If the professor agreed to be her adviser, Sera said, she’d like to more closely study the economic model, whether and how it was profitable for companies like Thornhill, whose housing costs were stable, yes, but for whom the cost of employee health care was an ongoing variable, especially for families like hers, where a nonworking resident commanded a considerable amount of health-care costs. She was also curious about Thornhill’s plans for residents who aged out of traditional hourly skilled labor. Inside the paper, she’d included a photocopy of her parents’ monthly statement for this past July. Joseph and Iris Fuller together had made only seven hundred dollars, even though their take-home taxable pay was listed at two thousand dollars with Thornhill amenities included. The company also had a program to cover the cost of taxes for any family that came up short, treated as a low-interest loan. Over the four years that the Fullers had lived there, they had a balance of over forty thousand dollars that they owed their employer. It was, Darren thought, modern-day sharecropping. Sure, each family had its basic needs met, but they had nothing else to show for their work. No wealth was being created, no legacy or security for a future generation that didn’t turn its bodies and labor over to the Thornhill corporation. They lived at its mercy and its perceived benevolence. And if they were fired, they would leave through the gates with nothing.
Which was what happened to the other families Rey had told Darren about, families that had moved to Thornhill when it first opened its plant in Nacogdoches County, families with members who were mostly undocumented like Rey. Except, according to Sera’s report, they didn’t leave so much as they were drug out of their homes in the middle of the night, put on buses with blacked-out windows, and driven as far away as Mississippi to the east. One family ended up north of Kansas. With Rey’s help — after he’d peppered his mother and stepfather with questions about anything they could remember about the families who’d worked and lived at Thornhill with them, where they’d come from, where they had other relatives — Sera was able to get in touch with three families that had left Thornhill suddenly. They each reported a terrifying scenario. Days of feeling unwell, groggy, and lethargic. They’d missed work and believed this was the reason for being fired and removed from the premises in the middle of the night. It had all happened fast, and they were weakened by unexplained illnesses and in no position to demand answers to the questions that were hammering in their chests. What was happening? Where were they being taken? For years they’d had good jobs, housing, and medical care. That it all came to a brutal, inexplicable end fit the capricious image they held of life in the United States, a country that didn’t guarantee half as much for its own citizens. Who were they to demand more? Most had moved on. Found work when and where they could. Only one man, who was by then separated from his wife, living on his own, and doing shift work at a pork-processing plant in Nebraska, held any bad feelings about Thornhill. “They used us,” he told Sera. “When they started moving in families with papers, Americans, I knew that they would get rid of us. There is no way to have a business legalmente aquí con nosotros. When the shit gets real, they’re not gonna have us in it.”
Darren sank into the front seat of his truck.
The cab had grown warm, even with the windows cracked.
The sun overhead was baking the roof of the Chevy. He could feel its warmth radiating above his head, which was overheating in its own way. Thornhill not paying its workers a living wage, running what sounded like a tax scheme, busing migrants out in the middle of the night. But there was another more pernicious thought running underneath all of it for Darren. So many reports of people feeling ill. People who got their health care from Thornhill, a company they counted on for their survival. He thought again of the look on Iris’s face when they said they’d found Sera’s pills, the shock and the abject terror… because she knew then what Darren didn’t yet. That the pills in Darren’s pocket, the ones that Bell had found in the dumpster behind the Rho Beta house, were likely the very thing that was making her daughter sick lately.
Which was why, on a day that he was supposed to be in Houston meeting with his lawyers, as a trial date had finally been proposed, he was pulling into the parking lot of Thornhill High School. There were camera trucks and catering vans and dozens of black cars. Escalades and Town Cars and Chryslers. Darren was in the rental car Randie had arrived in at the house in Camilla yesterday, when she’d kissed him and listened as he ran through his plan, agreeing that his Chevy would too easily draw attention to his presence. Her rental was thankfully a modest American-made sedan that fit in with vehicles that had carried politicians and lobbyists to the Keep America Working fundraiser. He’d put on a navy suit and the only pair of dress shoes he owned and driven through the back entrance to the town, the one Rey had told him about.
The arches of his feet ached, and his toes were pinched against the tight leather. He missed his beloved boots, but the shoes and the suit and the flag pin he’d dug up were part of a costume to get him in the room, to get him in the same rarefied air as Carey-Ann Thorn. Because he was now convinced that she knew where Sera Fuller was.
The event was in full swing when he entered the back of the gymnasium. The room had been remade into a simulacrum of a ballroom. A bluish-gray carpet rolled to all four corners, and there were dozens of round tables topped with crisp white linen and centerpieces of bloodred roses and chrysanthemums and aster. Servers were carrying trays of the evening’s main course, asparagus-stuffed chickens that might have been processed at the foul-smelling plant on the premises. Darren remembered how Carey-Ann wouldn’t touch the stuff at the Fullers’ home. She was already on the stage when he arrived. Her whitish-blond hair that he once took for a sober gray shone beneath stage lights that had been brought in special for the event, drawing Darren’s attention like a lighthouse, a target in a storm. She stood behind a cherrywood podium, wearing a shift dress the color of dark berries, a rich purple that, as she spoke, Darren realized was a nod to her political message of bipartisan unity. She was addressing a room in which Darren spotted a number of politicians, including Sutton Fielder, the Republican from Maryland, and two Democratic congresswomen from Texas. Darren, who hung by the entrance to a staging room for the caterers, stepped to his right as a waiter walked past him carrying a tray of dinner entrées. The flat, almost plastic scent of food prepared in bulk sickened him a little, the sight of a gummy-looking sauce on the bed of each plate.
On stage, Carey-Ann Thorn continued her speech. “This movement, this mission we’re on, it’s a big tent,” she said. “And you’re all here because you are believers in something better for our country. We can bring manufacturing back to the U.S., taking on China and Mexico, bringing all of that business back here. Letting the private sector provide for this nation’s citizens. Education, housing, health care. We free families from the burden of having to constantly grind, only to barely get by. That this is happening to good people in one of the richest nations in the world is unacceptable. It’s un-American. This country’s workers deserve care and protection. We save families from the direst situations; men and women who were in shelters are now in two- and three-bedroom homes, happy to have good jobs, their kids in good schools, having access to world-class health care. When I look into their eyes and hear them say, ‘Thank you’…”
She paused here, gathering herself against a show of rising emotion.
“Well, as a mom, I just could not be prouder of what E.J. and I have created with the Thornhill model.” She took a deep breath and looked out across the room filled with believers, as she had called them. Then she raised a hand as if she too had heard the gospel. “When I hear moms thank me for giving their family a chance, it gives me the energy we’re all going to need for the fight ahead, the fight for legislation at the federal level to make this model work not just for businesses but for the families that want this. We need your help securing a new class in Congress to make it easier for businesses to have flexible and creative pay structures.” To the applause that broke out, Carey-Ann Thorn smiled wide, then placed a hand over her heart in a gesture of love and humility, her appreciation for the potential converts in this room. Then she showed a video of a new model Thornhill family. They were white, but otherwise identical to the Fullers. Mom, dad, two kids. An older girl and a boy. They shared a testimonial about the dad having been laid off during the 2008 recession, just like Joseph Fuller, the family struggling financially for years, growing more and more desperate, scraping by without steady housing, until they heard about Thornhill. The family applied and were accepted earlier this year. After, Darren thought, all the undocumented families who had helped Carey-Ann Thorn and E. J. Hill shape and stress-test their business model had been conveniently removed. And just in time for the push for political support for legislation to protect Thornhill’s right to decide how to pay its labor force. On-screen, the mother of two dabbed at her eyes.
They were so grateful in the video, this family.
The men and women in the room clapped when the testimonial ended, and Carey-Ann Thorn returned to the spotlight at the podium. “Compassionate capitalism is not only possible,” she said, “it’s in the best interest of every life it touches.”
Darren felt the words rumble in his chest before he shouted them out loud.
“Except you switched her meds!” he said, stepping from the shadows toward the circle of light on the stage. “Sera Fuller… make sure you tell the people that part too.”
Lenarix, the miracle drug that had made Sera’s college life possible, didn’t have a generic equivalent. It’s why it was so important that Thornhill covered the cost for the family. But the drug didn’t come in a pill form, which was why a mother who had let her daughter start managing her own doctors’ visits, going to them alone, had panicked when Darren mentioned finding Sera’s pills. The real drug came only in a powder, to be mixed with food or drink. Whatever pills Sera’s Thornhill doctor had given her, it was not the medicine that had given her a new, pain-free life.
Darren’s words had cut through the audience’s applause at the end of the presentation. Heads turned, and he felt eyes on him. Whole tables were either checking the dark edges of the room to see what the disturbance was or staring at the stage, gauging Carey-Ann’s reaction. Stage lights may have blinded her vision, but Darren swore she knew who had spoken, if only by the tight smile on her face, the flint of anger in her eyes. Darren stepped further out of the shadows but got no more than two feet before he felt the hollow nose of a pistol at the base of his skull.
He was held for nearly an hour in a greenroom backstage, which was just a coach’s office into which someone had shoved a vanity and a card table laden with a fruit basket and bottled water. Two beefy men in all black, not Thornhill PD, had thrown him onto the concrete floor, roughing him up as they searched for a weapon. He was unarmed, though. The Colt he’d left with Randie. He had a single gun and a single woman he loved, and he’d felt better leaving her alone with a pistol, a choice that cut both ways, he knew. He prayed his instinct to protect her wouldn’t be his undoing now.
The door behind Darren opened and he heard the click of a woman’s heels.
Carey-Ann looked tired under the harsh overhead lights.
Darren rose to his feet. “Just tell me where she is.”
Carey-Ann sighed as she sat at the vanity table and reached into a camel-colored Chloé bag and pulled out a pill bottle. Her hands shook slightly as she opened it and poured a single white circle into the palm of her left hand. She slid it between her molars and crunched it into a powder she then ran over gums. She was silent a moment, waiting for whatever it was to hit her bloodstream. Then she cocked her head and regarded Darren as she might a windup toy that had gotten itself stuck in a corner, ramming over and over into a wall. “Frank Vaughn has become a friend of mine, a future soldier in our movement. And it’s my understanding that he has a pretty strong case against you. I would think a man walking his last days outside of a Texas penitentiary would be more cautious. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I want you gone, for good this time, or I’ll testify against you my damn self.”
“The phones you give families,” Darren said, “the computers — you’re watching everything, is that it? You knew that Sera had shared the details of the company with a professor at SFA? Her education coming back to bite you in the ass, is that it?”
A tiny vein on Carey-Ann’s forehead rose like a swelling river.
Her eyes narrowed.
“‘You’re mistaken’… ‘I don’t have the faintest clue what you’re talking about’… ‘You sound paranoid, Mr. Mathews.’ Which one of these gets this over with faster?” She gestured like she could do this all day. Placid denials.
“The families you moved,” Darren said. “Sera’s meds, the fact that Thornhill is practically charging people to work for them, I don’t care about that right now. I only care about the welfare of a young woman, a kid, barely nineteen. Someone’s child.”
“Whose father has known where she is this whole time,” Carey-Ann said.
“What?”
But he knew it was the truth before the word even left his mouth. He thought back to his first meeting with the Fullers, how oddly Joseph behaved, aggrieved by Darren’s inquiries, the concern over his child’s whereabouts, concern that Joseph didn’t share. Looking back, Darren realized there was disgrace in Joseph’s expression.
“I believe in what we’re doing, Mr. Mathews. This is the future. Agriculture, manufacturing, tech. Hell, we might bring customer service phone banks back to the States. There’s not a corner of industry that can’t make use of this model,” Carey-Ann said. “And I’m not going to let a kid, as you said, a young girl who was obviously unable to handle the rigors and stress of higher education, question what I am building.”
Darren listened to Carey-Ann, chilled by her callousness.
The way she’d used Sera, the Fuller family.
She looked at Darren as if she was suddenly irritated that they were still talking. She owed him nothing. “You have no idea how close we are to making this happen. Next year’s election goes my way, and we’ll have the votes to change a few laws, making Thornhill a new model for every major employer in this country.”
“You fucked with her medication, you could have killed —”
“People are starving!” she shouted. For a second the cool facade broke, and Darren caught a glimpse of the deep caring she had tried so hard to manufacture on stage. It was in there somewhere, and it was real, an impulse toward good that had rotted along the way. “There are families in this country literally starving right now. People who have worked their entire lives and can’t afford to live in this country. Why shouldn’t my company do what their government can’t or won’t, Mr. Mathews?”
“You could have killed her.”
“Every crusade has its casualties.”
She stood then, smoothing the front of her dress. When she finally spoke, she was calm again, politic. “Sera experienced a setback in her journey with sickle cell disease, yes. We wished the Fullers could represent Thornhill tonight. But such is the nature of her illness. Stress and” — she paused for a second and then continued pointedly — “drinking, these are terrible things for a condition like hers. But be assured that she is resting, well cared for, and Thornhill is, as ever, paying for it all. The Fullers are in our prayers. They are Thornhill family.” Then she lifted her bag and started for the door.
“Good luck, Mr. Mathews,” she said, in a way that suggested he would need it.
