GRAY MATTER (15 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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“What did you say?” Rachel asked and woke herself up.
For a long spell, she looked around the room. The maternity ward had turned back into Dylan’s room, still lit by the little night-light. The book they had been reading had slipped to the floor with a thud. Dylan stirred but did not wake.
A dream,
she told herself as she sat in the dim light.
No, nightmare. A wretched, brutal nightmare that has left my mind tender and begging for forgetfulness.
She closed her eyes for a minute, Sheila’s voice still humming in her head. She had said something that had gotten cut off.
Rachel got up to adjust Dylan’s blanket when in the dim light all she saw staring up at her from the pillow was a dark little monkey head. She nearly fainted in the moment before she recognized Curious George. Suddenly she hated that thing with its insipid grin and stupid blank eyes.
She folded back the sheet to expose Dylan’s face, and covered George with the blanket.
As she leaned over to kiss Dylan on his head, Sheila’s voice cut through the haze.
“He can be fixed.”
T
here were two things that Lilly Bellingham’s mom told her that day: Don’t go in the water just after eating; and when you do, don’t go in above your waist.
Lilly wasn’t that good a swimmer, so she understood the second Don’t. But she had trouble with the first. “Why do I have to wait an hour after eating?”
“Because you’ll get cramps.”
“How can I get cramps?”
Lilly was only six, but she was very persistent. And smart. That’s what all her teachers said. But there were times when Peggy was caught off guard. “Because,” Peggy said, and took a swig of her diet Mountain Dew.
“But why
because
? I want to go in. I’m hot as hell.”
Peggy shot her a hard look. “I don’t like you using swear words, little missy, ya hear?”
“You use it all the time.”
“That’s different. Children aren’t supposed to swear. Period.”
“But
hell’s
not a swear word. Not like taking the Lord’s name in vain, or the
f
and
s
words which Daddy uses all the time with Uncle Art.”
“Well, he shouldn’t. He knows better,” Peggy said, knowing how feeble her response sounded, even to her daughter. “I don’t want no daughter of mine using any of those words, including the
h
word. Period.”
“So how come I can’t go in the water?”
“Because you’ll get cramps. You just ate and your tummy is full, that’s why.”
“Then how come I don’t get cramps on land but will get them in the water? And how come I don’t get cramps in the bathtub after eating?”
Damnation!
Peggy thought. She was right. How come you didn’t get cramps on land but were supposed to get them in the water? Lilly was looking at her for an answer, something that was supposed to make the sweetest sense and sit her little girl’s fanny on her towel. But the best Peggy could come up with was, “Because that’s what the doctor said.” An even more feeble explanation and instantly Peggy knew Lilly wouldn’t fall for it.
“What doctor? Not Dr. Miller. I never heard him say that. Not ever ever.” And she stamped her foot in the sand. “And you know why? Because it doesn’t make any sense. Standing in water can’t give you cramps just like standing in air can’t give you cramps after you eat. Besides, all those other kids just ate and they’re in the water, and I don’t hear any of them hollering about cramps.”
Peggy sighed and glanced at all the kids goofing around in the shallows. Lilly was right: They had all just had lunch at a nearby picnic table and not a one of them was doubled over.
“So how come I can’t?”
“All right, all right! Go in the damn water.”
Lilly’s face lit up.
“But if you get the slightest cramp, don’t come whining to me, ya hear?”
“Mom, you said the
d
word.” And she dashed down the sand and into the water.
“And not too far,” Peggy shouted. “You hear?”
Lilly waved.
Peggy watched Lilly run in up to her waist then plop down to wet her upper body. For a second she submerged herself then shot up because the water was cold. In her yellow bathing suit she looked like a canary. She had picked it out herself last week in Kmart. They were having a sale on kids’ swimsuits, and it was marked down to $7.99. Lilly loved yellow. Half the T-shirts and other tops in her closet were yellow.
After a few minutes, Lilly wandered toward a group of kids about her age or a couple years older. They were tossing a Frisbee a few yards away. One kid overthrew and Lilly retrieved it. Although she didn’t know the kids, it didn’t take her long to make friends. In a matter of moments, she was tossing it with them, leaping in the air and splashing down to catch it. That was just like her—outgoing and sociable. Miss Chatty-Charm as Uncle Art had dubbed
her. “She could sweet-talk the quills off a porcupine,” he’d say. That was just the problem, Peggy thought. She was too friendly.
When she was satisfied that Lilly wasn’t going to go in above her waist, Peggy stretched out on the blanket with her magazine. Every so often she’d look up to see how Lilly was doing and that she was keeping in the shallows.
But the warm sun made her drowsy, and after a while Peggy dozed off.
Several minutes later, she woke with a start. It was nearly three-thirty, and she had to get Lilly to her four-thirty interview with Smart Kids, a summer-school program for gifted children at the local high school. She was one of five selected from her elementary school. The announcement was in the newspaper and even on the Internet.
Peggy sat up. Lilly was standing in the water looking out over the lake. “Lilly,” Peggy called.
But she didn’t turn, too preoccupied with some ducks floating nearby.
“Lilly!”
Still no response. Now she was playing deaf just to drag out the day. But they had to get back.
Peggy got up and headed down to the water. “Hey, young lady!”
But she still did not turn around.
Now Peggy was getting angry. The initial chill of the water shocked her in place. She would never understand how kids could just bound down the sand and plunge into such freezing water. It must have something to do with their metabolism.
She was five feet from her daughter. “Hey, you!” As she said those words, a chill passed through Peggy.
The girl turned. It was not Lilly.
Similar yellow one-piece suit. Same sandy brown hair. Same length. Same body size, though she did seem a little taller, her legs a little longer—but Peggy had dismissed that for not having seen her daughter in a swimsuit since last summer.
“Oh, sorry.”
The girl just shrugged, then waded to shore.
Peggy looked down the beach. No sign of Lilly. No other yellow suit.
She left the water, looking up and down the beach. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the girl in the yellow suit head toward the parking lot. As Peggy spun around trying to spot Lilly, it passed through her mind that the resemblance of the girl to her daughter from the rear was amazing. Before
she bolted down the beach, Peggy caught the girl looking over her shoulder at her. For one instant, Peggy felt something pass between them. Something dark and jagged.
The next instant Peggy was jogging down the beach the other way, scanning the people on the blankets and in the water, and shouting out her daughter’s name.
Oh
, God!
In a matter of seconds she was running, her head snapping from side to side.
“Lilly. LILLY.”
When Peggy ran out of beach, she shot to the lifeguard stand.
She could barely get the words out: “M-my daughter’s missing.”
“
E
nhancement?” Martin said. “Sounds like some kind of religious experience.”
As Rachel had expected, he was completely dismissive of the idea.
It was the next evening, and they were in the kitchen putting dishes in the dishwasher. They had just finished eating, and Dylan was upstairs taking a bath.
Still Rachel kept her voice low. She had related Sheila’s claim about the Nova Children’s Center. “She says they can improve a child’s IQ by fifty percent or more.”
His eyebrows shot up like a polygraph needle. “What? That’s impossible!”
“I’m just telling you what she said.”
Martin had an intelligent angular face—one that was capable of authority. He was not always right, but never uncertain. At the moment, his eyes narrowed cleverly, his mouth spread into a smirk, and his eyebrows arched the way they did when he was about to make a pronouncement. It was a look that annoyed her for its condescension. “Look, Rachel, you’re born with two numbers: your Social Security number and your IQ. And neither can be changed.”
“They also once declared the earth was flat.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t be so damn pigheaded.” Frustration was tightening her chest.
“Unless these
enhancement
people have come up with some brand-new science, I don’t buy it. You’re born as smart as you’ll ever be. Yeah, maybe you could add a couple points on a test, but intelligence is basically fixed.”
“Keep your voice down,” she said in a scraping whisper. She closed the French doors so their voices wouldn’t carry upstairs. “I want to look into it.”
“Fine, but keep in mind that Sheila loves to impress. She’s always dropping names and telling secrets. She rents a place on Martha’s Vineyard and leads you to believe she’s drinking buddies with Diane Sawyer and Alan Dershowitz. Not to mention how much so-and-so paid for their house.”
“So, what’s your point?”
“My point is that Sheila MacPhearson embellishes the truth. She exaggerates. Remember what she said when she showed us this house? That it was the childhood home of a ‘famous movie director.’ Her exact words. For days I had thought Steven Spielberg grew up here. Then we find out it’s some guy who did a music video for MTV.”
“So you’re saying that Sheila is lying?”
“I’m saying I don’t believe they’ve got some procedure that can turn your average Jack and Jill into a Stephen Hawking or Marilyn Vos Savant.”
“Well, I’m going to look into it.”
“Suit yourself, but don’t get your hopes up.”
She hated his absolutist manner. It was something he used on his workers to bring them to their knees, but she resented when he brought it home. It was obnoxious and failed to intimidate her. She also hated the possibility that he was right. That out of desperation she was chasing white rabbits on some offhanded remark by good-hearted Sheila MacPhearson.
Martin must have read the turn of her mind because he instantly softened. “Honey, more than anybody else you should know how these things don’t work. We tried every gimmick in the books and then some. It’s all a myth: It can’t be done—not in the first three years or the next or the next. That’s all a pipe dream of die-hard liberals who want to believe they can make poor inner city kids intellectually equal to children of white affluent suburbanites: How to flatten the bell curve. But it doesn’t work. The human brain is a Pentium chip made of meat: It’s got all the circuit potential it’s ever going to have.”
There’s a hole in our son’s brain
, a voice in her head whispered.
A gap. Missing circuitry. A deficiency in his left hemisphere
.
And I put it there for better sex.
Every other minute of the day she had thought about telling him, of finally spewing the vomit from her soul; but she really didn’t know if she could live with the consequence. She really didn’t believe that Martin could ever forgive her. He was like that—he held grudges. And what greater grudge than that against the woman who had ruined his only child? Even if
in time, she could work up the nerve to confess—fortified by the fact that at the time she was young, foolish, and unaware of the risks—the proper punishment would be to watch Dylan grow up impaired, her secret festering within her the rest of her life.
“I see no harm in looking into it.”
Martin nodded. “By the way, did she say what the enhancement procedure actually is?”
“She didn’t know.”
“But she said it works wonders,” he muttered sarcastically. “I’m just wondering: If they’ve got some kind of procedure to make you smarter, how come the world doesn’t know about it? How come Peter Jennings and
The Boston Globe
haven’t gotten the scoop on it? And how come there aren’t IQ jack-up centers in every hospital and clinic in the country?”
Martin was no fool. If she protested too much, he would wonder at her desperation. “Martin, I really don’t know,” she said, trying to sound neutral. But she was struggling between anger at his patronizing manner and her own transparency. He was right: She knew nothing about the procedure or those behind it. She wasn’t even sure where the place was located. “Forget it. Forget I ever brought it up,” she said.
“But you did. And what bothers me is how come you’re so wide-eyed about some foolish claim about boosting our son’s intelligence?”
For a long moment she just stared blankly at him, not being able to summon an answer. She felt the press of tears but pushed them down. “Because I’m feeling desperate. Because it makes me sick to think what he’s going to go through. Because … oh, nothing. Nothing!”
“Nothing,” he repeated. “Well, the only enhancement we need around here is our love life.”
Rachel slammed the dishwasher closed. She was not going to respond. He knew that she just didn’t feel like having sex, that she was going through a down spell.
Suddenly the French doors flew open and Dylan walked in. He had his pajamas on, but the shirt was on backward and inside out, the label under his chin. In his hand was a big zoo picture book.
“Daddy, can you read me ‘bout the aminals … I mean anminals … I mean anlimals?”
Rachel burst into tears and left the room.

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