A few days after that, Dr. Grind and Jill Patterson, the only supervisors who remained now that Jeffrey and Kalina had left the complex to begin preparations for their own versions of the project, called a meeting. It was strange to watch only the two of them at the front of the room, and Izzy felt the stab of loss from Kalina’s departure, the one who had found her, had brought her to the attention of Dr. Grind. She could not, in good conscience, begrudge Kalina taking on a new version of the project, but it had hurt Izzy deeply that Kalina had left the family before it had come to its natural close. If even the people paid to stay in the complex couldn’t do it, Izzy felt less and less sure that anyone else would.
And then, as if reading Izzy’s mind, Dr. Grind had informed the rest of the family that Patricia Acklen had made the decision to prematurely end The Infinite Family Project. On December 31, The IFP would officially close down. Legally, she had the power to do so, Dr. Grind assured everyone, having looked over the legal documents himself. She had allowed that each family would receive a payment of $100,000 to help cover the costs of relocation and reentry into the “real world,” but there would be no further affiliation with the original families. “It’s a transition,” Dr. Grind admitted. “But we still have each other, and some time to continue our work here.”
“What would it matter to Ms. Acklen if we stayed the full time?” Asean asked. “What harm would it do to keep the project going, the way you had planned it, Dr. Grind?”
“I don’t think it would matter to the bottom line,” Dr. Grind admitted, a touch of anger in his voice, though perhaps only Izzy could hear it. “It’s purely a managerial decision, which, unfortunately, we cannot change.”
“What if we just stayed?” Asean asked, and Nikisha leaned over to whisper to him, but he shook his head. “What if we just refused to leave?”
“I can’t imagine anything good would come from that, Asean,” Dr. Grind said, “though, honestly, I am so invested in this place, in all of you, that I’d be willing to try.”
“I think,” Julie said, fuming, “that we should burn this place down when we leave.”
“Okay, well, that’s problematic,” Dr. Grind offered, realizing perhaps what he had started. “Look, the real issue is that Acklen controls the money that funds this project. And they have legal barriers in place to prevent us from benefiting from the study after it has been deemed unnecessary. They are being generous, in their own way, by letting us stay here a little longer. They are giving you a fairly hefty severance package, as it were, which they are not obligated to do. They could even, if they wanted to use enough of their lawyers to do so, find ways in which we were in breach of contract, and ask us to pay restitution for those things. Right now, they think they are being kind. So you cannot imagine what it would be like if they decided to truly be nasty to The Infinite Family Project.”
“I still say we burn down the place,” Julie said.
“I hope they turn it into a museum,” Kenny said, “leave it exactly this way, and we can come back every year and look around. We could all bring the kids and they could see their old home.”
“There’d be a gift shop,” Carmen added, smiling.
“A food court,” Susan said.
“Free and open to the public,” Dr. Grind finally said. “Perhaps.”
“Though without us,” Kenny sadly admitted, gesturing to those who remained, “it wouldn’t be very interesting.”
And then Carlos, Nina, and Gilberto informed the rest of the family that they were moving to St. Louis, where Nina had a cousin who’d offered her a job working in the accounting department of a very successful start-up company. They left in November, leaving only six families.
It was a heartbreaking experience for Izzy, for the entire month of December, to walk around the complex and find it ghostlike and empty. Even if the people who had left had never been her closest confidantes (Carmen and Link and Susan were still here), they had created the framework that allowed Izzy to feel like she was a part of something larger than herself. Moreover, she felt a creeping dread around the edges of her consciousness. With fewer people populating the complex, the woods that surrounded the buildings seemed to be pulling closer, inches at a time, swallowing them up. When she walked through the courtyard at night, the safety she had always felt had given way to a need to be alert; the real world was seeping into the complex, and she did not feel safe in the open air.
The children attended classes, went on field trips, swam in the pool, but they also seemed haunted by the defections, as if, at any moment, another one of them could be taken away. Dinners were now muted affairs, as everyone was thinking about the next step, finding a new place to live, looking at school systems for the children, but not wanting to talk about it in public. They were huddled together, sharing this doomed space, unable to imagine a world without each other, with no other choice but to move on.