CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
VAL
“Why haven’t you been running?” Julie asked.
A reasonable question, but Val chose not to treat it as such. She shrugged and returned to her lesson plan. If she was taking a forced vacation, the school would at least get the best lesson plans they had ever seen. Perfect lesson plans. The kind that made a substitute compliment you to the principal. The kind that made it harder to get rid of such a team player.
Julie persisted. “Seriously. I can’t remember the last time you ran.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Love, when you don’t run you get cranky. As demonstrated.”
Val should have answered. Instead, she went into the kitchen and rummaged in the fridge for something to chop. Chopping was better than running. She needed something that took concentration without thinking. She closed the fridge and reached for the sweet potatoes. Perfect.
She dropped the potatoes in the sink and turned on the water, then grabbed the vegetable brush and began scrubbing dirt away. Behind her, Julie came into the room and pulled out a chair, scraping it on the floor to announce her presence. Val started hacking bad spots from the first potato. A slice down one side gave it a flat surface to rest on. Chop. Fluid strokes with a sharp knife, the point never leaving the cutting board as she fed potato to blade.
Julie sighed loudly, and when no response came from Val, she spoke. “What is going on with you? I don’t think I did anything to deserve the silent treatment.”
“I’m not giving you the silent treatment. I’m cutting potatoes. Maybe if I had a Pilot I would’ve heard you come in.”
“Bull. You heard me.”
“Okay, I did, but I don’t want to talk. Is that allowed?”
“Nope. Not if you’re not running and you’re turning your back on me. Not allowed. You can tell me why you’re upset, or you can prove you’re not upset, but you can’t hang out in between.”
Val glared at her, then lowered the knife. How had she gotten so much dirt under her fingernails when she’d used a scrub brush? She picked at them. Anything could become a mindful task if you concentrated hard enough. She turned on the tap and mindfully washed her hands, like a surgeon. Julie was gone when she finished; if she’d had a Pilot she would have known how long ago her wife had left the room.
It was wrong to take it out on Julie. She should explain. This was too important to hide, but she was embarrassed. She thought she knew what Julie would say, and Julie would be right, and she didn’t want to hear it.
• • •
The next day, Val woke at her usual time, as she had every day during her suspension. She made lunches for all three of them, like usual. She dropped Sophie off at school, and as usual, watched until the doors had closed behind the girl. That was as far as she could protect her. After that, Sophie was in the school’s hands; in the hands of people she trusted, to some extent, to recognize if there was a problem.
Those same people also missed the problems they were creating by dividing Piloted and un-Piloted students, so how could she expect them to recognize and respond well to Sophie’s seizures? No, she was being stupid. Piloted teachers probably had a better chance of noticing; they could keep tabs on all the students at once.
Maybe she was obsolete. Maybe teaching had moved on, and she was behind the times. At least they still needed her to coach, if nothing else. A Pilot couldn’t help someone run faster or fix bad body mechanics; that was her job. Except right now it wasn’t.
Right now she wasn’t supposed to go to school. Instead, she drove on past storefronts and houses and then to the place where the spaces between storefronts and houses widened. She pulled into the dirt lot at the entrance to the state park. Julie was right that she needed to run, wrong about when. She was running because she didn’t know what else to do with the time.
She walked down the hill into the park. When she reached the riverside trail she stretched against a tree, and then she ran. This time, everything followed her, as it had for every run during her suspension. No escape when you brought your problem on yourself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JULIE
When Julie was twelve years old, she realized an important thing about her family: everyone was lying. It was only the three of them, her parents and her. She thought it had always been that way, until the day she found the shoebox. The one filled with photos of an infant boy so small he was held in one gloved hand, wires and tubes snaking everywhere around his tiny body. There were no labels, no names, no dates. It could easily have been someone else’s child, but then there would have been no reason for the photos to be in a shoebox in her mother’s closet, and there wouldn’t have been a tiny knit blanket in the box, and she wouldn’t have recognized her father’s favorite plaid shirt in one photo’s background.
She put the pictures back, replaced the blanket, closed the box, and never mentioned it again. She waited her entire life for her parents to mention she’d briefly had a brother, to take her to a cemetery, to tell her whether he’d been older or younger than her, to let her in on their secret. Nobody ever mentioned him. Sometimes she wondered if she’d imagined finding it, if she’d conjured the whole thing.
She resolved to pay attention, to notice details. She resolved that when and if she had children, they would have siblings. She resolved never to keep anything big from her own family, when she had one of her
