Perfect Little World(28)
“I very much hope it does, Brenda.”
“When do you talk to the families?” she asked him.
“Next week. I will personally speak to each prospective family and tell them everything about the project, all the parameters and financial incentives that we’ve discussed.”
“Preston,” she said, gesturing for him to come closer to her. He stepped uncomfortably close and listened intently. “Do you remember that baseball movie with James Earl Jones in it?”
“I never saw it, but I know what you’re talking about. Field of Dreams.”
“That’s it. You know that guy builds a baseball field in the middle of nowhere and the line is, ‘If you build it, he will come.’”
“Yes, I’ve certainly heard that line before.”
“Well, my husband hated that movie. It was irrational, but that line just made him so irritated. He would always tell me, ‘By god, it’s not enough to just build something. You have to give people a reason to stay.’ That’s what he thought with the stores, that you had to sell people on something that they may or may not have known they wanted, because, ultimately, it’s best for both you and them if they believe in it.”
“I imagine that I understand that logic, Brenda,” Dr. Grind answered, wondering if the long car ride had unsteadied Mrs. Acklen’s faculties.
“You need to make these families understand that we’re doing something important. That this is going to make their lives so much better than they would have been otherwise.”
“I’ll do my best. I promise you.”
“I know you will, sweetie,” she said, and kissed him one more time.
He walked her back to the car, where her assistant and the driver were waiting, making small talk with the fellows. As the car drove away, and they waved good-bye, Jeffrey asked Dr. Grind, “What happens to us if she dies?”
Before Dr. Grind could answer, Kalina said, “She won’t die. That much money, you get to live for as long as you want.”
“There are measures in place,” Dr. Grind assured them, though he had no idea if this was true. It seemed in poor taste to mention the likelihood of the study outliving the donor, especially when so much money was at stake. And what he didn’t say, though he understood from his own experiences, was that there were no measures that truly protected against disaster; you simply held on to what mattered and hoped that you found your way to the other side.
They all turned and walked back into the complex, the buildings blending into the woods that surrounded them, keeping their existence a secret until they decided it was time to be known.
chapter seven
Izzy was wearing clothes too nice for chopping up steaming piles of pig meat, so Mr. Tannehill had taken a black garbage bag, cut holes for her head and arms, and pulled it over her head. Izzy made a face of extreme embarrassment, and Mr. Tannehill threw up his arms. “What?” he asked. “What’s the problem?”
“Wearing a garbage bag defeats the purpose of wearing nice clothes,” she said. “I think it’d be better to have grease stains on my blouse.”
“Do what you want, Izzy,” he said, “but you look pretty even in a garbage bag, so don’t think too much on it.”
Izzy went to work with her cleavers, using one to chop and the other to move the meat around on the block. She loved the reassuring thunk the cleaver made as it turned the meat into something perfect. She had kicked off her sneakers and was standing in a tub of ice-cold water, which Mr. Tannehill refilled every two hours to help with the swelling that came from standing around all day in a dry, hot room.
“I’m just nervous,” she said to Mr. Tannehill once she had finished with the pig. Dr. Preston Grind, the head of The IFP, was meeting her in less than an hour to discuss her future, or, rather, for him to outline her future. She had once again Googled his name the night before and found more information than she could process. She gave up halfway into a YouTube video of him on Oprah, surrounded by children, his manner easy and untroubled as he gave himself over to their pleas for his attention. He was legitimate, that was all she cared about at the moment. He was real, and he thought she was special enough that he was coming to see her.
She was overtly pregnant now, six months into the process, no hiding what would be coming. She knew that she made Mr. Tannehill nervous, the thought of having to deliver her child in a smokehouse, but she needed the work to keep her mind occupied. At all times, the baby was in motion. She felt the rhythmic lurch in her belly, the baby’s hiccups, and on a few occasions while resting in bed at night, she watched the baby push against her belly, fetal movement, and she would sit in controlled stillness, hoping to see it again. She was, for the first time in her life, infinitely interesting to herself, not a single change in her circumstances going unnoticed.
When she first became pregnant, all she could think about was the strange fact that a living thing was inside her, some kind of horror movie. Each week that passed, she appreciated how many of the pregnancy sites online compared the size of the fetus to food, starting with a mere poppy seed and then moving to a grape and then a lemon. It made her feel like she wasn’t having a baby at all, merely growing a vegetable in her belly, an organic garden housed within her own body. But as the baby asserted itself, began to move and flip and test the limits of the space it had been given, she grew irritated with the fruit comparisons. Fuck it, she thought, she was not having an avocado, she was making a baby. She wanted the power of creation now, to own the fact that she was making something tangible and beautiful. It was a rare feeling of satisfaction, from her experience as a teen mother, because everyone seemed to assume that you’d made a terrible mistake and that the baby’s development was just a harbinger of doom to come. People either avoided talking about it or made faces of the most punch-worthy suggestions of sympathy. Why, she now wondered, when a woman became pregnant, weren’t people lining up on either side of her as she made her way through each day, wildly cheering her on like she was running the most important marathon in the world? Other days, a fair number of days perhaps, she wanted simply to be invisible, to crawl into a cave with her baby and wait for it to come, far removed from anyone who thought they knew their future.