Shelby

It was a new kind of pasta dish that you boil and then put in the oven. The water was already thick with spaghetti starch when I slid the heavy pot onto the rack.

In the adjoining room, my wife was watching a TV commercial that showed young, attractive people with a device on their necks. A headlamp-sized box on a collar, clear and sleek. To my surprise my wife was calling the number on the screen and giving them her credit card information.

She bounded into the kitchen: “It anticipates when you’re going to speak out of turn and doesn’t let you say certain things. You can program it ahead of time.” She paused, then said, “I think it will be really good for us.”

I didn’t say anything. You can’t manage your emotions, so you’re buying a choke collar, I thought, stirring the pasta again. What kind of dish was this, anyway, putting a pot of water in the oven? I must be doing it wrong. I started lifting the bulging noodles out of the water with tongs. I imagined the two of us at a dinner party, my wife’s very obvious new device blazing above her shirt collar, her mouth gaping and eyes bulging whenever a Black Lives Matter discussion got too heated for her to protest the notion that the property damage was a necessary part of the action. I wondered who could program it, how to hack it, and whether I could get her to stop insulting me during arguments. Was that what she meant by good for us?

Two days later a package arrived from Ascendent Technologies. I looked at the clean white box on the table, amid the campaign ads, an organic grocery store mailer, and my wife’s homeopathic menopause supplements, which I quickly dispersed into her pill organizer. She didn’t know they were for her menopausal mood swings, didn’t even know she was pre-menopausal. But I knew. I told her they were garlic enzymes.

Our periods were an ordeal that spanned two and a half weeks per month and corrupted any good that came out of the one and a half weeks before. End-to-end, they defined our marriage, and the non-hormone-times were like a sucker hole peaking out in a rainstorm: an illusion of tranquility that you weren’t sure, looking back, you’d even seen. As my wife’s older body tightened its maniacal grip on the last fleeting estrogen leaving it forever, my younger one rounded and softened for a baby I feared would never come. Each month I grew more and more like a mother, in my breasts and haircut and footwear, and each period passed without even a discussion of whether or how to fill my baby-shaped hole with flesh and blood.

I was in the driveway, backtracking to look for the keys I’d just left in the car, when I saw it. In the backseat, a few years old, or maybe just one, I didn’t know. Male or female. Blonde. Its little baby lips curled up as baby tears flowed from baby eyes. It was my baby. I picked it up gently. Its legs felt like little baby legs. Little hands and feet. It was in such distress.

“How long have you been in there?” I cooed to it. Its cries started to sound like mama. “That’s right, I am your mama,” I said softly into its hair. The hair felt so real.

I carried it into the kitchen where there was pizza on the counter. I held up a piece. It started breathing heavily, hyperventilating, and I wondered if it had ever eaten before. “Is this your first food?” I asked. The tears were drying up but the breathing was getting more panicked. I pressed the pizza to its lips. It took a skilled bite, eyes closing in pleasure.

My wife had her choke collar and I had my baby. I named it Shelby.

Shelby came with a PDF of instructions. You could select male or female. On each birthday you were notified of the new Age and characteristics to expect. I was on the accelerated Age plan, so birthdays happened every month. This way I could catch up to my peers whose biological children were 6 and 8 years old, some even older.

Shelby was a beautiful child. I was lucky that Ascendent Technologies had recognized that I would be a capable mother and singled me out to be part of the pilot program. Somewhere there were monitors in the house, watching our interactions with Shelby, but we didn’t know where. My wife was disturbed by that at first and tried to find them. They comforted me. I knew that if I ever made any irreparable mistakes Ascendent would be notified and could send me instructions on what to do.

On Shelby’s first birthday, we invited our friends with kids over. My wife thought it was too much too soon, since we were still getting the hang of parenting. But it seemed important for Shelby to have friends. The other children didn’t play with her much though, so to make things easier we put her down for a nap so the guests could enjoy the party without feeling awkward. My wife ended up taking a nap too and I thought it was sweet that she slept in bed with Shelby, even though Shelby wasn’t really sleeping.

The second child was a surprise. It was much older when it arrived, or rather, bigger. It grew more rapidly, exceeding the pace of the birthday notifications, which were often sent late and with adjusted Ages. I stopped reading them. We named the new one Florence after Florence and the Machine, but it was very masculine. As it grew, its limbs took strange shapes. One Age briefly had its arms coming out of its nipples. That was the same birthday that it started to walk. Suddenly, clumsily, and it couldn’t be stopped. Its purple body stiffened and its center-attached arms pushed downward to steady itself up. I saw it out of the corner of my eye while I was changing Shelby’s diaper—Florence walking out of the bedroom door and into the living room.

“Florence!” I heard my wife say, surprised. My father was visiting. We hadn’t told him about the arms-in-nipples, which we expected Ascendent to debug within a few days. I heard my father say, “Oh!” with a hint of manliness, as if bracing to protect my six-foot-tall wife. He must have been caught off guard. Florence was just showing off, goofy with his own new ability. He was already four feet tall. I heard my wife stumble to find the niceties to make the introductions, but Florence hid behind her before my father could shake his hand.

Shelby’s development seemed to slow down as Florence’s accelerated. We got a notification that Shelby was turning four, but the developments never came, and a few weeks later Ascendent sent a correction email saying she would be three for a few months longer. That email also showed her with longer brown hair, but she remained blonde, which I preferred anyway. We let her run naked through the house and yard as the weather got warmer. Neither child was waterproof yet so we didn’t put them in the pool. Sometimes they played outside together while my wife and I cooled off in the air-conditioning inside. There were monitors outside, and we could lock the door if we needed alone time. The monitors would bring the children back in at the end of the day using the GPS honing system, if we ever forgot.

That was nice, the ability to get away even in our own home. There was less pressure on our sex life now that I had my two children, so we enjoyed our intimate time together more. I cancelled my wife’s hormone supplements because we didn’t fight as much. (The choke collar had never made it out of the box and sat in a corner of the office under the other Ascendent packaging, ready to be returned if we ever got around to it.) We spent that summer truly in love, in bed, forgetting about the monitors and what they could or couldn’t see. The children came home to charge every night. We discussed whether to put them in school in the fall, but never made any decisions. September came, fire season, and then I heard myself saying something before even thinking it.

“I think we need an exit strategy.” We were lying in bed, naked, sobering up after a sparkling rosé afternoon.

My wife’s eyes were closed but she was awake. The sheets were sticky with sweat.

“An exit strategy,” she repeated. Her tone was warm to the idea.

The monitors would be bringing the children back soon for dinner and bedtime.

“Can’t we just return them?” she asked.

“I’ll ask,” I said, knowing I would not ask.

I had signed a very complicated Terms and Conditions agreement when I got Shelby. Since it was a pilot program, they needed capable mothers who would be open to the uncertainties and fluctuations of motherhood in all forms. It’s what allowed them to send Florence without letting us know first. And as a capable mother, once the children were there, it was a crime to harm them, on purpose or not. Leaving them outside was okay because of the monitors; that was a feature of the program. But the monitors would know if you did anything to hurt them. If you stopped feeding them or providing clothes or toys, or put them in a closet, or put them back in their box. You couldn’t return them, either.

Anyway, I wanted to keep Shelby. She was hardly a handful. She played by herself most days, as Florence swirled a bulbous hand in the pool or practiced making noises. Sometimes Shelby tried to play with him, but he broke things and never understood the games. Shelby needed real friends, a group environment, and she could grow up and be just like a regular adult child. We had no reason to send her to college, but we could certainly find a country for her to live in and send her there once she became too old to live at home. Ascendent recommended it, if we chose from a list of partner countries and gave them the new address so they could put the monitors up. I imagined my wife and I flying to Italy to see our daughter’s apartment, taking pictures in a piazza as a family.

We decided drowning could work. Not in our pool because of the monitors, but maybe in the Bay. We didn’t know what would happen if we dropped Florence in, since the waterproofing feature was now in development and he could just float. So we decided to make it look like an accident. A car accident in the Bay. We would put a brick on the gas pedal and let my wife’s old truck drive Florence right into it, windows up and everything, so that Florence wouldn’t be able to escape. By the time the police would get there the whole thing would be over, and any computer inside Florence would corroborate the accident story. We worked this out in whispers under pillows while the children played outside. My wife put a brick in the cab of the truck while at work. She taped it under the steering wheel. When the day came, she would arrange the brick and we would jump out of the truck, leaving Florence behind in the middle seat.

We asked my father to watch Shelby. It was his first time babysitting and we were nervous that he wouldn’t understand the rules, or lack thereof: Shelby eats everything, can use the bathroom on her own, goes to bed around six, doesn’t need much in the way of entertainment or conversation. I expected my father would want to watch cartoons with her or try to play a game, and there was hardly any harm in that. He would get bored and she would go to bed. We told him we were taking Florence out for a grown-up movie, for parent/child bonding time.

After the movie we took the Bay Bridge home. There was a spot in Richmond below the oil refinery where the road goes right down to the water; my dad once tried to teach me to fish there. I'd checked it out a week before the accident and it was the same as I remembered it. So that night, Florence’s oversized body between us, we went according to our script.

“Let’s go see if that fishing spot is still there. Florence, one day we can teach you to fish.”

“Huggg. Yuugg.”

“I think it’s right down here, honey.”

“Here?”

“I think so.” We looked at each other, a glitter in our eyes that the cameras and microphones would never detect. My wife turned down the road.

“I think I see it…now.” On the code word, I unbuckled my seatbelt and she did the same. She reached down for the brick, one hand steadying the wheel. The water appeared up ahead, inky and shimmering with the reflected industrial lights. I opened my door.

I was out of the truck before she was. In fact, she still wasn’t out. I watched the truck advance, heard bits of Florence’s guttural cries, but I didn’t see my wife. As the truck went off the road, I did hear her crying out in panic: “Florence! Flo—“

I screamed. The cab was underwater more quickly than I’d expected. The bed, though, stuck out for awhile. I kept waiting for my wife to appear. Where was she? I waited for an hour.

When they eventually dredged the car, my wife’s right arm has been broken in two places. Florence had crushed it easily, continuing to grip it as the car sank. Because of the tragedy no one suspected wrongdoing, especially Ascendent. They sent a replacement Florence, but no one sent me a replacement for my wife.