Productive Struggle
by Lynn McGee
This story takes place in the late 21st century.
Lane never found out how the agent at the border kiosk knew the paper-thin envelope holding hundreds of birth control implants was embedded in her phone. He pried it open with a tiny screwdriver while she stood next to her truck, her long, chestnut hair flying in the cold wind. She didn’t resist as he zip-tied her hands behind her back and led her to a windowless room where she sat shivering for a few hours before being bussed to a detention facility in Michigan.
Lane was one of hundreds of women around the country serving time in federal detention centers for the crime of smuggling birth control across the border from Canada into the U.S. Estrogen implants — which stop egg release from the ovary, preventing pregnancy — were developed more than seventy-five years earlier, and when research related to women’s reproductive health halted abruptly in the U.S., Canada ramped up their efforts. Thanks to nano technology, scientists there reduced the implants to the size of an eyelash. Canadian activists joined with American groups to recruit volunteers who gave trainings on how to deliver the implants through an injection in a woman’s upper arm. Others, like Lane, travelled to Ontario to pick up a supply of implants and smuggle them across the border to Detroit.
Lane’s court-appointed assignment during those two years at the Saints Peter and Paul Women’s Prison of Ann Arbor, Michigan was to serve on the housekeeping staff in a nearby nuclear fusion reactor. Every morning, she rode with other inmates in a windowless green bus to her worksite. Her tasks included mopping the black-and-white tiled floor and wiping down tables. She changed filters in exhaust panels along the wall, and used a wet vacuum to clean up indoor spills. She wore protective gear — a bright-orange, hooded suit — but felt uneasy being in such close proximity to powerful magnetic fields and radiation, however contained they might be at the center of what looked like a giant concrete donut. She wondered if this assignment was payback for her social media comments in favor of wind farms and solar energy. Two of her bunkmates at the prison thought that was unlikely, and told her she was being paranoid. Her third bunkmate validated her theory, and the four of them went back and forth comparing evidence for their views.
Lane missed these spirited discussions. Many of the prisoners were older women with advanced degrees in biophysics, chemistry and computer science, and were serving time for infractions similar to Lane’s — smuggling birth control as well as doxing politicians who supported the reversal of women’s rights, hacking employee databases to expose payroll inequities, and creating exit pathways for women trapped in forced marriages. They met as often as possible at the prison gym, pooling information while they completed their turns on the treadmills and took turns with free weights. Prison was the place where Lane learned to love weight-bearing workouts and the mild dopamine-fueled euphoria they provided. She made real friends in prison, like Mary Ellen, a sturdy middle-aged woman with a wild mop of curly blond hair who maintained and cleaned the prison gym, guided Lane on the machines and critiqued her form. Like Lane, she’d been arrested for smuggling birth control into the country. Prison had interrupted her career as an algorithm engineer, but she started out teaching high school calculus. “Push yourself, but not to the point of sustaining and injury,” she said to Lane, who was straining to finish another set with a pair of free weights. “When I was a math teacher, we called that ‘productive struggle.’ You want the kid to develop perseverance, but not the point of shorting out and giving up.”
The day Lane was released, the women she’d gotten know gathered at her cell to say good-bye and congratulate her on having stayed strong during her incarceration. They laughed indulgently at her weepiness and when Mary Ellen hugged her good-bye she whispered, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” and winked.
“I’m proud of what I’ve done, I don’t regret a thing,” Lane told her sister Paula. The two women were sitting in their favorite coffee shop in Crown Heights, a tree-lined neighborhood of Brooklyn. They looked like slightly different versions of the same mold — dark eyebrows, dark wavy hair, but Paula was softer in appearance, a little plump, and Lane was taller, tighter. They looked up to read menu items written on a black chalkboard bolted to the red-brick wall, and a ceiling fan with oversized blades ticked lazily overhead.
“I still can’t believe I didn’t bolt as soon as Randall made it clear he wanted me to keep the whole prison thing a secret from his family — as if I had something to be ashamed of,” said Lane, who had left her boyfriend a few weeks prior, and would still occasionally beat herself up, over the whole fiasco. Paula reminded her of a scene from Seinfeld, a sitcom from the late twentieth century that their grandmother introduced to, when they were growing up. “Jerry is trying to make Elaine feel better about having given her boyfriend too many chances before finally leaving him,” Paula says. “He tells her that breaking up is like tipping over a Coke machine. You can’t do it in one try. You have to rock it back and forth a few times.”
Lane laughed as she lifted her foamy green drink to her mouth. She had missed living near her sister when she moved in with Randall and his ten-year-old son in their rowhouse in Hoboken, New Jersey, a small city on the Hudson River directly across from Lower Manhattan. She winces now, looking back on the excitement she’d felt in the weeks leading up to that move. Lane worked as a cybersecurity analyst in a blockchain firm. “How could I be an expert on threats and vulnerabilities and let myself get into that mess?” she complained to Paula. For weeks, she would sit at her desk, daydreaming about Randall and the life they were planning. Instead of reading on the subway, she would close her eyes and imagine the distance between them as the crow flies — across Brooklyn, then over the East River and Lower Manhattan, and finally across the Hudson River to the Jersey side.
Before that, she had viewed New Jersey as a kind of green blur, a land mass she noted with disinterest as she rode her bicycle up the Greenway path alongside Manhattan’s West Side Highway. To her surprised, she found Hoboken to be charming with its waterfront parks and cobblestone streets. She hadn’t even minded the commute to work each day, sipping her takeout coffee on the Path train as it dipped under the Hudson River and pulled into Penn Station at 34th Street in Manhattan. She liked living in a house, for a change, instead of an apartment, and she’d been fascinated by the view of the Manhattan skyline from their top floor bedroom.
Gradually she even became familiar with the soundscape of her new home; the rusty-hinge noise that cried out when the mail carrier pushed letters through their front door slot, the faint rise in the rumble of buses and cars, as the morning revved up. After a few weeks, she could tell from the clang of the black iron gate, and the speed of his steps up the concrete stairs to their stoop, whether Randall was in a good mood or not, his home-arrival face evolving over their first months together to telegraph disappointment that swallowed her like a cold wave.
“And that kid hated me, too,” she told her sister.
“He didn’t hate you,” Paula said. “I beg to differ,” said Lane with a wry smile. “Jared hated me with the white-hot hate only a ten-year-old can muster.” Paula shrugged. “Okay, he hated you. But you never have to see that little shithead again. Let’s move on.”
At first, Lane had tried to cut Jared a lot of slack because he lost his mother, Randall’s wife Susan, to a fentanyl overdose when he was only three. Years had passed, and Randall still talked about Susan’s addiction in hushed tones. He traced its origin to one clear summer night. “I can still see how beautiful the patio was, in moonlight,” he said. “That was the last time we were truly happy.” Susan had stepped out of their backdoor after dinner to join Randall, carrying a bowl of popcorn. She looked up at the starry sky, stumbled on the brick patio and fell across their fire pit, her sweater igniting. For a year she endured skin grants that extended down her right arm, which she had used to break her fall. She lost most of her hair, and a patch of her scalp was blistered.
Randall still harbored resentment for the doctor who prescribed a fentanyl patch to ease Susan’s unrelenting pain, then restricted her access to the drug. At that point, she began buying fentanyl in pill form from a dealer, he learned later, who had been her piano student when he was a kid, a graceful young man with a ponytail and who arrived on an electric scooter to deliver his product curbside. “He’d meet her down the block,” Randall said, “right under my nose, where there aren’t any street lights.” Susan’s descent into addiction was subtle — spacing out at the dinner table, staring off when people talked to her. It escalated to unhinged outbursts directed at the grocery clerk at their corner deli, and Jared’s daycare provider. She had also started drinking a bit more, and Randall didn’t realize that each glass of wine was hitting her harder because of the opioids in her system. Everything made more sense after she called him from a police station, under arrest for a DUI.
A few years after Susan’s death, Randall started dating again. His mother had encouraged him to sign on to a dating website, hoping he would give her more grandchildren. He browsed half-heartedly through the profiles and was first attracted to Lane by her photo gallery, a selection of moments from her gym routine — Lane with one knee on a padded bench, the opposite arm bending to lift a dumbbell; Lane smiling up at the camera and squatting with a set of barbells resting across her shoulders. The apparent pride she had in her own health and fitness told Randall she would never pollute her body with illicit drugs. And he was right. Lane lived on super foods; salmon and blueberries, organic grains and kale. She was all about anti-oxidants and fiber. She arrived at six a.m. every morning at the gym and worked with Mike, a personal trainer who fired platitudes while she completed her routine: Hustle for that muscle! Too fit to quit! Her musculature wasn’t conspicuous, but Lane could carry groceries and run up a flight of stairs without getting winded — and this did not endear her to single men seeking a cheerleader for their own strength and prowess. Dynamics between men and women had become problematic for women like Lane, in the last decade. A resurgence of mid-twentieth-century values coincided with the repeal of the 19th amendment, replacing women’s right to vote with a so-called “household vote” that only the male head of household was authorized to place. Bolstering this movement was the plummeting birth rate, not to mention a freeze on visas for foreign workers. Neither boded well for the growing labor shortage.
Randall didn’t look too deeply at the country’s political turns, or how it impacted people’s relationships. He had his hands full with Jared. He didn’t like relying on his mother for childcare, but it made it easier for him to work late in his job managing a fleet of self-driving cabs. A live-in partner would be a huge help. The fact that Lane didn’t want a child of her own was a plus, and he liked that she planned to maintain her financial independence as well as her name in any future relationship, details that deflected other men who visited her profile.
Randall ticked Lane’s boxes, as well. She enjoyed his admiration for her fitness and self-sufficiency. She felt they were on the same page, when it came to women’s rights. He asked thoughtful questions about her life story and interests. When they met in person, she was taken by his quiet manners and elegant taste in clothes; cashmere sweaters, tweed jackets. As they moved closer to the bedroom, he didn’t flex entitlement as a component of his sexual advances, something she’d encountered with other young men. She felt a flutter in her solar plexus, a blissful sense of safety and relief when he put his hand on the small of her back. “So this is what all the fuss is about,” she told her sister Paula. “I get it now.”
On moving day, Lane walked through her empty apartment and conceded she was taking a risk — but Randall was worth it. When the movers had finished loading her household in their truck, she and Randall followed them down the expressway and over the Verrazano Bridge. It was a windy spring day, and tiny white caps dotted the East River. A heron unfurled its wings and lifted out of the wetlands on the New Jersey side, which Lane took as a positive sign. “The heron is a messenger from Aphrodite, the goddess of love,” she told Randall, and he reached over to rest his hand on her thigh.
Once they arrived in Hoboken, the movers stacked Lane’s household in the living room of Randall’s rowhouse. Besides about a dozen boxes, she had brought a few pieces of furniture — a small leather sofa, an antique oak armoire and Formica-and-chrome table that her great-aunt had left her. Lane got right to work pushing her furniture into place and emptying boxes as Randall snapped open his newspaper in the other room. He hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived at the house with the movers, and deflected any comments she offered with one-word responses. The romantic welcome she’d fantasized about — he would surprise her with a gift, something he knew she’d love, like a book on the birds of New Jersey, and brandish a bottle of champagne — seemed childish to her now.
Later that afternoon, the school bus dropped Jared off, and he burst through the front door, dropping his backpack and jacket to the floor in the front foyer. Lane and Randall had included Jared in every decision they’d made about the move — when it would happen, what she would bring and even where her furniture would go in the house. Lane had spent months getting to know Jared as the three of them took long walks through farmer’s markets on the Hoboken piers and made dinner together. Jared was at a transitional age, she reminded herself, a tweener poised between childhood and puberty. He still wore T-shirts with dinosaurs on them, but his white Adidas were a vintage classic a grown man would wear. He stood looking at the stacks of boxes in the living room, and Randall gave him a weary “Hello.” Jared instantly mirrored his father’s despondency. “What is all this crap?” he called out. Lane countered with panicked cheer: “Help me put some of this stuff away and then we can celebrate!” but Jared raced past her, taking the stairs two at a time up to his room.
That night, she showered off the grime of moving and stepped into pajamas that smelled faintly of the vanilla candles she had burned in her bedroom back in Brooklyn, giving her a jolt of sadness. Her back ached from lifting dishes and books to their respective shelves and her quads were sore from heaving boxes up the stairs. Randall was sitting up in bed, reading on his phone. “Thanks babe, for giving me space,” he said, finally looking up. “I just needed a little time to process. I knew you would understand. I love that about you.” Lane was relieved at his explanation, but flattered in a way that made her uneasy. It was as if she’d been slightly altered, like a photo stretched in one direction, without adjusting for its proportions. Still, she was determined to stay positive and the next morning, offered to take Jared to a matinee.
He declined the invitation. It wasn’t easy to get him out of his room, where he spent his free time watching cartoons and shows that seemed way too young for him, Lane thought — retro classics like Scooby Doo and Sesame Street. Lane joined Jared on the floor in front of the entertainment screen that spanned across the wall, and encouraged him to try some nature shows, documentaries on big cats or restoring wolf populations. When that failed to engage him, she tried slapstick animal videos; the cat that swats a puppy down the stairs, the camel that spits on a boy at the zoo. He howled at those, and watched them again and again.
Randall was vague about Jared’s diagnosis. He blew off Lane’s questions with something about testing, MRIs, conflicting diagnoses. Jared had been held back a year at school, and was bigger than the other kids. Randall admonished him to sit up straight, walk with his head high, but he reverted to hunching over, making himself smaller as soon as he was out of his father’s sight. He struggled with homework and one evening as Randall started dinner, sauteing garlic and cilantro in a skillet, Lane and Jared sat at the kitchen table looking over a math worksheet. “Start with what you know,” Lane said quietly. “That’s the easy part. What do we know about this fraction? Which number is bigger, the top or the bottom?” Randall put the lid on the skillet and pivoted around to look over Jared’s shoulder. “You’re going too slow,” he scolded. He considered the worksheet himself for a moment, then reached down to take the pencil from Jared’s hand when Lane caught his eye and shook her head No. “Let him go at his own pace,” she said. “It’s called ‘productive struggle.’” She turned to smile at Jared as she continued: “Let him flex his stamina a little.”
“If you say so,” Randall said, and returned to the stove, but the damage had been done. Jared leapt up from the table and walked purposely from the room. “Thanks a lot, Lane,” he called over his shoulder. “He was gonna give me the answer.”
Lane initiated less contact with Jared, as the weeks passed. She tried instead to focus on making the rowhouse more comfortable. She picked up a foyer bench for the pile of shoes they’d always left at the front door. She installed hooks on the wall above the place where Jared threw down his jacket and backpack when he got home. In the backyard, she tied fallen twigs and branches in bundles, then stacked them at the curb. She pulled weeds and dug holes for Hosta plants around the bases of trees. Inspired by a documentary she’d seen on bioremediation — natural methods of detoxifying soil — she planted sunflowers along a stretch of fence that was drenched in direct light, several hours every day.
“They’re tough flowers, bad-asses of the flower kingdom,” she told Jared, hoping her love of gardening might rub off on him. “They actually leach metals out of the ground, and that makes the soil safer.” She held her hand up in what looked like the queen’s wave in a parade, slightly cupped, pivoting back and forth. “They actually turn their heads, like this, to follow the sun.” Every morning, she stood at the kitchen window quietly assessing how her plantings in the backyard were doing. The Hosta and geraniums were thickening by the day. The coleus plants were unfurling purple leaves and she was thrilled at the swift climb of the sunflower’s hardy stalks, the opening of their massive buds.
One morning she went down to the kitchen and dropped ice cubes into a sports bottle. They cracked loudly when she poured hot coffee over them. She added some cream, twisted on its lid and vigorously shook the bottle. It was going to be a perfect summer day; clear sky, low eighties. She took her iced coffee to the window and began her survey of the yard, then stopping her gaze at the line of sunflower plants along the back fence. Each gangly plant had been snapped in half and they were each brushing the dark soil with their yellow faces.
“Jared would never do something like that, it had to be the wind,” Randall insisted, and Lane tried to convince herself that maybe that was true. After all, she had been making progress with Jared. They had started going on bicycle rides together, and he looked up smiling, when she entered a room.
After a couple weeks, she stopped thinking about the sunflowers. She was folding laundry on the couch and watching a show about pandas when Jared sulkily passed through the room. “Who cares about pandas?” he said. “I do,” said Lane. “And I’m working, so I get to pick the show. Besides,” she said teasingly, “don’t you think pandas are kind of cool? They only eat bamboo, isn’t that weird? Imagine if you only ate one thing. What would it be?”
“That’s stupid,” Jared said, but he threw himself into an armchair and joined her as she worked. A few minutes later, Lane took a gulp from her iced tea, which had been sitting on the side table, and something lodged in her airway. She gagged violently, her whole body convulsing. For a few terrifying moments, she couldn’t breathe, finally coughing up a clump of something that looked like the muck from a shower drain, or maybe one of the dust bunnies from under Jared’s bed. He grinned from across the room.
“Jared would never do that, he would never put something in your tea,” Randall said later that night. “It just blew in somehow.” Again, Lane tried to take Randall’s view of things, but it was getting harder. Jared’s just a kid, she told herself. He didn’t have friends. He couldn’t follow the plot of the most basic television show, much less a story his class was reading. “It has to be hard, to be him,” she told Paula on the phone.
Jared’s grandmother Evelyn, Randall’s mother, adored the boy. She brought fresh-baked brownies to their weekly family dinners, and played checkers with him on the coffee table. A stout woman in her early seventies, Evelyn had wide-set hazel eyes and a single white braid she wound around her head and pinned in place like a crown. Her last child had been born when she was forty-six, and she’d given birth ten times altogether, she was quick to point out, including three stillbirths. This feat had earned her Five Plus status, one of the government’s highest honors for women and which came with a personal, framed letter from the president and a bump up to the next tier in her social security payments. Lane tried to initiate conversation with Evelyn, but they didn’t have much in common. “Neither you nor your sister had any children?” she asked once, as they sat down to eat, and Lane shot Randall a pained expression. “Mom,” he said in a gently scolding tone. “We’ve talked about this.”
Later that night, Lane and Randall cleaned up the kitchen. Randall had tired of the subject, but Lane was still troubled by Evelyn’s remark. “If she thinks my not having had kids is bad, wait till she gets a load of my prison record,” Lane said. “She’s going to find out on her own, if we don’t tell her. And I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done.” Randall was leaning down to load plates into the dishwasher, and stood up straight to look Lane in the eye. “You risked a lot, bringing birth control over the border,” he said. “I respect what you did. You know that. But I don’t think my mom is quite ready to hear it.”
Lane finally dropped the subject, but didn’t stop thinking about it. That night, she lay in bed imagining what her former bunkmates at Saints Peter and Paul, the federal detention center in Michigan, would have to say about her situation. She hadn’t told Randall that she’d gotten a text that day from Mary Ellen, who’d been her coach in the prison gym. Along with almost everyone else Lane knew there, Mary Ellen had been released not long after Lane finished her time, and most of the women settled in the New York City area.
Having their sentences dropped hadn’t come as a surprise. A more enlightened candidate had just won the latest presidential election, and in keeping with a decades-long tradition, he made a big celebratory show of pardoning federal prisoners whose crimes reflected alignment with the voters who had put him in office. Once they were out, the women at Saints Peter and Paul stayed in touch. Many moved to the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area. “A bunch of us are meeting for drinks,” Mary Ellen’s text read. “Come join us.”
Lane wanted to reconnect, but wanted to hold off until her family dynamic with Jared, Randall and Evelyn was better. She still felt hopeful she could turn things around and had just won a major battle with Randall, getting him to agree to one date-night a month, just the two of them. The first of these took place in a Peruvian restaurant sporting a mural with a rainforest motif. Parrot holograms fluttered across the ceiling, and a water fountain shimmered down an entire wall. Best of all, the restaurant was imbued with the intoxicating aroma of garlic and onions, ceviche and slow-cooked, simmering vats of rice.
Lane’s excitement about being there, however, was short-lived. She was perusing the menu and thought Randall was just dehydrated, when he said he was feeling dizzy. Then as they waited for the server to bring water, he began struggling to breathe. The restaurant staff acted fast, and within minutes, paramedics in dark blue uniforms lifted Randall to a gurney and rolled him into an ambulance. Lane sat on a stool in the back of the ambulance holding his hand, her heart pounding. The fluorescent lights gave a harsh sheen to her date-night turquoise dress and heels. “Call my mother,” Randall gasped, pulling the oxygen mask away from his face, then letting it snap back in place. A couple hours later, Lane and Evelyn sat on opposite sides of Randall’s bed, and the oncologist on call gave them an update.
The good news, he said, is that it wasn’t a heart attack. He let them take that in a for a couple beats, then delivered the bad news, something no one expected. “The reason you couldn’t breathe was because a large vein in your chest was being compressed by a tumor,” the doctor said, looking straight at Randall. “I’m sorry to tell you, you have what we think is an advanced case of lung cancer. I’d like to do a biopsy and start treatment right away.”
The next several weeks turned Randall into a much weakened version of the man he had once been. Cancer research had slowed to a crawl in the U.S. a few decades earlier, and never quite caught up. Chemo delivery was still a brutal process involving a port below the clavicle. Lane sat next to Randall as he lay stretched out in the hospital’s chemo lounge, an IV bag hanging over him and slowly going slack. “It should have been me,” she said. “I’m the one who worked in a freaking nuclear fusion reactor” — and Randall didn’t disagree, which bothered Lane, who then felt guilty for being so petty. She was determined to get him through this rough patch, and didn’t even object when his mother Evelyn announced she would move into their guest room. In fact, despite not being each other’s biggest fan, Lane and Evelyn managed to work well in tandem, taking care of Jared, tending to Randall and keeping the household running smoothly.
One morning, as Evelyn bustled in the kitchen and the house filled with the smell of coffee and pancakes, Lane stood at the bathroom sink robotically brushing her teeth. She was barefoot and had dark circles under her eyes. Randall had woken twice the night before with fierce cramps and nausea, and missed the stainless-steel bowl they tried to keep close at all times. Each time this happened, Lane stripped their bed and remade it as he sat dejectedly in a chair in the corner of their bedroom. To her relief, he was sleeping heavily now, and her alarm hadn’t woken him. She couldn’t find her glasses, though, and stood groggily immersed in a slightly blurred world as she leaned down over the sink and rinsed her mouth. When she straightened up and turned to dry her face on a towel, she bumped into Jared, who had snuck into the room and was standing like a statue, just inches behind her.
The prank startled Lane. She fumbled, lost her balance and fell backward, one arm braced on the sink and taking the full brunt of her fall. A searing pain shot through her shoulder and she yelled, “You little shit!” refusing later, to apologize to Jared, though Evelyn thought it best. That afternoon, an MRI showed a slightly torn rotator cuff. The orthopedic surgeon who treated her, an astonishingly tall man with light gray eyes, said it could possibly heal on its own, but there was no guarantee. He strongly recommended surgery, “sooner, rather than later,” but to his annoyance, Lane had a different idea. She suggested they start with physical therapy, then use surgery as a last resort. Shaking his head, he wrote a prescription for PT and she found a rehab center in her neighborhood.
Lane looked forward to those sessions. The big room full of people pushing themselves to sit up, walk and accomplish a wider range of motion inspired her. The smell of rubber mats reminded her of her old gym back in Brooklyn, and the prison gym before that. She was an eager participant in her shoulder stretches, the staff’s PT star, and returned to her surgeon a few weeks later for a follow-up appointment, proudly demonstrating her ability to raise her arm without pain. “It’ll come back,” he said, unimpressed, but it didn’t, and Lane continued her exercises at home with a pulley device she hooked to a kitchen cabinet door. She counted out her reps as it lifted and extended her right arm while Evelyn set the table for breakfast, grunting, “You’re in the way,” as she reached for plates in the cabinet. Lane didn’t mind. She was starting to feel like her old self — and that’s when the second text arrived from Mary Ellen. “Join us for a barbecue this weekend,” it read. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
Again, Lane didn’t respond to the text, but it didn’t leave her thoughts. She imagined the women in their street clothes — she’d only ever seen them in their prison uniforms — holding drinks and laughing around a backyard grill, and she was still thinking about them as she dumped out the laundry basket in her and Randall’s room. She separated the darks from the lights, and pulled out her lingerie to put in a smaller load when she noticed something wrong with one of her pairs of underwear. There was a hole in the crotch. That’s weird, she thought to herself, and pulled other pairs out of the stack of clothes — all of which were damaged in the same way. Looking more closely, she noticed what looked like lines of ink, as if a pen had been used to stab through the fabric, and this pushed her over the edge into an almost gleeful, righteous rage. She took the armful of damaged underwear downstairs and dumped them on the couch where Randall, his mother and Jared were watching one of Jared’s cackling cartoon shows. “Someone stabbed the crotch of all my panties with a pen,” she announced triumphantly. “I wonder who that might have been.” Jared looked in a panic at his father and then his grandmother, and ran up the stairs to his room. “Now see what you’ve done,” Evelyn said icily to Lane. Randall sat shell-shocked, mute. The three adults were quiet the rest of the night, but Lane brought up the subject again, as soon as she and Randall were in their room, getting ready for bed. “I need to think about how to handle this,” Randall said, and by the time they put the lights out, he agreed that they would see a family therapist, all three of them. He would set it up, in the morning.
This all became moot, of course, when Randall dropped his cereal spoon at breakfast, and twisted his face, unable to form words.
Lane knew that lung cancer patients are sometimes at risk for stroke, but Randall’s tumors were shrinking and the consensus was that he was out of the woods. Her voice was shaking as she called emergency services. Again, paramedics arrived quickly. They administered an IV drip as they rolled Randall on a gurney into the back of their ambulance and Evelyn and Jared leapt in behind them, but when Lane stepped up to the ambulance’s open back door, a paramedic held up his hand to stop her. “There’s only room for two people to ride with the patient,” he said, so she followed in her car.
Later, Lane couldn’t remember that drive to the hospital. She didn’t realize she was crying, till she felt her wet face. A clerk at the hospital’s front desk gave her Randall’s room number, and she sprinted up three flights of stairs — rather than wait for the elevator — and stood panting, reading and re-reading a large, hand-written sign taped to his door: “Family Only.”
A nurse hurried over and gently took her by the arm, guiding her to the elevator. “This way, that’s right,” she said, as Lane walked zombie-like beside her. “I’m sorry, hon. But if you’re not married, we have to honor their wishes.”
“Family only!” Lane wailed to her sister, that night on the phone. By then, she’d gone from stunned, to broken-hearted, to enraged. “I’m not family. I’ll never be family. There’s no place for me in that family.”
“I’m your family,” Paula said. “I’m your family. Get the hell out of there. It’s time.”
It only took a few days for Lane to pack up her belongings and schedule the move back to Brooklyn. Every morning as she wedged her belongings into boxes, she paused to add her name to Randall’s online visitation schedule — only to find it quickly erased. By day three when the moving truck arrived, she got an alert on her phone and rushed to check her texts. Was it the hospital? Had someone taken pity on her and would sneak her in for a visit? Her heart sank when she saw that it was an email, and read the subject line: “This is Evelyn, on Randall’s behalf.” Evelyn had been avoiding Lane during those awkward final days in the house, but now she was leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen, glaring at Lane who stood looking at her phone as she continued reading: “We think it’s best for everyone if you move out.” Evelyn had written the email, then held the laptop up to Randall’s face for his approval as he lay motionless on the hospital bed. Still unable to move his arms or talk, he found the strength to nod “Yes.”
Lane was still reeling from this latest insult when Paula arrived to help finish loading the truck. “At some point,” she said, unscrewing the Formica top from the chrome legs of Lane’s table, “you have to stop forcing yourself into spaces where you’re not wanted.” Lane didn’t respond, but she took in her sister’s words. When they were almost ready to leave, she made one last trip out to the truck and stepped back into the house just in time to see Paula and Jared standing in the kitchen with their backs to her. Jared had his hand deep in his jacket pocket.
“Let me see what you’ve got,” Paula said in a low, even tone. “No,” said Jared, and Paula took a step closer, her face inches from his. “Fine,” Jared said, and pulled out an antique children’s drinking glass that belonged to Lane, one of a set of six that Paula had found at an estate sale and given to Lane for her birthday a few years back. The glass was emblazoned with an image of a baby elephant called “Dumbo,” a long-ago cartoon character. The set also featured Bambi, Pinocchio and other beloved figures of that era.
“She doesn’t need it, it’s for kids!” Jared wailed, as Paula snatched it from his hand. “Go, scram! Get outta here!” she yelled at him, and Jared ran out the back door to the yard. For a moment, Lane considered running after him — but Paula read her mind. “Let him go,” she said. “Let him beat the crap out of the rest of your lovely plantings.” This made Lane laugh out loud. Exhausted both emotionally and physically, the two sisters howled with laughter and high-fived each other, while Evelyn watched in horror and Jared spied at them from outside, his face pressed against the screen of an open window.
Back in Brooklyn, Lane stayed with Paula for a few weeks while she looked for another apartment. She rejoined the local gym, and set up a workout schedule with Mike, her old trainer. Every morning at six, she showed up ready to move through her sets. “The body achieves what the mind believes,” Mike called out, as she lay on her back on the padded bench, lifting the barbell above her. “You’ll get back to where you were. Struggle makes you stronger.”
“Productive struggle,” Lane clarified. “It has to be productive or what’s the point?” Mike didn’t respond, focused on her form, and that’s when her phone buzzed. It was another text from Mary Ellen. “We’re opening a gym and need someone to lead an exercise class for women who’ve just gotten released,” it read. “Who better than our talented alumna Lane from Saints Peter and Paul.” Lane flashed back to the prison gym, the women quietly moving through their sets, the stationary weight machines clanging, treadmill humming. She felt for a moment the satisfaction she had felt then, knowing she would leave that place stronger than when she went in, and texted back her friend.
BIO
Lynn McGee published a few stories (Northwest Review, Berkeley Fiction Review and others), while earning her MFA in poetry at Columbia. “Productive Struggle,” from her short story manuscript SAFE HOUSE, is her first published story since then, though she did go on to write five books of poetry, including two award-winning chapbooks. She lives in NYC — for now. Visit www.lynnmcgee.com.
