Future Home of the Living God(25)

“Go away.”

He hears me, and quits. We are standing silent on either side of the shut door. I put the palm of my hand against the doorknob and then lower my forehead to the wood. I can hear him breathing on the other side and I am sure he can hear me as well. The door is constructed of three panels, the top a large rectangle and the other two below, neatly margined. The wood is stained a dark reddish brown and the grain underneath the varnish is umber, streaked and tangled.

“Open up, Cedar, I have to tell you something.”

I cannot let him in, but I can’t leave the door, either.

“I’ll call the police,” I say at last.

“I’m here because of the police,” he says. “Have you heard? Have you seen the news?”

“No.”

“Please, let me in right now so I don’t attract more attention. I don’t want anyone to see me out here and get suspicious. Please, it’s true, I swear.”

“What’s true?”

“They’re coming for you.”

*

They are rounding us up. Here is what your father told me, once I’d let him into the house and doused the lights. By a narrow majority the House and Senate have voted to strengthen and give new powers to what began so long ago as the Patriot Act. There were articles I, II, III, IV, and now we are up to V, section 215 of which still allows our government to seize entire library and medical databases in order to protect national security. This newly expanded decision, now only hours old, empowers the government to determine who is pregnant throughout the country. Your father says that the surgeon general they had was fired and the new one has announced that pregnant women will be sequestered in hospitals in order to give birth under controlled circumstances. It is for our own safety and we are required to go voluntarily. Those who do go in right now will receive the best rooms. The best rooms! Heart in my throat, I think of the doctor who probably put himself at risk. He gave me the ultrasound picture. He knew. Best rooms. Hysterical. Will women turn themselves in thinking that a bit more privacy, a better view, an extra chair, is worth it? We’re not going. And I am lucky, we are lucky. Because I used that old insurance card from the job I had working on the alumni magazine at the University of Minnesota, we will be hard to find. The card has an old box number, no street address. But in the middle of the night, I sit up, eyes wide. I used my credit card to buy baby clothes at Target. I paid my credit card bill online. I slip back down into the tangle of blankets. I am being pregnancy-purchase-tracked by Mother. Your father sleeps beside our bed on a pile of couch pillows. He has folded his wings. We are all three together for the first time. But we are already halfway found.

*

Now it is done. Days pass. We cannot leave each other. Ever.

*

I keep sending the same telepathic messages: Call me, Mom, call me, Dad, call me, call me. I touch in their number, but they are not home. Then one day someone picks up the telephone on the first ring and a woman says, “Songmaker residence, can I help you?”

The overly pleasant voice is not my mom’s, but it is familiar. Fulsome, full of inquiry, too avid. I put down the telephone. It is an old-fashioned black touch-tone with translucent buttons and black numbers. I don’t know what sort of information it holds or whether my messages on my parents’ voice mail can be accessed and traced back to me, here. Although my telephone bills come to my box number, my street address must be in the company’s records.

All day, I keep hearing that voice, the lilt increasingly sinister, Can I help you? A parodic melody. Can I help you?



August 25

I saw my first gravid female detention this morning in a mall parking lot where your father had driven to get Subway sandwiches for the two of us. It was stupid to go out, but we were disoriented by our long seclusion and I persuaded your father to take me after I looked critically at my reflection and decided that I didn’t show. When you give something a name like female gravid detention, it becomes official. I was careful. I wore an overcoat, though it was warm, and of course I didn’t intend to get out of the car. Once we’d parked, I squeezed down and opened the car window. That’s when I saw her. She was a petite woman wearing a red and white flowered smock. She had warm brown skin and wore a buttercup yellow scarf that pulled her hair back in a perky bun. She was wearing flip-flops and I was close enough to see that her toenails were painted the same clear scarlet as the red in her dress. She was perhaps in her early thirties and looked about seven months along—not terribly obvious, but observably pregnant enough, I guess, for the two police officers, one male and one female, to approach and question. While in the sandwich shop your father watched his sandwich artisans construct my sub and answered questions like Wheat? Cheddar? Jalape?o peppers? The police officers apparently asked to see the woman’s driver’s license. She looked confused, annoyed, as she reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. Perhaps she hadn’t watched the news. And of course she had done nothing. She decided that this was a mistake. Her pregnancy did not occur to her. The female police officer tipped up a pad, peering at and typing in the name on the license. The pregnant woman at first questioned the police aggressively. Then her mouth shut in a straight line and she began to look nervously at the entrance to a large discount shoe store where, perhaps, a friend or family member might appear. When her name apparently showed up in the files, the male officer grasped her elbow. She went rigid. She twisted toward the shoe store and a look of distress came over her face. A man appeared in the doorway, a white man holding the hand of a little girl a paler brown than her mom, about five years old.