Vox(19)

“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.