A Woman Alone Read online

  “Look, I know you want the best for her. And I guess it’s your decision, you’re her mom after all—”

  “And you’re her dad,” I interject. “And you should be concerned too.”

  “—but I think you should reconsider,” he says, ignoring my remark. “Remember how our parents forbade us to play video games or listen to music? Remember how annoying it was? And most of all, how freaking pointless? It was a losing battle.

  “Well, you’re being the same way right now. Screens are the future. Social media is the future. By the time she’s a teenager, they’ll probably be wiring our phones right into our eyeballs.” This last bit was intended as a joke but it doesn’t exactly lighten the mood. The pause hangs awkwardly in the air until he breaks it. “So, you’re not giving her a childhood by forbidding screens. You’re depriving her of a childhood. Her childhood.”

  “I never said anything about forbidding,” I argue feebly.

  “Limiting. Same thing. You’re being Therese right now. Is that what you want for Taryn?”

  I grit my teeth. Therese. My mother. My mother went beyond unplugging the PlayStation and monitoring my CD collection. Far beyond. And in the end, did it change anything?

  Maybe he’s right. I don’t want to be that to Taryn.

  “Maybe we can just spend more time doing family things,” I say uncertainly. “Out in nature. Or something.”

  “Yeah, we should go to the park,” Scott picks up with enthusiasm. “I drive past it every day. It’s beautiful.”

  I didn’t mean the local park. At all. I meant camping in the wilderness, or a trip to Yosemite, maybe, for a week or two. But not the SmartPark, with its perfectly shaped trees and acid-green lawns and ergonomic playground equipment and sensors, sensors, sensors. Logging the time Taryn spends on the swing versus the merry-go-round. The one time I was there, I looked at the park and wondered whether it was real—the trees, the grass, the flowers that never seemed to wilt.

  Lately, I often wonder whether any of this is real.

  * * *

  The old house is still real to me in a way this place never manages to be. A place where I was once so happy can’t just fade from memory, not even after all the evil things that happened within its walls. By the time police-car lights were flashing through the windows and the dreaded crime-scene tape was stretched out across the porch like a bad Halloween decoration, it was no longer the same house in my mind. It was a different, soulless house, wearing the old one’s façade like a mask.

  When the police got to the house that day, they found me sitting on the porch with Taryn in my arms. I was hugging her, squeezing her close to me way too hard, and she wailed and screamed her head off, tears and snot running down that little red face. If I’d looked up, I would have probably seen the neighbors peeking from behind curtains, morbidly curious but not daring—or just not wanting—to go outside and get involved.

  I learned later that not one of them called the police, even though they must have heard the gunshot. They can’t not have heard it. Our old street, so unlike Rosemary Road, was in the heart of the city, buildings sitting as close together as the builders a hundred years ago could manage. I heard other people’s wailing babies and barking dogs and the occasional explosive argument. But there, just like here, everyone prioritized their own peace of mind.

  So I sat there until the police cars pulled up, flashing lights and sirens and all. And then someone tried to pry Taryn from my arms, and I screamed so loud I startled myself. It was hardly a normal human scream, no words, more like an animalistic howl I never thought I was capable of. And it made Taryn cry even harder. And then the EMTs descended on me, and of course they took Taryn away, telling me all the while everything was going to be fine, she was in good hands and so was I.

  Only then did the neighbors creep out of the safety of their homes and circle the scene. I remember their faces, colored red and blue and white by the police-car lights, and their big, shiny eyes trained on us. On me. Where were you? I wanted to shriek. Where the hell were you ten minutes ago?

  That’s when I knew I couldn’t trust other people. No one has my best interests at heart but me. I have to watch out for myself, and for Taryn—I owe it to us. It’s the only thing I owe anybody.

  And this house, with all the cameras and sensors and detectors, was meant to protect us. That’s all that matters. That’s all I care about.

  I won’t let anyone mess with me, or with my daughter, ever again.

  * * *

  Jessica exits her boss’s office in a measured step and heads straight to the bathroom. Once there, she washes her face with cold water. Only when she looks up into the mirror above the row of square, modern-style sinks does she remember she wore mascara that morning, and now it’s all under her eyes. She gets a gob of toilet paper from one of the stalls and tries to wipe off the mess with little success.

  They’re not forbidden to wear makeup, exactly, but encouraged to keep a natural appearance, as her contract worded it. No garish colors of lipstick or smoky eyes. They’re not flight attendants after all. Their uniforms resemble casual clothes as much as possible, or at least the big bosses’ strange idea of casual clothes. Low heels and pencil skirts, and collared shirts under a sweater. Who on earth wears that of their own free will, let alone casually?

  In a way, it’s probably for the better. If by some unlikely hazard she were to run into someone from work when she’s on her day off, they’d hardly recognize her. And lately she’s been looking forward to those days off more than ever before. She gets home, changes, and then goes out all night and gets blind drunk. She’d get stoned too, if she could. But they do routine drug tests at work, and that stuff lingers in your body.

  She can’t afford to lose this job. She can’t afford to tell them to go to hell and quit. For now. The look on Clarisse’s face when she tells her to take that job and shove it—that’ll have to wait.

  Over the past two years, she’s mediated an untold number of conflicts, which is a fancy way of saying that she’s pacified entitled rich bastards throwing tantrums like babies. The things she’s seen. The things she’s heard them spew out casually like it was the most normal thing. And through it all, she’s had to keep her pleasant smile and not punch anyone in the face when confronted with some executive who throws a shit-fit because an ambiguous-looking family moved in across the street when they were supposed to be living on an all-white block.

  She has a degree from MIT, for crying out loud. She had a full scholarship. She was top of her class. And this is what it got her. Had anyone told her this when she was graduating with honors…

  When she first got hired at IntelTech, she marveled at the ironclad NDA, a bloated stack of papers she had to sign. Now she knows why.

  But the thing that stuck in her head the most—the thing that floated to the top of her consciousness every time she lay down and closed her eyes to try and sleep—that thing was Lydia. IntelTech’s dirty secret. One Clarisse would kill to keep hidden…literally, Jessica is sure. The woman living in that house is now starting to act unhinged too.

  Jessica would laugh about it if she could and if her job wasn’t on the line. The irony of it. Can a brand-new house, a marvel of gleaming marble and chrome and glass, packed full of circuits and chips, be haunted like some old Victorian manor?

  No. It’s people who are haunted, not houses, and all the technology in the world can’t set them free from themselves.

  Jessica exits the bathroom and heads back to her office where she discreetly slips her headphones in her ears and presses Play on an old-school MP3 player that hasn’t been on the market in a decade. Instantly, the tender voice flows from the device and into her ears, like honey.

  There’s a saying old, says that love is blind…

  CHAPTER TEN

  The morning I’m supposed to meet with Clarisse, the house messes up my morning coffee. A poor start. I come downstairs to find an unknown beverage steaming under the coffee machine, a fluffy thi
ng I’d never drink in a million years, sprinkled with something—is that ground cardamom?

  “Saya,” I say, annoyed.

  “How can I help you, Cecelia?”

  “Whose coffee is this?”

  “This is your coffee, Cecelia. Would you like to change the default settings?”

  “I would like the settings as before,” I say testily. I pick up the unknown creation. The mound of whipped cream on top of it wobbles, and the cardamom trickles down onto my hand.

  “I do not understand what you mean, as before.”

  I grit my teeth, take a teaspoon, and sweep the whipped cream off the cup into the sink. I take a sip of the coffee and nearly gag—there’s more syrup in there than actual coffee, some weird flavor. And why do we even have whipped cream? I never put it on the shopping list. I only drink my coffee black, and Scott is watching his weight so the only dairy he ever consumes is skim. Who in this house would ever drink a coffee like that?

  Lydia, that’s who, says a mean little voice in the back of my mind.

  “Saya, please make me a long double espresso,” I say.

  “Coming right up, Cecelia.”

  “And make that the default from now on.”

  “Of course.”

  I drink my coffee and scroll through my phone. This morning I got another text message. I’ll need to deal with this, and soon. I could just block, block, block. Technology to the rescue. And with this technology, I can literally block someone—they won’t be allowed past the gates. I toy with the idea, promising myself that, as soon as it gets hairy, I’ll do exactly that.

  By the time Clarisse arrives, with that assistant of hers in tow, the one with the face like a doll molded from plastic, the house is on its best behavior. It alerts me two minutes before they arrive that I have visitors incoming and confirms their identities in a loud, clear voice before asking for my approval. I let them in.

  “Cecelia, it’s lovely to see you.” Clarisse is beaming like we’re long-lost friends. The doll-faced woman hovers by her side with that unshakable smile. But I’m not having any of it today.

  “The house is malfunctioning,” I say, skipping the hellos. “I keep sending reports but no one ever comes to fix anything.”

  “Rest assured, we’re analyzing the situation,” says Clarisse. “Jessica is the one in charge of Rosemary Road, and she’s been working round the clock.”

  “What about what happened with the car?” I ask.

  “We’re working on that too. For now, there are no guilty parties. Just ill luck.”

  “Well, that ill luck could get someone killed,” I mutter. Somehow, in the face of that compulsory friendliness, it’s so tempting to be rude. Just how much could I get away with before the veneer cracks?

  “We’re working hard to resolve the issue.”

  “The map wasn’t working. And when I tried to play music, I was blasted with some song I never uploaded.”

  “Sometimes, the AI makes suggestions based on things you’ve listened to in the past,” the assistant speaks up. She introduced herself but I struggle to remember her name.

  “Well, I—” I’m not a fan of the oldies, I’m about to say.

  “As for the volume, is it possible you accidentally changed the settings yourself?”

  “Oh, so now it’s my fault?”

  “Nobody is saying that,” Clarisse cuts in. “We’re just trying to get to the bottom of what happened. And there’s no record in your car’s system of anything at all going wrong right up until the collision.”

  “Oh. So I’m making things up.”

  “Not at all. You’re saying you had your daughter in the car right before?”

  “I dropped her off at the day care.”

  “Is it possible she could have changed the sound setting or picked the song?”

  I give an incredulous chuckle. “She’s a child. How could she do that?”

  “Children have been known to figure out technology surprisingly well.” Clarisse’s smile is beatific. Sure, my three-year-old can figure out stuff I barely understand. But then I remember the look on her face as she watched through the fence posts…

  Could Taryn have changed the settings? Saya doesn’t answer to her, and the car has safety features. For instance, she can’t open the doors by herself. But could she have found a way to raise the volume? To do what? To hurt me? But she couldn’t have known the collision would happen. She’s three. She can’t make those logical connections yet.

  “Can we not blame my toddler for your failings?” I snap, my voice shrill.

  “It’s a possibility. We’ll review the settings in your car to make sure she can’t access any features at all. And we can’t blame her—she’s just a small child. Right?”

  “Exactly,” I fume.

  “So, as you can see, no bad guys,” Clarisse says, smiling. She seems to have come to that conclusion awfully quickly. Reminds me of one of the police officers on the scene, who kept asking me the same things over and over, hoping I’d slip up and he could somehow make what happened my fault. Are you sure you locked the door? Are you sure the windows were locked? Are you sure of this and are you sure of that. As though, if I’d forgotten to turn a latch on some window somewhere, I deserved the home invasion.

  “Cecelia, we want to create an atmosphere of safety and trust here at SmartBlock,” Clarisse is saying. I guess she noticed my spaced-out look. “It’s very important to us that everyone feels heard. We are constantly collecting feedback and improving.”

  “This house,” I find myself saying, “it could kill someone.”

  The smiles don’t waver.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” says Clarisse at last, echoing Saya in a jarring way.

  “Well, technically, it’s a possibility,” I stammer. Somehow their imperturbable faces make me feel like the crazy one, some tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist. Like my mother. “The AI controls everything. What if I were in the bathtub, for example, and it just decided to crank the water temperature to boiling?”

  Jessica gives a polite laugh. “That’s not possible. Such a thing isn’t even in the settings.”

  “I’m just making an example.”

  “And we’ve thought of everything,” says Clarisse. “Our techs have. Pretty much everything is preprogrammed to prevent harm, accidental or intentional. This goes without saying.”

  “Intentional?” I ask.

  Clarisse sighs. “These aren’t fun things to talk about, of course,” she says, “but, since you asked, it’s all in the fine print. If…someone in the house were to try to harm you, the house will go out of its way to prevent it. And alert emergency services at once.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Indeed. And we’re always working on improving these features. So we would like to thank you for your patience with the house’s little snags. Please continue to report anything that’s not to your liking. You can be sure your reports are being read and addressed.”

  They leave me with a bad taste in my mouth and a weird sense like I’d been cheated. They answered all my questions without answering anything at all. I wander the house aimlessly, taking a mental note of every single automatized feature, my mind concocting one crazy scenario after another. I’m living in an Asimov novel.

  This is why, when the house announces that I have a visitor, I give a start.

  When the house tells me who the visitor is, I nearly jump out of my skin.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I never could have imagined my life would take this science-fiction twist. In fact, growing up, I didn’t imagine much for myself in the best-case scenario.

  I understood early on that my family was different from those of other children my age. If I had to pinpoint the exact moment, I doubt that I could but the definitive reckoning came the day the authorities told Therese she had to enroll me in school or have me taken away and placed in a foster home.

  Until then, Therese was home-schooling me—or that’s what she called it. Child P
rotection Services asked her a couple of questions about the curriculum and decided that such an education was insufficient, to put it mildly. The reason they didn’t just take me away immediately remains obscure to me. Maybe because Therese was a white Catholic, and also not a drug addict or prostitute, which was already pretty good considering the averages in our neighborhood at the time. But CPS assigned us a social worker to check up on my progress and make sure I started second grade immediately.

  Until then, my primary exposure to children my age was the church play group. Even there, it wasn’t hard to realize that I lived in a completely different world. The rest of the children stayed an hour or two after Sunday school to tumble around the playground and then went home, to their otherwise secular lives of cartoons and video games and Twinkies for snacks. I’d spend the whole day there, waiting for Therese to be done with her volunteering, and in the evening, we’d go back to our crumbling rental apartment.

  Much later, I’d be shocked to learn we weren’t actually poor. Shocked is too kind a word. We lived in that one-bedroom for years, and in the meantime, she had close to six figures squirreled away in the bank. But at our apartment, we slept on secondhand cots. We didn’t have a television, let alone a gaming console or a DVD player. She got our clothes at the Salvation Army and made me wear them until they literally fell apart.

  I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find out we weren’t broke—she never outright said we didn’t have money. That lifestyle was Therese’s all-consuming crusade against sin. Anything pleasant or pleasurable or aesthetic had to be mercilessly rooted out of her life, and mine by extension. Pizza or takeout was a sin, new sneakers were a sin. Cartoons were the Devil’s work upon this earth, with subliminal messages to brainwash children and lure them away from the righteous path. Regular school would corrupt me, and so she decided to school me herself, teaching me how to read with a Bible.

  Who knows where Therese got these ideas, more suited to some Bible Belt small town than to the middle of a large, multicultural city. She mellowed out with age, moving from the decrepit rental with mold on the walls to a small but comfortable condo, and the very fact that she now talks to me again speaks volumes. But she remains reluctant to answer questions about the past. Clearly, something must have happened, something pretty damn drastic, but all I know is that she got pregnant at a young age, had me, and then became a born-again Christian. The how and the why remain a mystery.