worn suits to their high school graduation and wondered why they would be given them now, when summer was just starting, when they would be lifeguarding at the public pool, in swim trunks and flip-flops all day long. They were looking forward to marking themselves with zinc oxide. Their faces in tribal patterns.
“Thank you, Frederick,” said Silas.
“Thank you, Shirley,” said Abe.
“You’ve been so generous to us,” Silas said.
“Why suits?” asked Abe.
The Jacksons did not answer, but Frederick said, “Now put everything back in and zip up the suitcases.” Which the boys did.
“Now roll them over here, to the front door,” Shirley instructed, and the boys obeyed.
When the twins were at the front door, with their suitcases beside them, and Frederick and Shirley facing them, like short tackling blocks, Frederick said, “Put out your hands for the last birthday gift.”
Two white envelopes. They peeked inside; a wad of crisp bills, marked by Shirley’s iron.
“That, boys, is a thousand dollars each,” Frederick said, and Shirley reached between them and opened the front door. The boys turned their heads and looked outside. The four of them stood there in silence, staring through the open door, down the walk lined in daisies, to the street, where cars were neatly parked. A little girl on a yellow bike rode past and beeped her horn.
“It’s the way it works,” Frederick said at last. “We really are sorry.”
“Wait, what?” Silas said.
“What works what way?” Abe asked, his eyes wide, never moving off Frederick’s face.
Then Shirley said, “You’ve been selected, so there’s no reason to delay the inevitable. Anyway, we need your room for the next set of needy kids.”
Over the years, the Jacksons had said the twins would never have to go, would not be fostered out at eighteen, would stay with them for as long as was right, through college and graduate school. Silas was interested in architecture, Abe in medicine. There had been talk, when they were younger, that the Jacksons would make sure that by the time the twins walked out the open front door, they would be set up for life. What Shirley said made no sense to them, but clearly something had happened, or gone wrong, to change the minds of their surrogate parents.
Silas and Abe protested, then yelled, then grabbed on to the frame of the front door, but Frederick and Shirley, short as they were, were much stronger than they looked, stronger than the boys expected, all that hardy stock, and they found themselves outside the Jacksons’ home, outside of their home, they thought, the handles of their rolling luggage gripped tight in their fists.
Silas did not look back, but Abe did, and he saw the front door slam, heard the lock turn.
It was a shock they could not process, standing halfway down the flowery path. Everything they owned, collected, cared for, was on shelves and in drawers, in the closet, up in their room. Silas had a prized baseball he caught at a Chicago Cubs game, and a mitt he was still oiling, yearbooks signed by all the girls, and Abe thought of his microscope, a present from the Jacksons last Christmas, and the books he had acquired so far in the Netter Collection: tomes on anatomy, biochemistry, cardiology, and epidemiology. He had planned to use his lifeguard earnings to purchase, at the end of summer, the volumes on anesthesiology, infectious diseases, and pathology. There were also the two dirty magazines his friend Tad had given him, tucked under Abe’s mattress, naked pictures of gorgeous girls with their beavers fully exposed. Silas had lost his cherry, but Abe had not.
“What are they talking about? Selected for what?” Silas said. He was the tough twin, but tears were spilling out of his eyes, down his cheeks. He was cross-legged on the sidewalk, his face hidden behind his hands.
All their life, until this moment, Silas had been their leader, the more dominant twin, the one who made the plans, who led the way, but it was Abe who said, “Pull yourself together, Silas, we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to find a place where we can think. A place that has a phone. There’s the minimart three blocks down, let’s go there. We’ll get Yoo-hoos and sit on the curb and figure out what to do. We’ll call Frederick and Shirley. Maybe this is all just a joke. An initiation of sorts.”
When Silas did not move, Abe laid his hand on his brother’s shoulder and softly patted until Silas nodded, and rose, and followed Abe.
Thirty minutes after their kingly breakfast celebrating their eighteenth birthdays, they were rolling their luggage down the street, the wheels loud in the noon quiet of the summer Sunday.
On the corner of Unsworth Avenue and Third was the Exxon station and the minimart behind it. A man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit was pumping gas for a pretty woman in a white Mercedes. “You Silas and Abe Canwell?” Abe nodded for them both. “You’re expected. Go on into the market. Ask for Milt. He’ll give you what you need.”
Joan finished reading the opening pages of The Sympathetic Executioners and dropped them to the floor. She was stretched out on the living-room couch because she no longer fit at her desk. The couch, a hand-me-down from a colleague of Martin’s who had moved on to another hospital five hundred miles away, was ugly, tight checks in blue and green, but it was deep and comfortable and supported Joan firmly. Physically, she was as comfortable as she could be these days, but her heart felt squeezed tight, and it wasn’t the baby agitating her.
She had finished writing the novel by her own deadline, two weeks in advance of her estimated due date, the necessary time to catch her breath, before making final edits, bundling it up, and sending it off to Volkmann. She had imagined a third book tour, wondered what she and Martin would do when it was time for her to leave Rhome, leave the baby behind, and travel again. She had wondered how old the baby would be when that happened, and if she would feel torn away and unmoored, or find herself stepping lightly and fast.
For the last seven days, she had not peeked at all at the manuscript; instead she kept herself out of the house. Mornings she spent at Dawn’s Boulangerie, though Dawn was not there, eating warm Pain Bâtard with butter and raspberry jam, drinking mugs of decaffeinated Earl Grey, and making lists of unusable baby names, like Plutarch, Reimann, and Winchester; Esmeralda, Clothilde, and Aine—names that would encourage targeted bullying, a few impossible to pronounce. She read them to Martin at night, to hear him laugh. After, she swam in the overheated community pool, catching glimpses of the cold weather through the large windows and the clear retractable roof. Gloomy skies every day, rain, sleet, one brief snowstorm that left no evidence behind. The yoga class had ended, but she slid into the warm water with pleasure, with relief at being weightless, thinking the baby must feel as she did, floating in its pool of amniotic fluid.
She swam alone, sometimes floating on her back, until the baby rolled over, rolling her over. The Pregnant Six no longer swam, were no longer pregnant. They were nesting, they all said to Joan, when she had driven from one house to the next, delivering identical baby gifts to them all. Each had gone into labor on a separate day, six days in a row, and now their babies, every one had given birth to a girl, consumed them. Watching breasts pulled out at feeding time, listening to the baby talk that came from the new mothers’ mouths, Joan promised herself she would feed her child in private, talk to it in her regular voice, in full sentences that did not rise up at the end, as if everything in an infant’s nascent life was already an existential question.
Head underwater, swimming back and forth, she spent the seven days considering the theme of her book: The traumatic experience
