The pain knocked me flat.
Our bodies have a mechanism, a way to forget physical trauma. As with my non-memories of the pain of birth, I’ve blocked everything associated with that afternoon, everything except the tears in Patrick’s eyes, the shock—what an appropriate term—on my sons’ faces, and Sonia’s delighted squeals as she played with the red device. There’s another thing I remember, the way my little girl raised that cherry red monster to her lips.
It was as if she were kissing it.
FOURTEEN
Finally, they leave.
Reverend Carl slides into his Range Rover; the Secret Service men and Thomas ride in the other cars. Patrick and I are left in the living room with eight empty glasses of water dripping rings on the coasters beneath them.
Nothing has been decided yet.
He’s pacing the length of the room, sweat making his usually gelled-down hair stick in blond clumps around his face. Right now, he looks less like my husband and more like a caged feline. Or maybe a wild dog is the better choice; they’re pack animals.
“They won’t take off Sonia’s counter,” I say.
“They will. Eventually. Think how it would look if she turned up at school without that—”
“Don’t you dare call it a bracelet.”
“Okay. Counter.”
I load the tray with glasses, using only my thumb and index finger so I don’t touch them more than necessary. Shaking Reverend Carl’s hand made me want to scrub myself with lye. “Can’t you do something? You’re the one who called it a trade, so let’s trade. I go to work for the bastards; they let my daughter talk.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Patrick, you’re the president’s fucking science adviser. You’d better be able to do something.”
“Jean.”
“Don’t ‘Jean’ me.” I slam down the glass I’m holding hard, and it shatters.
Patrick’s over like a shot, catching the blood as it leaks from my hand.
“Don’t touch me,” I say. There’s a single sliver of glass wedged in the soft pad of flesh under my thumb. And there’s blood. Quite a lot of blood.
As water rolls over the wound, I travel back thirty minutes, back to when Reverend Carl was holding court in my living room, educating me on the plans for the future.
Something was wrong. Maybe it was his eyes, which didn’t smile along with his mouth, or the pattern of his sentences. They were too well rehearsed, almost, too practiced in their even cadence and intonation. Even so, the hesitance was audible—a few too many ums and ahs littered his recital of the president’s intended changes, modifications, dispensations.
I couldn’t put my finger on exactly the moment when I realized I didn’t trust him.
“What if they’re playing some game, Patrick?” I called over the running water while he cleaned up the bits of broken glass and dumped them into the trash bin. I didn’t turn to look; those pieces of glass looked too much like our marriage.
It wasn’t always this way. You don’t have four kids by accident.
He joins me at the sink, scrubs his hands as only a doctor can, all the way up to his elbows, and looks a question at me before reaching for my wrist. He’s still got that gentle touch. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Good news.”
“Okay. The good news is you’re not going to die.”
“And the bad?”
“I’ll get my sewing kit.”
Stitches. Shit. “How many?”
“Two or three. Don’t worry—it looks worse than it is.” When he comes back with his black bag, he pours me a short glass of bourbon. “Here. Drink this. It’ll take the sting away.” Then he sits me at the kitchen counter and takes the equipment out, ready to play doctor on the gash in my hand.
I take a long swallow of the hard stuff, and the needle slides into my disinfected skin without much pain. Still, I won’t look, only hand Patrick the pickup when he asks for it.
“Damn good thing you didn’t go into nursing, babe,” he says, and there’s tenderness again between us.
For a moment.
He makes an expert knot, cuts off the excess thread, and pats my hand. “There you are, Dr. Frankenstein. Good as new.”
“Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t the one with the zipper neck,” I say. “Anyway, what do you think? Are they playing a game, or are they serious about what they said?”
“I don’t know, Jean.” ‘Jean’ again. He’s pissed.
“Look, if I take this job, how do I know they won’t—I don’t know—use my research to promote worldwide evil?”
“With an anti-aphasia serum? Come on.”
The blood loss and bourbon cocktail have made me light-headed. “I just don’t trust these people.”
“All right, then.” He pours a drink for himself, then slams the bottle on the counter with enough force to hurt my ears. “Don’t take the job. We’ll deal with the AC when my direct deposit comes through next week, you can put your goddamned bracelet back on, and we’ll all go back to exactly the way we were this morning.”
“Fuck you.”
He’s mad, he’s hurt, and he’s frustrated. None of this justifies the next words out of his mouth, though, the ones he will never be able to take back, the ones that slice deeper than any shard of broken glass and make me bleed all over.
“You know, babe, I wonder if it was better when you didn’t talk.”
FIFTEEN
Even without the metal contraption on my wrist, dinner is a quiet affair tonight.
Steven, normally garrulous in between forkfuls of food, hasn’t mentioned school or Julia King or soccer. The twins seem confused and shift a little in their chairs. Sonia alternates between staring at her plate and staring at my left wrist, but she’s been silent since she got home from school. Another thing—there hasn’t been a single fist bump between her and Steven.
As for Patrick, he eats, takes his plate into the kitchen, and escapes to his study with a tumbler of bourbon and a few curt words about having to meet a deadline. It’s impossible to tell whom he’s more angry with—me, or himself.
“You explain it to them, Jean,” he says before shutting the door to that book-lined sanctuary of his.
Well, this is awkward.
I haven’t had a real conversation with my kids for more than a year. What once would have been an animated debate over whether Pokémon Go was a time waster or the cleverest innovation in gaming since Xbox is now four young faces staring in silent expectation. And I’m the main event.
I might as well get it over with.
“So, Steven, what’s going on at school these days?” I say.
“Two exams tomorrow.” It’s as if he’s the one with the daily word quota.
“Want me to help you study?”
“Nah. I’m cool.” Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “Thanks anyway.”
Sam and Leo are slightly more eager, pummeling me with news of their new soccer coach and how they played a trick at practice this morning, each one pretending to be the other. The two of them do most of the talking. I suppose that’s what they’ve grown used to.
Only Sonia watches me with wide eyes, the kind of look that makes me feel as if I’m a new person. Or have grown fur. Or turned into a dragon. She’s eaten none of the meat loaf on her plate, and only a few of the potatoes I’d run to the store to buy after the falling-out with Patrick this afternoon.
“Will I have another bad dream?” she asks.
Automatically, I respond with the wrong kind of question. “What makes you think that, honey?” I rephrase. “No. I won’t let the bad dreams happen. And I’ll tell you a story when I tuck you in, okay?”
She nods. The number on her wrist glows 40. “Scared,” she says.
“No reason to be.”
Sam and Leo exchange a nervous look, and I shake my head at them. Steven raises one finger to his lips, his silent sign to his baby sister, something normal.
Then Sonia nods again. Her eyes—Patrick’s Irish hazel—are glazed over with unfallen tears.
“You’re still afraid?” I ask.
Another nod.
“Of the bad dreams?”
Now she shakes her head.
The thing is, Sonia doesn’t know what the wrist counters do, other than glow brightly and show her numbers and pulse against her wrist, one time for each word she speaks. We’ve been careful to keep this secret from her. Maybe it’s a foolish thing, but I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how to describe an electric jolt of pain to a six-year-old. It would be like telling a child about the horrors of the electric chair in order to instill some sense of right and wrong. Grisly, and unnecessary. What parent would enumerate the exact workings of Old Sparky to get their kid not to fib or steal?
When the counters went on our wrists—there was no acclimation period, not even for children—I decided to go about it from the opposite direction. A scoop of ice cream, an extra cookie before bed, hot cocoa with as many marshmallows as would fit in the cup whenever Sonia nodded or shook her head or tugged on my sleeve instead of speaking. Positive reinforcement rather than punishment. I didn’t want her to learn the hard way. Not like I had.
Also, I knew something else about the counters. The pain increases with each infraction.
There was no time for me, on that first day, to process the steady surge in charge. Patrick explained, afterward, as he applied cold cream to the scar on my wrist.
“First word over a hundred, and you’ll get a slight shock, Jean. Nothing disabling, just a little jolt. A warning. You’ll perceive it, but it won’t actually hurt.”
Terrific, I thought.
“For every ten words after that, the charge augments by a tenth of a microcoulomb. Get to half a microcoulomb, and you’ll feel pain. Reach a full microcoulomb and”—he paused and looked away—“and the pain becomes unbearable.” He took my left hand in his own and checked the number on the counter. “Whew. One ninety-six. Thank god you didn’t keep talking. Another few words and you would have hit one microcoulomb.”
Patrick and I had rather different ideas of what “unbearable pain” meant.
He continued while I held a bag of frozen peas to the circular burn and kept my eyes trained on the closed door of Sonia’s bedroom. The boys were in there with her, at Patrick’s insistence, no doubt making sure she didn’t speak. No one wanted a repeat performance of the Electrocuted Female, not when a five-year-old was cast in the lead role.
“I think what happened is this, babe. I think you were going so fast, the device couldn’t keep up.” There were tears in his eyes now. “I’ll go talk to someone about it tomorrow morning. I promise. Christ, I’m so sorry.”
It took only a second’s worth of imagination to see my little girl blasted from her chair, no idea why she was hurting, to turn my bowels into liquid fire. So I went about it the Pavlovian way, focusing on the reward, as if I were training a dog, all for the greater good, I thought at the time.
Now, in the middle of this odd nonconversation at our dinner table, I realize I needn’t have bothered.
Sonia’s tears have started, falling into her plate of untouched meat loaf and potatoes like fat raindrops.
“Did something bad happen at school today?”
A single nod. Up once, down once, like an exaggeration. I can fish out of her whatever secret she’s holding.
“All right, baby girl. There, there.” I’m stroking her curls, trying to get some calm into her while all I want to do is scream. “Did someone say something to you?”
The tiniest of moans escapes her lips.
“One of the other girls?”
Now her head moves right, then left, under my hand. So not one of the students.
“Teacher?” I catch her eye—just a flicker from me to Steven. And I know. “Steven, your turn to clean up, okay?” I say.
He gives me the Look.
“Please,” I say.
I don’t expect it to work, but a softness comes into my son’s eyes, and he picks up the plates, careful not to stack them before they’re rinsed. He makes this little bow, an insignificant thing, but I can’t help seeing Reverend Carl Corbin and the way he swept out his hand this afternoon, offering me a place to sit down in my very own living room.
Offering, I think, and words tumble around in my head like Scrabble tiles. Officious. Official. Offensive. Off. Off with her fucking head.
The twins join Steven’s cleanup parade without too much objection, and Sonia and I are left at the table.
“You all right, darling?” I say. Then I place a hand to her forehead. A moment ago, my girl was sweating like a gin and tonic forgotten on a porch in July; now she’s settled down a bit. Not sweating, but far from a cool cucumber.
This is the worst of all of it. This, right now, watching Sonia track Steven, watching her grow more calm with every step he takes toward the kitchen. It’s the worst, because now I know what Sonia is really afraid of.
I don’t speak, only cock my head toward the place where Steven is rinsing bits of ground beef and potato off plates, humming some old tune.
And she nods.
Steven was eleven when his only sister arrived—almost old enough to be a father himself, if only in the biological sense. He had a way with her, kept her distracted and happy, changed the crappy diapers without more than a “Hey, Mom, this is some crappy nappy!” Few tweens learn baby sign language, but my eldest son was one of them. By barely older than a year, Sonia had the signs for her entire world down: eat, drink, sleep, dolly, and—her all-time favorite—go poo. Steven dubbed this particular gesture, often accompanied by the spoken words, a translation of some primitive language, a system so arcane that no one, not even Dr. Jean McClellan, would be able to piece it together.
He launched into a tune so grotesquely bastardized I didn’t know what to think. Patrick nearly spilled his morning coffee at the sound of Steven singing.
There were the Police and their doo-doo-doo-da-da-da—or however it goes; there was that Lou Reed piece about how the “colored girls” sing “do-do-do”—ultra-racist now, but it was Lou Reed and he could get away with all kinds of shit back then; there were those Motown bands and those white people who wanted to sound like they were a Motown band and there was every other songwriter in the modern world who stumbled over a lyric and ended up filling the space with something that rhymed with the kiddie word for defecation. And, finally, there was my own son crooning along to the entire musical canon from Brahms to Beyoncé, replacing each and every word with “poo.”
The memories make the present doubly hard, but, finally, I say it.
“Did Steven come to your school today?”
A nod.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
No. She does not.
“Story, then?” I say.
I let her go off to her bedroom, my lackluster reminder to brush her teeth following her from the dining table, down the hall, to the bathroom she has for herself now that the twins are of that age when separate peeing quarters become important. Patrick’s door doesn’t so much as squeak on its hinges when Sonia runs by it.
I take everything out on Steven. Maybe this isn’t the best parenting tactic, but I’m furious.
“What happened at Sonia’s school today, Steven?” I say after sending Sam and Leo off to the TV room. They’re eager to go, mostly because, without their older brother, they get a few minutes alone with the remote.
Steven shrugs but doesn’t turn from the sink.
“I’d like an answer, kiddo,” I say, and I press his shoulder, forcing him to turn.
It’s only now that I see the small pin on his collar, about a pinkie’s worth wide. Inside the silver circle, on a white field, is the single letter P in bright blue. I’ve seen this before.
The first time, it was on television during that ridiculous segment where three Bible-thumping women in twinsets tore Jackie Juarez to shreds. Not a week later, I saw it decorating one of Olivia King’s church dresses when she knocked on my door asking if I had an egg to spare.
It’s supposed to be a symbol of solidarity, I guess, this quiet blue P worn by both men and women now. Olivia’s daughter, Julia, has one, and sometimes I’ve seen it when I’ve been at the grocery store or at the dry cleaners picking up Patrick’s shirts. I ran into Dr. Claudia, my former gynecologist, in the post office, and even she had one, although I suspected her husband had more to do with Claudia’s choice of accessories than she herself did. I know the P stands for “Pure”—Pure Man, Pure Woman, Pure Child.
What I don’t know is why my own son is wearing this pin.
“When did you start this?” I say, fingering his collar.
Steven brushes my hand off as if it’s an annoying fly and returns to rinsing plates and loading the dishwasher. “Got it the other day. No big deal.”
“Got it? As in, what? It fell from the sky? You found it in a storm drain?”
No answer.
“You don’t just get these, Steven.”
He shoulders past me, pours himself a glass of milk from the fridge, and downs it. “Of course you don’t just get them, Mom. You have to earn them.”
“I see. And how does that happen?”
Another glass of milk disappears down Steven’s gullet.
“Save some for cereal tomorrow,” I say. “You’re not the only human in this house.”
“Maybe you should go out and get another carton, then. It’s your job, right?”
My hand flies with a will of its own, makes contact; and a bright palm print blooms on the right side of Steven’s face.
He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t raise his own hand, doesn’t react at all, except to say, “Nice, Mom. Real nice. One day, that’s gonna be a crime.”
“You little shit.”
He’s smug now, which makes everything worse. “I’ll tell you how I earned the pin. I got recruited. Recruited, Mom. They needed volunteers from the boys’ school to make the rounds to the girls’ schools and explain a few things. I accepted. And for the past three days, I’ve been going out in the field and demonstrating how the bracelets work. Look.” He pushes up one sleeve and brandishes the burn mark around his wrist. “We go in pairs, and we take turns. All so girls like Sonia know what will happen.” As if to defy me once more, he drains his glass of milk and licks his lips. “By the way, I wouldn’t encourage her to pick the sign language back up.”
“Why the hell not?” I’m still trying to absorb the fact that my son has purposefully shocked himself “so girls like Sonia know what will happen.”
“Mom. Honestly. You of all people should get it.” His voice has taken on the timbre of someone much older, someone tired of explaining how things are. “Signing defeats the purpose of what we’re trying to do here.”
Of course it does.
“Look, I can’t tell you the details, but there are people researching the new—you know—devices. They’ll be more like gloves. Really, that’s all I should say.” He straightens, smiling. “Except that I’ve volunteered to beta test them.”
“You what?”
“It’s called leadership, Mom. And it’s what Pure Men do.”
I don’t know what to say, so I say the first thing that comes to mind. “You goddamned bastard.”
Steven shrugs. “Whatevs.” Then he stalks out of the kitchen, leaving the glass on the counter next to a note saying Buy milk.
Sam and Leo are in the kitchen doorway, staring at me, so I don’t dare cry.
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