Frankenstein’s Daughter
Maureen McHugh is an award winning short story writer and novelist. Her books include the Tiptree Award winner, China Mountain Zhang and the short story collection, Mothers & Other Monsters. Along with Steve Peters and Behnam Karbassi, she is a partner in No Mimes Media, which produces immersive, interactive narratives. She has worked on projects for Nine Inch Nails, the Watchmen movie, and the Halo video game franchise. She lives in Austin, Texas.
“Frankenstein’s Daughter” deals with the ripple effect of miraculous new technologies on those not directly affected by their use.
I’m at the mall with my sister Cara, doing my robot imitation. Zzzt-choo. Zzzt. Zzzt. Pivot on my heel stiffly, 45 degrees, readjust forward, headed toward Sears, my arms stiff and moving with mechanical precision.
“Robert!” Cara says. It’s easy to get her to laugh. She likes the robot stuff a lot. I first did it about a year ago, and it feels a little weird to do it in public, in the mall. But I want to keep Cara happy. Cara is six, but she’s retarded, so she’s more like three or four, and she’ll probably never be more than about four or five. Except she’s big. She was born big. Big bones like a cow. Big jaw, big knuckles. Big blue eyes. Only her blonde hair is wispy. You have to look really hard to see how she resembles Kelsey. Kelsey was my big sister. I’m fourteen. Kelsey was hit by a car when she was thirteen. She’d be twenty now. Cara is Kelsey’s clone, except of course Kelsey wasn’t retarded or as big as a cow. In our living room there’s a picture of Kelsey in her gymnastics leotard, standing next to the balance beam. You can kind of see how Cara looks like her.
“Let’s go in Spencer’s,” I say.
Cara follows me. Spencer’s is like heaven for a retarded girl—all the fake spilled drinks and the black lights and the lava lamps and optical projections and Cara’s favorite, the Japanese string lights. They’re back with the strings of chili pepper lights and the Coca-Cola lights. They sort of look like weird Christmas lights. If you look right at them, all they do is flicker, but if you look kind of sideways at them, you see all these Japanese letters and shit. Cara just stares at them. I think it’s the flicker. While she’s staring, I wander toward the front of the store.
Spencer’s is shoplifter paradise, so they’ve got really good security. There’s this chubby guy in the back, putting up merchandise and sweating up a storm. There are the cameras. There’s a girl at the front cash register who is bored out of her mind and fiddling with some weird Spencer Gifts pen but who can pretty much see anything in the store if she bothers to look. But I’ve got Cara. That, and I understand the secret of shoplifting, which is to have absolutely no emotions. Be cold about the whole thing. I can switch off everything, and I’m just a thinking machine, doing everything according to plan. If you’re nervous, then people notice you. Iceman. That’s my name, my tag. That’s the nickname I use in chatrooms. That’s me.
I look at the bedroom board games. I stand at the shelf so that I pretty much block anything anyone could see in a camera. I don’t know exactly where the cameras are, but if I don’t leave much space between me and the shelf, how much can they really see? I wait. After a minute or two, Cara is grabbing the light strings, and after another couple of minutes the girl who’s watching from the cash register has called someone to go intercept Cara and I palm a deck of Wedding Night Playing Cards. They’re too small to have an anti-theft thing. I don’t even break a sweat, increase my heart rate, nothing. The ice man. I head back to Cara.
Everyone’s just watching the weird retarded girl except this one chubby guy who’s trying to get her to put down the lights but who’s afraid to touch her.
“Not supposed to touch those,” he says. “Where’s your mom? Is your mom here?”
“Sorry!” I say.
The chubby guy frowns at me.
“Cara,” I say. “No hands.”
Cara looks at me, looks at the lights. I gently try to take them.
“No!” she wails. “Pretty!”
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m her brother. She’s developmentally delayed. Cara! Cara, no. No hands.”
She wails but lets me disentangle her hands.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, the concerned big brother. “I was just looking around and thought she was right with me, you know? Our mom’s down at Dillard’s.”
Chubby guy kind of hovers until I get the lights away from Cara, and as soon as I put them on the shelf he grabs them and starts straightening them out and draping them back over the display.
I herd Cara toward the front of the store, mouthing sorry at the front cashier. She’s kind of pretty. She smiles at me. Nice big brother with retarded sister.
Back out in the mall, Cara is wailing, which could start an asthma attack, so to distract her I say, “You want a cookie?”
Mom has Cara on a diet, so of course she wants a cookie. She perks up the way Shelby, our Shetland Sheepdog, does when you say “treat.” I take her to the food court and buy her an M&M cookie and buy myself a Mountain Dew, and then, while she’s eating her cookie, I pull the deck of cards out of my pocket and unwrap it. We’ve got another fifteen minutes before we have to meet my mom.
The idea is to play fish, except every time you get a match you’re supposed to do what it says. Tie partner’s hands with a silk scarf. Kiss anywhere you like and see how long your partner can keep from moving or making any noise. The one who lasts the longest gets to draw an extra card.
Tame but pretty cool. I can’t wait to show Toph and Len.
Cara has chocolate smeared on her mouth, but she lets me wipe her face off.
“You ready to go back to see Mom?” I say.
When we pass Spencer’s again, she stops. “Uhhh,” she says, pointing to the store. Mom always tries to get her to say what she wants, but I know what she wants and I don’t want to fight with her.
“No,” I say. “Let’s go see Mom.”
Cara’s face crumples up, and she hunches her thick shoulders. “Uhhh,” she says, mad.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Come on.”
She swings at me. I grab her hand and pull her behind me. She tries to sit down, but I just keep on tugging, and she follows me, gulping and wailing.
“What did you do?” my mom says when she sees us. My mom had to buy stuff, like gym shorts for me and underwear for herself, so I told her that I’d take Cara with me while she bought her stuff. She’s holding a Dillard’s bag.
“She wanted to go in Spencer’s,” I say. “We went in, but she kept grabbing stuff and I had to take her out and now she’s upset.”
“Robert,” my mom says, irritated. She crouches down. “Ah, Cara mia, don’t cry.”
We trail out of the store, Cara holding Mom’s hand and sniffling.
By the time we get to the car though, Cara’s wheezing. Mom digs out Cara’s inhaler, and Cara dutifully takes a hit. I tried it once, and it was pretty dreadful. It felt really weird trying to get that stuff in my lungs, and it made me feel a little buzzy, but it didn’t even feel good, so it’s pretty amazing that Cara will do it.
Cara sits in her booster seat in the back of the car, wheezing all the way home, getting worse and worse, and by the time we pull in the driveway, she’s got that white look around her mouth.
“Robert,” Mom says, “I’m going to have to take her to the Emergency Room.”
“Okay,” I say and get out of the car.
“You want to call your dad?” Mom asks. “I don’t know how long we’ll be.” Mom checks her watch. It’s three something now. “We may not be home in time for dinner.”
I don’t want to call my dad, who is probably with Joyce, his girlfriend, anyway. Joyce is always trying to be likable, and it gets on my nerves after a while—she tries way too hard. “I can just make a sandwich,” I say.
“I want you to stay at home then,” she says. “I’ve got my cell phone if you need to call.”
“Can Toph and Len come over?” I ask.
She sighs. “Okay. But no roughhousing. Remember you have school tomorrow.” She opens the garage door so I can get in.
I stand there and watch her back down the driveway. She turns back, watching where she’s going, and she needs to get her hair done again because I can really see the gray roots. Cara is watching me through the watery glass, her mouth a little open. I wave good-bye.
I’m glad they’re gone.
I watch my daughter try to breathe. When Cara is having an asthma attack she becomes still—conserving, I think. Her face becomes empty. People think Cara looks empty all the time, but her face is usually alive—maybe with nothing more than some faint reflected flicker of the world around her, like those shimmers of light on the bottom of a pool, experience washing over her.
“Cara mia,” I say. She doesn’t understand why we won’t pick her up anymore, but she weighs over sixty-five pounds and I just can’t.
She doesn’t like the Emergency Room, but it doesn’t scare her. She’s familiar with it. I steer her through the doors, my hand on her back, to the reception desk. I don’t know today’s receptionist. I hand her my medical card. When Cara was born, we officially adopted her, just as if we had done a conventional in-vitro fertilization in a surrogate and adopted the child, so Cara is on our medical plan. Now, of course, medical plans don’t cover cloned children, but Cara was one of the early ones.
The receptionist takes all the information. The waiting room isn’t very full. “Is Dr. Ramanathan on today?” I ask. Dr. Ramanathan, a soft-spoken Indian with small hands, is familiar with Cara. He’s good with her, knows the strange idiosyncrasies of her condition—that her lungs are oddly vascularized, that she sometimes reacts atypically to medication. But Dr. Ramanathan isn’t here.
We go sit in the waiting room.
The waiting room chairs don’t have arms, so I can lay Cara across a chair with her head on my lap and stroke her forehead. Calming her helps keep the attack from getting too bad. She needs her diaper changed. I didn’t think to bring any. We were making some headway on toilet training until about two months ago, but then she just decided she hated the toilet.
I learned not to force things when she decided to be difficult about dinner. She’s big, and although she’s not terribly strong, when she gets mad she packs a wallop. The last time I tried to teach her about using a fork, I tried to fold her hand round it and she started screaming. It’s a shrill, furious scream, not animal at all but full of something terribly human and too old for such a little girl. I grabbed her hand, and she hit me in the face with her fist and broke my reading glasses. So I don’t force things anymore.
The nurse calls us at a little after five.
I settle Cara on the examining table. It’s cold, so I wrap her in a blanket. She watches me, terribly patient, her mouth open. She has such blue eyes. The same eyes as Kelsey and the same eyes as my ex-husband, Allan. I can hear the tightness in her chest. I sit down next to her and hum, and she rubs my arm with the flat of her hand, as if she were smoothing out a wrinkle in a blanket.
I don’t know the doctor who comes in. He is young, and his face seems good-humored and kind. He has a pierced ear. He isn’t wearing an earring, but I can see the crease where his ear is pierced, and it cheers me a little. A little unorthodox, and kind. It seems like a good combination. His name is Dr. Guidall. I do my little speech—that she has asthma, that she had an attack and didn’t respond to the inhaler, that she is developmentally delayed.
“Have you been to the Emergency Room before?” he asks.
“Many times,” I say. “Right, Cara?”
She doesn’t answer; she just watches me.
He examines her, and he is careful. He tells her the stethoscope is going to be cold and treats her like a person, which is a good sign.
“She has odd pulmonary vascularization,” I say.
“Are you a doctor?” he asks.
When Cara’s sister Kelsey had her accident, I was in charge of the international division of Kleinhoffer Foods. Now I sell real estate. “No,” I say. “I’ve just learned a lot with Cara. Sometimes we see Dr. Ramanathan. He’s familiar with Cara’s problems.”
The doctor frowns. Maybe he doesn’t care for Dr. Ramanathan. He’s young. Emergency Room doctors are usually young, at least at the hospital where I take Cara.
“She’s not Down’s Syndrome, is she,” he says.
“No,” I say. I don’t want to say more.
He looks at me, and I realize he’s pieced something together. “Is your daughter the clone?”
The clone. “Yes,” I say. Dr. Ramanathan asked me if he could write up his observations of Cara to publish, and I said yes, because he seems to really care about her. I get requests from doctors to examine her. When she was first born I got hate mail, too. People saying that she should never have been born. That she was an abomination in the sight of God. I’m upset that Dr. Ramanathan would talk about her with someone else.
Dr. Guidall is silent, examining her. I imagine his censure. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s just surprised.
“Is she allergic to anything?”
“She isn’t allergic, but she has atypical reactions to some drugs like leukotriene receptor antagonists.” I keep a list of drugs in my wallet. I pull it out and hand it to him. The list is worn, the creases so sharp that the paper is starting to tear.
“Do you use a nebulizer?” he asks. “And what drug are you using?”
“Budesonide,” I say. I’m not imagining it. He’s curt with me.
He puts a nebulizer—a mask rather than an inhaler, so she won’t have to do anything but breathe—on her face. The doctor leaves to pull her chart from records.
I know we’ll be here a long time. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals.
The doctor wants to punish me, I think. He does a thorough exam of Cara, who has fallen asleep as the asthma attack waned. He listens to her lungs and checks her reflexes and looks in her ears. He doesn’t need to look in her ears. But how many cloned children will he get to examine? Cloning humans is illegal in the United States, although there’s no law against having your child cloned in, say, Israel and then bringing the adopted child into the U.S.
“I don’t like what I’m hearing in her breathing,” he says. “I would like to run some tests.”
He has gotten more formal, which means that something is wrong. I want to go home so bad; I don’t want things to start tonight. Things. The crisis doesn’t always come when you’re tired and thinking about the house you’re going to show tomorrow, but often it does.
The doctor is very young and very severe. It’s easy to be severe when you’re young. I can imagine what he would like to ask. Why the hell did you do it? How do you justify it? Cara’s respiratory defects will kill her, probably before she is twelve, almost certainly before she is eighteen.
He is perhaps furious at me. But Cara is right here. What would the angry people have me do, take her home and put a pillow over her face? How do I tell him, tell them, that when Cara was conceived, I wasn’t sane? Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it.
If he says anything, I will ask him, Do you have any children? I hope you never lose one, I will say.
He doesn’t ask.
Nobody is impressed with the wedding night playing cards because Toph has scored really big. His dad took him along to Computer Warehouse so his dad could buy some sort of accounting software, and while Toph was hanging out playing video games, some salesperson got out Hacker Vigilante to show to some customer and then got paged and forgot to lock it back up. “So I just picked it up and slid it under my shirt,” Toph says, “and then when my dad and me got to the car, I slid it under the seat before he got in.”
We are in awe, Len and me. It’s the biggest thing anyone has ever gotten away with. Toph is studying the box like it’s no big deal, but we can tell he’s really buggin on the whole thing.
I’m not allowed to have Hacker Vigilante. In it, you have to do missions to track down terrorists, and you do all these things to raise money, like steal stuff. My mom won’t let me have it because one of the things that you can do to get money is pick up two teenaged girls at the bus station and get them to make a porn movie for you and then post it on the Internet. You don’t really get to see anything; the girls just start taking off their shirts and the hotel room door closes, but it’s hysterical.
I am dying. I can’t believe it. “Man, that was lucky,” I say, because it was. No salesperson ever left anything that cool out in front of me.
“Hey,” Toph says. “You just gotta know how to be casual.”
“I’m casual,” I say. “I’m way casual. But that just fuckin fell in your lap.”
“You loser,” Toph says, laughing at me. “Fuck you.” Len is laughing at me, too. I can feel my face turning red, and my ears feel hot, and I’m so mad I want to smash their faces in. Toph is just picking up stuff left lying around by dumbass sales droids and I’m setting up scams in fucking Spencer Gifts which everybody knows is really hard to score at because security is like bugfuck tight.
“You wait, asshole,” I say. “You wait. I’ve got an idea for a score. You watch on the bus going to school tomorrow and you’ll see.”
“What?” Len says. “What are you going to do?”
“You’ll see,” I say.
By the time they check Cara into a room, it’s almost seven. I manage to get to a phone and call Allan. Joyce, his girlfriend, answers the phone. “Hi, Joyce,” I say, “this is Jenna. Is Allan around?”
“Sure,” she says. “Hold on, Jenna.”
Joyce. Jenna. Allan likes “J” women. Actually, Allan likes thin women with dark hair and a kind of relentlessly Irish look. Joyce and I could be cousins. Joyce is prettier than I am. And younger. Every time I talk to her, I use her name too much and she uses mine too much. We are working hard to be friendly.
“Jenna?” says Allan. “What’s up?”
“I’m at the hospital with Cara,” I say.
“Do you need me to come down?” he says, too fast. Allan is conscientious. He is bracing himself. Is it a crisis? is what he wants to know.
“No, it’s just an asthma attack, but the doctor in the Emergency Room didn’t like her oxygen levels or something, and they want to keep her. But Robert is home by himself, and they want to do some more tests tonight . . . ”
“Ah. Okay,” he says. “Let me think a moment.”
It’s Sunday night. What can he be doing on a Sunday night? “Are you busy? I mean, am I calling at a bad time . . . “
“No, no,” he says. “Joyce and I were supposed to meet some friends, but I can call them and let them know. It wasn’t anything important.”
I try to think of what they could be doing on a Sunday night.
“It’s just Joyce’s church,” Allan says into the pause. “They have a social thing, actually a kind of study thing on Sunday nights.”
I didn’t know Joyce was religious. “Well,” I say, “maybe you could just check in on him? I mean, will it take you too far out of your way?”
“No,” Allan says, “I’ll go over there.”
“See how things are. If you think he’s all right, maybe you can just call and make sure he’s in bed by ten or something?”
“No,” Allan says, “I can stay with him. You’re going to be there for hours, I know.”
“He’s fourteen,” I say. “Use your judgment. I mean, I hate to impose on you and Joyce.”
“It’s okay,” Allan says. “They’re my kids.”
I feel rather guilty, so I hang up without saying, “Church?” One Christmas my dippy older sister was talking about God protecting her from some minor calamity, some domestic crisis involving getting a dent in her husband’s Ford pickup, and later, as we drove home, Allan said, grinning, “I’m so glad that God is looking after Matt’s pickup. Makes up for whatever he was doing during, you know, Cambodia, or the Black Plague.”
He’s going to church for Joyce.
Well, he went through the whole cloning thing for me. I don’t exactly have the moral high ground.
I go to bed early because my dad and his girlfriend have shown up to baby-sit for me. Toph and Len bug out as soon as Dad shows up. Joyce is being so nice to me that it feels fake, but she’s acting weird toward my dad in the same way: being really nice to him. They’ve brought a movie they rented, and when my dad asks her if she wants popcorn with it, she says things like, “That would be really nice, thank you.” Like they barely know each other.
So I play computer games in my room for a while, and then I go to bed. Shelby, our dog, leaps onto the bed with me. She usually sleeps at the foot of my bed. I get under the covers with my jeans on, and I don’t mean to fall asleep, but I do. Shelby wakes me up when my mom gets home because she hears Mom and starts slapping the bed with her tail. My mom talks with my dad and Joyce for a few minutes—I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can hear the murmur. I pretend to still be asleep when my mom checks in on me. Shelby is all curled up but happy to see Mom, and my mom comes in and says “Shhh” and pets her a minute.
The hard part is staying awake after that. My clock says 11:18 when my mom leaves my room, and I want to give her at least half an hour to be good and sound asleep. But I nod off, and when I wake up with a jerk it’s 1:56 a.m.
I almost don’t get up. I’m really tired. But I make myself get up. Shelby wakes up and leaps off my bed. Shelby is my big worry about sneaking out. If I lock her in my room, she’ll scratch and then she’ll bark. So she follows me downstairs, and I let her out back. Maybe Mom will just think that Shelby had to go out, although usually if Shelby has to go out, I sleep right through it, and she goes downstairs and pees in the dining room, and then my mom gets really twisted at me the next morning.
I almost fall asleep on the couch waiting for Shelby to come back in. I could tell Toph and Len that my dad came over and I couldn’t sneak out, and do it tomorrow night. But while Shelby is out, I make myself go into the basement and get a can of black spray paint. My mom used black spray paint to repaint the patio furniture, and most of this can is still left.
I have a navy hooded sweatshirt, and I slide open the back door, let Shelby in, and go out the back. That way the door only opened twice: once to let Shelby out, and then to let Shelby in.
The backyard is dark, and the cold is kind of startling. Mom keeps saying that she can’t believe that in four weeks it will be Memorial Day and the pools will be open, but I like the cold. I look up at the stars. The only constellation I know is Orion, but if it is up, it’s behind the trees or on the other side of the house. I bet Shelby is watching me through the window when I come around the front of the house. I can’t see her, but I know what she looks like cause she does it every time people go out in the car; she’s standing on the couch so she can look out the window, but all we’d be able to see is just this little miniature Lassie face with her ears up all cute.
I walk down the street, and I feel like people are watching me out the windows, watching me like Shelby. But all the windows are dark. Still, anyone looking out would see me, and it’s after curfew. I should cut through the yards, but they’re too dark and people’s dogs would bark and people would think I was stealing stuff and call the police—and mostly I just don’t want to.
It’s a couple of miles to the police station—which is past the middle school. After a while I stop feeling like people are looking at me. They’re all in their beds, and I’m out here. I’m the only one moving. I can picture them, all cocooned in their beds. Unaware.
I’m aware. All you sleeping people. I’m out here. And you don’t know anything about me. I could do stuff while you sleep.
It’s so cool. It’s great. I’m like some sort of assassin or something. The Iceman. That’s me. Moving out here in the dark. I’m a wolf, and you’re all just rabbits or something.
I’m feeling so good. I’m not cold, because I’m walking and I’m feeling so good. By the time I get to the police station, I feel better than anything. Better than after I steal something, which up until now has been the best. But this is the best. The Iceman out moving in the dark. The dark is my friend. I watch the police station for a while, but nothing’s moving. I shake the paint can, and the ball bearing in it sounds loud, and for a moment my heart hammers, but then I’m okay again.
I’m casual. I’m better than casual. I’m Special Forces. I’m fucking terror in the streets.
I take a minute and look at the wall. I spray the words on the side, really big, big enough to be seen from the bus:
TO REPORT A CRIME CALL 425-1234
I sketch them fast and then carefully fill them in. Then I sketch my tag—”Iceman.” I make the letters all sharp and spiky. It’s a bitch that I’ve only got black paint—it should be blue and white with black outline. I carefully start darkening the “I.” Toph and Len will just die. It’s so funny to me that I’ve got this grin on my face. They’re going to come by on the bus, and there it will be. Tagging the fucking police station. 425-1234 really is the police phone number. First I was going to put PROTECTED BY NEIGHBORHOOD BLOCK WATCH, but I thought this was funnier.
Then the squad car coasts up behind me and turns the floodlights on, and the whole world is white.
I had no idea that police stations had waiting rooms, but when I go to pick up Robert, that’s where I end up. It’s a room with seats along the walls and fluorescent lights and a bulletproof window. The window has one of those metal circles in it, like movie theaters. I tell the young woman that I’m Robert’s mother and I got a call to come down and get my son, and she picks up a phone to tell someone I’m here.
A cop comes out with Robert. Robert looks properly scared. The cop, who has sandy hair and a handlebar moustache and looks rather boyish, introduces himself as Bruce Yoder. Yoder is an Amish name, although Bruce Yoder obviously isn’t Amish. I bet his parents are Mennonite, which is less strict than Amish. It’s what you do if you’re Amish and you don’t have any high school education but you want a car. You become Mennonite. And now their son is a cop, the route to assimilation of my Irish ancestors. Why am I thinking this while my son, who is almost as tall as the cop, stands sullen and afraid with his hands jammed in the front pocket of his sweatshirt?
We walk outside and around the building so I can survey Robert’s handiwork.
The police station is pale, sandstone-colored brick and the black letters, as tall as me, stand out even in the dim light. I don’t know what to say. Finally I say, “What’s ‘Iceman’?”
When he doesn’t answer, I say, “Robert?”
“A nickname,” he says.
The cop says to me, “You’re the family with the little girl, the clone.”
“Yes,” I say. “Cara.” When people call her “the clone,” I always feel compelled to tell them her name. The cop looks a little embarrassed.
We go back inside, and I talk to the cop. Robert has been booked, and he’ll have a hearing in front of a family court referee. I say I’m sorry a number of times. A family court referee. That’s what we need. That’s what everyone needs, someone to tell us the rules. When the phone rang, I thought it was the hospital, that something had happened to Cara, and then I was washed with clear, cold rage. How can you do this to me? But it isn’t about me, of course.
Allan walks in. I called him before I left the house, and he said, as soon as he understood that it wasn’t Cara, as soon as he understood what was going on, “He’ll have to come live with me. You can’t do this, not with Cara.”
I am so glad to see him. There have been times I loved him, times I hated him, but now he is kin. For all his flaws and for all my flaws, seeing Allan walk in wearing an old University of Michigan sweatshirt, with his hair tousled so I can see how thin it is getting, and his poor vulnerable temples, I feel only relief, and my eyes fill with tears. It’s unexpected, this crying.
Allan talks to the cop, the ex-Amish cop, while I sniffle into a wadded-up and ancient Kleenex I found in the pocket of my jacket.
We walk back outside. “I think I should take him home with me tonight,” Allan says. “We’ll follow you to the house, get him some things. I’ll call in tomorrow and start arranging for him to go to school in Marshall.”
Robert says, “What?”
Allan says, “You’re going to come live with me.”
Robert says, his voice cracking across the syllables, “For how long?”
“For good, I suppose,” Allan says.
“Is Joyce—” I almost say, “Is Joyce at your place,” but I can’t ask that.
“Joyce left early; she’s got to go to work tomorrow,” Allan says, and he looks off across the parking lot, his mouth pursed. This is a problem for him, a monkey wrench.
I start to reach out and say “I’m sorry” again, and tears well up, again.
“What about school?” Robert asks. “I’ve got to go to school tomorrow. I’ve got an algebra test on Tuesday!”
“That,” Allan says quietly, “is the least of your problems.”
“What about my friends!” Robert says. “You can’t do this to me!” I can see his eyes glistening, too. The family that cries together.
“I can,” Allan says, “and I will. Now you’ve put your mother and me through enough. Get in the car.”
“No!” Robert says. “You can’t make me!”
Allan reaches for his arm, to grab him, and Robert slips away, dancing, tall and gangly, and then blindly turns and runs.
I open my mouth, drawing in the breath to shout his name, and he is running, long legs like his father’s, full of health and desperation, running pointlessly. It’s inescapable, what he is running from, but in the instant before I shout his name I am glad, glad to see him running, this boy of mine who will, I think, survive. “Robert!” I shout, at exactly the same time as his father, but Robert is heading down the street, head up, arms pumping. He won’t go far.
“Robert!” his father shouts again.
I am glad, oh so glad. Run, I think joyfully. Run, you sweet bastard. Run!