cookie – or “high functioning,” an expression that had always struck Jackson as insulting. It wasn’t fair, since Carol did most of the parental heavy lifting, but Flicka was always in cahoots with her father. She may have been a pale, scrawny kid with limp hair, red blotches, and – a biological network he’d never heard of before her diagnosis – an “autonomic” system on the fritz, while he was a dark, burly, half-Basque tradesman of forty-four, but their emotional default setting was identical: disgust.
“Don’t you go repeating that stuff about ‘the Asians taking over the world’ without adding that your dad said they deserve it,” Jackson chided; in the presence of anyone who could decode her slurred whine, that kind of charged racial rhetoric could get Flicka, or more to the point her father, into massive trouble. “The Chinese, the Koreans – they work hard and ignore their teachers’ sad-ass advice to wait to learn the multiplication tables until they feel like it. They’re the real Americans, like Americans used to be, and they’re colonizing all our top universities not from some patronizing helping hand of affirmative action, but from merit—”
As usual, Carol wasn’t paying the slightest attention. Fucking off at Knack, he garnered plenty of little-known information on the Web, but his wife figured she’d heard it all before, and dismissed it. Some women would be grateful for a man who brought home new, fascinating (if enraging) factoids every day, and who had an unusual, incisive point of view that made (if depressing) sense of the world. But no such luck with Carol, who would apparently have been more content with a docile drudge who credulously washed out his mayonnaise jars even though most of his “recycling” ended up in landfill, who cheerfully donated to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in defiance of the fact that the word benevolent didn’t belong within five miles of a cop, and who championed the sacrifice of nearly all his disposable income to bureaucratic shysters and incompetents as an act of civic-mindedness. In sum, she’d have preferred a husband who bought into the whole brainwashing hoax of “patriotism,” which slyly converted an arbitrary accident of birth into the kind of mindless go-team frenzy of pom-pom waving that had driven Jackson to get stoned in stairwells during pep rallies in high school.
Sure, her politics had always been wet, but otherwise Carol didn’t used to be like this. When they met she’d been doing the landscape gardening for a house where he also had a big Sheetrock job; they’d found common cause in the owner’s being an asshole, and their both being underlings had put them on the same level. So it hadn’t been a factor then that, despite the just-out-of-college scut work, she turned out to have a degree in horticulture from Penn State, or that her father (who always thought his daughter had married beneath herself) wasn’t any old seat-of-the-pants “handyman” but a property developer. Back on that job, Jackson had been drawn to a pretty woman who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, and who hefted her own thirty-pound bags of peat. But most of all he’d liked that she could spar. She disagreed with him on everything, but had seemed to enjoy disagreeing with him, and over beers after work they’d really got into it. Nowadays it was as if she’d summarily won already so why bother, which was a puzzle, since Jackson couldn’t remember losing a single argument.
And she never used to exude this killjoy seriousness. She’d been a hoot before, or she’d at least laughed at his jokes, which gave him an even better feeling than laughing at hers. He put it down to Flicka. The responsibility, it changed you. One of the reasons that Carol hardly drank anymore: at any given time their daughter’s life might depend on her mother’s mind being sharp. It was like being a doctor yourself but without the golf. You were always on call.
So Jackson returned to the subject that at least seemed to engage his wife. “You don’t understand why it’s so important to me that Shep follows through with his exit from this travesty of ‘freedom.’ But let’s turn it around. Why is it so important to you that he doesn’t?”
“I didn’t say it was ‘important’ to me,” said Carol. “I said he’s a kind, considerate person who would never leave his family in the lurch.”
Jackson slammed his boot back down on the blue parquet of their Forbo Marmoleum (and who had helped him to install it? Shep Knacker). “You just can’t stand the idea that somebody might get out! That somebody might not trudge through their life like an automaton and march in lockstep to the grave! That there might be such a thing as a real man. With courage! With imagination! With volition!”
“So you want to pick a fight? Great, that’s a surefire, hundred-percent-guaranteed route to upsetting your daughter. But go ahead, make her tense,” Carol murmured temperately, with that calmness she had that bordered on insanity. “You’re not the one who has to shove the diazepam up her anus because she can’t keep down the oral kind.”
At the mention of pharmaceuticals, on cue Heather flounced into the kitchen and demanded, “Isn’t it time for my cortomalaphrine?” Jackson had no idea; he could never remember if they were pretending she had to take it before or after meals.
“Heather, I’ve got to get this dinner ready because we’re having a guest, who could be here any minute, so why don’t you take them when Flicka grinds her meds after we eat.”
“But I’m starting to feel funny,” Heather objected, introducing a slight weave to her stance. “Dizzy and prickly and sweaty and stuff. I can’t concentrate or anything.”
“Oh, all right then; pour yourself a glass of milk.” Carol unlocked the high cabinet; keeping sugar pills under lock and key was obviously gratuitous, but part of the theater. So was “cortomalaphrine,” a name they’d effortlessly made up after years of the Catapres, clonazepam, diazepam, Florinef, Ritalin, ProAmatine, Depakote, Lamictal, and Nexium that filled out Flicka’s pill chart like nonsense rhymes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Cortomalaphrine” and its recommended dosage were printed on formal Rx labels. Jackson had been dumbfounded to learn that pharmacists keep sugar-paste placebos as part of their standard stock, so presumably it wasn’t only Heather who was scarfing down little brown vials of Good & Plentys at ten bucks a pop.
As Carol shook out three capsules, Jackson looked away. He didn’t believe in this crap. Oh, he took Carol’s point that Heather always had to assume a backseat to her sister’s ceaseless medical crises. But if Heather needed more attention, a fake prescription wasn’t the answer. She should be taught to treasure her good health, to be grateful for it. Sure, back when Carol was pregnant with Flicka the labs didn’t have a test for familial dysautonomia, and once they were told that the baby was fine they’d relaxed. (Ha ha, big surprise in the offing. When their pediatrician finally stopped hiding behind his lame nineteenth-century diagnosis of “failure to thrive” and identified why their newborn couldn’t suckle, was losing weight, and puked all day, that false reassurance from the first trimester made the news much harder to take.) But Jesus, by Carol’s second pregnancy a test had just been developed, and they already knew the chances of another FD kid were one-in-four; getting the results of the amnio, they’d been nervous to the point of stroke. When the obstetrician beamed a big smile and gave them the all-clear, Heather’s mother-to-be was so relieved she cried. Did Heather have any idea that if her fetus, too, had carried the two copies of the FD gene she seemed so foolishly to envy she wouldn’t be here? Well, no, you didn’t tell children that they had ever been an inch away from an abortion.
And you didn’t let your older kid know that, either, since the obvious implication was that if they’d known they’d have marked Flicka “Return to Sender,” too. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that they would have, or should have, but he’d wondered about it. During some of the worst of it – once the corrective surgery for scoliosis had barely healed, they then had to break it to her that it was time for a “Nissen fundoplication” to cure her chronic acid reflux – he’d suspected that Flicka was angry not just in that why-me way, but angry at her parents in particular, who made her be here. Just be here at all.
However much it cost her, he’d assured Flicka many times – and thanks to her very refusal to embrace that hackneyed angel-of-innocence shtick, which would have bored her father senseless – that she really did brighten their lives. It was his fault that she was