Page 73 of A Better World

“Try it, little witch, and nobody’s feeding you.”

Maybe she sensed Linda wasn’t in a patient mood, could readfrom her muscle twitch that she’d have been happy to kick her. Sunny waddled aside.

Around dusk that evening, Cathy Bennett’s stepbrother dropped her off. She and Hip had gotten more than a thousand signatures supporting golden tickets for all born citizens. They planned to spend the evening making calls, explaining their case, and getting at least fifty more. Eventually, they’d ask for an audience with the board. Daniella had told them that when Rachel became CEO and Lloyd chairman, they’d be receptive.

Cathy beamed lately. Linda’d never seen her so radiant.

“You know, this doesn’t help the Farmer-Bowen cause much,” Linda’d recently told Hip.

He had nodded at this, like the idea was neither new nor interesting to him. He no longer brooded like he used to in Kings. The things that used to concern him (how he measured up against his sister, his weight, his performance in school, whether the United Colonies would last into his old age) had fallen away. All he cared about now was making Cathy happy. “I’m not in it just for the now. I’m in it for the long game, Mom.”

“You’re a good boyfriend,” Linda told him, because it was true. Though she was beginning to think the relationship was uneven. Cathy snapped, Hip asked how high he ought to jump. Hip snapped, the sound echoed.

Soon after Cathy and Hip disappeared, Josie headed out the door to meet the crowd of kids waiting for her. “You don’t have to go. You can stay home,” Linda said.

“I know,” Josie answered, soft and meek.

Dinner at Sirin’s went how it always went: jolly and silly. But she’d gone to enough of these evenings that their novelty had scraped away. They were beginning to feel like a performance:Here are the important people. Look how much fun they’re having! Do what they do. Act how they act! Or else you’ll get kicked out, you poor son of a bitch!

As if there’d never been any tension during the Thanksgiving race, Daniella acted just the same. Rachel and Kai sat close and held hands. Jack seemed displeased about this turn of events and was especiallymean to his wife, Colette, telling her she was no good at spreading butter on bread, sneering at her choice in mead, and ignoring her when she asked him to scoot down a little. Lloyd came to her rescue, offering to switch seats because he worried she was being affected by a draft. He entertained her with stories about a town in Florida he’d visited, where the rule of government was decided by a divining rod. “You’d think it would be a mess. But it’s actually worked for them. That’s the crazy part.”

Linda drank more than usual. It made everything feel further away. She had an itch inside her that she wanted very much to scratch.

“I wasn’t able to find much on idiopathic leukemia,” Russell told her later that week. “The hospitals aren’t sharing information. And you’re right, BetterWorld categorizes illness differently. You have to look underspontaneous mutationorimmunologic auto-aggressionto find anything, but once you get there, the numbers align. The incidence of leukemia and lymphoma in this town is something like .01 percent, which seems to be a little less than on the outside, though it’s all guesswork.”

He handed her the materials he’d printed out, along with Fielding’s letter.

“Anything about chlorine and benzene?” she asked, running her thumb over Fielding’s name. She and Fielding had been exchanging emails once a week. Fielding’s grammar was going. Her sentences weren’t making much sense, either. A normal person would print them all and keep them in a special, cherished file. Linda didn’t want to do that. Such an act would be an admission that these letters were finite.

“Nothing of note. There’s no reaction that I’m seeing. No benzene or PERC. I know Fielding mentioned them, but running GIS on this end, there’s no idiopathic leukemia clusters on record. I honestly think that tumor’s spread to her brain.”

December meant flu season. Her work picked up. Between the hospital and the clinic, she was seeing at least twenty patients every week.She enjoyed the ride to the clinic, listening to news from the outside. Despite the global information embargoes, an international consortium of scientists had gotten together and made their own network. Threatened with espionage charges by their home countries, they’d encrypted their exchanges and had so far eluded detection. Some people thought this was treason—the scientists would get together and hold the world for ransom. Linda thought it was Promethean, but probably doomed. People had been trying to halt the Great Unwinding for a very long time, and so far nobody’d found traction.

Mid-December. In tranquil Plymouth Valley, everything but the weather stayed exactly the same. Small wood fires burned at night in houses, their chimneys billowing gray smoke. Caladrius retreated into their warm houses and snow fell and piled. It was fluffier than eastern pack; you could see the individual patterns of flakes as they drifted, at first melting on blacktop and then collecting into a perfect crust of white.

An itch, an urge to scratch.

As a kid, she’d lived by the river. She’d been born the youngest of four. By then, her parents had been old. She’d had more freedom and almost no supervision. She’d ditched summer camp at the community center and gotten lost in the woods, then found herself again.

And then, practically overnight, Glamp took over their lives, and the school, and camp, and the town. At first it was the miracle drug everyone loved, and then it was the outlawed drug that everyone still loved and took but didn’t talk about. They kept it in hidden purse pockets and locked drawers and glove compartments. She’d tried it. Even now, she didn’t like to admit that, but yeah, she’d spent a few months crushing and snorting it. She finally learned, then, the joy of secrets. They nest inside you, and make you feel less alone. At fourteen, she lost her virginity to a thirty-year-old pharmaceutical rep in the back of his car.

When her mom got hospitalized with heart failure, that high, absent feeling lost its appeal. She kept sleeping with friends and strangers.It made her life feel less empty. Then she met Russell. She’d never felt understood by him. He didn’t seem to get her moods, or to know why she liked having friends for dinner, or her interest in working at a free clinic. Having come from parents who fought when they talked, who’d aired grudges like laundry set to dry, he’d craved peace. For that reason, he wasn’t curious about people or what made them tick. But he’d loved her. She’d felt that love. It was certain and unwavering—the pillar she’d been searching for since she’d first started wandering those woods.

Even during their bad times—when he’d left her alone with the kids, when she’d begged for help and he’d agreed, looking her plainly in the eyes, then gone back to work as if the conversation had never happened, forcing her to sideline her medical career so that it eventually became more of a hobby than a profession—she’d always known he loved her. Even when, fed up, she’d asked for a divorce, it hadn’t been because she hated him, as happened to so many couples she knew. She’d been bluffing, hoping to force a little more equality. That time, he’d been good. He’d promised to change and actually changed, going so far as to come home for dinners and show up for his first parent-teacher conference. But he’d soon backslid, and by then she’d been worn down. The kids would be home for only another few years. Logistically, divorce wouldn’t help her situation. She’d wind up having to do more on less money. She let it go, even as she’d wondered: What was it like, inside other marriages? Did this happen to everyone, only they didn’t talk about it? Or despite her outward bravado, her competence, was there something deeply wrong with Linda Farmer?

Had her own falling-apart family of origin been the thing to make her cling to Russell that much more tightly? She didn’t know. All she knew was that for a long time, she’d told herself a story about how her life could have turned out tragically, how Russell, in his unwavering stability, had saved her. He’d been the reason that she’d escaped the rest of Poughkeepsie’s fate. But she saw now that she’d given him too much credit. Some people have Glamp-shaped holes in them. Either they’re born with that hole, or something cruel carves it into them. Her own emptiness could never be filled by something like Glamp.

Always, she’d been someone who needed to understandwhy. Whyhad her family succumbed? Why had the manufacturers marketed it? Why had the distributors and regulators agreed it was safe? Why weren’t they all in prison now? Why had her family chosen it, over her? She’d looked on at the wreckage of Poughkeepsie, and hadn’t wanted to drown in it; she’d wanted to pave it. To undo it, save it.

One December morning after drop-off, she drove to Gal’s house. Gal’s car was parked in the driveway. A light was on in the den, the place with the couch where Linda had once sat. She noticed the ash tree, leaves heavy with snow. Someone had wrapped its trunk in black ribbon.

When she got home, she checked her email and saw a note from Leticia. Dr. Carole Fielding had died. Her daughter had her cremated, no funeral. Without reading any of it, Linda printed up all of Fielding’s correspondence then, and put it in a special envelope markedCAROLE.

Then she went outside.

The air was bitter, its sting pleasant on her lungs. She tried to think of who to call, to tell what had happened, but Russell didn’t typically answer his device during the day. He wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. She’d feel him on the other end, trying to come up with something pacifying, so he could go back to work. Neither Rachel nor Daniella would be interested. Probably, they might even ask her why she’d called them, as her sadness was ruining their day. She thought of Hip, who would hijack the conversation with talk of Cathy and golden tickets. She thought of Josie, to whom she’d always been so close. But Josie wasn’t Josie anymore.

She walked in just her sneakers through the snow, her feet crunching through the top, thick layer and sinking down midcalf. It felt so satisfying. She kept crunching, all over the lawn, until her feet were numb from cold. Until half the yard was packed-down footprints. She looked over her work and saw that she’d made a giant spiral—a circle getting ever wider.

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