“Keep your voice down,” she said in a scraping whisper. She closed the French doors so their voices wouldn’t carry upstairs. “I want to look into it.”
“Fine, but keep in mind that Sheila loves to impress. She’s always dropping names and telling secrets. She rents a place on Martha’s Vineyard and leads you to believe she’s drinking buddies with Diane Sawyer and Alan Dershowitz. Not to mention how much so-and-so paid for their house.”
“So, what’s your point?”
“My point is that Sheila MacPhearson embellishes the truth. She exaggerates. Remember what she said when she showed us this house? That it was the childhood home of a ‘famous movie director.’ Her exact words. For days I had thought Steven Spielberg grew up here. Then we find out it’s some guy who did a music video for MTV.”
“So you’re saying that Sheila is lying?”
“I’m saying I don’t believe they’ve got some procedure that can turn your average Jack and Jill into a Stephen Hawking or Marilyn Vos Savant.”
“Well, I’m going to look into it.”
“Suit yourself, but don’t get your hopes up.”
She hated his absolutist manner. It was something he used on his workers to bring them to their knees, but she resented when he brought it home. It was obnoxious and failed to intimidate her. She also hated the possibility that he was right. That out of desperation she was chasing white rabbits on some offhanded remark by good-hearted Sheila MacPhearson.
Martin must have read the turn of her mind because he instantly softened. “Honey, more than anybody else you should know how these things don’t work. We tried every gimmick in the books and then some. It’s all a myth: It can’t be done—not in the first three years or the next or the next. That’s all a pipe dream of die-hard liberals who want to believe they can make poor inner city kids intellectually equal to children of white affluent suburbanites: How to flatten the bell curve. But it doesn’t work. The human brain is a Pentium chip made of meat: It’s got all the circuit potential it’s ever going to have.”
There’s a hole in our son’s brain, a voice in her head whispered. A gap. Missing circuitry. A deficiency in his left hemisphere. And I put it there for better sex.
Every other minute of the day she had thought about telling him, of finally spewing the vomit from her soul; but she really didn’t know if she could live with the consequence. She really didn’t believe that Martin could ever forgive her. He was like that—he held grudges. And what greater grudge than that against the woman who had ruined his only child? Even if in time, she could work up the nerve to confess—fortified by the fact that at the time she was young, foolish, and unaware of the risks—the proper punishment would be to watch Dylan grow up impaired, her secret festering within her the rest of her life.
“I see no harm in looking into it.”
Martin nodded. “By the way, did she say what the enhancement procedure actually is?”
“She didn’t know.”
“But she said it works wonders,” he muttered sarcastically. “I’m just wondering: If they’ve got some kind of procedure to make you smarter, how come the world doesn’t know about it? How come Peter Jennings and The Boston Globe haven’t gotten the scoop on it? And how come there aren’t IQ jack-up centers in every hospital and clinic in the country?”
Martin was no fool. If she protested too much, he would wonder at her desperation. “Martin, I really don’t know,” she said, trying to sound neutral. But she was struggling between anger at his patronizing manner and her own transparency. He was right: She knew nothing about the procedure or those behind it. She wasn’t even sure where the place was located. “Forget it. Forget I ever brought it up,” she said.
“But you did. And what bothers me is how come you’re so wide-eyed about some foolish claim about boosting our son’s intelligence?”
For a long moment she just stared blankly at him, not being able to summon an answer. She felt the press of tears but pushed them down. “Because I’m feeling desperate. Because it makes me sick to think what he’s going to go through. Because … oh, nothing. Nothing!”
“Nothing,” he repeated. “Well, the only enhancement we need around here is our love life.”
Rachel slammed the dishwasher closed. She was not going to respond. He knew that she just didn’t feel like having sex, that she was going through a down spell.
Suddenly the French doors flew open and Dylan walked in. He had his pajamas on, but the shirt was on backward and inside out, the label under his chin. In his hand was a big zoo picture book.
“Daddy, can you read me ‘bout the aminals … I mean anminals … I mean anlimals?”
Rachel burst into tears and left the room.
24
“If you keep this up, you’re going to starve.”
Vera glared at him. Travis didn’t like Vera. She wasn’t warm or kind like his mom, and she had hard flat eyes like a catfish.
Yesterday when he had stopped eating and talking, she called in Phillip to help. (Travis vaguely remembered him as the man who carried him out of the seaplane that first night.) They had wanted him to eat so he could be healthy for “the tests”—whatever those were. He wondered if they were like the ones he took in January for the SchoolSmart scholarship.
Phillip’s was the only other face that Travis had laid eyes on here. And it was a scary face—a pale, tight, unsmiling stone with gray eyes that poked you when they stared. Vera had called him in to make Travis take his pills. He could still feel Phillip grip the lower half of his face in that big meaty hand and squeeze until Travis’s mouth opened. Then Phillip tossed in the pills and squirted water down his throat with a plastic squeeze bottle and clamped his mouth shut so he had to swallow or choke.
While Vera circled him, Travis sat still in the beanbag chair looking blankly across the room at the TV His eyes did not follow her, nor did he answer her.
He had stopped asking for his mother. He had stopped asking when he was going home. Most of the day, all he would do was stare at the television, losing himself in the mindless flickering of colors and squealy voices.
Beside him was a cardboard tray with a sandwich, a cup of carrots, pudding, and a carton of milk, now warm. There had been a Snickers bar, which he had pocketed. The rest he hadn’t touched, and it had been sitting there for several hours.
Vera brought the tray over and handed him the sandwich wedge. It was peanut butter and grape jelly. She wagged it under his nose, but he turned his head away. She pressed it closer until it pressed onto his lips. He turned his head even farther away.
“I just talked to your mother on the telephone.”
Travis’s head twitched, and he glanced tentatively at the woman.
“She asked about you and said to tell you that you had to eat your food or she would be sad.”
Slowly he looked at the woman.
She raised the sandwich to his mouth again. “She said that she missed you, so does Beauregard. But if you eat and get your strength back you can go home.”
“You’re lying.”
Vera looked at him, shocked at the first words he had spoken in two days. “I’m not lying. I just got off the phone with her, I’m telling you. She called to see how you were doing on the tests. But if you don’t eat, you can’t take them which means you can’t go home.”
“His name isn’t Beauregard.”
She stared at him with those small dead catfish eyes. “Look, I made a mistake,” she said. “So what’s his name?”