to keep her attention on me. “They look delicious.”
“I got them at Whole Foods,” she said, and reached for the remote.
“Clear,” Dr. Gloria said. The words had disappeared.
I tried to look as bored and anxious as I had all day, but inside I was almost collapsing from relief. Ollie had told me that pens were tracking devices, and ever since Hootan had picked me up at Bobby’s apartment I’d been praying that she was following me. Now I knew that she’d done more than that: She’d tracked me, listened in, and formed a plan.