Vox(58)

“You never get sick, babe,” he says. And then, with a small laugh, “Well, unless you’re preggers. You know, with four kids, that amounts to a full year of private bathroom time.”

I try to laugh along with him, but my voice sounds hoarse, wrong.

“You’re not—” Patrick’s eyes dart from my face to my belly, and he frowns. He’s not stupid, and he’s a doctor. Between the math and his textbook grasp of embryology, he must know it’s impossible. Our sex life over the past several months means that I’m either three days pregnant or carrying around a beach ball.

“Of course not,” I say. “I really think it was the pizza. Tasted off.”

“All right, then. Come on back to bed.” He takes my hand and shuts the light in the half bath off, leading me out of my midnight reading room.

“Be there after I get a drink of water,” I say. “And I might as well call Papà while I’m up.”

When his footsteps fade down the hallway toward our room, I slide the envelope out of its temporary hiding place, backtrack to the front porch, and reverse the process of stealing. I stop in the kitchen for a glass of ice water and suck it down while I dial my father’s cell number from memory.

“Pronto,” he says, sounding not like my father at all but like a much older man.

“Papà, it’s Jean. How’s Mamma?”

His voice tells me everything, even before he says the words “brain damage” and “that area that begins with a W” and “why can’t I talk to her anymore?” “Can’t you fix her, Gianna?”

“Of course I can.” I pull as much confidence into my voice as possible, hoping it camouflages the telltale jitter I feel in my throat. “Soon, Papà. Real soon.”

After one more glass of water, most of which I end up patting onto my face, I walk down the hall to our room.

Patrick is snoring again.

I lay the keys on the carpet, just next to his nightstand, and crawl into bed for six hours of sleep.





FORTY-EIGHT




In my nightmare, the kids are gone.

One by one, I see them taken away from me, their faces darkening and fading. Someone—Olivia, maybe, or possibly a soldier—holds Sonia up amid a flash of camera lights. The twins wave, and Sam flicks a pack of playing cards in the air above Leo’s head. “Fifty-two pickup!” he says. Steven smiles a crooked smile and calls, “Later, Mom.” He cocks his head to one side, as if to say he’s sorry.

And all the while, Patrick watches, saying nothing.

This isn’t really how my Saturday starts.

Patrick opens the blinds, letting a blast of morning sun into the bedroom. The twins and Sonia march in with a tray smelling of coffee and warm bagels—smells that on any other day might get my appetite going, but today they bring another wave of nausea. In the middle of one cream-cheese-smeared bagel is a single candle.

“Happy birthday, Mom!” four voices scream.

I nearly forgot that I’m forty-four today.

“Thanks,” I croak, trying to look hungry. “Where’s Steven?”

“Asleep,” Sam says.

The clock next to my bed glows a digital nine-one-one. I told Lin and Lorenzo I’d be in the lab by ten.

“Blow out the candle and make a wish, Mommy,” Sonia says.

I do it, dripping wax onto my breakfast, then heave myself out of bed and sprint to the bathroom. “Back in a minute. Get Steven up. I want to talk to him before I leave for work.”

The birthday parade reverses and files out. Thirty seconds later, while I’m pouring my undrunk coffee down the sink, Patrick comes in.

“Steven’s gone,” he says quietly.

I think of “gone” in every other semantic sense. Gone to the store, gone running, gone out for morning pizza, gone crazy. I don’t think of it in the simplest of terms. I don’t think of “gone” meaning absent, not here, as in my dream. I don’t think of it as in gone from this life, dead.

Patrick holds out a sheet of notebook paper. “This was in his room. On his pillow.”

It could be worse, I think, reading Steven’s scribble. Still, it—that horrible It—is enough to take the wind out of me.

Gone to look for Julia. Love you. S.

In four days, everything has changed from lousy to shit.

“Should we call the police?” I say.

Patrick shakes his head as if he knows what I’m thinking. “Probably better not to.” He touches my arm and takes the empty coffee mug from my hand without asking What’s the matter with your coffee? or eyeing the streaks of brown in the sink. What he does say is, “I haven’t been a very good husband, have I?”

Then, like magnets, we’re together, attached, holding each other up. He touches that soft spot behind my ear with a finger, and I feel my pulse beat a rhythm, syncopated at first, then steady. It’s odd to think of love at a time like this, with our son gone and the brown sludge of coffee in the sink, but Patrick’s hands roam down from my neck, across my back, and forward to my breasts, which swell in the silk nightie, responding to his touch in that automatic way the flesh has of pricking up, even when the mind tells it not to.

“I can’t be late,” I say, pulling back from him. I also can’t lie under my husband this morning, thinking about the first time, the time we made Steven.