Chapter 27
Deadline:??? Progress: Loads. Or several steps backward. Unclear.
As Alex had promised, Sloane’s car was parked in the driveway the next morning.
Sloane had been fully prepared to offer Max a story about why she’d left her car behind, but she hadn’t even had to lie.
Instead, she woke up to Isla (who’d roused sobbing around midnight and gotten in bed with them for the night as usual) kissing her face (sweet, if inconvenient) and then they came down to the kitchen to find Max drinking coffee, the dishes from the breakfast he’d prepared for himself—just him—waiting patiently for someone’s attention in the sink, beside the unloaded dishwasher.
“Why’d you park in the driveway instead of the garage?” Max offered in greeting. Sloane shifted Isla to her other hip, searching around in the cabinets for something suitable to eat.
“I didn’t want to wake you. Is there any more oatmeal?”
“Oh, sorry, no.” Max kissed her forehead, an apology for last night’s argument. “How was dinner with your friend?”
Isla began pointing urgently to something mysterious. “It was a meeting, Max, for the book I’m writing. Not dinner with my friend.”
“Right, how was it?”
“Can you get her juice, please? It was fine.”
“Where’s her cup?”
Sloane paused to try and remember. “I don’t know, somewhere. And the meeting was fine. She’s a cannibal.”
“What?” Max laughed.
“The Country Wife. She’s a cannibal. So is that whole sorority.”
“Okay,” said Max, getting distracted by something on his phone. “Sounds like a productive meeting.”
Isla wriggled to get down, then darted into the living room to either cuddle or harass the dog, depending on who you asked. “Make sure Frankie doesn’t snap at her, Max, please. Did you find her cup?”
“What cup?”
“What do you mean what cup?”
And so on. Such was the morning, and so Sloane did not think about cannibalism again for at least another hour, after Isla had been dressed (Max’s morning activity, though Sloane had to pick it out first or he’d try to dress Isla in something that didn’t fit and had, in fact, been shoved into the back of the closet because Sloane didn’t have time to organize things, not even for the person she cared most about on this earth, and Max was busy playing Scrabble on his phone) and dropped off at daycare.
Once in her office, Sloane spotted a note from Alex on her desk, and lifted her phone to her ear with a weighty sense of having lost the plot completely.
“When you say Caroline’s a problem,” Sloane began without preamble the moment Alex picked up, hoping Alex wouldn’t call her out for her failure to condemn cannibalism one more time.
(Alex didn’t, because she was a very good friend, if also an insane fucking cannibal.) “She said The Country Wife is a cover. Does that mean…?”
Despite everything that Sloane had willingly said aloud that day, she still couldn’t bring herself to say things like “murder,” although she couldn’t imagine how else one procured human organs.
Still, Alex had said there was a ritual.
What kind? Was it like when ethical vampires on TV shows used blood banks?
Was it worse? Did Sloane even want to know?
“Caroline is … taking things too far,” Alex said, an ominous place to end a sentence.
“I didn’t teach her that. I don’t approve—” She stopped.
“I strongly condemn Caroline’s philosophies and actions.
You could turn her in if you wanted,” Alex added, “but I don’t have any proof of wrongdoing and I doubt you’d find any if you tried.
Caroline is very smart, and very careful. ”
Even to Sloane, that sounded like a weak attempt at reverse psychology. Not to mention a little bit too doting, like a mother describing the bare accomplishments of her degenerate son.
“You think she’s killing people?” Sloane asked. When Alex didn’t immediately answer, she added, “And you haven’t tried to turn her in yourself?”
For once, Sloane’s tone of incredulity was rewarded with a sigh from Alex that felt genuinely disturbed rather than purely tired.
“She’s one of mine,” Alex concluded simply. “I want to fix her. I want to stop her. I want to help her. But what will prison do for her? I don’t even believe in the carceral system as a means to cure social ills. And she has a code of morality, I know that.”
“So she kills…?”
“Bad men. Violent sexual offenders are mainly her targets, I believe, unless she’s changed her internal manifesto.
Either way, it’s some vigilante shit.” Alex hesitated, then said, “The other girls, the ones currently in The House … some of them do know about Caroline, but they think it’s …
earned, I guess. That violence has been their only option for a long time.
I’m working on it,” Alex said quickly, “but it’s exactly why you’re necessary.
You’re smart, you’re academic, you can appeal to them from a place of—I don’t fucking know—logic, I guess.
You can remind them of what the mission is and what it isn’t. ”
Sloane found this both exasperating and intriguing. “What is the mission?” she asked, intending to sound sarcastic but finding herself genuinely curious. “Like, seriously, what on earth is your validation for any of this?”
“The point is to win,” said Alex. “To grow. Achieve. Lift each other up.”
“But—”
“Sloane, come on. It’s fucking hell being a woman,” said Alex. “Do I really have to explain that to you, of all people? Your husband’s on a tenure track and his record as an academic is barely even with yours. You’re a better writer and you’re smarter.”
“We’re in different fields.”
“Who cares? It’d be even worse if you were in the same field and you know it. Who had to quit their job to take care of the baby?”
“Come on.” Sloane didn’t want to be forced to defend that decision again, least of all to Alex. “You’re supposed to get this, you’re supposed to understand that I wanted to—”
“I do get it,” Alex said. “But why didn’t he want to?
Why didn’t he fight you for the right to stay home with his child?
Because it’s less important work, Sloane.
” Sloane’s head rang out like she’d been slapped.
“What you contribute to the life and health of his child is less important to Max than what he provides, intellectually, to the world at large.”
“Alex, who are you right now, Betty Friedan?”
“I’m not saying this is new or revolutionary, Sloane. In fact, I’m saying it’s so baked-in that there’s no point fighting about it.”
“What Max and I decided privately has no bearing on what you’re suggesting is completely normal behavior,” Sloane muttered just as her office door opened.
Arya slipped inside, lifting a hand in greeting.
He was bobbing his head to whatever beat was emanating from his headphones as he took his usual seat at her absent colleague’s desk, pulling his laptop out of his bag.
“Sloane, while I’d love to beat this dead horse with you again, you’re obviously in no place for a meaningful conversation and I have about eight thousand meetings today for five million things that don’t matter,” said Alex.
“Can we table this for now? You can call the cops on me if you want, just please, as a fellow mother, spare me having to hold your hand through an ethical crisis when I only slept three hours last night.”
“You know I don’t trust cops,” muttered Sloane. Arya turned around in his chair to grin at her.
“We’ll talk later, okay? I just have to get through the hellscape that is my average Thursday.” Then Alex hung up, and Sloane slumped lower in her chair.
“Fuck,” said Sloane, to no one.
“That bad?” said Arya.
“The Country Wife is a cannibal,” she said.
“Juicy,” said Arya. “Though I assume that would be difficult to prove.”
“Is cannibalism actually an ancient Egyptian practice?”
“Nah, that’s just what medieval Europeans said to get away with it.”
“Of course. Classic medieval Europe.” Sloane, to her great despair, was sulking.
“It’s not just medieval fetishism,” Arya continued.
“It still exists in some parts of the world. A lot of those places also acknowledge and legally define sorcery. It’s one of those conversations that’s hard to have, anthropologically speaking, because culture is relative.
There’s no universal standard to measure what is culturally wrong or right—once you go down that path, it’s a slippery slope.
Homosexuality is often penalized, but love is love.
But then, is love also love when it’s your close blood relative? How do we draw those lines?”
“You can’t compare queer relationships with incest,” Sloane moaned, and Arya laughed.
“Why not? You can theoretically define ‘acceptable’ love as nothing more than consensual love. Once you start making arguments based on biology, things go awry.”
“Stop,” said Sloane. “I know you’re rationalizing all this to prove a point, but it’s making me physically ill.”
“There’s even some research to suggest Genetic Sexual Attraction is a real, biological phenomenon—”
“First of all, conflating taboos feels like a really unproductive headspace,” said Sloane. “Secondly, ew.”
“I’m trying to help.” Arya’s face was sweetly puppylike. “And I seem to have distracted you, which is good work by me, I think.”
“I wonder if I should ask Max what he thinks about all this.” Sloane exhaled deeply. “He’s a philosopher. He’ll talk himself in circles and I can just watch.”
Arya’s expression flickered ever so slightly, or perhaps Sloane imagined it. “You could. I do love a little logical contortion.”
“God.” Sloane checked her watch and closed her eyes. “The last thing I want to do right now is a lecture about categorical variables.”
“What would you rather do?” asked Arya.
“I don’t know. Kiss my daughter. Sleep for a hundred years.
” Sloane pressed two cold fingers into the throb of her sinuses, glancing up at the unmoving string tied to the vent of their malfunctioning air-conditioning.
“At least it’s cold enough now that I can suffer at a different temperature in here. ”
“Go get Isla, then.” Arya rose to his feet and walked over to Sloane’s desk, gently removing her laptop from her hands. “Is this today’s lecture?” he asked, glancing at her screen.
“I can’t just go get her, Arya, I’ve got thirty barely conscious undergraduates to enthrall—”
“I’ll do it,” he said, bending down over her laptop to email her open slides to himself. “Go get Isla, spend the day with her. I’m sure you could both use the time.”
Sloane cracked one eye, frowning at him. “Is this you trying to get some extra lecturing hours in at my expense?”
Arya laughed, full and throaty, and turned his bright smile directly on her, like someone suddenly turning on the sun. “Maybe I want you to owe me a favor,” he said. “Or maybe I think there’s a good chance you’ll have a full mental breakdown in that lecture hall. Who can say?”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Sloane asked, and realized she’d inflected wrong.
She’d meant to dryly suggest that Arya couldn’t believe her because doing so would be categorically impossible, but instead it came out as if she were tentatively curious, like she’d asked is this okay, or can I touch you here.
“It just seems to me like you’ve got a lot going on in there,” Arya said, tapping Sloane’s forehead gently with one finger. “And I know it’s been tough on you, not having as much time with Isla as you’d like. So take the morning off, I’ll cover for you.”
Sloane’s heart was already racing across campus, though she made a show of holding back. “This is why Burns won’t give me tenure, isn’t it? Because I put my daughter before the craft,” she sighed.
“Burns won’t give you tenure because he’s a fucking goblin,” said Arya. “And what kind of person would you be if you didn’t choose your daughter over everything?”
“A man,” said Sloane.
“Not to ‘not all men,’ Dr. Hartley, but I must protest, not all men.” Arya played dramatically at injury and hit her with another of those obscene smiles. Sloane felt the sunrise of it down to her geriatric bikini, a heat that drifted up from her vagina through her soul.
“How old are you?” asked Sloane abruptly.
“Old enough,” said Arya without missing a beat. “Why?”
Well, fuck! That time she rose to her feet, recognizing an opportune exit and deciding there was no point being a martyr, fighting for the idea of respect at the cost of her very real heart. Not today, anyway. Maybe tomorrow.
“Don’t make me fire you,” she called over her shoulder, gathering her things and quickening her pace as she went, the rush of blood in her ear singing Isla, Isla, Isla until she flung open the daycare door and could breathe.