Perfect Little World(99)
“Izzy,” he said, but she wouldn’t let him finish. Whatever he said next would be proper and measured and he would try to put distance between this moment and their lives moving forward. He would calm her down and this moment would pass and, if they both worked hard, nothing would come of it. She had a few seconds, she knew this, to disrupt the moment, to have what she wanted. She kissed him again and she felt him relent and then return the affection. And when it was over, the two of them stood there, unable to speak, unsure of how to proceed. Izzy looked down at the floor, at the indentations that her shoes had made on the carpet. She had left some kind of imprint, she understood this. If her family was falling apart, was it wrong of her to try to hold on to another person and make it last? She smiled at him and, before she could get a response, she opened the door to his apartment and walked out, closing the door behind her as quietly as she could.
She walked out into the courtyard and stared up at the smeared clouds above her, not a star in the sky. She wanted to find a way into Cap’s heart, reach all of the children in that room, but knew that she could not invade their space with her own presence. Instead, Izzy went into her house, remembering the pneumatic tubes that ran throughout the complex and all ended up at the former communal bedroom of the children. The glass door that held the canister had been easy to ignore these several years in the house since there was no longer any need to send milk to the bank. She opened up one of the drawers in her kitchen and grabbed a handful of lollipops, enough for all of the children to have more than one, and she dropped them one at a time into the canister before sealing it shut. She placed it in the tube, shut the door, and pushed the button, wondering if the tubes still worked. There was a soft hum, a whoosh of air, and then the canister shot out of view, through the walls, through the complex, and she imagined it ending up in the room where her child now slept. She imagined the clunk as it settled into its new destination and the tiny red light that would blink on and off until someone removed the canister. She wondered if the children would even see it, if anything that Izzy did from now on really mattered. After a lifetime of trying to do the exact opposite, had she ruined her own child? No, she knew she hadn’t. None of the children, so impervious and brilliant, could be ruined. The parents, however, had become ruined, or had simply dragged their already broken bodies into the complex and let them rupture all over again. She felt like it would take thousands of pages of official paperwork to ever deserve Cap, but some miracle had simply given him to her, no questions asked. She hoped she could keep him, whatever came next.
She packed her duffel bag with her swim cap and suit and goggles and went to the pool. She kept all of the lights off and lowered herself into the water of the main pool, the temperature just cold enough to alert her muscles to the fact that they were needed. She swam lap after lap, the room echoing with the sounds of her movements, the world completely closed off to her, nothing but blackness. She loved the sensation, though, of pushing her way through the water, entirely blind, and finding, every single time, the solid edge of the pool against her fingertips, reminding her that she had once again found her way home.
After nearly an hour of swimming, her body finally felt accepting of sleep. It was now 4 A.M., but she changed into a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and crept across the courtyard and back into the main building. She found the parents still in the hallway, a weird rhythm of snoring and breathing and slightly whining murmurs coming from the pile of them. She stepped over a few parents and found a tiny unoccupied spot and fit her body into it. She made her own breathing match the people around her and, before she even knew it was happening, she was asleep, her waking life so bizarre that she dreamed of nothing but the sound of waves, beating against a shore that she could not see.
chapter sixteen
the infinite family project (year seven)
Dr. Grind could not help but think of his own parents, long dead, as the world around him started to fall apart. He no longer debated whether or not they loved him; he had long ago determined that they had loved him, in their own way, no more or less than other parents he had encountered. What he now wondered, thinking back to those experiments, carried out over such a long period of time that they were not really experiments to him but the events of his life, was what exactly his mother and father were preparing him for. What darkness could they have imagined that would require such steadfast resilience in the face of it? And yet, his wife and child, his world entire, had died, and he had somehow kept going. Were his parents to thank for this? Perhaps. But now, as his new family, the Infinite Family, threatened to splinter into pieces that could not be put back together, he did not think that his parents, as strange as they were, could have ever imagined the scenario in which he found himself. And perhaps, he finally decided, that was the point. Parents do everything they can for their children, unable to conceive of the child’s future, hoping only that they’ve done enough to protect them. Right now, looking at a chart that outlined each member of the Infinite Family, Dr. Grind only knew that he had not done enough, and his family was now leaving him behind.
Not long after Ellen had moved into the mental health facility, Jeremy and Callie had taken Eli and moved permanently to their farm, having already constructed the yurt and some basic conveniences to sustain themselves while they worked the land. Dr. Grind had tried everything he could think of to keep them, had looked over the legal contracts that they had signed and found, though he already knew it, that there was very little that would keep the families in the complex if they did not want to stay. It had always been a fragile situation, but the project had given the families so much that they never questioned the fact that they could leave. They hadn’t wanted to. But now, with one family already gone, Dr. Grind knew there would be a greater awareness among the members of the family, the realization that they, too, could become a singular family.