Free The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman

Plaza, with its flags flying. One hundred flags, and on each flag seven stars to represent the seven seas. They passed the windowless Central Store. They passed the Coupon Bank, the Island Bakery. They passed the bus depot, where a hundred silver buses waited to take the orderlies back to their Barracks on the other side of the island. At last they arrived at the hospital, surrounded by gardens and coral block walls.
    Will showed his identification card to the usher and led Honor up the stairs to a room of beds. The room was painted clean white, but the paint was cracked. Several large windows were boarded up. The glass must have broken in the storm.
    Honor’s mother was sitting up against pillows in a white gown. Honor cried out and ran toward her.
    “No, no, no.” The nurse hustled Honor out of the room. “We cannot have children in the ward,” the nurse scolded Will. “Take her downstairs, please.”
    “Can’t she stay in the hall?” Will pleaded.
    “Are you arguing with me?” the nurse asked.
    Honor looked up at her father. His face was calm, but he was squeezing her hand so hard it hurt.
    She almost fell trying to keep up with Will as he marched her down the stairs. “Stay here,” her father told her when they came out to the hospital garden.
    She waited for him on a green bench in the shade of a monkeypod tree. She watched two orderlies clipping hedges with sharp garden shears. She thought of Octavio. You aren’t a baby, and you know as well as I do that if the orderlies got him . . .
    Honor imagined the school orderlies clipping Octavio with garden shears. She thought of them slashing and puncturing his soft body. When she closed her eyes, she imagined Octavio looking up at her. She felt his delicate tentacle wrap her wrist.
    “Honor.”
    She opened her eyes with a start. There was her father, walking toward her with a bundle of blankets in his arms. Honor’s mother followed slowly. She had changed out of her nightgown and was dressed again in ordinary clothes.
    Will and Pamela sat next to Honor on the bench. Then Honor saw that the bundle of blankets contained a baby.
    “That’s the baby?” Honor exclaimed. She’d had no idea he would be so little. She’d never seen a baby before.
    “Honor,” said her father, “this is Quintilian.”

PART TWO

ONE
    ALL THE CHILDREN IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD FELT SORRY for Honor. No one had ever heard of keeping a second child. Where would such children live when they grew up? The Corporation had not yet built cities in the Northern Islands, and there was no room in the Colonies for extra children. The Tranquil Sea was vast, but the islands left in it were small.
    Every once in a while a family had a second baby by mistake, but in such cases, parents gave the infant to the Corporation for redistribution to those people who could not have children. This was called Giving Back to the Community. To keep an extra baby was shocking.
    The neighborhood children hushed and stared when Honor approached. They would not play basketball with her anymore. Their parents had warned them. Honor’s parents had committed a Selfish Act. Even though Corporation Counselors came to talk to them, Will and Pamela would not give up Quintilian. Now every afternoon on day seven, Will was required to volunteer for digging ditches. He dug ditches to pay his debt to society. Pamela wheeled the recycling bins to the curb for the whole row of town houses. This was how she paid her debt. The bins were heavy, but none of the neighbors helped Pamela. No one wanted to be seen with the Greenspoons, because a family with two children was Not Approved.
    There were no gifts or baby showers for second children, no balloons or celebrations. There were no openings for second children in the Colony day-care system, and so Pamela couldn’t work like the other mothers; she had to stay home with Quintilian. Pamela did not complain. Even though she looked tired, she never said she was sorry for what she’d done.