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 full 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.