Vox(55)

“Jesus, Steven.”

He’s composing himself now, pulling in deep breaths and steadying his voice. “You know what he said?”

I don’t think I want to. “No. What?”

“He said we should never call people ugly things, like whore and slut and harlot. But then he told us that some people deserved to be called that stuff. Like Julia. So he made us scream at her while she was on television. She looked so small, Mom. So helpless. And they cut off all her hair. All of it. Like a marine cut, you know? Mr. Gustavson said that was good. It’s what they used to do to heretics during the Spanish Inquisition and witches in Salem.” Steven starts laughing, cackling almost. It’s a maniac’s laugh.

He keeps going.

“It gets worse. He went around the room, smiling, and he handed out a sheet of paper with the foulest garbage written on it. You remember that old thing about seven dirty words? Well, they were there, and about fifty other ones. He wanted us to take out our notebooks and write a letter—one letter from each of us—to Julia King, using as many shitty words as we could. We were supposed to tell her she deserved whatever she got, to have fun breaking her back in the fields.”

I don’t flinch when Steven says “shitty.” Compared to everything else he’s telling me, profanity sounds like a goddamned lullaby. “Did you do it?”

“I had to, Mom. If I didn’t, they’d all think—” He stops short, and a smile creeps up one side of his mouth. “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. That’s what they say, right?”

He’s got the essence of Burke’s quote, if not the exact words. But I know what he means, and I nod.

Jackie would like that.





FORTY-SIX




This is almost normal, sitting around the table amid boxes of pizza, Sam and Leo arguing about who has the best soccer team, Sonia educating us on the ins and outs of cow milking and stable mucking. If I close my eyes, Patrick isn’t slumped in his chair, almost shrunken, and Steven is working his way into a sixth slice, crust and all. There’s chatter, and arguing, and interruptions. All that normal family-dinner shit.

Except it isn’t.

Patrick had more to drink than he should have. Steven picked off the pepperoni on a single slice and made piles of it on the side of his plate. And me? Tiredness has become an endless song, a never-ending loop of exhaustion running through my head and my limbs, pulling me down.

Then again, this is my chance, and it happened all by itself.

I put Patrick to bed—no small feat given his bulk and my fatigue—and read Sonia a story. She’s asleep before Winnie-the-Pooh gets himself stuck in Rabbit’s house.

Good for you, kid, I think.

The little clock on her nightstand tells me it’s eight—too early for the twins to be in bed, and way too early for Steven. I go to check on the three of them.

Sam and Leo are teaching each other card tricks in the den—also a normal thing. Steven, when I knock on his bedroom door, says he wants to be alone for a while. To tune out, he tells me through the thick walls.

This makes me think of Olivia.

“You sure you’re okay?” I say. What I don’t say is Don’t do anything stupid, kiddo.

Maybe he’s read my mind; maybe he’s got more sense than I’m giving him credit for. “I’m not gonna—you know.”

Nothing like having a little pre-bedtime suicide chat with your son, I think, and go find Patrick’s keys.

My husband has a nightly ritual: an hour in his study with a beer after dinner, teeth brushing, and—on occasions that have grown rarer over the years and as scarce as hen’s teeth in the past twelve months—sex. At some point between his study time and crawling into bed, he locks his keys in a steel safe in his nightstand, the kind of box with a keypad you see in hotel rooms.

Once, he tried to pass off this sequestering as a side effect of his new job, but I know better. I know if he resigned from the advisory position tomorrow and went back to consulting for the AMA, those keys and drawers and boxes would still be here, just like they are in every other house. I saw Evan King going through the same motions last month on a night he forgot to roll the shade down. And Evan’s not science adviser to the president of the United States. Evan’s a fucking accountant for a grocery chain. There can’t be much secrecy in that.

It’s Father Knows Best now, baby. All the way.

Patrick skipped most of this locking-and-unlocking ritual tonight, but habit forced him to roll over, open the drawer, and punch in the six-digit code he keeps more secret than a mistress. I heard the keys clang into their hiding place, and the electronic pulse of five more numbers before he slid the drawer closed and rolled onto his back, mumbling something about trying hard and needing more time.

I filled a glass with ice water and set it on a coaster within reach, along with three aspirin for the morning. Then I went in to read to Sonia. In between Rabbit and Pooh and Tigger, I thought of those five beeps when Patrick locked the safe.

Five beeps. Not six.

After checking on the boys, I slip off my shoes and pad down the hall to our bedroom. Patrick is snoring softly on his pillow, his chest rising and falling under the thin sheet. In the dim glow of the bedside clock, I feel for the brass drawer handle on his nightstand, hook an unsteady finger under it, and ease the drawer out along its runners. The humidity has made the old wood sticky, and a single finger isn’t enough to get it open. My hand curls around the brass and tugs.