Vox(52)

Of course, I turned out to be the one with the secrets. Or with one six-foot-tall Italian secret.

Correction. Make that two secrets. One of them is about the size of a small orange.

“I’d better get going,” I say. The drive out to Sharon Ray’s farmette will take the better part of an hour in traffic, and I want to stop in to check on Olivia King before dinner, call the hospital where my mother is, and—don’t forget, Jean—get my husband liquored up so I can steal classified government documents from his office. It’s a tall order for a Friday evening.

Lorenzo helps me into my Honda—not that I need the help, but it keeps up the pretense. It also gives him the opportunity to talk to me without Lin hearing.

“Have you told him?” he says.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“He’s a medical doctor. He’ll know the baby can’t possibly be his.”

Lorenzo’s face distorts into a question mark.

“We haven’t—we weren’t very active for a few months,” I say.

He relaxes into a smile. “I see. So there’s no doubt?”

“None at all.” I already feel the slight bulge, sense where the waistband of my skirt cuts in more than it did two weeks ago. Sooner or later—sooner, I think—I’ll have no choice but to tell Patrick.

He won’t, in Steven’s words, rat me out. I know that. Even if he wanted to, the news would run the kids over like a freight train. That train would keep coming, unexpectedly, in the form of an intruder while Sonia watched cartoons, during a soccer match, in between CNN news segments. School, for them, would become a daily trek into hell. Patrick would know this, and he would keep silent.

But the thing, that unspeakable It, will always hang over us like a storm cloud. No, that’s not true. It won’t hang. It will crawl and toddle and walk and laugh and be a living reminder of how I spent a cold March afternoon fucking Lorenzo. And fucking up everything else.

“That other matter I said I was working on—I may know something by Monday,” Lorenzo says, snapping me back to the parking lot. “Hold on until then, okay?”

“What is it?”

Lorenzo straightens, pulling his hand away from mine.

“You two,” a voice says. “What’s going on?”

Poe is standing in front of the Honda, arms folded across his massive chest, aviator glasses masking his eyes. I hate Morgan, but the only person I’m scared to death of is this quiet giant named Poe.

I manage a smile, throw the car into reverse, and back away without meeting his stare.





FORTY-FOUR




Never let a child visit a farm, I think as I drive Sonia back home from the Rays’ place. They’ll want to stay forever.

Sonia, only two days free of her counter, has developed the gift of gab. Nonstop chatter about Aristotle the mare—who is really a girl horse with a boy’s name, Sonia informs me—is interrupted only by a narrative about brown chickens laying brown eggs and white chickens laying the normal white ones. She can’t wait to go back tomorrow, and I wonder if I should have left her at the Rays’ overnight.

No, it’s better to bring her home. If Delilah Ray’s trial goes well on Monday, I may not have more than a week’s talking time with my daughter.

I planned to ask Del if he would do us the same favor he’d done for his own family, remove our wrist counters and replace them with decoys, but I haven’t. Not yet. A small voice keeps reminding me of Steven. He’s drunk every flavor of Kool-Aid the Pure has handed him. Also, the twins might blurt something out, reveal the secret at school. I can’t risk that.

As we drive, the landscape changes from rural to suburban. All those houses, I think, are little prisons, and inside them are cells in the shape of kitchens and laundry closets and bedrooms. Morgan’s words come back to me, his matter-of-fact talk about how things were better before, long ago, when men worked and women stayed in their private sphere of cookery and cleaning and baby making.

I don’t think I really believed it would happen. I don’t think any of us did.

After the election, we started believing. Some of us became vocal for the first time. Women, for the most part, spearheaded the anti-Myers campaign—women like me, who hadn’t ever tried on a pair of marching boots, piled into buses and Metro cars and froze in the Washington winter. There were men, too, I remember. Barry and Keith, who had three decades between them of fighting for gay rights, spent a Saturday painting signs at their house two doors down from ours; five of the graduate students from my department said they had our backs. And they did, for a while.

It’s hard to pinpoint what—or whom—we were protesting. Sam Myers was a terrible choice for the chief executive. Young and inexperienced in big-time politics, his military training a one-year ROTC stint from college days, Myers ran his presidential race with a crutch under each arm. Bobby, his older brother and a career senator, supplied the practical advice. There was a shit ton of that, I’m guessing. The other crutch was Reverend Carl, the vote supplier, the man people listened to. Anna Myers, pretty and popular, didn’t hurt the campaign, although in the end, it hurt her. Plenty.

Our only real hope had been the Supreme Court. But with one empty seat on an already right-leaning bench and two more retirements looming, the Supremes didn’t offer much hope. Even now, I’m told it will take months for the handful of restraining orders to make their way through the labyrinthine system. If they make it at all.