There’s a trumpet blast that sets off the percussion of parade music, and through the crowd I can make out the drummers deftly spinning sticks between their fingers as they march. And then there’s the president on a high platform that’s decorated in gigantic fake flowers, in honor of spring. I remember one winter his bulletproof dome was aflutter with artificial snow. He never ventures anywhere unless he’s encased in that dome.
Today he’s dressed in a bright leafy green suit, his white hair crowned with laurel.
His platform stops. He holds up his arms. Cameras loom over the crowd on vertical lifts.
“How will we hear what he’s saying in that thing?” Gabriel asks me.
I don’t have to answer him, because immediately President Guiltree’s voice comes booming and echoing through speakers that have been fastened to the surrounding trees. “What a large turnout!” he says. There’s the squeal of interference in one of the speakers. Maddie is a furious shade of red, her hands pressed against her ears. I try to comfort her by stroking her hair, but she jerks back and hides her face in Gabriel’s neck.
Gabriel loops his arm through mine, drawing me close. Between the orphanage and his time at the mansion, I doubt he’s ever seen a crowd like this—stretching along every pathway like the legs of a giant spider. And I doubt he’s ever heard the president speak. He isn’t missing much. President Guiltree is more of a figurehead than anything else. A symbol of a pointless tradition that’s been carried on for centuries. America is a country. A country must have a leader, even if its people are scrambling around like ants without their queen, going through the motions but to no end.
Behind the president, in his dome, are all nine of his wives, each wearing a different shade of pastel dress and a crown of laurel. Three of them are first generation; four of the younger brides appear to be in various stages of pregnancy. They were chosen from a long list of applicants, bright-eyed and willing. I often wonder if they regret their decision. The luxurious life of a wealthy man’s bride has its appeal. I know that. But it even took its toll on Cecily, who’d spent her childhood dreaming of it. There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage—a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn’t seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.
The president is saying something about the approach of spring and newness, but it’s hard to pick out his words when they keep echoing. The drummers have all stopped to listen. A hush falls over the crowd in time with a gust of sea air, and the president’s voice becomes a mumble and then nothing at all as the speakers are readjusted.
“Technical difficulties, folks,” he says, laughing good-naturedly. Someone behind me growls.
I’m just opening my mouth to tell Gabriel we should leave, when the president starts up again.
“As everyone is aware,” he says, “spring will soon be upon us.” And then he dips into a speech about how spring brings newness and life, and with the birth of the dogwood blossoms that surround his home, and the anticipated arrival of his new sons, he would like to restore some hope to us as well. “That is why,” he says, smiling so brightly I can see his teeth all the way from my place in the crowd, “I am announcing the rebuilding—no, the rebirth—of the laboratories that stood in Manhattan’s shipping district.”
He wants to rebuild the laboratories in which my parents worked—the ones that were bombed in protest of further research for the antidote. My brother and I heard the blast as we were walking home from school. The ground rattled under our feet, and we held hands as we ran toward the billowing smoke in the distance.
There were hundreds of buildings there. It could have been any of them. Still, we knew. Some survivors were crawling from the rubble when we arrived. I had to wrap my arms around Rowan like a vise, pleading for him not to join the civilians who rushed in to help. In the end he stayed with me on the sidelines, and we watched until the last rescue effort had evacuated. And later that evening, what was left of the structure collapsed entirely.
Not only did that explosion take my parents, it took the city’s pro-science ideals, left us all thinking we had no choice but to accept our meager life spans, that nothing could be done.
A new lab. It is the first thing the president has ever said that has made me feel hope. But that hope only lasts for an instant, because as the president is starting up his next sentence, the angry cries from the crowd drown him out.
Gabriel tightens his arm around mine. In the distance someone hurls a rock that hits the president’s dome. No, they don’t want more research. They don’t want children to be tampered with more than they already have been. Isn’t it bad enough, they ask, that we’ve already been given death sentences?
The first generations are the angriest, but, then, they make up the majority of the pro-naturalist mentality. They’ve already watched their children wither away; they’ve seen the consequences of science, and will have no more of it. “Use that space to build a hospital!” someone yells. Hospitals are a luxury only the wealthy can manage. However, there are some who have studied medicine and offer makeshift health care out of their homes. If they’re able to find a usable abandoned building, they might set up a broader practice. I’ve never heard of the president shelling out a dime to help fund these ventures. Why would he? What would be the point in saving a life that will end in a few years anyway?
“We should go,” I tell Gabriel. I’m not sure if he can hear me over the commotion—the drums have started up in an attempt to drown it out—but he is pulling me away anyway. The crowd is everywhere, tightening on us, and I’m craning my neck to see over the heads and find the proper route.
Then the explosion happens.
I freeze. Gabriel tugs me, but then stops when he realizes I won’t move. Can’t move. I’m transfixed by the tiny gray cloud that has formed in the distance. And then another blast. And another. Someone is bombing the trees. One goes off behind me, knocking over a camera lift.
The screams in the crowd are not only terror. They are outrage. The president’s dome is framed by hands pressed and pounding against it in anger. His wives, in their row behind him, are steely and brave, their chests pushed forward, their chins high, their hands roped together. The president tries to speak, over the blasts and the drums and the microphone interference, but eventually he gives up. His platform starts moving slowly forward through the crowd, and people scramble out of the way and then follow it. Follow it all the way to the pier, where it connects with a ferry that will take him out to sea before his helicopter comes to retrieve him.
The blasts are small. Nobody appears to be injured. But as the thin smoke spreads through the crowd, all I can think is that these explosions are only a taste of what’s to come.
When we finally break free of the commotion, I quickly steer us in the direction of the residential district. Most of the crowd has headed to the pier, leaving only a dwindling number of people for us to push through. More than half of the crowd, though, was opposed to the new lab. More than half of my home city believes we are a lost cause. Believes I am a lost cause.
My hands are shaking, and Gabriel clenches his fingers around mine. Now that the noise is in the distance, and not so immediate, Maddie has lowered her hands from her ears and is blinking owlish eyes at me as though for an explanation.
“I don’t think anyone was hurt,” I say, swallowing the catch in my voice. “It was just a . . . demonstration.”
Gabriel is working through his shock, I can tell. His sharp breaths are accented by clouds, small versions of the smoke plumes. “What,” he says, “were they trying to demonstrate?”
“More than four years ago protestors bombed the research labs in the name of pro-naturalism,” I say. “They didn’t want any further experiments to be done on children to find an antidote, because they don’t think there is an antidote. They think we should just accept what has happened.”
I start walking, unsure what else to do, and Gabriel follows alongside me, Maddie latched to his chest. It takes a lot to rattle her, but I’m guessing even the freak show at Madame’s hadn’t prepared her for something like this.
“So they blow up trees?” Gabriel says.
“To demonstrate,” I repeat, slowly, deliberately. “They are saying they will do the same if the lab is rebuilt. I don’t know how they were so prepared. Maybe someone knew what the president’s plans were in advance.”
“Or they hate him enough to blow up trees no matter what he said,” Gabriel offers.
“That’s possible too,” I say. “I’ve seen that happen.”
He shakes his head, mumbling something I don’t catch. High above us, we hear the chopping of helicopter blades, and Maddie tilts her head to watch as the president and his nine wives fly into the blue, far away to someplace that’s safe.
The houses in the residential district attempt to be more colorful than the ones in shipping. Bubble gum pinks, sage greens, an ashy gray that was probably once cerulean. We get lost a few times, because here the streets are not numbered the way they are in the shipping district; they have names. Jennifer. Eileen. Sarah Court. A century ago several of the crumbling factories in this area were demolished to make way for new houses, to encourage families to grow. I wonder if these streets were all named for someone’s daughters.
Normally this amount of walking wouldn’t bother me, but my head won’t stop swimming, and several times I have to blink away the bright spots that crowd my vision. I open a bag of Kettle chips, hoping the empty carbohydrates will aid my brain as it works through the shock of this afternoon. First, the lost brother. Then the hope of a new lab, which was immediately destroyed. But the chips don’t help, not really, and Gabriel keeps asking me if we should take a rest.
Eventually we find Dawn Avenue, and we begin working our way down the house numbers. Maddie is watching the numbers descend, all of them big and gold on the doors. She’s paying better attention than I am, because I bump into her where she’s stopped before the number 56. Claire Lottner in blue crayon in a faded children’s book.
The building is bright green, three stories high with white and pink polka-dot curtains. The lawn is scraggly but decorated with colorful gnomes and wooden statues of cartoon animals arranged as though they’re playing a game of catch. A red wagon is capsized on the pathway that leads to the front door.
It’s the sign that really gets my attention, though. It’s hand-painted in deliberate cursive, a couple of feet in from the sidewalk: GRACE’S ORPHANAGE.
Gabriel is the one who walks ahead of us and knocks on the white painted door. Inside I can hear piano keys. But not a skillful melody like Cecily used to play; this is more like a cat walking across all the low notes. The playing stops, and a child shrieks with laughter, and a muffled voice is approaching us as the door opens.