WE MADE THE CHILDREN PAY FIRST
CHAPTER ONE
The Year She Was Born
Diane sat in the back seat next to her daughter. The new car seat made her look so small. The packet the hospital had sent home with them sat at Diane’s feet, and she wondered when she would ever find the time to go through all of it. She was in awe of how eight pounds could rearrange their whole life overnight.
They rode the whole way home in silence. Diane sat with her head back against the seat, one hand resting light on the baby’s chest, feeling each small breath lift it. She was wrung out the way you only are after bringing your baby into the world, too spent for words, and not needing any.
Mark couldn’t have put it into words either, if he’d tried: how this new person, all of two days old, who could not so much as hold up her own head, had already taken complete command of his entire life. He wasn’t sure he had ever been so afraid, or so unsure of anything.
Mark drove home ten miles under the speed limit, both hands on the wheel. The whole of his life was riding in the back seat, and he drove like it.
He ran the checklist one more time, the way he had all week. Was the car seat in right. The pacifiers, were they safe? Were the diapers the right ones. The whole list, and it grew by the day.
There was one thing that never made it onto the list.
In his coat pocket sat a new cell phone. An amazing little device: it meant that if anything went wrong on this drive home, he could call for help from the road itself. Call anyone, from anywhere. That was the whole promise of it, and it was a good one.
It was just a phone. It made calls, and that was what it was built to do. The baby was the event. The phone was a wonder, but right then it was irrelevant. It had simply come along at the right time.
Her name was Sarah, and 1992 was the year the cell phone came into their house, the same year she did.
And the three of them, Mark and Diane and their new baby girl, were about to spend the rest of their lives inside a future that was arriving too fast for anyone to stop and look at it.
Sarah would never know any other kind of world.
Before very long, neither would any other child.
So when they carried Sarah inside, the whole new world came in with her, and no one thought to hold the door, least of all Mark.
He knew the hardware inside and out, better than anyone in that house, and loved every new thing it could do; nothing he knew about it gave him the smallest reason to worry, so he didn’t.
Diane trusted it because Mark did.
And every other new mother and father carrying a baby home that year felt exactly the same, certain, and unworried.
The house looked no different than it had the day before. But the world it sat in had quietly become a new place, and not one of them thought to wonder whether anyone had checked.
They weren’t just glad about it. They were thrilled. It was the most exciting thing any of them had ever owned.
And then, one day no one could ever name, the coolest thing in the world quietly became the most ordinary thing in the world.
Nobody saw it anymore.
No one looked at it twice.
END OF CHAPTER ONE