These Women by Ivy Pochoda

Author:Ivy Pochoda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

3.

A CATHOLIC GIRLS’ SCHOOL AT RECESS. ESSIE TIMES HER lunch break to coincide with the bell that sends the kids outdoors to the grubby playground that she worries is too close to the street. This is her therapy. Better than the mandatory sessions with the counselor ordered by her old captain—the sessions that insist she either had too much empathy or too little.

They assign you to one pole or the other and tear you down. Faking the psych eval was easy. Like everything else: a puzzle with a solution. A game. Pay attention and you’ll learn exactly what they want to hear.

The girls wear uniforms, maroon skirts, white polos, blue sweaters. The materials are cheap and pill easily. The younger ones fly down the steps into the playground, racing toward the climbing structures. The upperclassmen take their time, sauntering and performing for one another.

It took a week for Essie to determine the hierarchy—who ruled the roost, who was trying to climb. A couple of overheard conversations gave her enough information that a mindlessly executed social media search—fake names notwithstanding—told her who had a boyfriend from the brother school a few blocks away and which girls were getting involved in stuff out of their league, the kind of stuff that might bring them across Essie’s desk in a few years if they’re not careful. None of this matters to her. She forgets half of it less than five hours after she uncovers it.

She watches the climbing structure, where the twelve-year-old girls are swinging wildly, daring each other to backflip and catapult from the rungs to the concrete. As they fly through the air—a moment that always seems to occur in slow motion, as if there’s a possibility of stopping it, rewinding, pulling back—Essie’s nerves spark, a prickle like she’s licked a battery that radiates from her stomach to her extremities in anticipation of impact. Boom. They land. A buckle of knees. A moment of silence.

Essie’s breath catches.

Then a cheer.

And over again.

As a teenager, Essie was in the hospital when her older sister went into premature labor and Essie watched the complications pile up—internal bleeding, cardiac arrest. She stood by as the doctors held up Gladys’s organs, checking them like bruised produce, to see which one was to blame, before tucking them back into place. They sewed Gladys up. She healed. It had given Essie the false sense of security in practical resolutions.

A decade and a half on the force and the human body isn’t the kind of puzzle Essie likes. It doesn’t have obvious solutions or even solutions at all. From a distance, it looks easy to reassemble. The neck crooked at a horrible angle? Gently put it back. Untwist, realign. Straighten what was bent. Undo the damage.

There’s a girl on top of the climbing structure. She stands, balancing on two thin rungs of the jungle gym. She wobbles, pinwheeling her arms to stay upright. The game is to execute the most elaborate jump—the most daring—with a flip or a twist or a straddle or a kick.

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