Vox(24)

I switch the TV off. I don’t give a shit what Reverend Carl wants to say. I never will. “I won’t do it,” I tell Patrick. “So call Reverend Carl before you leave for work.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

I look at my wrist, clear of its electrical burn, clear of its silver-toned collar. “Tell him I said no.”

“Jean. Please. You know what will happen if you don’t agree.”

Maybe it’s the way he says this. Maybe it’s the look in his eyes, that tired, beaten-down-like-a-disobedient-puppy look. Maybe it’s the sour smell of milk and coffee on his breath when he speaks. It might be a combination of all three, but at this moment, in the house where we conceived four children, I realize I don’t love him anymore.

I wonder if I ever did.





EIGHTEEN




This time, Reverend Carl comes to the house alone. His suit is the same expensive coal gray wool of yesterday, but double-breasted instead of single. I count the buttons on it: three on the right, three on the left, four on each sleeve. The sleeve buttons are the kind that overlap by a few millimeters, kissing buttons as my father called them when he had his haberdashery, the sign of a bespoke suit. Also, they’re real, working buttons, and Reverend Carl leaves each of the bottom ones undone. He wants the world to see what exquisite taste he has, I suppose.

Lorenzo never showed off like this.

Over coffee one afternoon—I think it was two winters ago while we were plowing through another roadblock on the Wernicke project—I accidentally brushed his jacket sleeve with my pen, leaving a small, but ugly, mark on the gray material.

“Leave it,” he said.

“Be right back.”

I kept a bottle of hair spray in my office in those days. By “those days,” I mean the days after Lorenzo and I started working together. I hadn’t bothered before, usually content to let the dark curls that I inherited from my mother have their own unruly way. But that afternoon, I had a canister of Paul Mitchell Freeze and Shine lurking in a drawer along with a nail file, a pick, and an emergency makeup kit. Just in case Lin called any surprise project meetings.

The things we girls do.

After I sprayed and dabbed at the ink mark, I ran a fingernail down the waterfall of four buttons. They clicked as I touched them. “Kissing buttons,” I said. “Haven’t seen those in a while.” My father had told me they work sleeve buttons that way only in Italy.

And so, that’s how it happened. A stupid, offhand comment about a childhood memory, and Lorenzo’s foot kicked the door shut as his mouth found mine.

That was a nice place to be, but now I’m back in my living room with Patrick and Reverend Carl and Carl’s sleeve buttons, the bottom one on each wrist undone.

“We were hoping, Dr. McClellan, that you would—,” Reverend Carl starts. He’s staring longingly at my coffee mug.

I don’t offer him a drink of his own, and I don’t let him finish. “Well, I won’t.”

“We could up the pay.”

Patrick’s eyes flash, first at Reverend Carl, then at me.

“We’ll make do,” I say, and take another sip of coffee. I’ve grown used to defiance in small forms, like when I picked that bloodred counter for Sonia.

There’s no desperation in his voice, no pleading, only a slight turning up at the corners of his mouth when he says, “What if I told you we had other incentives?”

Now I imagine myself in a room somewhere, a dirty and barren place with sound-attenuated walls and no windows and with sweat-streaked, beady-eyed men who follow commands like “Take it up a notch” and “Give her a moment to think it over” and “Let’s start again.” It’s all I can do not to flinch, to hold a steady gaze. “Such as?”

His smile broadens. “We could, for instance, increase your daughter’s quota. Let’s say to one hundred fifty? No. Two hundred.”

“You can increase it to ten thousand, Reverend. She’s not talking as it is.”

“I’m sorry about that,” he says, but nothing in his tone indicates sorrow. This is what he wanted: docile women and girls. The older generations need to be controlled, but eventually, by the time Sonia has children of her own, Reverend Carl Corbin’s dream of Pure Women and Pure Men will be the way of the world. I hate him for this.

“Anything else?” I say.

Patrick shoots me a look but doesn’t speak.

Reverend Carl only takes a slim metal box from his pocket. “Then I’ll have to put this back on.” The “this” he’s referring to is the narrow black band inside the box.

“That’s not mine,” I say. “Mine is silver.”

Another smile, but now Reverend Carl’s eyes join in. “A new model,” he says. “You’ll find it functions exactly as your former bracelet did, but this one has two additional features.”

“What? A built-in miniature bullwhip?”

“Jean!” Patrick says. I ignore him.

“Nothing like that, Dr. McClellan. The first feature is a courtesy tracker.”

“A what?”

“We like to think of it as a gentle nudge, nothing more. Just keep things clean, and everything will function normally. No four-letter words, no blasphemy. If you slip up, that’s okay, but your quota reduces by ten for each infraction. You’ll get used to it.”