George Higgins - A change of gravity

Dan and Mercy had shown up for what turned out to be the last season at Swift's Beach. Merrion and Sunny had tidied the house and put all their gear into his Olds. Emily and Timmy were with Danny and Mercy.

Donna was not. They were all subdued. Mercy took the kids quickly into the house before Sunny or Merrion could say much more than Hi.

When the screen door on the porch had flapped slowly shut behind them and Dan was sure that they were out of earshot, he told Merrion and Sunny that he and Mercy had finally decided to do what both of them knew had to be done. He said that preceding Wednesday he had made a call to a man who owed him his job and continuing funding for several programs under his management at the State Department of Mental Health.

Hilliard took a deep breath and said he had told the man that regardless of how many there were on the waiting list for beds in the Walter Fernald School, or how important their names were, he and his wife would bring their daughter, Donna, almost four years, to the school on Saturday morning and say good-bye to her. He told the man it had to be that way; that he'd managed once more to make Mercy see it had to be done. The burden of having the child around and trying to take care of her was going to kill her if it didn't end their marriage first. He told the man he couldn't take a chance on waiting for their turn to come, lest she change her mind again. "And Malcolm did the right thing," Hilliard said.

That morning they had risen early, having packed the car the night before with what they would need on their vacation at the beach and all the things that Mercy, weeping, thought Donna might need to have around her at the Fernald School for the next several years that would most likely be the rest of her life. Hilliard had backed Mercy's green Ford Country Squire station wagon out of the garage and down the driveway of their home on Ridge Street in Holyoke; none of them spoke. He and Mercy sat stiffly in the front with their eyes filled with tears and Timmy and Emily sat silent in the back seat, each of them touching Donna wide-eyed in her car seat in the middle, knowing Donna wasn't 'right," because they could see that, but also fearfully wondering if their daddy and their mummy some day would decide to do this to them.

They had driven down to the Massachusetts Turnpike and taken that east to Route 128 in Weston, and from there they had driven north to Waltham to the state home for retarded children. "And then we left her there,"

Hilliard said.

"It wasn't quite the same as when I was a kid and we were going to see my grandmother up in Lewiston and we had to leave Comet at the kennel because the old bat hated dogs. But it wasn't all that different either." He said it with his hands jammed in his chino pockets, his voice grinding flat and rough and low, his face desolate except for the tears in his eyes. "For one thing, even though Comet didn't know it, in a couple weeks or so we were coming back for him. We at least knew we weren't abandoning him.

"And for another thing Comet was a dog, not my kid." He sobbed and shook his head. Merrion went to him and put his hands on Hilliard's shoulders. Sunny inhaled sharply, spun around on the scrub and sand underfoot and started toward the house. Hilliard put his head down and shook it several times and wept. "Isn't quite the same thing, I find," he said. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if none of us ever really get over what we did today, no matter how many years we may be lucky enough or unlucky enough to have left to live, depending on how you look at it."

Merrion hugged him and patted his back and crooned: "Danny, Danny, Danny; oh my poor friend Danny." Hilliard said he thought the best that he and Mercy could hope to do was to make it through what was left of the day before bedtime for the other two kids, 'who now for the rest of their lives of course will always wonder if there was something they could have done or should have done or tried to do that would've stopped their wicked parents from doing what they did to Donna, whether they want to or not."

Merrion asked him if he wanted him and Sunny to get a room at a motel and stay up with them that night. Hilliard shook his head again and said No, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his face. He said: "We have to get used to this. There's no way to do advance-work on sorrow.

We have to get used to it ourselves, by ourselves. Might as well get started now." He said he thought that it was likely that he and Mercy would get at least slightly drunk and go to bed and hope to Jesus they could sleep, but that at least they'd know in the morning it would no longer be the day that they had gone and done the thing, but the day that it would be beginning to recede into the past. "One way or the other."

"I spent this morning chatting with the borderline lady, part of my day-job," Merrion said. "A couple or three years ago the people who own the Burger Quik out on the pike, plus, I dunno, seven or eight others in the area, they dreamed up entirely on their own this very decent policy of reserving all the jobs they could for people like my kind-of-confused lady. Girl. People who are not super-bright but can learn to take directions, if there aren't too many of them and they aren't too complicated. That way they become reliable employees. This is a very fine thing for a person to be, no matter how bright he is.

Doing simple but real jobs, not make-work which they spot instantly and know right off they're being patronized. Out of those basic jobs they can make something that looks like a real life for themselves — because that's what it actually is. They wipe off tables high-fliers like you and me slobber all over and then walk away from, never cleaning up the mess we made. They pick up trays and stack them and collect trash and throw it in the bins. And then they empty the bins and heave all the rubbish in the Dumpster out in back and soak a mop in clean hot water and mop the dirt up off the floor that we fine citizens tracked in. Not particularly stimulating work, but good honest toil all the same.

"Nobody made the franchise people do this. They had this bright idea all by themselves. It looks a hell of a lot like something you and I would've been real proud of, wed been smart enough to think of it back when you were still up on the Hill showin' off. We could've passed a law to make 'em do it, hire the retards, ram it up their ass or else we're gonna take their common victualler's licenses away and put 'em outta business. Or bribe 'em with a fat tax-break to do it. We'd've been real pleased with ourselves, if wed've thought of that. But we didn't. Neither did any of the other public-spirited geniuses we hung around with all the time. This was purely a private idea.

"Initiatives," I think they're called now.

"Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences turns out to apply to private good ideas just like public ones. Full fucking force and effect. This humanitarian idea had something nasty in it nobody noticed. The franchise people were making these retards into targets for the predators. Someone's going to tell them if they're smart enough to do this donkey work and get four or five bucks an hour plus the benefits our nice franchise people also throw in, then it stands to reason they can also swindle people.

"Because that's the kind of company they start to keep, not meaning to, of course, as soon as they start getting actual paychecks. They may be small, but those paychecks represent money, and money draws serpents.

First to see if they can get those checks away from those hardworking people who aren't terribly bright, and then see if they can't think up some way to use them, manipulate them, get even larger sums of money from other people. Some other innocent person who'd be on his guard against a crook, but who'd never suspect a poor retard.