“Hey guys,” Joe speaks up. “This is Abby Williams in the flesh. She’s the one who’s been cluttering your inbox for the past two weeks.”
The research team is a modest one: a first-year associate and a few wide-eyed volunteer law students. I swear one of the girls looks as if she’s still in high school. That’s CEAW—law on a shoestring budget. Fighting the good fight is always underpaid.
“I believe the correct term is prepping,” I tell Joe.
He ignores that. “Abby,” he says to the rest of the group, “as you all know, is the other lead on the team besides me. But really she’s the reason we’re here, so when you hate your life in a few days, blame her.” He bats his eyelashes at me when I pull a face.
I can match the team to the little thumbnail images I got from Estelle Barry when she was staffing us. There’s Raj, the first-year associate, fresh out of Harvard. And, already, I’ve given out nicknames to the interns: Flora, a perky California girl in a floral top; Portland, a bearded hipster with a flannel too tailored to be truly authentic. Interns are like one-night stands. You can pretend to listen to a name or two, but the outcome never justifies the effort.
Flora leaps to her feet. Wants to prove she did her homework. “So far we’ve gathered all the town hall meeting notes from the past five years, before they went digital,” she says. “Several families started complaining as early as, um…” She glances down at her notes, and her face darkens. “As early as three years ago.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “We’ll be revisiting those complaints, one by one,” she adds, before sitting back down.
“What about now? Who else do we have besides Gallagher?” Gallagher is one of the largest landowners in or around Barrens—his farm’s been here since long before my time—and he uses the reservoir for irrigation. According to the notes Joe sent, he’s had to rely on it more than ever during the past two years’ drought. When he lost whole fields of corn and soybeans, he began to suspect something was wrong with the water—a suspicion borne out by several neighbors’ complaints of funny odors from the pipes, of skin inflammations and headaches.
“A half dozen people have signed the complaint he brought to the town. A family called Dawes and a Stephen Iocco seem like our best bets.”
“A half dozen complaints? We’ll be laughed out of the judge’s chambers.” Joe is underexaggerating. We’ll be kicked out.
Flora looks uncomfortable. “Optimal’s the biggest employer in Barrens,” she says. “It’s hard to sway people.”
“It’s a company town,” I say, and think uneasily about what Misha said—you’re on opposite sides now. I fear most people in Barrens will be on the other side. “That’s going to be our biggest obstacle.”
Everyone nods, but the whole team has the slick look of a city—or at least suburbia—about them, and can’t possibly understand.
When I was growing up, the morning air was coated in a film of plastic ash; we breathed in Optimal chemicals every time we inhaled, and the chemical smog turned the sun into different shades of pink and orange. Our ears rang with the constant din of Optimal construction: new scaffolds, new warehouses, new storage hangars, new smokestacks. I ate my lunch in a newly added school library built by an Optimal donation and rode home on a bus purchased by Optimal, with parts made by Optimal, and went to Optimal-sponsored dances, bake sales, and cookouts. My dad was right: there was someone bigger than us, someone watching us, someone who even made the colors in the sky and textured the air we were breathing. I remember as a kid when the skeleton of the production plant went up. I used to sneak around the reservoir to play on the construction site and write my name in the rusty ooze along the drainpipes, when the house was full of the smell of sick and seemed as if it might fold in on me.
“A company town,” Joe repeats. “How quaint.”
“When is ETL sending techs?” Raj asks. He even sounds depressed. Environmental Testing Laboratories specializes in clean water supplies, with a focus on heavy metal contamination. Unfortunately, they’re one of the few trustworthy labs in the Midwest, and their backlog runs months deep.
“Next week,” Joe says. “But we shouldn’t expect results on the water to come in before July.”
“If that,” I say. “What else can we look at? What about accelerated rates of cancer?”
“In the past few years? Nope.” Only in our line of business is there reason to be disappointed that cancer doesn’t work faster.
“Optimal moved in twenty years ago,” I point out.
“You expect us to go back that far? We don’t have the manpower. Besides, you know how these hospitals work. It’s easier to get blood out of a quarter, and half of what you do get is restricted.”
“It’s data. Even if it isn’t admissible later, it isn’t a waste. We should do a survey of local doctors at least.” This is how we work: quick back and forth, push and pull. The first time I met Joe, he pointed out that the water bottle I was drinking from was a source of chemical leach, and I pointed out that he was a dick. We’ve been friends ever since.
I decide to push my advantage. “What about the old cases I sent around? Do we think there’s anything there?”
“You mean the Mitchell case?” Flora speaks up. Brightly, of course.
“The Mitchells, Dales, Baums, and Allens were the primary plaintiffs,” Portland jumps in. He doesn’t miss the chance to get some Brownie points. I like him. “Apparently their daughters—teenagers, four of them—got really sick. Tremors. Vision disturbances. Episodes of fainting. They filed a civil suit when it began to spread—”
“Right. Then dropped it.” Joe tosses the stack of notes back on his desk. “It was a hoax. Just young girls trying to get rich in a corporate payout.” Then, without warning, he rounds on me. “Wasn’t it, Abby?”
Fucking Joe. He’s always litigating.
“That’s what they said.” I think of Kaycee trying and failing to pick up her pencil in art class. I think of her friends, twitching through the halls like insects. “There was a lot of attention on them. One of the girls skipped town afterward. The others withdrew their complaints. I’m originally from Barrens,” I explain into a room of blank stares, taking on the originally as if afterward I hopped around to, who knows, Paris and Rio and Santa Monica. “I was in school with the girls who got sick.”
“But there was an audit.” This is from Raj, our first-year associate. I suspect, from the distant courtesy with which he and Joe treat each other, that maybe they are screwing after hours. “Someone from the EPA came down and spent a month doing tests. Optimal passed. They’ve passed every review since then, too.”