Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  It’s hard to pinpoint what—or whom—we were protesting. Sam Myers was a terrible choice for the chief executive. Young and inexperienced in big-time politics, his military training a one-year ROTC stint from college days, Myers ran his presidential race with a crutch under each arm. Bobby, his older brother and a career senator, supplied the practical advice. There was a shit ton of that, I’m guessing. The other crutch was Reverend Carl, the vote supplier, the man people listened to. Anna Myers, pretty and popular, didn’t hurt the campaign, although in the end, it hurt her. Plenty.

  Our only real hope had been the Supreme Court. But with one empty seat on an already right-leaning bench and two more retirements looming, the Supremes didn’t offer much hope. Even now, I’m told it will take months for the handful of restraining orders to make their way through the labyrinthine system. If they make it at all.

  Patrick tolerated my absence two winters ago, reheated batches of soup and other one-dish meals, took care of the kids on weekends while I marched and phoned and wrote and protested. He didn’t seem to require explanations or apologies, not like Evan King next door would have if Olivia had suddenly decided to be a poster girl against the administration. Patrick and I had an unspoken understanding of the direction our lives—my life—might steer if I stood silent.

  Tolerance didn’t extend to those in charge, to the men Patrick works for.

  There were rumblings, and they were much louder than mine.

  One day, and I can point to it on a calendar (I often did during that first year after the counters went on), when the magnolias were pregnant with white stars, Patrick sent the children to bed early and led me out into the garden, under the canopy of trees.

  “I’ve heard things at the office,” he said, holding me close, whispering. “The administration is discussing ways to shut you up.”

  “Me?”

  “All of you. So do me a favor and skip next week’s march on the Capitol. Let the other women go if they want, but hang out in your lab, Jean. The work you’ve done is too important, too—”

  I slammed my palm into a nearby trunk, cutting him off. “And what exactly are they planning? Forced laryngectomies? Slicing out our tongues? Think about it, Patrick. You’re a scientist yourself. No one can shut half of the population up, not even that bastard you work for.”

  “Listen, I know more than you do, Jean. Stay home with us this time.” Above us, a high wind whisked away the clouds. Patrick’s eyes, soft and moist, reflected the naked moon.

  I didn’t march that weekend. Or any other.

  The next day, though, I told my gynecologist, Dr. Claudia, what Patrick had told me. I told Lin and the women in my book club and my yoga instructor—everyone. The more I retold the warning, the more preposterous it sounded, like a bad science fiction tale, the kind of thing you see in movies. All gloom and doom, Dr. Claudia said. “Never gonna happen.”

  Lin echoed this sentiment one day in her office. “Simple economics,” she said. “Imagine cutting the workforce in half”—she snapped her fingers—“just like that. Overnight.”

  “Maybe we should go away,” I said. “Europe is better. I have a passport and I can get Patrick and the kids their own. We could—”

  She cut me off. “And what are you going to do in Europe?”

  I didn’t know. “We’ll think of something.”

  “Look, Jean,” Lin said. “I hate the bastard. I hate all of them. But that Reverend Carl, he’s a joke. Take a long, hard look around this city. You see anyone who actually believes his bullshit?”

  “My neighbor does.”

  She leaned over her desk, pointing a finger up in the air. “That’s a sample of one, Jean. One. You know more about statistics than to hang your hat on a single subject.”

  Lin was right and wrong at the same time. My neighbor Olivia was an outlier, but she was an outlier only here in Washington. What Lin didn’t consider—what none of us considered—was how much of a bubble our city was, how different from the rest of the country with its bearded duck people and Christian communities cropping up like weeds. There was a documentary about one of those places, Glorytown or Gloryville or something like that, where all the women wore pretty blue dresses with high collars and followed special diets and milked cows. The director, when interviewed, had called it “neat.”

  Jackie had made the bubble reference first, that snide remark about me in my safe little lab, and followed it with an unhappy-birthday-to-you basket of things that went pop: bubble gum, balloons, sparkling wine. She asked me—it seems like a million years ago now—to think about what I would do to stay free.

  What would I do?

  Lorenzo has something cooking, I know. Something that costs quite a bit of money, more than he would have stashed away as a wandering academic. I don’t dare raise my hopes that it’s a ticket out of here, a stolen passport, anything like that. But I’m thinking exactly those things as I drive up our street past Annie Wilson’s old house, now inhabited by one man and one boy while Annie works long hours in some no-man’s-land.

  Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary actions.

  “Mommy, look!” Sonia chirps. “More lights!”

  We’re even with the Kings’ house now, and this time, the ambulance is really an ambulance.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Julia King wasn’t the first girl to find herself a victim of Reverend Carl’s fornication police, and Olivia wasn’t the first mother who watched her child being taken away in the middle of the night, only to reappear, transformed, on television the following day.

  Nor was Olivia the first woman to try her own way out.

  I’ve seen them in Safeway, the regular customers who disappear for a while and come back in a week, a little dopey in the eyes, the bandages on their wrists peeking out from long sleeves when they reach to a high shelf for that elusive can of peas or chicken soup.

  And there have been funerals, of course, not all of them for old men and women who died of natural causes.

  Evan’s car was still in the driveway this morning when I left with Sonia. He’d stayed home, I assumed, to console his wife—not that I believe Evan capable of much consoling. Possibly, he stayed to watch her until the house could be suicide-proofed or Olivia could be doped up enough so she wouldn’t be tempted to try anything.

  I park, and send Sonia into the house as soon as the gurney emerges on the Kings’ front porch. “Go to the den and watch something with your brothers, okay?”

  “Why?”

  Why? Because Olivia King’s body is on that stretcher. “Because I said so, baby girl. Now.”

  Olivia’s body is on the stretcher, her face uncovered and serene. Her left arm dangles down beneath the white sheet.

  Or what’s left of her arm.

  The fingers are five charred stubs, black with necrotic tissue that crawls up her palm to her wrist, a wrist now the size of a baby’s. I think even one of Sonia’s infant bracelets would hang loosely on it, clattering against the exposed bone. An acrid odor fills the air, and stray wisps of smoke billow out their front door.

  Oh god.

  Our own screen door bangs open, and Patrick catches me in time, just as my knees buckle. “It’s okay. Don’t look, Jean. Don’t look at it.”

  It. Always It.

  Inside, he pours me a drink and tells me the kids are watching a video. “No television today. Not after—” He pauses. “I’ll tell you about that later. Drink this.”

  “What happened to her?” My own voice is thin and stringlike. I take a sip of scotch, and it burns.

  Patrick pours himself a glass of the same—not his usual afternoon beer—and steadies himself against the kitchen counter. “Evan said he’d thought of everything. Locked up all the knives, anything sharp. Took away whatever she might use as a rope, even shut off the electricity.”

  “Good thinking,” I say. Bu
t he forgot something, didn’t he?

  “After lunch, Olivia said she was going to lie down for a while. So he stripped the bed and took everything out of the bedroom that she might, you know, use. Oh Jesus, Jean. I can’t.” He swallows a long draw of scotch. “Okay. She had this little recorder, see? One of those Dictaphone things, maybe from when she used to work as a secretary—I don’t know. Evan heard her talking when he went to check on her, but she didn’t say much, only a few words about Julia. Twenty or so words in all. Then she went quiet, and he figured she was sleeping. You don’t want to hear the rest, Jean. I swear you don’t.”

  “I have to.”

  Another draw from his tumbler of Dutch courage, and he continues. “He went out to the garage to find some boxes—I don’t know—maybe to pack the knives in or something. He didn’t say. He thinks he was gone about ten minutes when he saw the smoke from their bedroom window. They kept it open a crack, even though it’s warm. I guess they liked the fresh air. I don’t know, Jean.” Patrick’s voice starts to tremble.

  “It’s okay,” I say, laying a hand on his.

  He tips the bottle again. “She made a loop, you see. She recorded twenty words and made a loop out of them on the Dictaphone. Then she put the gizmo out of reach and set it to play. Over and over and over again. If she even knew what she was doing after the first of the charges, she wasn’t able to get to the machine and turn it off.”

  “Oh. Oh no.”

  Patrick falls onto the counter, head in his hands, still talking, although his voice is muffled. “Evan said when he came into their bedroom, the recording was still playing. Same words, over and over. ‘I’m so sorry, Julia,’ it said. And all the time, it was burning her, that goddamned metal monster on her wrist, eating into her skin until—until—”

  I run a dish towel under the tap, wrap a few ice cubes in it, and lay it over the back of Patrick’s neck. “Shh. Be still for a minute.”

  “When did it get so bad, Jean? We’re doing everything we can. But when did it get so fucking bad?”

  We.

  A moan—no, a low, animal-like sob—comes from the living room. I leave Patrick at the counter, the towel on his motionless head, walk through the dining room, and crane my neck around the corner toward the front window.

  Steven is there, watching as the ambulance reverses down the Kings’ driveway and takes off, sirens blaring. My son’s shoulders undulate in a jerky, arhythmic pattern.

  “She’ll be all right,” I say, coming up to where he stands, but still keeping some distance.

  “Nothing’s all right,” Steven says.

  This is not the right time to talk about making beds and lying in them, so I stay silent.

  “You have no idea, Mom. You have no idea what they said about her today.”

  He watched it at school, the broadcast of Julia and Reverend Carl. “About Julia?”

  Steven spins around, and his face is a picture of horror, pale and drawn, puffy around the eyes. His nose is running, and he swats at it with a sleeve. “Who do you think?”

  All of a sudden, he’s five years old again, sniffling and crying about a scratched knee or a palmful of road rash from when he tipped his bike and went skidding to a stop. So much for sullen seventeen-year-olds.

  “Want to talk about it?” I say.

  “They didn’t act like that with the lady down the street. Remember her? Mrs. Wilson? They just yawned while she was on television.” Another sniff, another sleeve wipe. “Maybe because she was old or they didn’t know her. But they all knew Julia. We all went to school together before . . . before it all changed.”

  “It,” I repeat.

  “So her picture came on the screen, and Mr. Gustavson told us she was the kind of girl we all had to watch out for because she had the devil in her and would drag us down. You know, like to hell.”

  “Jesus, Steven.”

  He’s composing himself now, pulling in deep breaths and steadying his voice. “You know what he said?”

  I don’t think I want to. “No. What?”

  “He said we should never call people ugly things, like whore and slut and harlot. But then he told us that some people deserved to be called that stuff. Like Julia. So he made us scream at her while she was on television. She looked so small, Mom. So helpless. And they cut off all her hair. All of it. Like a marine cut, you know? Mr. Gustavson said that was good. It’s what they used to do to heretics during the Spanish Inquisition and witches in Salem.” Steven starts laughing, cackling almost. It’s a maniac’s laugh.

  He keeps going.

  “It gets worse. He went around the room, smiling, and he handed out a sheet of paper with the foulest garbage written on it. You remember that old thing about seven dirty words? Well, they were there, and about fifty other ones. He wanted us to take out our notebooks and write a letter—one letter from each of us—to Julia King, using as many shitty words as we could. We were supposed to tell her she deserved whatever she got, to have fun breaking her back in the fields.”

  I don’t flinch when Steven says “shitty.” Compared to everything else he’s telling me, profanity sounds like a goddamned lullaby. “Did you do it?”

  “I had to, Mom. If I didn’t, they’d all think—” He stops short, and a smile creeps up one side of his mouth. “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. That’s what they say, right?”

  He’s got the essence of Burke’s quote, if not the exact words. But I know what he means, and I nod.

  Jackie would like that.

  FORTY-SIX

  This is almost normal, sitting around the table amid boxes of pizza, Sam and Leo arguing about who has the best soccer team, Sonia educating us on the ins and outs of cow milking and stable mucking. If I close my eyes, Patrick isn’t slumped in his chair, almost shrunken, and Steven is working his way into a sixth slice, crust and all. There’s chatter, and arguing, and interruptions. All that normal family-dinner shit.

  Except it isn’t.

  Patrick had more to drink than he should have. Steven picked off the pepperoni on a single slice and made piles of it on the side of his plate. And me? Tiredness has become an endless song, a never-ending loop of exhaustion running through my head and my limbs, pulling me down.

  Then again, this is my chance, and it happened all by itself.

  I put Patrick to bed—no small feat given his bulk and my fatigue—and read Sonia a story. She’s asleep before Winnie-the-Pooh gets himself stuck in Rabbit’s house.

  Good for you, kid, I think.

  The little clock on her nightstand tells me it’s eight—too early for the twins to be in bed, and way too early for Steven. I go to check on the three of them.

  Sam and Leo are teaching each other card tricks in the den—also a normal thing. Steven, when I knock on his bedroom door, says he wants to be alone for a while. To tune out, he tells me through the thick walls.

  This makes me think of Olivia.

  “You sure you’re okay?” I say. What I don’t say is Don’t do anything stupid, kiddo.

  Maybe he’s read my mind; maybe he’s got more sense than I’m giving him credit for. “I’m not gonna—you know.”

  Nothing like having a little pre-bedtime suicide chat with your son, I think, and go find Patrick’s keys.

  My husband has a nightly ritual: an hour in his study with a beer after dinner, teeth brushing, and—on occasions that have grown rarer over the years and as scarce as hen’s teeth in the past twelve months—sex. At some point between his study time and crawling into bed, he locks his keys in a steel safe in his nightstand, the kind of box with a keypad you see in hotel rooms.

  Once, he tried to pass off this sequestering as a side effect of his new job, but I know better. I know if he resigned from the advisory position tomorrow and went back to consulting for the AMA, those keys and drawers and boxes would still be here, just like they ar
e in every other house. I saw Evan King going through the same motions last month on a night he forgot to roll the shade down. And Evan’s not science adviser to the president of the United States. Evan’s a fucking accountant for a grocery chain. There can’t be much secrecy in that.

  It’s Father Knows Best now, baby. All the way.

  Patrick skipped most of this locking-and-unlocking ritual tonight, but habit forced him to roll over, open the drawer, and punch in the six-digit code he keeps more secret than a mistress. I heard the keys clang into their hiding place, and the electronic pulse of five more numbers before he slid the drawer closed and rolled onto his back, mumbling something about trying hard and needing more time.

  I filled a glass with ice water and set it on a coaster within reach, along with three aspirin for the morning. Then I went in to read to Sonia. In between Rabbit and Pooh and Tigger, I thought of those five beeps when Patrick locked the safe.

  Five beeps. Not six.

  After checking on the boys, I slip off my shoes and pad down the hall to our bedroom. Patrick is snoring softly on his pillow, his chest rising and falling under the thin sheet. In the dim glow of the bedside clock, I feel for the brass drawer handle on his nightstand, hook an unsteady finger under it, and ease the drawer out along its runners. The humidity has made the old wood sticky, and a single finger isn’t enough to get it open. My hand curls around the brass and tugs.

  Physics is a fascinating thing. I think of the times when I’ve been out for a drink with friends, in one of those bars where they serve beer in heavy glass mugs, except you find out—just about when the beer hits you in the face—that the mugs aren’t made of glass but of plastic, some kind of composite that has the look of glass but not the weight. You calculate the force needed to lift a pound or so of beer mug, and—whoops!—you’ve got a face full of lager. “Drinking problem,” you say, and start wiping.