Vox(63)

Which one? Which one do I save?

“How long do I have to think about it?” I ask, here in the dark of our bedroom.

We both know I don’t have long, not once we stage our first trial on Monday.

“We could stall the project,” I say. “Buy a few weeks.”

“Would that be enough?”

“No.”

Suddenly I’m thinking of a beach from more than twenty years ago, not a posh beach, not Cancún or Bermuda or anything—Jackie and I could barely scrape together the cash for a couple of nights in a crappy motel with no ocean view. But we went every summer to Rehoboth, to drink beer and sun ourselves and escape the madness of grad school for a few days. The last time we were there, I told her I’d socked away some money. We could stay another day, maybe two.

“Would that be enough?” Jackie said, sucking on a Corona she’d plucked from the cooler and squeezed a wedge of lime into.

“No.” I laughed.

“It all ends, Jeanie. Sooner or later. You can’t stay in the vacation bubble forever, you know.”

I don’t remember whether we stayed the extra day in that motel room, or whether we drove back the following morning. What I do remember is thinking, once we hauled the beach bags and suitcases full of bikinis and suntan lotion into our apartment, that it really didn’t matter. Sooner or later, we’d be right there in our Georgetown hovel, throwing leftovers turned science experiments out of the fridge, checking the piled-up mail, losing our tans, diving back into the academic grind.

Jackie, once again, was right. Sooner or later, it all ends.

“It crossed my mind,” I tell Lorenzo. “When Reverend Carl first asked me, I thought maybe he’d invented the whole story about the president’s brother’s head injury. I remember standing in my kitchen, wondering if he’d take my work and reverse engineer it.” I flop back on the pillow, wishing it would swallow me whole.

“Not your fault,” Lorenzo says.

But it is. And my fault didn’t start when I signed Morgan’s contract on Thursday. My fault started two decades ago, the first time I didn’t vote, the umpteen times I told Jackie I was too busy to go on one of her marches or make posters or call my congressmen.

“Tell me I don’t have to leave this bed,” I say. “Ever.”

Lorenzo checks his watch. “The mice have two more hours to go. It’ll take forty-five minutes to drive back to the lab.”

“An hour,” I say. “For me, at least. Remember, I’m not Mario Andretti.”

“So we have an hour.”

I say I can’t, but I do. And this time, I’m not silent. I scream with my body and my voice, nails digging into the bedclothes or into Lorenzo’s skin. I bite and moan and scratch like a feral cat on amphetamines, letting out all the stress and all the fear and all the hate, pouring it from me into him. He takes every last drop of it, then gives some back, pulling my hair, gnawing at my lips and breasts, attacking me with kisses. It’s violent, but it’s still love, a tandem scream from us to the rest of the world, and all of the world’s sins.





FIFTY-THREE




We allow ourselves fifteen minutes to clean up and decide what happens next.

“There’s another lab,” I say, letting the shower rain over my skin. The hot water stings when it hits an abrasion. I look down and realize I’m a mess. “Oh Christ.”

“Your face is fine. Perfect, actually,” Lorenzo says, working up a lather in my hair. “And you’re right: there has to be another lab. But we won’t get inside it.”

“We have to.”

He rinses off and leaves me to deal with the rat’s nest my hair has become. Two minutes later, he’s back in the cramped bathroom, leaning one hip on the sink while he talks. “Listen to me, Gianna. Even if we get into their other lab, which we won’t, what then? Arson? We’d be caught. Steal their supplies? Sure, and if we weren’t caught by those security creeps with an armful of vials on our way out the door—which, by the way, we would be—then what happens? It’s the government, honey. It’s a machine. They’ll only start again. By next year, you and Lin will be picking fish guts out of your nails.” Lorenzo pauses, then says, “If you stay.”

I consider this. He’s right. “So we do nothing?” I step out of the shower and start toweling. “Nothing at all?”

“No. We do something. We get the fuck out of here.”

“I have kids, Enzo. Four of them. Even if I could leave Patrick—”

He looks me up and down, pausing at the swell of my belly. “Well. I have one, too. Do I get a say?”

“You could take her—it, him, whatever it is. You could take her away.” Even as I speak the words, I know it’s impossible. By the time this baby’s come to term, who knows what new enforcements will be in place?

“We both know that can’t happen,” he says, sterner now, decisive. “It’s now or never, Gianna.”

“No. It’s next week or never. I have a test on Monday and should have the results by midweek.”

“And?”

And here, in this crab shack that smells of sweat and semen and love, I make my decision.

“If it’s a girl, I’ll go with you. As soon as you want.”