The Invasion of the Tearling

“What’ll happen to her?”


Michele shrugged, and Lily saw that Michele had already begun to forget about Sarah, to move on. This forgetting was something you learned to do when someone disappeared, the response so ingrained that it seemed like poor taste to do anything else. Lily had not been able to forget Maddy, but that was different. She bore fault.

“I have your books.” Lily pulled them from her bag, but before she could hand them over, Michele reeled away, bent over and threw up into the sink. Even before she was finished, the sink’s cleaning mechanism began to wipe it away, making small, methodical sweeping sounds.

“Are you all right?” Lily asked, but Michele waved her away. Her voice, when it came, was garbled.

“I’m pregnant again.”

“Congratulations,” Lily replied automatically. “Boy or girl?” Michele spat into the sink. “Boy, and a good thing too. If we had another girl, Mark wanted to have it taken care of.”

“What?”

“I don’t really care, either way.”

Lily stared at her. Michele had never talked this way before, and although Lily could imagine that it was no picnic being Mark Palmer’s wife, she had always assumed that Michele was like the rest of her friends: happy to be a mother. Michele was always going to soccer games and bragging about her children’s grades. Lily tentatively offered her the books again, and Michele shoved them inside her enormous purse. The size of Michele’s handbags was a running joke among their group of friends, but she needed the space for all the contraband she had to transport around New Canaan. Michele did many of her dealings in this very bathroom, one of the few places in the city that had no surveillance camera.

“What are you going to do?” Lily asked.

“Have it. What else am I going to do? Mark’s already bragging to everyone at work.”

“What about the painkillers?”

Michele narrowed her eyes. “What about them?”

Lily pursed her lips, feeling like the unpleasant chaperone at a party. “Aren’t they bad for the baby?”

“Who cares? Eighty percent of upper-income mothers are on tranquilizers or painkillers, or both. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Of course you didn’t. Drug companies don’t want that information made public. People might start asking why.” Michele fixed her with a disgusted stare. “And then there’s you. Never have to be pregnant, do you? Never have to be a mother.”

Lily recoiled. She and Michele had never been good friends, but they had always gotten along … and now Lily realized how little that meant.

“Mark laughs at you two all the time … Greg and his empty oven. But you’ll never have to have four screaming kids hanging off you, will you?”

Lily backed up a step at the sight of Michele’s normally pretty face, contorted with hatred and—jealousy? Lily thought it was. But even as she backed away, she felt her temper rising. The picture Michele painted was the stereotype of a poor woman with too many mouths to feed. Lily had even seen the image on government posters whenever a social services bill was up in Congress. But Michele had two nannies to help raise her three children. Some of their friends even had three or four nannies. Michele spent perhaps an hour a day actually being a mother.

Michele had taken out a bottle of pills now, and she swallowed two of them with ease. The digital cleaner had finished, and now the sink was as clean and gleaming as it had been when they came in. Michele splashed some water on her face and dried it with a towel. “We should go back out.”

When they sat down at the table, Keith leaned over and asked Lily, “Are you all right?”

She nodded, fixing a pleasant smile on her face. For the rest of the meal, she tried to keep her eyes off Michele, but she couldn’t help it. Were all of her friends so miserable on the inside? Sarah had answered that question. Jessa, maybe; her husband, Paul, was a decent enough guy until he drank. Christine? Lily didn’t know. Christine’s eyes had a constant, glazed shine that could be either drugs or religious fervor; Christine was the head of the Women’s Bible Circle at their church. Lily had never trusted any of her friends, but she had thought she knew them.