She walked out into the courtyard and stared up at the smeared clouds above her, not a star in the sky. She wanted to find a way into Cap’s heart, reach all of the children in that room, but knew that she could not invade their space with her own presence. Instead, Izzy went into her house, remembering the pneumatic tubes that ran throughout the complex and all ended up at the former communal bedroom of the children. The glass door that held the canister had been easy to ignore these several years in the house since there was no longer any need to send milk to the bank. She opened up one of the drawers in her kitchen and grabbed a handful of lollipops, enough for all of the children to have more than one, and she dropped them one at a time into the canister before sealing it shut. She placed it in the tube, shut the door, and pushed the button, wondering if the tubes still worked. There was a soft hum, a whoosh of air, and then the canister shot out of view, through the walls, through the complex, and she imagined it ending up in the room where her child now slept. She imagined the clunk as it settled into its new destination and the tiny red light that would blink on and off until someone removed the canister. She wondered if the children would even see it, if anything that Izzy did from now on really mattered. After a lifetime of trying to do the exact opposite, had she ruined her own child? No, she knew she hadn’t. None of the children, so impervious and brilliant, could be ruined. The parents, however, had become ruined, or had simply dragged their already broken bodies into the complex and let them rupture all over again. She felt like it would take thousands of pages of official paperwork to ever deserve Cap, but some miracle had simply given him to her, no questions asked. She hoped she could keep him, whatever came next.
She packed her duffel bag with her swim cap and suit and goggles and went to the pool. She kept all of the lights off and lowered herself into the water of the main pool, the temperature just cold enough to alert her muscles to the fact that they were needed. She swam lap after lap, the room echoing with the sounds of her movements, the world completely closed off to her, nothing but blackness. She loved the sensation, though, of pushing her way through the water, entirely blind, and finding, every single time, the solid edge of the pool against her fingertips, reminding her that she had once again found her way home.
After nearly an hour of swimming, her body finally felt accepting of sleep. It was now 4 A.M., but she changed into a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and crept across the courtyard and back into the main building. She found the parents still in the hallway, a weird rhythm of snoring and breathing and slightly whining murmurs coming from the pile of them. She stepped over a few parents and found a tiny unoccupied spot and fit her body into it. She made her own breathing match the people around her and, before she even knew it was happening, she was asleep, her waking life so bizarre that she dreamed of nothing but the sound of waves, beating against a shore that she could not see.
chapter sixteen
the infinite family project (year seven)