Vox(40)

“Look at you, the romantic,” I said.

She shrugged it off. “Maybe. I’d just want someone who was tough when he needed to be.”

“Patrick’s kind,” I said. “Isn’t that worth something?”

“Not in my book.”

When I’d defended my thesis and Patrick started his residency, we got married. I invited Jackie, hoping she would come.

She didn’t.

Maybe I wouldn’t have, either.

I pull off the parkway and stop at the light beside a middle-aged man in a matte black Corvette. Sports-car menopause, I think. The back window is plastered with stickers: MYERS FOR PRESIDENT!; I’M SURE PURE, ARE YOU?; and MAKE AMERICA MORAL AGAIN! He honks, waits for me to turn my head, and rolls down his window. I do the same, thinking he wants directions around the labyrinthine Washington streets with their devilish diagonal avenues.

He spits into my car as the light turns from red to green, then roars off.

I realize I’ve still got the other candidate’s sticker on my back bumper.

What would Jackie do? Speed on after him? Probably. Spit back? Likely. What’s on my mind, though, is what Patrick would do: absolutely nothing.

He’d sigh and shake his head at the barbarism, and then he’d clean up the mess of phlegm and forget about Mr. Midlife Crisis. And Lorenzo? Lorenzo would beat the living shit out of the bastard.

For some reason, I find that appealing. I didn’t use to. It hits me that I’ve turned into more of a Jackie than I expected, and suddenly I want to see her again more than anything.

I doubt she wants to see me, and even if she does, Jackie’s in a place where the word “visitor” doesn’t exist.

Jackie is in a camp (Say it, Jean: prison) somewhere in the middle of the country, where she works on a farm or ranch or fish hatchery from morning to night. Her hair—whatever color it last was—shows graying roots and split ends, and her arms are red with the sunburn of a farmer’s tan. A redneck tan, we used to call it, the kind that leaves your shoulders pale. She wears a wide metal bracelet that does not display any numbers because, in Jackie’s new world, there are no words to count. Like the women in the supermarket, the ones with those small babies, who did nothing more than try to finger spell a bit of gossip, a message of comfort, a mundane little I miss talking to you, too.

Jackie Juarez, feminist turned prisoner, now sleeps at night in a cell with a man she doesn’t know.

I saw a documentary about these conversion camps on television last fall. Steven had turned it on.

“Freaks,” he said. “Serves them right.”

The last of my words flew out, little daggers aimed at my oldest son, who had begun acting less like my son and more like Reverend Carl Corbin. “You don’t really believe that, kiddo.”

He muted the television as an endless line of men and women marched from a hole in a concrete wall toward the working farm. Jeeps with armed soldiers flanked the parade of prisoners.

“It’s a life choice, Mom,” Steven said. “If you can choose one sexuality, you can just as easily choose another. That’s all they’re trying to do.”

I sat speechless as I watched the faces of gray-clad people, once mothers and fathers and accountants and lawyers, make their way from wall to fields. Jackie might have been among them, tired and blistered from day after day in the sun.

Steven upped the volume and pointed at a screen of statistics. “See? It’s working. Ten percent after the first month, up to thirty-two percent as of the end of September. See?” He was referring to the conversion success rate.

I didn’t see at all. But I saw, and still see, Jackie Juarez in work boots and a khaki uniform, weeding and harvesting until her hands are raw and bloody.

Or.

Jackie is married. Maybe to a fat fuck like Jack the security man, maybe to one of the gay guys she knew before. She wears a word counter and spends her days baking and hoping to get pregnant, so the authorities will know the marriage is bona fide, more than a convenient arrangement to dodge life at one of the camps.

No. Jackie would never fold, never work the system, never whore herself out to the president’s men in exchange for money or a voice or a month of liberty. Patrick would, of course. Lorenzo wouldn’t. That was the difference between my husband and my lover.

But Lorenzo did, the second he signed the contract and agreed to work on the aphasia project.

As I pull into my driveway, the reason dawns on me:

Lorenzo has another agenda, and I think it bears my name.





THIRTY-TWO




I put on my Mother and Wife face when I walk through our back door. Sonia and the twins are playing a game of cards on the den carpet; Patrick is chopping vegetables in the kitchen, an open bottle of beer next to his cutting board. I wonder if this is his first of the afternoon.

“Hey,” I say, dropping my purse—thoroughly searched at the security checkpoint before I left the office—onto a side counter.

“Hey, babe.” Patrick sets the knife down and gives me a squeeze. “Everything go okay?”

“Well enough.”

“What was it like?”

“We’re under the pain of torture not to talk about it outside the office,” I say. It’s probably truer than I think. “Where’s Steven? He’s about to miss his six o’clock predinner feeding.”