Perfect Little World(105)
“What would it matter to Ms. Acklen if we stayed the full time?” Asean asked. “What harm would it do to keep the project going, the way you had planned it, Dr. Grind?”
“I don’t think it would matter to the bottom line,” Dr. Grind admitted, a touch of anger in his voice, though perhaps only Izzy could hear it. “It’s purely a managerial decision, which, unfortunately, we cannot change.”
“What if we just stayed?” Asean asked, and Nikisha leaned over to whisper to him, but he shook his head. “What if we just refused to leave?”
“I can’t imagine anything good would come from that, Asean,” Dr. Grind said, “though, honestly, I am so invested in this place, in all of you, that I’d be willing to try.”
“I think,” Julie said, fuming, “that we should burn this place down when we leave.”
“Okay, well, that’s problematic,” Dr. Grind offered, realizing perhaps what he had started. “Look, the real issue is that Acklen controls the money that funds this project. And they have legal barriers in place to prevent us from benefiting from the study after it has been deemed unnecessary. They are being generous, in their own way, by letting us stay here a little longer. They are giving you a fairly hefty severance package, as it were, which they are not obligated to do. They could even, if they wanted to use enough of their lawyers to do so, find ways in which we were in breach of contract, and ask us to pay restitution for those things. Right now, they think they are being kind. So you cannot imagine what it would be like if they decided to truly be nasty to The Infinite Family Project.”
“I still say we burn down the place,” Julie said.
“I hope they turn it into a museum,” Kenny said, “leave it exactly this way, and we can come back every year and look around. We could all bring the kids and they could see their old home.”
“There’d be a gift shop,” Carmen added, smiling.
“A food court,” Susan said.
“Free and open to the public,” Dr. Grind finally said. “Perhaps.”
“Though without us,” Kenny sadly admitted, gesturing to those who remained, “it wouldn’t be very interesting.”
And then Carlos, Nina, and Gilberto informed the rest of the family that they were moving to St. Louis, where Nina had a cousin who’d offered her a job working in the accounting department of a very successful start-up company. They left in November, leaving only six families.
It was a heartbreaking experience for Izzy, for the entire month of December, to walk around the complex and find it ghostlike and empty. Even if the people who had left had never been her closest confidantes (Carmen and Link and Susan were still here), they had created the framework that allowed Izzy to feel like she was a part of something larger than herself. Moreover, she felt a creeping dread around the edges of her consciousness. With fewer people populating the complex, the woods that surrounded the buildings seemed to be pulling closer, inches at a time, swallowing them up. When she walked through the courtyard at night, the safety she had always felt had given way to a need to be alert; the real world was seeping into the complex, and she did not feel safe in the open air.
The children attended classes, went on field trips, swam in the pool, but they also seemed haunted by the defections, as if, at any moment, another one of them could be taken away. Dinners were now muted affairs, as everyone was thinking about the next step, finding a new place to live, looking at school systems for the children, but not wanting to talk about it in public. They were huddled together, sharing this doomed space, unable to imagine a world without each other, with no other choice but to move on.
Izzy was still unsteadied when Dr. Grind was around. If he was near her, Izzy would force his gaze, staring at him until he truly looked at her, and she would quickly search for some small clue that he had relented, would give himself to her, but she could find nothing in his demeanor other than the apologetic sadness that seemed to glaze his expression these days. His boyishness, so unreal and disconcerting at times, was finally starting to give way to his actual age, stubble that roughened his face, a pale grayish hue around his eyes. She promised herself that there would be no more outbursts on her part. She had made her intentions known, had embarrassed herself; if something was going to happen, he would be the one to do it.
One morning, while Izzy was preparing lunch for the children, Dr. Grind came in, asking if Jill had been in the kitchen. Izzy shook her head and returned to her work, expecting him to move on, but he lingered in the doorway, and she looked up and smiled.
“We’re doing some more research,” he admitted. “Jill and I aren’t quite sure what to do anymore; it’s not like Patricia will want any further data from this project, but we can’t just sit around, waiting for the end. Pretty soon, we’ll lose the kids; it hurts to think about it. We’re trying to do all we can in the meantime.”
“What kind of research?” Izzy asked him.
“Oh, we resurrected an old experiment. Do you know about the marshmallow experiment?” he inquired.
Izzy nodded. She had watched clips of it on YouTube, had wondered how Cap would have reacted to the experiment.
“We tried it the fourth year. It was not a success, or not in the obvious ways. The children could not hold off from eating the marshmallow, not a single one of them. A lot of them simply assumed that, no matter what they did, they would still be rewarded. It was a problematic experiment at a key time in our work here at the complex. We tried it the following year and got the same results. I made a call to discontinue the experiment. And . . . I hid the results from Brenda Acklen.” Dr. Grind shrugged when Izzy showed surprise. “It was not my finest moment. But I didn’t want anything to prevent the work we were doing from moving forward. It seemed like such a silly experiment, and I’ve come up with dozens of reasons why the testing itself is quite flawed and not really predictive of anything.”