But it was a mistake. Even if it worked out, she had made a mistake, joining this project. The strangeness of it, and the way everyone worked so hard to pretend that it was perfectly normal, was going to change Izzy in ways that she would not recover from.
But Izzy was used to making mistakes. She was used to living inside it. The key, she knew, was to bend and shape and worry the mistake until it turned into something else, something that would allow her to survive.
Then she forced herself to sit up, to become tough. She willed it to happen.
She thought of where she’d be if not for the complex, living in that tiny bedroom at her father’s house, her mother long dead, her father drunk and useless. She thought of how impossible it would be to sleep, the baby crib wedged so tightly into the room that Izzy could hardly move. She thought of her hair smelling of wood smoke, her eyes red with irritation. She’d have to take on another job, extra hours, a job so bad, the only thing she was qualified for, that would stretch her out so much she’d be flattened by the end of the night. She would have to leave Cap with old ladies who ran nurseries out of their own ramshackle houses, women so burned out by life that they swatted the kids into submission, charging so much that Izzy could barely afford to feed herself and her son, eating food that only slowed them down more. People in town would wonder who the father was, poor Izzy Poole, a smart girl, but such bad circumstances. Pity, she hated it. She’d come to regret Cap like she’d regretted Hal and damn near most of her life.
She would not allow that to happen, she told herself, now sitting up so straight in bed that it felt military or like very perfect yoga. She’d fought her way out of that life, had traveled so far to this place in the woods. She was scared. She was terrified of fucking everything up. It didn’t matter. She would make it work. Izzy would find tiny ways to make herself essential, to succeed when it seemed so unlikely. Ten years, that’s what she had. She would mine every essential element out of these ten years and she would be transformed. “Infinite,” she said to herself. “Infinite. I am infinite.” And so she was, and so she would be.
chapter ten
the infinite family project (year one)
Dr. Grind sat in Gerdie Kent’s office on the first floor of Main 1 as she explained the finances of The IFP at the end of the first year, which seemed like imaginary numbers to him, the endowment so large that it simply was not possible that they could ever spend it all. Even so, Gerdie was frugal. It was her job to tell Dr. Grind that perhaps they did not need a full-time physical therapist to help with the babies’ gross motor skill development when they could simply use an outpatient program in Nashville or bring in an independent contractor for a few months. And it was Dr. Grind’s job, or one of the many aspects of his job, to defer to Gerdie’s expertise. “Save more than you spend,” Gerdie always told him, “and it’s there when you really need it.” Dr. Grind always wanted to say, but never did, that he always needed it, that there was always some aspect of the project that could be expanded in order to make life easier for the parents and children. He did not say that, if this all blew up in his face, it would probably be the end of his career. Gerdie did not care about any of that.
Gerdie was fifty-seven years old, loaded down with degrees, unfazed by the strangeness of the project. She and her husband had raised six foster children and she admitted during her interview for the job that “sometimes you gotta start with an artificial family in order to make it a real one later on.” She was gruff and often seemed to regard Dr. Grind with bemusement, which he appreciated, having someone acknowledge that maybe he didn’t know what he was doing, since he had to radiate confidence to everyone else in the complex.
“We spent just under what we had budgeted for the first year, though of course that number is going to increase quite a bit now that we’ll be funding the parents’ educational and occupational endeavors and hiring some extra staff to make up for their absence within the complex. It would help to try to cut back in other ways, which I’ve outlined here.” Gerdie handed Dr. Grind a sheaf of papers that would have taken him days to read.
“Just be honest with me, Gerdie. We’ve spent enough time together. You know what I’m trying to do here. Are any of these cuts going to make me feel bad?”
“Any cut would make you feel bad, Preston. But these will make you feel the least bad.”
“Okay, then. Let’s move forward.”