That first night, Charlie gripped the front of my mother’s nightgown and made those terrible noises and she clutched him back even tighter. She waved her one free arm at us. “Charles, girls, not now, go.”
My father scrambled off the bed. He took Callie and me by our shoulders and hustled us out of the room. When we were safely over the threshold he halted, then turned and gently shut the door behind us, careful not to slam.
We huddled together in the hallway, none of us wanting to move. From the other side of the door, my mother’s voice was pleading now. That was the scariest part. My mother did not beg for anything from anybody, but here was her voice now, warbling, “Please, love, please, love, please.”
Suddenly Charlie stopped. There was no noise at all, not even a groan of defeat.
After a moment, my father began walking us to our rooms.
Callie took his hand. “There’s nothing wrong with Charlie, right? Like, he’s not sick or something?”
“Probably not.”
“Will he do this every night?”
My father said he didn’t know.
When I was alone in my bedroom, I couldn’t lie down. I opened the window, stuck my hands out into the deep night air, and wagged them at the dead countryside. If I squinted, I could see the woods through the dark.
I listened for any sound. I would have preferred the sounds of Dorchester—a creaking floor, the dirty sigh of a city bus’s exhaust pipe, the scattered footfall of a neighbor stumbling home, an ambulance’s siren, the heavy husk of Callie breathing—I’d rather have any of that than this nothingness.
I leaned farther out the window and looked up. All summer long, as we got ready for the move, my father told me about the constellations I would see when we lived in the countryside.
“I see stars in Boston all the time,” I countered.
“Nah,” he said. “You’re just seeing satellites.”
Now, I wanted to see the shapes in the stars: the bear, the scorpion, the crab, and the lion. But when I looked above me, all the stars were tangled. They didn’t make any forms or symbols—they were meaningless and mute. But the earth and the trees and the water below me were not. All in a rush, the night broke and I heard waves from some water, somewhere, burping up against a shore. I heard the rancid woods creaking. And then suddenly, the rise of a bass cry, some animal caught up in its own dreams.
I slammed my window shut, not caring anymore about the heat. I turned on the overhead light and then I lay in bed, absolutely still, until I heard a click click click, and the room sputtered into darkness. I sat up in bed with a start, even more terrified, and the lights sprang back on. The Toneybee had our bedroom lights on a motion sensor, a way to save money. I lay back down, tried to calm my breathing but the lights went out before I quieted. I held my hands up above my head and frantically signed nonsense into the air until the light clicked back on. I did this over and over again, waited for the timer to run out, then furiously called the lights back. My arms tired. I had exhausted myself. I could fall asleep to the snapping sound of the Toneybee Institute’s economy.
NOBODY WANTED CHARLIE. Not at first. He came into this world unasked for, a problem to be solved.
He was the result of an unplanned pregnancy in the lab. His mother was a loud, nosy, gap-toothed teenaged chimp named Denise. She was supposed to be on the Pill. All the girl chimps at the lab were—it was standard policy. But Charlie’s will to exist was stronger than progestogen, and so Denise managed, somehow, to conceive him despite the grubby patch of hormones stuck to her hairy side. None of the researchers even suspected Denise was pregnant. They noticed she was irritable sometimes, and that her middle was swollen, but they chalked that up to a rough adolescence. Charlie’s father was a mystery: there were two or three older chimps sniffing around Denise for a bit, pushing at her shoulders and backing her into corners before the researchers could shoo them away. Dr. Paulsen and her assistants never got close to figuring out who exactly was the culprit. Charlie was a fatherless child.
No one at the Toneybee noticed Denise was pregnant until the day Charlie was born. It was on a summer morning, and some of the chimps were allowed into the yard for outdoor observation. Denise usually spent her time outside good-naturedly bullying her friends, but this particular day, she abruptly left off swatting at a younger girl chimp, turned on her heel, and staggered over to a shaded corner in the pen—the farthest one from the observation deck. Once, twice, she rocked back and forth on her heels, and then clumsily squatted down into the dirt. She sat like that, low on her haunches, for the rest of the afternoon, only moving to stay in the shade, following it, inch by inch, as it drifted across the yard. Dr. Paulsen and her team watched her all day, tracking her inertia. She bared her teeth and screamed at anyone or anything that came near. Even the other chimps left her alone. Confused and brave Denise was determined to give birth alone.
Late in the day, just past dusk, as abruptly as she sat down, Denise reached between her legs and pulled up something damp and dark and strange and tucked over. She rested the thing beside her in the dust. She stayed close to it for a little while, occasionally prodding it with one knobby finger. But when it was dark, when all the other chimps had been coaxed back inside and she was all alone in the yard, Denise put her palms on the ground and pushed herself up. She staggered back, then forth. She was still very weak, the hair on her thighs and ankles matted down with dried wet and blood and dirt. She swayed once more. Then she grunted, turned her head, and strode away, leaving Charlie down in the dirt, never once glancing back.
It wasn’t Denise’s fault that she left Charlie behind. She wasn’t callous by nature. It was only that she had been hand-reared. She was raised by humans, so never knew her mother’s touch. She didn’t know what to do with a baby.
AFTER THAT FIRST night of crying, my mother told Callie and me this story in a hushed and hurried tone, as if she was betraying some trust with Charlie. When she finished, she stood up, her face chastened and sad, and left us to go back to him. As soon as she was gone, I turned to Callie and pressed the fat tip of my tongue against the inside of my cheek until a round little bulb popped out there.
What’s that? Callie signed.
“Knocked up,” I told her. “It means dumb kids get pregnant.” Another dirty sign learned at summer camp and put to good use. We began to laugh but when my mother came back in the room, Charlie on her hip, neither one of us could bring ourselves to tease him to his face. He seemed too fragile for that. There was something about the set of his shoulders, if he didn’t know you were watching he would kind of slump them forward, already wary of the world, preparing himself for defeat.
It was true what my mother said about him. He was beautiful. Large, deep-set eyes, well-formed teeth, perfectly circular nostrils. But his chin was weak and recessive, and his eyes, as well formed as they were, as soft and full as his lashes grew, his eyes never lit on anything for long. He was too nervous to look anything in the eye.
Our first afternoon with Charlie, we sat with him in front of a standing mirror. My mother propped it up longways against one of Charlie’s bare walls. She and Callie and Charlie rolled a red ball back and forth among the three of them until my mother rolled the ball away from Charlie, toward the reflection. He followed. She picked up the ball and tapped it against the glass. She put her own finger to the mirror, then touched the center of her chest and signed Mother. Then she handed the ball to Callie, who tapped it on the floor in front of her, then to her own reflection, and signed Callie. Callie rolled the ball to Charlie again. My mother touched Charlie’s chest very gently with the rubber ball, then touched it to his reflection in the mirror. The first few times they did this, she signed his name, too, Charlie. On the final round, though, and I don’t know why she did, she didn’t sign Charlie. She signed chimp instead.
As soon as she was finished, Charlie looked down at the ball in his own lap, then up at the reflection of the chimp with the red ball in his lap. He didn’t make a sound, just stared for a few moments at the face in the mirror. His eyes flitted for a second to Callie, to my mother, both of whom were nodding, holding out their hands for him to roll the ball back. Charlie glanced again at his reflection and then he drew his little bullet head deep into his neck, hunched his shoulders, raised his fists—and my mother, on instinct, lunged quicker, lunged faster, held him back before he could beat up his own shrieking reflection.
It was worse than his scream that first night. That one was unbearable because it was so sad. This one was angry. He tore and scratched at my mother’s arms. His lips drew back so that we could see his yellowing teeth and black gums. If he’d wanted to, he could have bitten my mother, gashed her good. But he didn’t. Instead, his eyes still fixed on his reflection, he raised his hands to his own face and scratched at the skin there until he drew red. He calmed down when he saw that, stopped thrashing in my mother’s arms, sucked some of her shirt’s cloth in between his lips, gathered what he could of her between his teeth and held it there, trying to calm himself.
My mother rocked him back and forth and Callie was crying and I was standing up, I was at the door, I was calling for my father, for help.
Max came first, then Dr. Paulsen, dry tongue clacking, green-gloved hands plucking at the fake pocket square at the front of her blazer, ready to wipe Charlie’s spit and tears off my mother’s face.
At dinner that night, my mother insisted she was fine. She squared her shoulders when my father pointed to the damp spot on the front of her shirt. She tried to recount the story as if it was a joke—“He just didn’t recognize himself, poor thing”—but her voice shook as she spoke.
“Were you scared?” my father asked Callie. “It’s okay to be scared.”
Callie wouldn’t answer. “What’s going to happen to Charlie?” she asked.
He was not with us at dinner. He had been taken to some unknown part of the institute. “They gave him a sedative,” my mother said carefully.
“Having to spend a night on sleeping pills with Dr. Paulsen is punishment enough for what he did.”
My mother shot me a look.
“This is Charlie adjusting to us and his surroundings,” she began to say, but my father shook his head.
“Enough.”
“I’m telling you Charles,” she started again, “it was the mirror that did it. We’ll take the mirrors out and he’ll be fine. He must have thought it was another chimp in there, playing with us.”
But that’s not what happened. I’d watched in the mirror, the light in Charlie’s eyes change. I didn’t tell my mother. She would have said I was projecting, that it was impossible. But after that I became even warier of him. Callie and I stayed away from my mother and Charlie during the day, and Max and Dr. Paulsen came back to their posts in Charlie’s bedroom. My mother doubled down on her efforts to love him. She carried him on her hip or in her arms, and when he grew too heavy for her, she put him down but always held his hand in hers. “He only has to get used to us,” she said. “Then he’ll be better.”