Vox(53)

Patrick tolerated my absence two winters ago, reheated batches of soup and other one-dish meals, took care of the kids on weekends while I marched and phoned and wrote and protested. He didn’t seem to require explanations or apologies, not like Evan King next door would have if Olivia had suddenly decided to be a poster girl against the administration. Patrick and I had an unspoken understanding of the direction our lives—my life—might steer if I stood silent.

Tolerance didn’t extend to those in charge, to the men Patrick works for.

There were rumblings, and they were much louder than mine.

One day, and I can point to it on a calendar (I often did during that first year after the counters went on), when the magnolias were pregnant with white stars, Patrick sent the children to bed early and led me out into the garden, under the canopy of trees.

“I’ve heard things at the office,” he said, holding me close, whispering. “The administration is discussing ways to shut you up.”

“Me?”

“All of you. So do me a favor and skip next week’s march on the Capitol. Let the other women go if they want, but hang out in your lab, Jean. The work you’ve done is too important, too—”

I slammed my palm into a nearby trunk, cutting him off. “And what exactly are they planning? Forced laryngectomies? Slicing out our tongues? Think about it, Patrick. You’re a scientist yourself. No one can shut half of the population up, not even that bastard you work for.”

“Listen, I know more than you do, Jean. Stay home with us this time.” Above us, a high wind whisked away the clouds. Patrick’s eyes, soft and moist, reflected the naked moon.

I didn’t march that weekend. Or any other.

The next day, though, I told my gynecologist, Dr. Claudia, what Patrick had told me. I told Lin and the women in my book club and my yoga instructor—everyone. The more I retold the warning, the more preposterous it sounded, like a bad science fiction tale, the kind of thing you see in movies. All gloom and doom, Dr. Claudia said. “Never gonna happen.”

Lin echoed this sentiment one day in her office. “Simple economics,” she said. “Imagine cutting the workforce in half”—she snapped her fingers—“just like that. Overnight.”

“Maybe we should go away,” I said. “Europe is better. I have a passport and I can get Patrick and the kids their own. We could—”

She cut me off. “And what are you going to do in Europe?”

I didn’t know. “We’ll think of something.”

“Look, Jean,” Lin said. “I hate the bastard. I hate all of them. But that Reverend Carl, he’s a joke. Take a long, hard look around this city. You see anyone who actually believes his bullshit?”

“My neighbor does.”

She leaned over her desk, pointing a finger up in the air. “That’s a sample of one, Jean. One. You know more about statistics than to hang your hat on a single subject.”

Lin was right and wrong at the same time. My neighbor Olivia was an outlier, but she was an outlier only here in Washington. What Lin didn’t consider—what none of us considered—was how much of a bubble our city was, how different from the rest of the country with its bearded duck people and Christian communities cropping up like weeds. There was a documentary about one of those places, Glorytown or Gloryville or something like that, where all the women wore pretty blue dresses with high collars and followed special diets and milked cows. The director, when interviewed, had called it “neat.”

Jackie had made the bubble reference first, that snide remark about me in my safe little lab, and followed it with an unhappy-birthday-to-you basket of things that went pop: bubble gum, balloons, sparkling wine. She asked me—it seems like a million years ago now—to think about what I would do to stay free.

What would I do?

Lorenzo has something cooking, I know. Something that costs quite a bit of money, more than he would have stashed away as a wandering academic. I don’t dare raise my hopes that it’s a ticket out of here, a stolen passport, anything like that. But I’m thinking exactly those things as I drive up our street past Annie Wilson’s old house, now inhabited by one man and one boy while Annie works long hours in some no-man’s-land.

Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary actions.

“Mommy, look!” Sonia chirps. “More lights!”

We’re even with the Kings’ house now, and this time, the ambulance is really an ambulance.





FORTY-FIVE




Julia King wasn’t the first girl to find herself a victim of Reverend Carl’s fornication police, and Olivia wasn’t the first mother who watched her child being taken away in the middle of the night, only to reappear, transformed, on television the following day.

Nor was Olivia the first woman to try her own way out.

I’ve seen them in Safeway, the regular customers who disappear for a while and come back in a week, a little dopey in the eyes, the bandages on their wrists peeking out from long sleeves when they reach to a high shelf for that elusive can of peas or chicken soup.

And there have been funerals, of course, not all of them for old men and women who died of natural causes.

Evan’s car was still in the driveway this morning when I left with Sonia. He’d stayed home, I assumed, to console his wife—not that I believe Evan capable of much consoling. Possibly, he stayed to watch her until the house could be suicide-proofed or Olivia could be doped up enough so she wouldn’t be tempted to try anything.