Vox(62)

May 31, I think, is my birthday, the day Steven ran off with a wad of cash from Patrick’s wallet, and the day I’ll meet Lorenzo for another secret rendezvous in a rented Maryland crab shack.

We decided to take opposite routes from the city, so I follow traffic south toward the highway that cuts through Washington, past the fish market that’s still there at the waterside. I wonder where the fish come from. Maine? North Carolina? Probably both. I don’t wonder who works in the processing factories, gutting and scaling, packing and freezing. Maybe one day, I’ll have a job doing the same. Long hours. No pay. Permanent stench of fish in my skin.

Lin was wrong about the economy falling apart. It might not be thriving, but the machine chugs along at a constant, working speed. Our workforce wasn’t cut in half, only reassembled and redistributed. Men who performed unskilled labor were replaced with whoever the Pure deemed unworthy of hanging about in society. Industries—and that all-encompassing industry, government—cherry-picked freshly graduated males from the country’s top universities to fill the gaps women left: CEOs, doctors, lawyers, engineers.

It was an eminently doable reworking of the system.

I’ve been pushing Steven out of my mind all day, and now the sadness uncorks itself and spills out of me. There were so many times I wanted to blame him, but I can’t. Monsters aren’t born, ever. They’re made, piece by piece and limb by limb, artificial creations of madmen who, like the misguided Frankenstein, always think they know better.

He won’t get far, anyway, even with the cash. Steven will find his way back home. This is one thing I have to believe.

The traffic subsides at the same time my tears run out, just as I pull the Honda onto the exit ramp and turn eastward toward the Chesapeake Bay, that land of William Styron and blue crabs and sailboats skimming over calm waters. It’s a long drive, but a quiet one, and it gives me time to think.

If the Wernicke cure works, which I expect it will, I’ll ask Morgan to have a dose sent to my mother in the Italian hospital. That small benefit is a single bright ray of sun in an otherwise drab landscape. Not much, but it’s something to hold on to.

Lorenzo’s car sits in the driveway of the shack, radiating distorting waves of heat from its hood. Of course he’s arrived first—you can take the mad Italian driver out of Italy, but you can’t take the madness out of him. I drive past it, up to the next lot, which has stood vacant since the time Lorenzo rented our place. The rule is, first one arriving parks at the shack; second, in the empty lot. I’ve never been first.

He’s in the kitchen, or what would be a kitchen if it contained more than a sink, a two-burner stove, and a cube-shaped refrigerator for water and wine. We never wasted time cooking in this place. Not food, anyway.

I had everything planned out during the drive. Get in, talk, and get out. But when he lays a hand on my right cheek, the plans all go to hell. It isn’t Lorenzo leading me to the small bedroom off the kitchen, a dark and wood-paneled room with a single window we’ve never opened. Instead, I take his hand from where it rests on my cheek and lead him.

The last time, there wasn’t any talk. I still had my wrist counter on, and Lorenzo stayed silent, perhaps out of solidarity. He didn’t whisper my name, as Patrick did, and he had no words of pity. He simply didn’t speak as he moved over me and in me. We’re still quiet today, our hands and bodies reciting the words for us, but inside me are the clangs and horns of an orchestra playing full out.

After one round of love, we go at it again, this time slowly and unrushed, as if we had days or years, not hours. Not fractions of hours.

When he finally softens—in every sense of the word—Lorenzo lies on top of me, covering me with his body like a shield that blacks out the world.

“I can get you out,” he says.

For a moment, I’m not sure what he means, but he reaches over to where his jeans lie with mine, twin puddles of denim on the pine floor, and comes back to me with a slim burgundy booklet in his hand.

I recognize it immediately, the cogwheel and five-pointed star surrounded by branches—olive for peace, oak for strength.

“How did you get this?” I say, leafing through the new passport. Page two has my picture, but another woman’s name: Grazia Francesca Rossi. The birthdate matches my age, roughly.

“I have friends,” he says. “Well, friends who can be bought.”

“Who’s Grazia?” Rossi is a common surname in Italy, but the coincidence seems over the top. “Your sister?”

Lorenzo shakes his head. “No. I don’t have a sister. Grazia is—was—my wife.” He doesn’t wait for me to ask before explaining. “She died five years ago.”

“Oh,” I say, as if he’s given me a piece of ordinary news, a weather report, the outcome of the World Series, where the next Winter Olympics will be hosted. I don’t ask questions, and he doesn’t offer answers. “I can’t leave, you know.”

There’s no argument from him, only his hand running down my body, starting at my collarbone and stopping an inch above my sex. “What if it’s a girl, Gianna?”





FIFTY-TWO




What if it is a girl?

I lie on my side, one finger tracing the gold emblem on the front of my passport, this gift that cost Lorenzo the earth, my ticket out of hell. Our ticket out, I think, holding my other hand to my belly. Only an hour ago I was thinking about Styron, and now, here I am, his short-lived Sophie, lying with her man, a terrible, Solomonic choice dangling in the space above us.