One look at her face and I knew.
That feeling of wrongness inside me had become something real and hard and utterly impossible to accept. The surgery room was out of commission, the roads out. Necessary equipment was broken. Necessary people were not present. The baby was upside down and she couldn’t be born without killing me. In this storm, on this night, there were no safe possibilities and no fairy-tale endings.
Only premature good-byes.
I’m not sure when I noticed the technician standing at the door. Over his paper surgical mask, I could see his eyes were a pale yellow. Greedy, somehow. A rash of pulpy scars traced out from under the mask, veering up toward his ear. He was breathing funny under there, kind of wheezing—maybe from excitement at the emergency, or maybe from whatever deformity lay hidden.
He shuffled into the room, carrying a dark promise. The nurse wouldn’t look at him, but she gave the man his space while he went about his business.
Speaking quickly, he said he was a technician for a special machine—a remote gate designed to remove tumors from the human body. Using it to target a baby would be simple, he said. A teleporter gate could be generated around the contours of my unborn child and she could be whisked right out of me. She could be saved.
There were no guarantees, except that Bea would die if we did nothing.
I listened to his promises with my breath coming in sharp pants, sweat pooled in the hollow of my throat. Numb from the waist down, I was nearly delirious after a day of not sleeping and choking down Dixie cups of ice shards.
Nothing ever came easy for my Beatrix. Not from the very start.
Kemper took my hand, already shaking his head no. Tears were shining in his eyes. That stupid timer was still hanging around his neck.
But the path had become clear to me.
“I can’t lose her. I won’t,” I said.
“We can’t,” he told me. “You’ve seen what happens to—”
Anger crept in, tightening my grip on his hand.
“No,” was all I could say.
“You have to accept this,” he said. “We have to let go.”
“Her name is Beatrix,” I said.
He closed his eyes and those tears did fall.
“She wasn’t meant to be,” he said.
“I can’t,” I repeated. “I would rather die.”
The wind threw itself against the window then, blasting the wall of raindrops into random streaks of light and darkness.
“Honey,” Kemper said, opening his eyes and wiping a forearm across his face. “Whatever you decide. I’m with you. But please—”
“Yes,” I said to the technician. “Do it.”
My husband’s face went a little empty then. His military bearing crept back into his stance and his spine straightened up. This is how he survived deployment, I thought to myself. Going blank is how you make it through the hard parts.
Kemper stepped back as the technician wheeled his machine over.
It happened quickly. I signed a paper. Nurses gathered, murmuring. The machine splayed crooked white fingers of plastic around my bulging stomach like a skeletal paw. A strange humming came from inside it, almost like a tune. It must have been the ultrasound targeting, locking on to the baby inside me. For one second, I glimpsed her face on a gray-scale monitor, pixelated and perfect, thumb curled in her mouth. My Beatrix was so close I could almost feel her weight over my chest.
I am your mother, I thought. I will keep you safe.
An alert chimed. The machine was ready.
The technician nodded at me, his feline eyes wide over the mask.
Across the room, Kemper was silhouetted against the hallway lights. I could see that his face was in his hands, his shoulders shuddering. I raised an arm, the IV dangling like a puppet string. It will be okay, I tried to say.
The universe will give us this one.
After a flash and a puff of ozone, the world went still. The only truth left was the clear ringing in my ears—a simple song that proved I was still alive. Looking down at myself, I bit back a scream as my stomach deflated grotesquely, the slack skin falling in on itself like a building with a dynamited foundation. I realized I could feel the horrific alien fingers of the teleporter reaching inside.
Beatrix was gone. The life inside me had been ripped from the warmth of my womb and sent to some cold, beautiful place.
“Success,” whispered the technician.
My Beatrix, tiny and perfect, lay inside a clear acrylic receiving chamber that had been retrofitted onto the machine. Squirming like a grub, steam was curling off her bloody body. She screamed, just once, like she was surprised at her own existence.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
Nurses swarmed around the receiving tray. Between their busy elbows and hips I could see only snatches of my now-silent baby. They cleaned off the blood and amniotic fluid, throwing away layer after layer of towels, each less bloody than the last.
“Is she okay?!” I asked again, voice rising.
Three sets of eyes turned to me over surgical masks. The nurse in the middle was holding Beatrix in her arms, the baby swaddled tightly in a clean hospital blanket. I saw fear in the woman’s eyes, a quivering across her forehead.
Three steps and then the baby was in my arms, handed to me quick, like a bomb.
Beatrix’s pudgy face was pinched and bruised from her time trying to be born. She was a dark-skinned little thing, with a layer of fine black hair covering her body and tiny tangles of black fuzz sprouting from her head. Her eyes were open wide already, calm and watchful as an old crow.
My daughter was the first and only human being born to teleportation.
Kemper’s arms closed around my shoulders as he planted kiss after kiss on my temple and cheek. I simply held Bea and looked down at her. She looked back at me with eyes like a bird had pecked two holes in her face.
“Something’s wrong,” I said to Kemper. “Look at her eyes.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, hugging us both. “She’s got your eyes, honey. She just got them early.”
And then Bea seemed to look past me toward the storm-battered window. Turning, I saw only an empty wall of dark glass. Then I noticed how the dim lights from the machine were illuminating silver veins of falling water, forming a kind of pattern.
The infant smiled then, impossibly, her tiny face crinkling like a mask.
Goose bumps erupted down the backs of my arms and a sense of horrible regret settled over my heart. Closing my eyes to the sight of her leering face, I pulled the baby against my chest and squeezed her.
Just a face spasm, I told myself. Normal. Normal for a sweet baby.
And then I made myself think the thoughts that I needed to have.
She is my daughter. She is my blood.
When I dared to look at Beatrix again, that devilish smile was gone.
* * *
—
The baby was fine. Every examination showed that. Bea had become proof that maybe, at a certain age, the gates wouldn’t wipe a person’s mind and force them to go insane. Maybe the brain of an unborn child was too undeveloped to comprehend whatever shapeless things lurked in that millisecond of teleportation.
Bea was fine. But she was never normal.
Over the next six years, Kemper and I watched our black-eyed infant grow into a beautiful little girl. She learned to speak a little, and even to read. She was small, but she had a laser focus that she wielded with singular intent. The things she loved were impossible to keep from her.
We got her a kitten when she was six.
Booker T. Washington was a little pink-nosed ball of orange fur, with claws like pinpricks and the sweet habit of ramming his head into our ankles. We called him Booker T. for short. Kemper and I carried the kitten into Bea’s room, both of us
smiling and hopeful. But as we watched Bea’s flat, expressionless face…our hope started to fade.
Bea had other things on her mind.
Sitting on her bedroom floor, she was hunched over, as usual, carefully placing her blocks one by one. The room was littered with toys, a chaos of color spread over every square inch of space. Kemper bent down to release Booker T., and the kitten tumbled and bounded around the clutter for a little while, ignored.
After ten minutes, Kemper left to set up Booker T.’s litter box. He tried to hide it, but I could see the disappointment in his tired shoulders. My mouth opened as he left, but there was nothing I could say to make Bea normal.
I lowered myself to my knees, stroked my little girl’s hair.
“Oh, Bea,” I whispered, watching her pick up another brightly colored block and replace it in a slightly different position. Looking into her face, I was startled, catching sight of that horrible little smile fading from the corners of her mouth. Eyes downcast, she was staring at the colorful blocks with dark fascination.
I stood up, heart pounding.
Dizzy, I stumbled over the chaos of blocks and toy cars and dolls, climbing straight onto Bea’s little bed and looking down. I saw the wooden blocks hadn’t been thrown randomly. No, each one was carefully laid in its place. Eyes blurry with sudden tears, I saw that cursed pattern.
Bea flung herself onto her back, arms outstretched.
The blocks curled away from her body in a perfect imitation of the shimmering depths of a teleporter gate. Oranges and reds faded to blues and purples, all in weaving lines that sprouted from my daughter in rootlike curls and twists. The pattern of the gate was right there on her floor, frozen in its incredible complexity.
And my Bea lay inside it, her black braids spread out like streaks of oil.
“Sweet Bea?” I asked, not expecting an answer. “What did you make, honey?”
My normally silent six-year-old daughter looked up at me with her lips twisted back into that grin, her black eyes twinkling.
“Inside,” she said.
I put her through that teleporter before she was even born. It was my choice to do it because I couldn’t lose her. She was so little and helpless.
“No,” I whisper.
“Pretty inside, Mama.”
“Bea,” I said, lips gone numb. “No, honey.”
The madness in those angles and colors was suddenly too much. Compulsively, I stepped down and began to kick the pattern apart. Bea howled and I kept kicking. I had to destroy it before Kemper could see, before my husband could realize that our Beatrix had been born into a different world. Our baby had sojourned through a nameless land beyond all sanity and she remembered it.
By the time Kemper came to the door, I was holding Bea in my arms, rocking and soothing her as she sobbed.
I destroyed the pattern that day, but it always came back.
Bea’s coordination was delayed, but as soon as she could hold a crayon, the lines spilled out on reams of butcher paper. Somehow, her chubby little fingers could unleash patterns of light and darkness with the precision of a supercomputer. And as she got older, Beatrix herself began to appear in the images. A little girl’s self-portrait, made of black circles, lost in a storm of color.
Sometimes, other shapes emerged in the drawings: outlines of spire-like buildings with stairways at impossible angles; smudges of color that seemed to shimmer like grease; and the primitive beginnings of embryonic, inhuman faces.
Every new drawing I saw felt like swallowing a needle.
Often, I would find Bea lying in her bed with Booker T. asleep at her feet, surrounded by pages and pages of the uncanny drawings, the thick construction paper infected with that horrendous, eye-wrenching pattern. Sometimes blobs of crayon were caked into topographical patterns like the landscape of an alien planet, or I’d find hundreds of ragged holes that seemed to stare like the compound eyes of an insect.
I got religious about throwing them away.
At first, Bea would scream when I balled up her drawings and threw them in the trash. But that stopped when she realized where the paper was going. The omnigate in our basement teleported garbage straight to a massive sorting facility somewhere else, thousands of miles away.
Beatrix began to follow me around the house during the day while Kemper was away working at the army base. At first, I liked having her near me. Then I realized she was waiting for the trash to be emptied. Once we were in the basement, she would stand on the next-to-last step. The plastic guard on the omnigate mostly blocked the light from inside, but at that exact angle on the stairs, Bea’s face would flash with the pattern.
Bea lived for that shining moment—the harsh angles of her face would smooth, eyes drinking the light. Soon enough, I lived for it, too. Seeing her in that moment felt like catching a glimpse of the daughter I might have had.
* * *
—
I was watching drowsy television with Kemper, well after Bea’s bedtime, when the high-pitched shrieking launched us both off the couch. At first, I thought it was the squeal of metal from a car crash outside—nothing human, surely.
But then I realized it—and other, worse sounds—were coming from inside.
Kemper ran to the basement door and threw it open. As he thundered down the stairs, I turned and ran for Bea’s bedroom. Flipping on the lights, I saw only the pattern in blocks again, spread out around her bed. Bea was gone.
Then I heard Kemper shouting her name.
I found him at the bottom of the dark basement stairs, his back to me, the crackling light of the omnigate casting his shadow across the concrete floor. The flimsy plastic guard lay on the ground, twisted off. And at the mouth of the gate, her body silhouetted by its hot, shifting light, stood my little girl.
In her arms, a wriggling mass of shredded fur was screaming and clawing pathetically. Booker T., insane, orange fur falling off his skin in clumps, was wailing like a human, coughing blood over her forearms.
“Bea! What did you do?!” I shouted.
Kemper lunged forward and snatched the cat away, covering it up so that I couldn’t see. Clutching the squirming bundle to his chest, he rushed past me up the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped to look down at me for a split second.
“Oh my God, Bea,” he said. “Oh my dear God.”
As Kemper took the cat outside, I flew down the stairs to Bea’s side.
“Honey? Honey? Are you okay?” I asked.
“Kitty,” said Beatrix. “I showed kitty.”
“Showed him what, Bea?” I ask, checking her hands and arms. She must have pushed him through the gate and pulled him back. “What did you show the kitty?”
A familiar dark smile played at the corners of her mouth, then faded, like a sea creature sinking into the shadow of the ocean. This close, I could see the spatters of thick blood dotting the skin of her face.
“Inside,” she said.
I watched my own hands leap away from her then. I could feel a stranger standing in front of me—an otherness that did not belong here in this world.
She’s the wrong one, I thought to myself, closing my eyes. This thing is not my daughter.
Telling myself to breathe, I shut down that thinking. I opened my eyes and made myself wrap my arms around Beatrix, pulling her limp body against mine. Watching her bloody, expressionless face, I forced the necessary words into my head. I picked them up like a pile of bricks and I carried them with me.
You are my daughter. You are my blood.
“I want to go inside, Mama,” she said to me. “Please.”
After that, we locked the basement door. Kemper buried Booker T. in the backyard with nothing to mark the spot. We tried to forget.
I took away Bea’s blocks and her coloring books.
Lying in bed with Kemper, staring at a dark ceiling, I coul
dn’t help but whisper my fears out loud.
“Would it be better…if she hadn’t of, hadn’t been…”
“Don’t say that, baby,” whispered Kemper, and I felt his warm hand close over mine. “She’ll grow out of this. She’s got challenges, but we can do this.”
“Yeah, but…” I let it stretch out.
“She’s our daughter,” Kemper said flatly.
* * *
—
To be honest, deep down, I knew Bea would go back someday.
Beatrix is twelve years old on the day that it happens. On my way home from the grocery store, I see the smoke and stomp on the accelerator. Sirens wail in the distance. Our neighbors stand outside their houses, watching with concerned looks as flames lick through our roofline.
I charge through the open front door.
“Kemper?” I call. A haze of smoke clings to the air, but I can’t see where the fire is coming from. “Bea?”
I check her room. Empty.
The rest of the small house is empty, too. I see half a graham cracker still sitting on the kitchen table. The door to the basement is slightly open.
Hesitating, I pull it open wider and call into the darkness. “Guys?!”
Nothing.
Catching a faint glimmer of light slithering over the concrete block walls at the bottom of the stairs, I take one step down. And then another.
“Bea?”
The reinforced plastic guard we bought has been torn off the teleporter. An ax from the shed lies beside it, bluish light reflecting off the nicked blade.
A low moan builds deep in my throat.
Reaching the last step, I see my husband’s legs. Kemper is lying on his stomach but my mind can’t process all of this right away. Legs, all I see are legs.
Legs coming out of the shimmering mouth of the teleporter.
“Kemper!” I shriek. There is an animal raggedness to my voice that I don’t recognize. My breath is coming in high-pitched gasps. Falling to my knees, I latch my hands on his ankles and yank him out of the teleporter.