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FOR One thousand thousand

I think the rules were different at that place. Information technology was all about science, merely the science was magical. It didn't intendance about whether something could be done. It was most whether it should be done, and the reply was always, always yeah.

—JACK WOLCOTT

PART I

JACK AND JILL Alive UP THE HILL

1

THE Dangerous Allure OF OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN

PEOPLE WHO KNEW Chester and Serena Wolcott socially would take placed money on the thought that the couple would never choose to have children. They were not the parenting kind, by whatever reasonable interpretation. Chester enjoyed silence and confinement when he was working in his home office, and viewed the slightest deviation from routine as an enormous, unforgiveable disruption. Children would be more a slight deviation from routine. Children would be the nuclear option where routine was concerned. Serena enjoyed gardening and sitting on the lath of diverse tidy, elegant nonprofits, and paying other people to maintain her domicile in a spotless state. Children were messes walking. They were trampled petunias and baseballs through picture windows, and they had no place in the carefully ordered earth the Wolcotts inhabited.

What those people didn't see was the way the partners at Chester's constabulary firm brought their sons to work, handsome little clones of their fathers in age-appropriate menswear, futurity kings of the world in their perfectly shined shoes, with their perfectly modulated voices. He watched, increasingly envious, as junior partners brought in pictures of their own sleeping sons and were lauded, and for what? Reproducing! Something and then simple that any beast in the field could do it.

At nighttime, he started dreaming of perfectly polite lilliputian boys with his pilus and Serena's eyes, their blazers buttoned just and so, the partners beaming beneficently at this proof of what a family man he was.

What those people didn't come across was the way some of the women on Serena'due south boards would occasionally bring their daughters with them, making apologies about incompetent nannies or unwell babysitters, all while secretly gloating every bit everyone rushed to ooh and ahh over their beautiful baby girls. They were a garden in their own right, those privileged daughters in their gowns of lace and taffeta, and they would spend meetings and tea parties playing peacefully on the edge of the rug, cuddling their stuffed toys and feeding imaginary cookies to their dollies. Everyone she knew was quick to compliment those women for their sacrifices, and for what? Having a babe! Something so like shooting fish in a barrel that people had been doing information technology since time began.

At night, she started dreaming of beautifully equanimous little girls with her oral fissure and Chester's olfactory organ, their dresses explosions of fripperies and frills, the ladies falling over themselves to exist the showtime to tell her how wonderful her daughter was.

This, y'all encounter, is the true danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every 1 of them. A person may look at someone else's kid and see but the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They practice not even see the love, not really. Information technology can be piece of cake, when looking at children from the exterior, to believe that they are things, dolls designed and programmed past their parents to bear in ane fashion, following 1 set of rules. Information technology tin exist easy, when continuing on the lofty shores of adulthood, non to remember that every adult was once a child, with ideas and ambitions of their own.

It can exist easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned.

It was right later on Christmas—round after round of interminable part parties and charity events—when Chester turned to Serena and said, "I accept something I would like to discuss with y'all."

"I want to have a baby," she replied.

Chester paused. He was an orderly man with an orderly married woman, living in an ordinary, orderly life. He wasn't used to her beingness quite and then open with her desires or, indeed, having desires at all. It was dismaying … and a trifle exciting, if he were being honest.

Finally, he smiled, and said, "That was what I wanted to talk to you nigh."

In that location are people in this world—skillful, honest, hard-working people—who want zip more than to take a baby, and who effort for years to conceive one without the slightest success. There are people who must see doctors in minor, sterile rooms, hearing terrifying proclamations almost how much it will price to fifty-fifty begin hoping. There are people who must go on quests, chasing downwards the north wind to ask for directions to the House of the Moon, where wishes tin can be granted, if the hr is right and the need is peachy enough. At that place are people who volition try, and try, and attempt, and receive naught for their efforts but a cleaved center.

Chester and Serena went upstairs to their room, to the bed they shared, and Chester did not put on a prophylactic, and Serena did not remind him, and that was that. The next forenoon, she stopped taking her birth control pills. Three weeks later, she missed her period, which had been as orderly and on-time as the rest of her life since she was twelve years old. Two weeks after that, she sat in a pocket-size white room while a kindly man in a long white coat told her that she was going to be a mother.

"How long before we can get a moving-picture show of the infant?" asked Chester, already imagining himself showing it to the men at the function, jaw strong, gaze distant, like he was lost in dreams of playing catch with his son-to-be.

"Yes, how long?" asked Serena. The women she worked with always shrieked and fawned when someone arrived with a new sonogram to pass around the group. How nice it would exist, to finally be the heart of attention!

The doctor, who had dealt with his share of eager parents, smiled. "Yous're most five weeks forth," he said. "I don't recommend an ultrasound before twelve weeks, under normal circumstances. At present, this is your first pregnancy. You may want to wait before telling anyone that you lot're pregnant. Everything seems normal now, merely it'south early on days all the same, and it volition be easier if yous don't have to accept back an annunciation."

Serena looked bemused. Chester fumed. To even suggest that his wife might exist so bad at being pregnant—something so elementary that whatever fool off the street could exercise it—was offensive in means he didn't even have words for. But Dr. Tozer had been recommended by ane of the partners at his firm, with a knowing twinkle in his eye, and Chester simply couldn't come across a style to change doctors without offending someone too important to offend.

"Twelve weeks, and so," said Chester. "What do we do until so?"

Dr. Tozer told them. Vitamins and nutrition and reading, then much reading. It was similar the homo expected their baby to be the virtually difficult in the history of the earth, with all the reading that he assigned. But they

did it, dutifully, similar they were following the steps of a magical spell that would summon the perfect kid direct into their arms. They never discussed whether they were hoping for a boy or a daughter; both of them knew, so completely, what they were going to have that it seemed unnecessary. Then Chester went to bed each dark dreaming of his son, while Serena dreamt of her daughter, and for a time, they both believed that parenthood was perfect.

They didn't listen to Dr. Tozer'south advice near keeping the pregnancy a hugger-mugger, of course. When something was this proficient, it needed to be shared. Their friends, who had never seen them as the parenting blazon, were dislocated merely supportive. Their colleagues, who didn't know them well enough to understand what a bad idea this was, were enthusiastic. Chester and Serena shook their heads and made lofty comments nigh learning who their "existent" friends were.

Serena went to her board meetings and smiled contently as the other women told her that she was beautiful, that she was glowing, that motherhood "suited her."

Chester went to his office and found that several of the partners were dropping by "just to chat" nearly his impending fatherhood, offering communication, offer camaraderie.

Everything was perfect.

They went to their offset ultrasound appointment together, and Serena held Chester's hand every bit the technician rubbed blueish slime over her abdomen and rolled the wand across it. The picture began developing. For the first time, Serena felt a pang of business. What if there was something wrong with the infant? What if Dr. Tozer had been right, and the pregnancy should have remained a clandestine, at least for a little while?

"Well?" asked Chester.

"You wanted to know the baby's gender, yeah?" asked the technician.

He nodded.

"You lot have a perfect babe girl," said the technician.

Serena laughed in vindicated please, the sound dying when she saw the scowl on Chester'south face. All of a sudden, the things they hadn't discussed seemed big enough to fill up the room.

The technician gasped. "I have a 2nd heartbeat," she said.

They both turned to look at her.

"Twins," she said.

"Is the second babe a boy or a daughter?" asked Chester.

The technician hesitated. "The get-go baby is blocking our view," she hedged. "It's difficult to say for sure—"

"Guess," said Chester.

"I'm afraid it would not be upstanding for me to guess at this phase," said the technician. "I'll brand yous another appointment, for two weeks from at present. Babies motion effectually in the womb. We should exist able to get a better view then."

They did not go a better view. The first babe remained stubbornly in forepart, and the second baby remained stubbornly in dorsum, and the Wolcotts fabricated it all the way to the delivery room—for a scheduled induction, of class, the date chosen past common agreement and circled in their day planners—hoping quietly that they were most to become the proud parents of both son and daughter, completing their nuclear family unit on the first try. Both of them were slightly smug well-nigh the idea. It smacked of efficiency, of tailoring the perfect solution right out the gate.

(The thought that babies would go children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biological science was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might take been easier if those ideas had e'er slithered into their heads, unwanted only undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.)

The labor took longer than planned. Serena did not want a C-section if she could help it, did not desire the scarring and the mess, so she pushed when she was told to push, and rested when she was told to residue, and gave birth to her first child at five minutes to midnight on September fifteenth. The doctor passed the babe to a waiting nurse, announced, "It's a girl," and bent back over his patient.

Chester, who had been holding out promise that the reticent boy-kid would push his manner forward and merits the vaunted position of firstborn, said zilch as he held his wife's hand and listened to her straining to expel their second child. Her face was red, and the sounds she was making were nothing short of brute. It was horrifying. He couldn't imagine a circumstance under which he would touch her always once again. No; it was good that they were having both their children at once. This way, it would be over and done with.

A slap; a wail; and the doctor's vox proudly proclaiming, "It's another good for you baby daughter!"

Serena fainted.

Chester envied her.

* * *

Later on, WHEN SERENA WAS tucked safe in her private room with Chester beside her and the nurses asked if they wanted to meet their daughters, they said yes, of grade. How could they have said anything different? They were parents now, and parenthood came with expectations. Parenthood came with rules. If they failed to meet those expectations, they would be labeled unfit in the eyes of everyone they knew, and the consequences of that, well …

They were unthinkable.

The nurses returned with two pink-faced, hairless things that looked more than like grubs or goblins than anything human. "1 for each of you," twinkled a nurse, and handed Chester a tight-swaddled infant similar it was the near ordinary thing in the world.

"Have yous thought about names?" asked another, handing Serena the second infant.

"My mother's proper noun was Jacqueline," said Serena charily, glancing at Chester. They had discussed names, naturally, 1 for a girl, i for a male child. They had never considered the need to proper name two girls.

"Our caput partner'south wife is named Jillian," said Chester. He could claim information technology was his mother's name if he needed to. No one would know. No one would ever know.

"Jack and Jill," said the start nurse, with a smiling. "Beautiful."

"Jacqueline and Jillian," corrected Chester frostily. "No daughter of mine volition go past something every bit base and undignified every bit a nickname."

The nurse's smiling faded. "Of course not," she said, when what she really meant was "of course they will," and "you'll see soon enough."

Serena and Chester Wolcott had fallen casualty to the dangerous allure of other people's children. They would learn the fault of their means presently enough. People like them always did.

2

PRACTICALLY PERFECT IN Virtually NO Ways

THE WOLCOTTS LIVED in a house at the top of a hill in the middle of a fashionable neighborhood where every house looked alike. The homeowner'southward association allowed for 3 colors of exterior paint (two colors as well many, in the minds of many of the residents), a strict diverseness of fence and hedge styles around the front end lawn, and pocket-sized, relatively quiet dogs from a very curt listing of breeds. Most residents elected not to have dogs, rather than deal with the complicated procedure of filling out the permits and applications required to own ane.

All of this conformity was designed not to strangle merely to comfort, allowing the people who lived there to relax into a perfectly ordered world. At night, the air was tranquility. Safe. Secure.

Save, of course, for the Wolcott home, where the silence was split by healthy wails from ii sets of developing lungs. Serena sat in the dining room, staring blankly at the two screaming babies.

"Yous've had a bottle," she informed them. "You've been changed. You've been walked around the house while I bounced you and sang that dreadful song about the spider. Why are you lot even so crying?"

Jacqueline and Jillian, who were crying for some of the many reasons that babies weep—they were common cold, they were distressed, they were offended by the existence of gravity—continued to wail. Serena stared at them in dismay. No one had told her that babies would cry all the time. Oh, at that place had been comments near it in the books she'd read, but she had assumed that they were only referring to bad parents who failed to take a properly business firm mitt with their offspring.

"Can't you lot shut them up?" demanded Chester from b

ehind her. She didn't accept to turn to know that he was standing in the doorway in his dressing gown, scowling at all three of them—every bit if it were somehow her fault that babies seemed designed to scream without cease! He had been complicit in the creation of their daughters, merely now that they were hither, he wanted virtually cipher to do with them.

"I've been trying," she said. "I don't know what they desire, and they tin can't tell me. I don't … I don't know what to do."

Chester had non slept properly in three days. He was starting to fear the moment when it would impact his work and take hold of the attention of the partners, painting him and his parenting abilities in a poor light. Perhaps it was desperation, or perhaps information technology was a moment of rare and incommunicable clarity.

"I'thou calling my mother," he said.

Chester Wolcott was the youngest of 3 children: by the time he had come forth, the mistakes had been made, the lessons had been learned, and his parents had been comfortable with the procedure of parenting. His mother was an unforgivably soppy, impractical adult female, but she knew how to burp a baby, and maybe by inviting her now, while Jacqueline and Jillian were too immature to exist influenced by her ideas about the world, they could avoid inviting her afterward, when she might actually do some harm.

Serena would normally have objected to the thought of her mother-in-law invading her domicile, setting everything out of order. With the babies screaming and the business firm already in disarray, all she could practise was nod.

Chester made the call first affair in the morning.

Louise Wolcott arrived on the train viii hours later.

By the standards of anyone save for her ruthlessly regimented son, Louise was a disciplined, orderly woman. She liked the earth to make sense and follow the rules. By the standards of her son, she was a hopeless dreamer. She thought the world was capable of kindness; she thought people were substantially proficient and only waiting for an opportunity to show it.

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