Vox(44)

Except they aren’t rights. There’s nothing that rhymes with “You have the right to,” only the monotonous repetition of phrases that all begin with “You will.”

My foot catches a piece of gravel as I walk back across our driveway to the rear door. There are so many pebbles, so many bits of stone, and I want to cram them by fistfuls into my eyes to blot out everything I’ve seen, and everything I’m going to see.

For instance, Patrick, standing in the kitchen, doing nothing. Steven, who has emerged from his room by the time I drip all over the doormat, and is now watching with expressionless eyes—doll’s eyes—as the black van that is not an ambulance takes Julia King to her new, and permanent, home.

Sam and Leo have brought me towels. I take them and send the twins and Sonia to bed. Then I go for the kill.

“What the living hell did you do, Steven?”

He shirks away at the sound of my voice, no longer the cocky teen he was yesterday at dinner. “Nothing.”

“What did you do?”

“Let go, Mom!”

Right. So I have my seventeen-year-old son by the shirt collar now, and I’m feeling like I could squeeze and squeeze the fabric around his neck until he’s ruddy and sweating. But this isn’t how I want to be. This isn’t the image I want to see in the mirror tomorrow morning. I lower my voice. “What did you do, kiddo?”

Steven seems to shrink, folding himself into the corner of the kitchen next to the fridge and the shelf that used to hold my cookbooks, a thousand or a million years ago. My eyes slide to Patrick. I need you now, they say, these eyes of mine.

“I d-didn’t—,” Steven stammers. “It wasn’t my fault!”

It. What is it? An old Eartha Kitt tune hammers through my head: Let’s do it.

“Oh, Steven,” I say.

And it—It—all spills out.

“She said she just wanted to make out, to try something. And—” Steven looks to Patrick for help. Finding nothing but a quiet shake of a head, he goes on. “It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

It.

I make a silent promise never to use this word again.

Outside, under the light of the Kings’ porch, Evan is shouting something I can’t understand while Olivia slumps against the brick wall.

“She’ll never get over this,” I say, but not to anyone in particular. Then, turning to Patrick: “Can you do something? Can you talk to Carl Corbin or Myers?”

Patrick’s words are stale. “What would I say?”

“Christ. I don’t know. You’re smart. What if you told them it was Steven’s fault? That he started it and Julia said no, and he went on anyway. That they were confused. Or that it didn’t actually happen.” There’s that It again. “That they didn’t actually have sex. Can you do that?”

“That would be a lie,” Steven says before Patrick can answer.

“I don’t care,” I say. “Do you realize what’s going to happen to Julia? Do you?”

She comes into my vision, as in an old family movie, skating or biking down the street with her halter top and her music, talking over the fence while I pruned Mrs. Ray’s roses, holding Steven’s hand. Now I see her on the television, dressed in a gray smock, flinching at the flash of a hundred cameras, standing silent while Reverend Carl reads out lines from his Pure manifesto. Fast-forward some years, and Julia is tired and bent, thin as a rail, pulling weeds or gutting fish.

And no one in this room can do anything about it.

Like I said: the follies of men.





THIRTY-SIX




Friday, according to my contract, is my day off, but too much adrenaline is coursing through me to sleep, so I get up, leaving Patrick to snooze, and go to the kitchen. It’s where I do my best thinking.

I want to fight, and I don’t know how.

If Jackie were here, she’d have a few words for me. Mostly, I think of one of her last lectures, that late April afternoon in our Georgetown apartment with its Ikea rugs and Ikea dishes and maybe a few pots and pans from a yard sale.

“You can start small, Jeanie,” she said. “Attend some rallies, hand out flyers, talk to a few people about issues. You don’t have to change the world all by yourself, you know.”

And the usual catchphrases ensued: grassroots, one step at a time, it’s the little things, hope-change-yes-we-can! All those words Patrick sneered at, and I sneered along with him.

At six, Steven drags himself into the kitchen and pours a glass of milk, which he takes back to his room.

Good. I can barely look at him.

I fix myself some dry toast and tea. My brain wants coffee, but the rest of my body rebelled as soon as I opened the bag of beans and poured them into the grinder. Even the toast smells off, as if the entire contents of my pantry went rotten overnight. Everything tastes like old fish.

Sonia’s up next, full of questions about last night. “What happened at the Kings’ house?” “Will I be going to play with Mrs. King today?” “Is Julia sick?” Her speech is like music, but the lyrics are all wrong.

“Everything’s fine, baby,” I lie. “But I think Mrs. King needs a break today.” Which means, of course, I’ll need to find another sitter for Sonia while I’m at work.