The Invasion of the Tearling

  When Dr. Anna had sent out all of the various tools and swabs, she told Lily, “The receptionist will tell you your test results, and she’ll have your pills together. Just give her your name.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dr. Anna went for the door, but paused just before opening it and turned around, her schoolteacher’s face set in its default expression of pinched disapproval. “You know, it won’t ever get better on its own.”

  “What won’t?”

  “Him.” Dr. Anna’s eyes dropped to the ring on Lily’s finger. “Your husband.”

  Lily clutched the hem of the paper gown more tightly between her fingers. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do. I see over five hundred women a month in here. The bruises don’t lie.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Plus,” Dr. Anna continued, cutting Lily off, “you’re clearly a wealthy woman. There’s no reason you can’t get contraception closer to home. With black-market prices what they are these days, you could even get a dealer to deliver pills to your house. Unless, of course, you’re afraid your husband will find out.”

  Lily shook her head, not wanting to hear any of this. Sometimes she thought that everything was almost fine, so long as it wasn’t brought out into the open.

  “Your husband doesn’t own you.”

  Lily looked up, suddenly furious, because Dr. Anna didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. That was all marriage meant: ownership. Lily had sold herself for someone to take care of her, to pay the bills and tell her what to do. Certainly there had been some buyer’s remorse along the way, but that was the proverbial pig in a poke, as Lily’s mother would have said. Mom and Dad hadn’t wanted her to marry Greg, but Lily had been so sure of what was best. Thinking of her parents, Lily felt a sudden, hopeless longing for her old room back at their house in Pennsylvania, for the twin bed and oak desk. The furniture had been plain, nowhere near as nice as the things Lily owned now. But her room had been her own. Even her parents didn’t come in without knocking first.

  Lily’s eyes had watered; she wiped a quick hand across them, smearing her makeup. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  Dr. Anna gave a mirthless chuckle. “This dynamic never changes, Mrs. Mayhew. Believe me, I know.”

  “He’s only done it a few times,” Lily mumbled, knowing even as she spoke that it was a mistake to answer. Had she ever resented Dr. Anna’s clinical, impersonal manner? She longed to have it back now. “He’s been under a lot of pressure at work this year.”

  “Your husband’s a powerful man?”

  “Yes,” Lily replied automatically. It was always the first thing that popped into her head about Greg: that he was a powerful man. He worked for the Department of Defense, acting as a civilian liaison between the military men and the weapons contractors. His division oversaw supply for all of the military bases on the East Coast. He was six foot two and had played football in college. He had met the president. There was nowhere that Lily could escape to.

  “Even so, there are places you can go, you know. Places you can hide.”

  Lily shook her head, but there was no way to explain to Dr. Anna. Women did run sometimes, even in New Canaan; last year, Cath Alcott had just taken off one night, packed her three kids into the family Mercedes and disappeared. Security had found the car, abandoned in Massachusetts, but so far as Lily knew, they never found Cath. John Alcott, a big, quiet man who had always made Lily feel slightly uneasy, had hired a private firm to find his wife, but it hadn’t helped. They couldn’t even trace her tag. Cath had done the impossible: she had taken her children and gotten away clean.

  But Lily would never be able to disappear, even without children in tow. Where would she live? How would she eat? All of the money was in Greg’s name; the big banks wouldn’t open individual accounts for married women anymore. Even if Lily had known people who could create a new identity for her—she didn’t—she had no skills. She had graduated college with English credentials. No one would hire her, not even to clean houses. Lily closed her eyes and saw the homeless of Manhattan in their shapeless garbage bags, living in clusters beneath the roadways, fighting for scraps. Even if she made it so far, she wouldn’t last a day in that world.

  “Well, think it over,” Dr. Anna told her, face severe again. “It’s never too late.”

  Reaching into her pocket, she produced a card and, with a questioning glance at Lily, tucked it into Lily’s purse where it sat on the chair. Then she slipped out, closing the door behind her.

  Lily slithered down off the paper-covered exam table, carefully shedding her paper gown so that it didn’t rip; her parents’ waste-not-want-not upbringing still ruled her sometimes, even in such silly matters as a paper gown that couldn’t be reused. Looking down at herself, she saw purple finger-shaped bruises on her upper arms from where Greg had grabbed her on Tuesday. The rest of the cuts and bruises from the bad night almost a month ago had finally healed, but these new marks meant that she couldn’t wear anything sleeveless for a while, and Greg liked her in sleeveless tops.

  She began to put on the rest of her clothes, trying not to look down at the rest of her body. Greg had been under a lot of stress; that, at least, hadn’t been a lie, and he had been sorry afterward. But “a few times” was stretching it. There had been six times so far, and Lily could remember each of them in detail. She could lie to Dr. Anna, but there was no use varnishing the truth inside her own head. Greg was getting worse.

  When Lily exited the elevator, she found several members of Security clustered around a well-dressed man at the scanner. The man looked respectable enough to Lily’s eye, with just a touch of grey in his hair and a very smart navy suit. But the guards hustled him behind the desk, through a blank white door with “Security” painted on it in black letters. All sound ceased when they closed the door behind them.

  Under the watchful eyes of the two remaining guards, Lily moved toward the waiting Lexus. Terrible memory had awoken: Maddy’s blonde pigtails, disappearing through the doors. Sometimes there were whole months when Lily managed not to think of Maddy, and then she would see something: a woman being escorted from her car, Security knocking on someone’s door, even the faintest glimpse in the distance of one of the sprawling detention centers that lay along I-80. Maddy was gone, but even the tiniest thing could bring her back. Lily jerked the car door open angrily, forcing the image away. This little expedition was hard enough; she didn’t need Maddy along for the ride.

  “Back home, Mrs. M.?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yes, please,” Lily replied, feeling the same odd, amalgamated emotions the word always evoked in her: half comfort and half revulsion. “Home.”

  After Jonathan dropped her off, Lily went right to the nursery. Greg wasn’t home yet and the house was empty, silent but for the humming of circuits inside its walls. Jonathan was supposed to stay with Lily at all times, even when she was at home, but she heard the engine gun outside and knew that he had left again. He often ran his own errands on the clock, sometimes at odd hours, but Lily had never mentioned this to Greg. She never felt unsafe by herself, not here in New Canaan. The walls around the city were twenty feet high and topped with electrified fencing. There was never any crime . . . or at least, Lily amended to herself, any violent crime. The city was full of law-abiding thieves.

  The nursery was a spacious, airy room on the ground floor. Lily had chosen this room because it was beside the kitchen, but even more so because the nursery opened onto a small brick patio that overlooked the backyard. Lily had liked the idea of being able to bring a baby outside to feed it in the shade of the elms. Three years ago, but it seemed like a hundred, and now Greg’s baby was something to avoid having at all costs.

  When no children came, the room had become Lily’s by default. Greg wasn’t the sort of man who would ever enter the nursery anyway; his father, whom Lily had loathed, had raised Greg with very definite ideas of what was masculine and what wasn’t, and a room fu
ll of stuffed animals didn’t make the cut. The fact that Lily remained childless only made the nursery less inviting to him, and despite the toys strewn all over the place, the room had more or less taken on the air of a Victorian lady’s parlor: a quiet, sedate space where men never entered. Sometimes when Lily had friends over, they would have coffee in here, but it was always the women, never the men.

  Of course, the house’s surveillance system was set up so that Greg could watch her in the nursery, even while he was at work. But Lily had taken care of that wrinkle early on by recording several days’ worth of innocuous footage—Lily knitting, napping, even staring longingly into the crib, as well as plenty of footage of the empty room—and looping it within the feed. Greg was not particularly computer-literate; in his parents’ house, everything had always been done for him by the nanny, the tutor, the bodyguards. Now, at work, he had a secretary who handled his entire life. But Lily knew something about computers, at least enough to alter the surveillance system. Maddy had been something of a hacker; in the last two years before she disappeared—was taken, Lily’s mind amended; this was a fact she was never allowed to forget inside her own head—Maddy had more or less lived in her room with the door closed, spending long hours on the computer. But sometimes, during weeks when Lily and Maddy were getting along, Maddy would show her interesting things, and this was one of them: how to cut into surveillance footage. If Security ever decided to monitor their surveillance system, Lily would need a new trick, but fortunately Greg’s job as a military liaison meant that he and Lily were respectable citizens, and so their house feeds were supposedly closed. Lily had a sneaking suspicion—confirmed the longer she got away with it—that Greg didn’t like to look at the nursery, not even on a monitor. If he did check up on her in this room, it was probably limited to a brief glance, certainly not long enough to connect anything he saw with earlier footage. So far, it had worked fine. Her time in the nursery belonged to her and no one else. Even in the past year, as Greg grew increasingly invasive of her few remaining privacies, this place was still safe.

  Lily closed the door behind her and took the pills over to the secret place beneath the corner tile. Even if Greg ever did decide to come in here, Lily didn’t think he would be able to spot the loose tile, which lay perfectly flush with the wall. Over the years Lily had hidden plenty of contraband here: cash, painkillers, old paperback books. But nothing was as important as the pills, which Lily arranged in neat, careful stacks of three boxes each beneath the tile. She stared down at them, wondering for the hundredth time why she was so different from all of her friends, why she didn’t want to be a mother. Being childless was a failure; she heard this message constantly, from her friends, from the minister, from the government bulletins online (the tone of these had grown increasingly panicked in the past ten years, as the ratio of poor to rich had quadrupled). There were even tax incentives now, deductions for people above a certain income level who had multiple children. To the outward eye, Lily had failed at her most important task, but she could only dissemble the shame that her friends would have felt. Inside, she thanked God for the pills. She wasn’t ready to have children, and certainly not with Greg, not when he got worse all the time. The night last week . . . Lily had tried not to think of it since, but now the bubble in her mind popped, and all at once, for the first time, Lily found herself seriously considering a new life.

  Considering escape.

  Even Lily knew that the world was full of dark places to hide. She thought again of Cath Alcott, who had bundled her children into a car and simply vanished. Had Cath had a plan? Had she joined the separatists? Or had she reestablished herself somewhere as an ordinary citizen, with a new name and a new face? There were forgers and surgeons out there who would do such work.

  But I have no money.

  This was the real stumbling block. Money bought options, the ability to disappear. Lily could ask her mother for help, but Mom didn’t really have any money either; when Dad died, his company claimed he had breached his employment contract, and so there was no pension. Mom barely had enough to pay the property taxes on the house. But even if Mom had been rich, she didn’t want to hear about Lily’s problems with Greg. As far as Mom was concerned, Lily had made her own bed. She had plenty of friends in New Canaan, but no real friends. There was no one she could trust, no one who would help her with something like this, and she suddenly found herself hating Dr. Anna, hating her utterly for trying to upset the status quo. Lily didn’t need to peek over the horizon at another, better world that was far beyond her reach. This, right here, was the best possible outcome: to get her pills every year and not have to bring a child into this house.

  “Lil!”

  She started guiltily. Greg was home. The front door panel on the wall was blinking brightly, but she hadn’t noticed.

  “Lil! Where are you?”

  She shoved the tile back into position and stood up, hastily smoothing her skirt down over her hips. On her way out, she tapped the panel on the wall and was rewarded with the quiet, somehow comforting whirring of the house beginning to make dinner as she went down the stairs.

  Greg had gone straight to the bar. This was another thing Lily had noticed lately: Greg used to drink only when something good had happened at work, but now it seemed to be every night, and his intake was increasing. They didn’t all turn into bad nights for Lily, but she couldn’t help noticing the correlation, the way Greg immediately went for the booze every night now, the way he drank as though he were trying to escape from something.

  “How was your appointment?”

  “Good. Dr. Davis said it’s looking better.”

  “What’s looking better?” He came toward her, tumbler in one hand, and wrapped an arm around her waist.

  “He thinks my body will respond well to something called Demiprene. It stimulates my ovaries.”

  “To release eggs?”

  “Yes.” The lies flowed glibly, well rehearsed, from Lily’s mouth. She had done her research two years ago, knowing that the time would come when Greg would demand real information about what the hell was wrong with her reproductive system. But his questions grew more pointed all the time, and Lily had begun to have the uneasy feeling that he was doing his own research now.

  “I got good news today,” Greg remarked, and she relaxed a bit; there would be no real interrogation tonight.

  “Really?”

  “Ted said—well, hinted—that there’s a Senior Liaison spot opening up next year. Sam Ellis is retiring. Ted says I’m in line for it.”

  “That’s good.”

  Greg nodded, but his hands were already pouring another glass of scotch. Lily saw that something was troubling him, badly. “What’s wrong?”

  “Ted said I was in line for the job, but he made a crack when I was leaving. I think he meant it as a joke, but—”

  “What was it?” Lily asked, but that was merely routine, the routine of comforting her husband at the end of the day. She already knew.

  Greg’s cheeks had stained a dull brick red. “He said that if it wasn’t for my little problem, I would have been an SL last year.”

  “He was joking.”

  “The first couple of times, maybe. Now I don’t think so.”

  Lily took his hand, trying to project more sympathy than she felt. Greg was under enormous pressure, certainly, but it was a pressure with which Lily couldn’t identify. She had never been ambitious. She didn’t care whether Greg made senior anything, so long as they had a roof over their heads and a decent life. Other wives at the club took great pride in their husbands’ advancements, as though they were all still in high school, where dating the starting quarterback meant you were somehow superior to every other girl in your class. But not Lily. Greg had a good job, and his superiors liked him. He was in no danger of being fired. Who gave a fuck if he became the youngest Senior Liaison in the history of the Pentagon?

  Greg does, she reminded herself. But that fact no longer carried the weight it
once had. It would have been much easier to cheer for Greg if he had shown some reciprocal concern for her. Early in their marriage things had been better; Greg had treated her like a separate person once. But the tone had shifted, and now all of Lily’s actions were evaluated in terms of the main chance, as though she were merely a booster engine on Greg’s rocket. These little stories from the office were always the same, and while Greg was certainly looking for reassurance, he was also looking to goad. The message was clear: Lily’s shriveled uterus was impeding his career path. The possibility that Greg’s testicles might be an issue had never even come up. Lily felt anger climbing up the back of her throat, but then Greg leaned forward, elbows on the bar, burying his head in his hands. He wasn’t crying, not Greg; his hateful father had smacked that out of him long before Lily had ever come on the scene. But this was as close as he ever got.

  “Greg.” She bit her lip, trying to gather courage. She had broached this topic twice in the first year of their marriage and Greg had shut her down each time, but now it seemed like a moment when he might actually be able to listen. Lily reached out and took his hand. “Greg, you know, maybe it’s okay.”

  He raised his head, looking at her as though he’d never seen her before. “What?”

  “Lots of people don’t have children. Maybe it’s not the end of the world.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve always wanted kids.”

  No I haven’t! She bit back the words, but they continued as a kind of scream deep in her mind. You assumed I did! We never discussed it! You never even asked!

  Lily swallowed, trying to get her anger under control. This was her husband, and once they had been able to talk honestly, sometimes even for hours on end. She reached out and touched Greg’s hair, took a deep breath, and continued. “Greg, if we never had kids, I would be okay with it.”

  He wrapped his arms around her with an incredulous chuckle. “You’re just saying that.”

  “No, I’m not.” She pulled back and looked him in the eye. “Greg, we’d be fine.”