And then there’s Steven, his cryptic question ringing in my ears now.
“Oh my god,” I say, and go to the window.
As best I can see, there are two cars and one larger vehicle, boxy, like an ambulance, but not white. A third car pulls up behind the boxy van, blocking our driveway.
Blocking any cars from getting in. Or out.
The next words I say scratch the air, hardly more than a hoarse whisper. Nothing inside me is functioning, not my knees, which have gone to jelly, not my voice, not my stomach. Wave after wave of nausea ripples through me as I stare at the electric colors lining the street in front of our house.
I’m expecting the doorbell to ring, such an ordinary event, one I used to look forward to. Doorbells meant visitors on holidays; packages I was expecting; friendly pairs of young men from Utah who, despite my resistance to any sort of conversion, somehow always seemed pleasant and well scrubbed. Doorbells meant trick-or-treaters dressed as ghosts and goblins and the princesses or action heroes of the month.
“I’ll go,” Patrick says.
I wait for the ding of the bell and think about Poe with his scar and his ex–Special Forces mien and his eerie silence. They won’t be silver or golden bells for me tonight, but iron ones.
Oh fuck.
Now I see them coming inside, uniformed and armed with black devices, walking over the polished hardwood of my house, leaving scuffs and tracks. I see Thomas and Reverend Carl and other men, one carrying a small box with a counter set to zero that will snap on my wrist like an iron shackle. I see the television cameras and the news reporters, all flashing and straining to catch a glimpse of the former Dr. Jean McClellan, now destined to a life of silence and labor in the fields of Iowa, the fisheries of Maine, the textile mills of Alabama. Subsequent to a public shaming, of course.
Steven, I think. What have you done?
They won’t go after Lorenzo. I know this. The follies of men have always been tolerated.
Sonia comes running into my room, eyes glowing. The boys’ footfalls move in the other direction, into the main part of the house, where Patrick has gone.
“It’s okay, baby girl,” I say, taking Sonia into my arms. “It’s okay.”
But it’s not okay. Nothing is okay as I sit here with my back to the bed frame, rocking my daughter, waiting for the inevitable doomsday clang of the doorbell.
THIRTY-FIVE
Five horrible minutes pass before Patrick’s footsteps come running back down the hallway.
“It looks bad,” he says. “Whatever it is, it looks bad.” His face is a map of worry, all lines on a parchment-pale landscape.
But the doorbell hasn’t rung.
I pull myself up, scoop Sonia into my arms, and follow Patrick to the kitchen. The parade of vehicles is still in the street, still screaming their sirens and polluting the night with blue and red. Six men stand guard on the front porch of the Kings’ house, two more at the back door.
It’s not me, I think. It’s not me. It’s not me. It’s not me.
A woman’s scream pierces through, all the way into our kitchen, and I risk a look out the window.
Leo moves to turn on the light.
“No. Keep it off. Keep it dark,” I say.
What could Olivia King have done?
If someone you knew—maybe even someone you really love—did a shitty thing, would you rat them out?
And then I realize these men are here not for Olivia but for Julia.
I turn away from the window. Here’s Patrick, next to me, still a ghoulish pale. Sonia I’ve sat on one of the barstools by the island. Sam and Leo stare at the scene next door through rounded eyes the size of Frisbees.
Only Steven isn’t here.
Outside, the screaming has gotten worse. Olivia—I think it must be Olivia of the pink head scarves and pink Bibles and empty measuring cup in her hand—has unleashed pure hell.
“You can’t take her! Evan! Do something! For fuck’s sake, do something instead of standing there with your fucking hands in your fucking pockets and watching. Kill them. Shoot the motherfucking bastards. Tell them it wasn’t her fault! It wasn’t—”
Her tirade is interrupted by a pained wail, but only for a moment, a slice of a second. Then she’s back at it, half screaming, half wailing while two men haul Julia King out of the house, while Evan stands silently by with his hands in his pockets and the porch light casting a yellow glow on his face.
Before Patrick can stop me I’m out the back door of our house, ignoring the May rain that’s started falling, sloshing with bare feet across our driveway and into the Kings’ yard.
“Stop it! Take her counter off!” I scream.
Every head except Olivia’s turns toward me.
Olivia continues on, begging and sobbing now. “Please don’t take her. Please. Take me instead. Please.” Each word is interrupted by the sickening zap of an electric charge and a wail.
“Take the fucking counter off her!” I scream again.
“Go back inside, ma’am,” a voice says. I recognize it as that of Thomas of the dark suit and even darker soul. Then, to one of the others, he says, “Put her in the truck.”
They mean Julia, who hasn’t said a word. Not yet. When she turns under the wan glow of the porch light, her face is a complete blank. She’s in shock. Around her left wrist is a wide metallic cuff. Julia is about to join the supermarket women, and Jackie, and god only knows how many others in their twisted version of solitary confinement. Zero words per day, girlies. Let’s see how long it takes you to fall into line.
I’ve never much cared for Olivia, but my feet take me farther into her yard, over to the bent and convulsing body in its peach satin nightgown, now sticking to her like a film, as mine is to me. From sweat, it must be, since the Kings’ porch is covered and the rain isn’t driving. Thomas motions to one of the other men, and he steps toward me, hand poised like a starfish next to the weapon on his belt.
“Go home, ma’am. Nothing to see here.”
“But I—”
The starfish hand moves an inch closer to his belt.
Now I’m witnessing the single most terrible event of my life as Julia King is led from the porch, away from her mother, and toward the dark van. The man escorting her, which is really to say holding her limp frame semi-upright, reads her rights.
Except they aren’t rights. There’s nothing that rhymes with “You have the right to,” only the monotonous repetition of phrases that all begin with “You will.”
My foot catches a piece of gravel as I walk back across our driveway to the rear door. There are so many pebbles, so many bits of stone, and I want to cram them by fistfuls into my eyes to blot out everything I’ve seen, and everything I’m going to see.
For instance, Patrick, standing in the kitchen, doing nothing. Steven, who has emerged from his room by the time I drip all over the doormat, and is now watching with expressionless eyes—doll’s eyes—as the black van that is not an ambulance takes Julia King to her new, and permanent, home.
Sam and Leo have brought me towels. I take them and send the twins and Sonia to bed. Then I go for the kill.
“What the living hell did you do, Steven?”
He shirks away at the sound of my voice, no longer the cocky teen he was yesterday at dinner. “Nothing.”
“What did you do?”
“Let go, Mom!”
Right. So I have my seventeen-year-old son by the shirt collar now, and I’m feeling like I could squeeze and squeeze the fabric around his neck until he’s ruddy and sweating. But this isn’t how I want to be. This isn’t the image I want to see in the mirror tomorrow morning. I lower my voice. “What did you do, kiddo?”
Steven seems to shrink, folding himself into the corner of the kitchen next to the fridge and the shelf that used to hold my cookbooks, a thousand or a million ye
ars ago. My eyes slide to Patrick. I need you now, they say, these eyes of mine.
“I d-didn’t—,” Steven stammers. “It wasn’t my fault!”
It. What is it? An old Eartha Kitt tune hammers through my head: Let’s do it.
“Oh, Steven,” I say.
And it—It—all spills out.
“She said she just wanted to make out, to try something. And—” Steven looks to Patrick for help. Finding nothing but a quiet shake of a head, he goes on. “It wasn’t supposed to happen.”
It.
I make a silent promise never to use this word again.
Outside, under the light of the Kings’ porch, Evan is shouting something I can’t understand while Olivia slumps against the brick wall.
“She’ll never get over this,” I say, but not to anyone in particular. Then, turning to Patrick: “Can you do something? Can you talk to Carl Corbin or Myers?”
Patrick’s words are stale. “What would I say?”
“Christ. I don’t know. You’re smart. What if you told them it was Steven’s fault? That he started it and Julia said no, and he went on anyway. That they were confused. Or that it didn’t actually happen.” There’s that It again. “That they didn’t actually have sex. Can you do that?”
“That would be a lie,” Steven says before Patrick can answer.
“I don’t care,” I say. “Do you realize what’s going to happen to Julia? Do you?”
She comes into my vision, as in an old family movie, skating or biking down the street with her halter top and her music, talking over the fence while I pruned Mrs. Ray’s roses, holding Steven’s hand. Now I see her on the television, dressed in a gray smock, flinching at the flash of a hundred cameras, standing silent while Reverend Carl reads out lines from his Pure manifesto. Fast-forward some years, and Julia is tired and bent, thin as a rail, pulling weeds or gutting fish.
And no one in this room can do anything about it.
Like I said: the follies of men.
THIRTY-SIX
Friday, according to my contract, is my day off, but too much adrenaline is coursing through me to sleep, so I get up, leaving Patrick to snooze, and go to the kitchen. It’s where I do my best thinking.
I want to fight, and I don’t know how.
If Jackie were here, she’d have a few words for me. Mostly, I think of one of her last lectures, that late April afternoon in our Georgetown apartment with its Ikea rugs and Ikea dishes and maybe a few pots and pans from a yard sale.
“You can start small, Jeanie,” she said. “Attend some rallies, hand out flyers, talk to a few people about issues. You don’t have to change the world all by yourself, you know.”
And the usual catchphrases ensued: grassroots, one step at a time, it’s the little things, hope-change-yes-we-can! All those words Patrick sneered at, and I sneered along with him.
At six, Steven drags himself into the kitchen and pours a glass of milk, which he takes back to his room.
Good. I can barely look at him.
I fix myself some dry toast and tea. My brain wants coffee, but the rest of my body rebelled as soon as I opened the bag of beans and poured them into the grinder. Even the toast smells off, as if the entire contents of my pantry went rotten overnight. Everything tastes like old fish.
Sonia’s up next, full of questions about last night. “What happened at the Kings’ house?” “Will I be going to play with Mrs. King today?” “Is Julia sick?” Her speech is like music, but the lyrics are all wrong.
“Everything’s fine, baby,” I lie. “But I think Mrs. King needs a break today.” Which means, of course, I’ll need to find another sitter for Sonia while I’m at work.
I rule out the other neighbors, one by one. Too old, too religious, too weird, too careless. The last thing any of us needs is Sonia falling off a swing set or—worse, I think—coming back home reciting passages from the Pure’s manifesto. I rub sleep out of my eyes and search my brain for a solution.
It comes to me, all at once, that triple blink of my mailman’s eyes. And he’s got three girls.
While Sonia’s crunching on cereal, I outline my day. Make a doctor’s appointment, wait for the mailman, check on Olivia as soon as Evan leaves for work, get to the office and tell Lin what I found in Patrick’s office yesterday. What I’m not planning on doing: watching Julia King’s public shaming.
The program will air today, and tonight, and probably for most of the next month until there’s a new victim to parade in front of the press. They always handle it this way, usually inserting the footage into some show they know people will be watching. It’s sinister. No one is actually forced to watch, but the alternative is to keep your television off. And even then, reruns crop up when you least expect them—during cooking shows, This Old House, a documentary on zebras.
Steven pads back into the kitchen. “I don’t feel so hot. Think I’ll skip school today.”
Of course he’ll want to do that. Julia King will be the feature of the day at PBS.
“You’re not sick, Steven,” I say. “So go get your brothers up and put some clothes on.” I check the clock. “Bus is coming in an hour.”
“But, Mom—”
“Just don’t, kiddo.”
He needs to see this program, needs to be strapped down with his eyelids forced open like that son of a bitch in the Stanley Kubrick movie. Maybe, for good measure, they’ll throw in a few clips of Julia’s future life in the fields or fisheries.
The phone rings as I’m rinsing dishes. “Get that for me, please. Then wake Sam and Leo.” I turn to Sonia. “How about you go check on your daddy? You can bring him this if you’re careful.” I hand her a half-filled coffee mug, wincing a little at the stench. Never before did it occur to me how much coffee smells like shit.
“Okay!” Sonia says, and goes off, holding the mug with both hands, walking at a snail’s pace. With any luck, Patrick will get his coffee sometime in the next week.
“It’s for you,” Steven says. “It’s Babbo.”
It kills me, this pet name for his grandfather, a childish holdover from a time when my son was Sonia’s age, when he was still running around in bright red corduroy pants and a sun yellow T-shirt with the words SUPER KID! blazoned across the front. I have a clear memory now, of us in this kitchen, before the remodeling job, when the appliances were still avocado, and gold-flecked white Formica covered the countertops. I was making a batch of brownies, and Steven, rather than asking for the spoon to lick, pulled the empty batter bowl toward him, using his tiny hand as a spatula.
Why do they have to grow up so goddamned quickly?
I take the receiver. It’s my father. “Hi, Papà. How come you’re calling on the phone instead of FaceTiming?”
Whatever answer he has for this, I don’t hear it. My father is crying hoarsely, and the background noise of Italian hospital sounds filters through the phone line.
“Papà. What’s happened?” I say.
A new voice replaces his. “Professoressa McClellan?” a woman asks. Only she pronounces Patrick’s un-Italian surname as macalella, avoiding clusters and codas, turning it into something familiar to her.
“Yes.” Tea and toast begin an obnoxious roiling in my stomach. “What is it?”
It again. Everything has become one looming It.
“Your mother,” the doctor says after introducing herself. Her English is good, good enough that I don’t have to worry about medical jargon in a language I haven’t used for more than a year. “Your mother had an aneurysm. It burst early this morning.”
My tea and toast climb up farther, into my chest. “Locus?” I say.
“In her brain,” the doctor says.
“Yes. I know that. I mean, where in her brain? I have some background in neurology.”
“In the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus.”
&n
bsp; “Left or right?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
Papers rustle over the phone. “Left hemisphere.”
I lean forward on the counter, my head pressed against the cool of the granite. “Wernicke’s area,” I whisper.
“Yes, near the area of Wernicke.” Another blast of Italian comes over the phone, drowning out the doctor’s words. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry. But I have another patient to attend to. If you can call back in a few hours, we might know more about your mother’s situation.”
She puts my father back on the line.
“Is she conscious?” I ask.
“No.”
When we disconnect, I’m left with Jackie’s words. One step at a time, Jeanie. Start small.
I don’t know how to start, big or small, but I know whatever I do next needs to be huge.
I wish Jackie were here.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Everyone except Sonia is out of the house when the mailman’s truck pulls up. He dodges puddles on the way to our mailbox, sifting through the stack of envelopes in his courier bag.
“Morning, Dr. McClellan,” he says.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Aw, don’t waste your words on the likes of me, ma’am. I’ll understand.”
I hold up my wrists. “Temporary reprieve, courtesy of the president’s brother.”
“I don’t get you.”
“I’m back at work. And we’ll be needing subjects for our clinical trials.”
He processes this. “Well. That’s some fine news. Can I tell Sharon? That’s my wife.”
“Sure.”
“She’ll be so happy. My ma always treated Sharon like one of her own.” His face darkens. “I know she’ll have to wear one of those counters, but still. A hundred words a day is better than nothing, right?”
“I guess it is,” I say, unsure whether I agree. I’m trying to read the return addresses on the envelopes he’s carrying, but he’s holding them close. “Do you think your wife might want a babysitting job? I’ve got a little girl, and the people who were watching her—well—they’re unavailable.”
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