Vox(54)

I park, and send Sonia into the house as soon as the gurney emerges on the Kings’ front porch. “Go to the den and watch something with your brothers, okay?”

“Why?”

Why? Because Olivia King’s body is on that stretcher. “Because I said so, baby girl. Now.”

Olivia’s body is on the stretcher, her face uncovered and serene. Her left arm dangles down beneath the white sheet.

Or what’s left of her arm.

The fingers are five charred stubs, black with necrotic tissue that crawls up her palm to her wrist, a wrist now the size of a baby’s. I think even one of Sonia’s infant bracelets would hang loosely on it, clattering against the exposed bone. An acrid odor fills the air, and stray wisps of smoke billow out their front door.

Oh god.

Our own screen door bangs open, and Patrick catches me in time, just as my knees buckle. “It’s okay. Don’t look, Jean. Don’t look at it.”

It. Always It.

Inside, he pours me a drink and tells me the kids are watching a video. “No television today. Not after—” He pauses. “I’ll tell you about that later. Drink this.”

“What happened to her?” My own voice is thin and stringlike. I take a sip of scotch, and it burns.

Patrick pours himself a glass of the same—not his usual afternoon beer—and steadies himself against the kitchen counter. “Evan said he’d thought of everything. Locked up all the knives, anything sharp. Took away whatever she might use as a rope, even shut off the electricity.”

“Good thinking,” I say. But he forgot something, didn’t he?

“After lunch, Olivia said she was going to lie down for a while. So he stripped the bed and took everything out of the bedroom that she might, you know, use. Oh Jesus, Jean. I can’t.” He swallows a long draw of scotch. “Okay. She had this little recorder, see? One of those Dictaphone things, maybe from when she used to work as a secretary—I don’t know. Evan heard her talking when he went to check on her, but she didn’t say much, only a few words about Julia. Twenty or so words in all. Then she went quiet, and he figured she was sleeping. You don’t want to hear the rest, Jean. I swear you don’t.”

“I have to.”

Another draw from his tumbler of Dutch courage, and he continues. “He went out to the garage to find some boxes—I don’t know—maybe to pack the knives in or something. He didn’t say. He thinks he was gone about ten minutes when he saw the smoke from their bedroom window. They kept it open a crack, even though it’s warm. I guess they liked the fresh air. I don’t know, Jean.” Patrick’s voice starts to tremble.

“It’s okay,” I say, laying a hand on his.

He tips the bottle again. “She made a loop, you see. She recorded twenty words and made a loop out of them on the Dictaphone. Then she put the gizmo out of reach and set it to play. Over and over and over again. If she even knew what she was doing after the first of the charges, she wasn’t able to get to the machine and turn it off.”

“Oh. Oh no.”

Patrick falls onto the counter, head in his hands, still talking, although his voice is muffled. “Evan said when he came into their bedroom, the recording was still playing. Same words, over and over. ‘I’m so sorry, Julia,’ it said. And all the time, it was burning her, that goddamned metal monster on her wrist, eating into her skin until—until—”

I run a dish towel under the tap, wrap a few ice cubes in it, and lay it over the back of Patrick’s neck. “Shh. Be still for a minute.”

“When did it get so bad, Jean? We’re doing everything we can. But when did it get so fucking bad?”

We.

A moan—no, a low, animal-like sob—comes from the living room. I leave Patrick at the counter, the towel on his motionless head, walk through the dining room, and crane my neck around the corner toward the front window.

Steven is there, watching as the ambulance reverses down the Kings’ driveway and takes off, sirens blaring. My son’s shoulders undulate in a jerky, arhythmic pattern.

“She’ll be all right,” I say, coming up to where he stands, but still keeping some distance.

“Nothing’s all right,” Steven says.

This is not the right time to talk about making beds and lying in them, so I stay silent.

“You have no idea, Mom. You have no idea what they said about her today.”

He watched it at school, the broadcast of Julia and Reverend Carl. “About Julia?”

Steven spins around, and his face is a picture of horror, pale and drawn, puffy around the eyes. His nose is running, and he swats at it with a sleeve. “Who do you think?”

All of a sudden, he’s five years old again, sniffling and crying about a scratched knee or a palmful of road rash from when he tipped his bike and went skidding to a stop. So much for sullen seventeen-year-olds.

“Want to talk about it?” I say.

“They didn’t act like that with the lady down the street. Remember her? Mrs. Wilson? They just yawned while she was on television.” Another sniff, another sleeve wipe. “Maybe because she was old or they didn’t know her. But they all knew Julia. We all went to school together before . . . before it all changed.”

“It,” I repeat.

“So her picture came on the screen, and Mr. Gustavson told us she was the kind of girl we all had to watch out for because she had the devil in her and would drag us down. You know, like to hell.”