Dahlia's Secret Smile

It’s Jimmy’s birthday this time. He’s nine, like me. This means we’re mostly worried but still trying to slurp up the last bits of happiness.

The boys always want the rec. room decorated the same: blue, blue, blue. Blue streamers, blue balloons, and blue fairy-bread if their mum can get those sprinkles. I don’t care. I don’t hate blue.

Most of the kids from the apartment building are here today: Sally, Mason, Kylie, Gemma, Billie, Tyler, and a bunch of others whose names I don’t know yet ‘cause we only moved here last winter after Grandma died.

Jimmy’s mum, who speaks through a nose like an ibis beak, tells us the first game is pass-the-parcel. We all sit in a circle on the floor. Most of the adults are sitting on plastic chairs along the wall. My Dad is the only dad. The rests are mums. I chose to sit where I can watch their faces while we’re passing the news-papered rectangle to Baa Baa Black sheep, which is for babies, but is one of the only ones we’re allowed to listen to now.

None of the adults are talking to each other. None of them are smiling, of course. Even when Kylie tears apart the last piece of paper and finds a tin of coloured pencils inside, and laughs and squeals, and stands up and does a little spin on the spot, their faces don’t move much. Some of the mothers, especially Kylie’s, look away. I see Kylie wait for her mum to look back. When their eyes meet, Kylie’s shine like cherries, and her mum’s are hard like the cat’s-eye marbles the boys play with in the hallways.

Dad says it never stops hurting that he can’t smile. I like that he’s honest with me about that. I’m almost ten and I don’t want lies about what it will be like. It’s not like I’m not going to find out anyway. I think Dad knows it’ll be less of a shock if he tells the truth.

Because they only started putting in the dopamine sensors the year before I was born, Dad says that he could laugh, and smile, and cry tears of happiness until he was thirty-two. He didn’t have time to prepare like we do. Nor did Mum.

The bit that worries me the most is having good dreams. I can always tell when Dad has one – although it’s hardly ever – because he screams and jumps and throws himself off the side of the bed. Then he sits in the big armchair for the rest of the night and the lamp keeps me awake.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to control my dreams. I started trying, a while back. Since then, I seem to be having more scary ones, like about the time when I talked too much at school, and Mr Trainor rolled me up in a rug so only my head stuck out, and stood me up in the corner at the front of the class for the whole day until I weed my pants. But I also still have good ones, like about getting my own puppy that’s white with brown spots and floppy ears. Even if I can be really good all day - and stop myself from having any happy thoughts at all - I think I will still get the electric shocks when I dream.

I asked Dad once why They would do this to us. He said it’s a way of keeping us in our place. I didn’t understand what that meant and when I asked again, he said I’d see for myself one day. He didn’t say it to make me scared, but it did. Luckily, we’re allowed to be scared.

I asked Granny once if Mum was good at not getting the shocks. She didn’t like to talk about that, and she said something really old-fashioned, like, ‘hold your tongue, child.’ So I asked Dad. He told me he’d tell me another day, so I just kept asking. Then, one day I asked again, and I also said I wanted to know the truth. It’s like the magic thing you say to Dad when you want to find something out. I think he thinks if he doesn’t answer, then he’s a liar, and he hates liars more than anything. He says They lie.

So, he sat in his big armchair and patted his lap and I sat on it even though I hadn’t done that since I still needed the green turtle stool to reach the bench. But it made me feel all glowy when I hopped up, and I almost forgot that I’d asked him something. He started telling me a story in his ‘story voice,’ which is the flat one he uses so he doesn’t feel happy while he’s telling it. At first, he told the story I already knew: that my Mum was called Dahlia, and she was pretty, and beautiful, and brave, and honest, and kind and wore flowers in her hair. But this time, he also told me she was funny, and laughed and smiled all the time so her cheeks shone pink, and that she had a little book where she wrote down three blessings every night. He said that, when she got the sensor in her neck, she swore never to change. So she just kept up at being happy.

Every day and every night, Dad said, she would fall down with happiness. He meant because of the shocks. He said that she would cry out but then she would get up and get right back to being happy. He said that she smiled if a pigeon landed on the windowsill, and chuckled if Granny farted when she bent over to clean the bathtub. He said that she still ate delicious things like cake – although she could only get a teensy taste in before falling – even when everyone else chose to eat boiled rice and lettuce. He said that nobody could believe how brave she was, although some people thought she must be mentally damaged, which I think means retarded.

Dad said that they met a doctor once in the old building, except after he wasn’t allowed to be a doctor anymore. He told Mum and Dad that your body can’t take the shocks forever. That every time you get one, it wears down the muscle of your heart, and one day your heart just stops. Which means you’re dead.

I asked Dad when Mum’s heart stopped, and if it was because of the shocks. He went quiet for a really long time and his face went all soft and pale and mushy like mashed potato. He nodded. I asked him when she died. He looked away and his eyes were shiny and it looked like he was going to say he would tell me another time, so I grabbed his chin with my fingers – gently though – and turned his head back to face me. I looked right into the black part of his eyes and said I wanted to know the truth. He breathed in so long I wondered if he had some special thing where he could do that forever. But then he breathed out and said, ‘Your Mum died right after she had you. She died when she held you in her arms for the very first time.’

Sometimes when Dad tells me the truth, I feel sad. But when I picture my Mum getting one last giant shock, I feel something worse than sad. I feel something better too, because I know how much Mum must have loved me when she held me. I also feel something tickling my belly, because I imagine how funny it would be to be a nurse when a mother got a shock and her baby went flying and you had to catch it in mid-air like a football.

Dad told me to hang on for a second while he squidged his hand down into his pocket. While it was in there squirming around, he said he had something to give me. He said he was going to give it to me the night before my tenth birthday, so I had the best night ever before I got my sensor. But he said he’d changed his mind, and that I should have it now, so I have more days and nights to enjoy it.

When he pulled his hand out of his pocket, it was in a fist. He turned his fist over and his fingernails glowed pink with how hard he was squeezing. He took so long to open his fingers that I almost reached out to grab one and pull it loose. But he undid them himself. Sitting on his palm was a gold necklace with a heart-shaped thingy that he said was called a ‘locket’. He told me I could open it, and so I picked it up very gently and found the catch and pulled the top half of the heart away from the bottom half. Inside was a picture of a lady with long brown hair and a pink flower, which had lots and lots of petals, behind her ear. Her eyes were big and green and just like mine, and she was smiling.

###

My body’s shaking so hard it bounces while I lay face down on the metal table. There’s a hole for my nose and mouth, and it’s adult-sized, so I can get my eyes in there too and see the man’s ugly black boots on the tiles. My Dad is holding my hand and telling me to lie still, while the man finishes shaving the patch at the top of my neck where my hair starts. The man's voice is low and rough and sounds wrong when he says, ‘little sting,’ as he slides in the needle. But it is only a little sting, and then he’s doing something, and I can hear the clanking of metal things on the table beside my body and then pulling and squeezing where my hair used to be. It doesn’t hurt. It just feels weird and kind of numb.

Then, all of a sudden, it’s over and Dad leads me outside by the hand and we’re back on the street. He tells me to keep my eyes down; it’s best not to look around too much in case I see things I shouldn’t. Things that make me happy, he means. I haven’t told him yet what I’ve decided, and I do what he says. We walk for a long way and the footpath is grey and cracked. When we reach the edge of the park, a man stops Dad to ask him something about the area. They talk for a long time, so I go and stand in the shade under the willow tree. My neck is starting to go, 'thrum-thrum, thrum-thrum. It feels hot and stingy, but I do what the man said and don’t touch the stitches.

Instead, I slide my hand into my pocket and touch the locket for long enough that the cool metal gets warm. Dad’s voice drones on and on, and the swans call to each other on the pond. I look up and see little kids running up to the water’s edge and throwing bits of bread to the ducks.

Before I know it, the locket is out in the open and I hold it in my palm and watch myself unclip it. There, my Mum’s green eyes meet mine. She smiles at me. Somewhere, far away, I hear myself scream as I fall to the ground.