Fan nodded.
And this is for you.
It was a pretty little box of red lacquered wood, its lid inlaid in faux pearl with the figure of a delicate, reposing crane.
Go ahead, open it.
She suddenly didn’t want to, but he insisted. It was a silver locket on a silver chain. He had her open the locket and inside there was a diamond, small but dazzling and cut in a perfectly faceted oval.
It’s a real one, he said. Antique, not manufactured as most all diamonds are these days. It’s worth quite a sum. Probably more than you can imagine. It’s all yours, Fan. But don’t put it on now. Let this be our secret, yes? Why don’t you wear it only at night, when you go to bed. All right? How nice that would be. Will you be a good, sweet girl and do that?
Our Fan, we can well imagine, could not sleep that night. After returning with Mister Leo from the office and giving the therapy to Loreen, she went right up to her room. The necklace was in her pocket and she dropped it on the night table, not wanting it touching her. The others had been wondering where she and Mister Leo had gone, but once she presented the vials Loreen was overjoyed, hugging her and Quig and even Mister Leo, despite his visibly stiffening at her embrace. Quig was squarely looking at her now but Fan wouldn’t acknowledge him, afraid she might betray her dread. She must get away but not before Loreen and Quig were back at the Smokes and Sewey’s medicine was secured and after the well-drilling was done. She would have to endure for that long at least. But there was no lock on her bedroom door or on the door of her bathroom, and she wondered whether Mala would let her stay in her room after tomorrow, when Quig and Loreen departed. Although when she pictured the girls on Mala’s viewer, a streak of panic flashed through her; was she imagining it, or had some of them been adorned with an inordinately fancy piece of jewelry, a stud earring or gold ring or pearl necklace? And through all these years, with all those girls, had Mala been a knowing bystander, or abettor, or worse?
She kept the bed lamps on and read from Penelope’s handscreen. She was going to stay up all night, fighting it. Yet at some point in the scant moments before dawn she must have fallen dead asleep. For the lamps around her were turned off, the veil of the night drawn down over her. And we can barely recount what was about to happen next, for how awful it could have been, for when she gasped from the touch on the cap of her knee, and the horrid murmuring blandishments, she half cried out. There was the stricture of Mister Leo’s hand. She did have time to deeply breathe. She was passing out. He was fully heavy on her and now she wished to be gone, but before anything else could happen, he was sliding away. And the voice she heard was not his but Miss Cathy’s, telling her husband to get off the bed.
15
Why, in the life of a community, does a certain happening or person become the stuff of lore? You would probably say great accomplishment is the reason, such as when one of our B-Mor children triumphed in an event for the first time ever in the biannual regional track meet (in the four-thousand-meter event), this against a field of intensively coached, superprimed Charters. We will note the historical significance of the achievement, basking in the reflected glory, for naturally we would like to think how it is emblematic of the best qualities of our kind, even if we ourselves can hardly summon the effort to jog half a block in pursuit of a candy wrapper skittering away on a sudden gust of wind.
It’s our common character on display, which is why we invest so much of ourselves — often totally beyond reason — in particular figures and performers, both fictive and of flesh. And when that display is unsettling or notorious, we can collectively wring our hands and wail and then try to assuage the disquiet in our hearts by more coolly interrogating its antecedents, the conditions and causes of its expression, and debate about how we might curb a future recurrence, none of this cynically posed but subtly servicing the final hopeful notion that This Is Not We.
Yet sometimes, as in the instance of our dear Fan, the talk lingers. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have much actual footage of her, unlike that of the long-distance runner, or even of Joseph niftily curling a shot into the goal. There’s no more to see on our handscreens after that first surveillance vid of her exit, nothing at all, and so the secondary rumor and conjecture continues to root and grow. We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it. Our telling becomes an irrepressible vine whose hold becomes stronger than the originating stock and sometimes even topples it, replacing it altogether.
And while we shall resume our trailing of what happened to Fan et al. after Miss Cathy’s intervention, we feel the need to return at least briefly to B-Mor, where rumors had spread about imminent cutbacks in the production facilities because of the oversupply of fish and now produce and then even some outlandish scenarios about the eventual shutdown and closure of B-Mor itself. For after the price of fish dropped precipitously, so, too, did the prices on our succulent vegetables, the markets of our neighborhoods for a time selling produce by the crate, the obvious explanation being that Charter suspicion of our products had widened, branding even those perfectly sheened and plump tomatoes that Reg and his coworkers would pick to be somehow perilous to their health.
As with what occurred with the falling price of fish, our first impulse was to buy as much as we could of normally very expensive Charter-bound fresh peas and cucumbers and sweet corn, most everyone freezing and salting and canning whatever their households couldn’t consume, so much so that the price of pickling jars tripled and then quadrupled before the containers of new jars finally got trucked in. By that time, the supply of ripened, ready produce had more or less equilibrated, our facilities adjusting accordingly to the lowered Charter demand, and the unfortunate B-Mor fellow who remortgaged his clan’s row house to bring in the jars was ruined, as the price suddenly dropped below what they used to cost.
In fact, we just heard of his body being discovered blocking one of the intakes of a pond in West B-Mor; he’d come up from the bottom, having drowned himself by tying dozens of jars filled with gravel to his wrists and ankles. Apparently the pond fish had pecked enough at his body to release him from the twine, and not just where he was anchored, which precluded any traditional viewing of the body at his funeral. There were whispers that his clan had done him in, in retribution for being saddled with a now enormous, multigenerational debt. There was also a spate of ironic, off-color comments on the boards and in the neighborhoods, about how the fish were developing their own taste for “B-Mor prime,” for the truth of the matter is that there has been a noticeable rise in the number of people choosing to do away with themselves, and then selecting the park ponds for the site of their demise. Firearms are banned in B-Mor, and the only widely available lethal weapon is a kitchen knife, which is no easy instrument when contemplating suicide. Most people have neither CO-producing vehicles nor garages, there are few accessible, assuredly high-enough places from which to jump, pills are strictly regulated and meagerly dispensed, and so the waters beckon the hopeless and desperate (plus the fact that very few of us can swim). In the commentary there were jests about the tenderness of the cheeks of Jar Man versus those of Popped Rice Cake Lady (who rashly sold her successful kiosk and invested in opening a fancy health-smoothie shop), or the likely gamey flavor of another fellow who was known to spend whole mornings eating slices of blood sausage dipped in pepper salt while he wagered on New China cockfights streaming live on his handscreen.
We know of others who, perhaps shaken by the soured spirit of our community, have also chosen the nether path. There are no official directorate numbers — never would such things be published — but it seems that everybody has heard of someone from the block or the neighboring clan who has chosen to depart. Maybe they would have done so anyway, maybe their own demons were inevitably going to consume them, but we have to wonder why there have been so many in such a relatively brief period, and what this might suggest about the relationship between the public realm and private lives in our settlement.