Vox(28)

“Beautiful,” I say, taking the drawing. But I don’t think it’s beautiful. I think it’s the ugliest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.

Instead of standing next to Patrick, or even at the far end of the family line, bookending our kids, I’m fifth. After my husband, after Steven, after the eleven-year-old twins. And Sonia has made me smaller than everyone except for her. I manage a forced smile and take her into my lap, pressing her head against me so she can’t see the tears that are welling up, that I won’t be able to contain.

I think of Jackie, and those last words she spoke in our crappy Georgetown apartment, the accusations and admonitions. Jackie was right: I was living in a bubble. I inflated it myself, one breath at a time.

And so here we are. Me, my daughter, and the wrist counters that keep us in line. I wonder what Jackie would have to say about it. Probably something like Good work, Jean. You gassed up the car and drove it straight into hell. Enjoy the burn.

Yeah. That’s what she’d say. And she’d be right.

I blot tears with my sleeve and set my face into a less crooked state before turning Sonia’s tiny head toward me and planting a kiss on her cheek. Then I check my word counter.

Sixty-three words so far today. Plenty left for what I have to say to President Myers.





TWENTY-ONE




I can do this, I think.

I can do it in fewer than the thirty-seven words I’ve got left. In my head, I rehearse my half of the telephone conversation:

I want three things, Mr. President. I want my daughter’s counter removed. I want her excused from school; I’ll teach her at home Friday through Monday. I want Lin on the project full-time, not just backup.

No need to mention any other names. Lorenzo will be back in Italy now, anyway.

Sonia and the boys are in the add-on rec room watching cartoons whose sound effects trickle all the way into the kitchen. It’s cooler in there, because of the window unit, and that leaves Patrick and me alone.

“Go on, babe,” he says after yelling to Steven to turn the volume down. “Make the call.”

I’ve never dialed the White House before. Patrick’s job there started after the wrist counters went on, and I have little reason to phone him at work, unless all I want to do is engage in some telephonic heavy breathing. I don’t. Not with Patrick.

My fingers find the numbers and press each one, hovering over the last. I almost miss it and dial a five instead of a four; that’s how badly my hands are shaking. A voice answers, not of a secretary or any other gatekeeper, but his, and I speak my thirty-six words.

“I’m sorry, Dr. McClellan, but I can’t do that.”

Except these aren’t the words he says in his gruff voice, a voice I sometimes think is unnatural in its harshness because I suspect the president is, at heart, a weak and insecure excuse for a man. I suspect they all are.

What he says, after a slight pause, is, “Very well, Dr. McClellan.” And he ends the call.

“Wow,” Patrick says. He’s been close to me, breathing beer-scented air into my nostrils as he listened in. He seems shocked.

A moment later, the phone rings. Patrick answers it with a cheery “Hello!” and says single words: “Yes.” “Fine.” “Okay.” I have no idea what he’s agreeing to.

“Thomas will be here in a half hour,” he says. “To take off the—um—”

Don’t you dare call them bracelets.

“Counters,” he says.

I nod and take out two boxes of pasta for dinner. Tomorrow, I’ve already decided, it’s going to be steak. A mountain of steak. We haven’t been eating much of it lately.

While I’m squeezing peeled tomatoes into a pot for sauce, I think about Sonia, how in less than thirty minutes she’ll be free of that metaphorical collar, free to sing and chatter and answer questions that involve more than a nod or a shake of her head. What I don’t know is how she’ll greet this freedom.

In college, before I switched gears and plunged headlong into the black hole of neuroscience and linguistic processing, I’d studied psychology. Behavioral, child, abnormal, and all of that. Now, staring into this pot of tomato mush and garlic, I’m thinking I did a crackerjack job on the behavioral part, conditioning Sonia with bribes of cookies and marshmallows to keep her words unspoken. Someone should take away my mothering license.

I keep reminding myself it isn’t my fault. I didn’t vote for Myers.

I didn’t vote at all, actually.

And here’s Jackie’s voice again, telling me what an acquiescent shit I am.

“You have to vote, Jean,” she said, throwing down the stack of campaign leaflets she’d been running around campus with while I was prepping for what I knew would be a monster of an oral exam. “You have to.”

“The only things I have to do are pay taxes and die,” I said, not holding back the sneer in my voice. That semester was the beginning of the end for Jackie and me. I’d started dating Patrick and preferred our nightly discussions about cognitive processes to Jackie’s rants about whatever new thing she had found to protest. Patrick was safe and quiet, and he let me bury myself in my work while he crammed for one medical school exam after another.

Naturally, Jackie hated him.

“He’s a pussy, Jean. A cerebral pussy.”