“I think we can work something out.” He lifts the metal flap and peers inside the locked box. “Ah. Outgoing mail today. Just a sec.” From the ring of keys on his belt loop, he takes a newish-looking silver one, with teeth in a pattern I haven’t seen before except on the set of keys Patrick carries around. The box hinges open, and he takes out a single envelope, carefully covering with his palm the area where the address would be. He locks the mailbox again and, almost as an afterthought, lets the letters in his hand slide through the metal mouth.
“You Pure, Dr. McClellan?” he asks, blinking his eyes three times before raising them to the camera trained on our front door. A reminder.
I shake my head. It isn’t much of a shake, only a slight move to the right and the left. Slow, but definite, enough to get the message across.
“Hmph,” he says. “Well, lemme call the wife and see what we can do about taking care of your girl. What’s her name?”
“Sonia.”
“Pretty name.” He speaks a few words into his watch, which beeps once when he’s finished. “Sharon, darlin’, I got that lady doctor here in AU Park who needs a little help with her baby girl. How ’bout I send her on over to the house in a while?” Another beep, and he ends the call. “Heh heh. Blink once for yes, twice for no, remember?”
I have zero idea what he’s talking about.
“Okeydokey. I best get on with my route. When you see Sharon, you tell her I said I’ll be home a little late today. Gotta take an extra shift, make a bit more jingle, keep the home fires burning and all that garbage. Know what I mean?”
“Sure,” I say, although I’m beginning to think Mr. Mailman and I speak mutually incompatible languages. “And I’ll make sure I leave my number for you so we can set up Mrs. Ray’s appointment.”
He scribbles on a scrap of glossy advertising flyer. “Hate these things. Everybody hates the Valpaks. Can’t stop ’em, though. Anyway, here’s the address. Sharon’ll be expecting you.”
I take the folded scrap from his hand. “Thanks. Be in touch soon.”
And he’s off, back down the gravel driveway, dodging puddles and whistling to himself. It’s a curious whistle, not really a song, but tuneful all the same, and there’s a touch of familiarity in it.
When I get inside, Sonia is still watching her cartoon.
“No, honey. Let’s turn this off for a while.”
“No!” she squeals.
There she is, Julia King, up on the screen in the time it takes me to locate the remote. She’s in a drab gray smock, long-sleeved and down to her ankles, even in this heat, and her hair is cut, which I don’t remember them doing to Annie of Mr. Blue Pickup Truck fame, but maybe they’ve changed something, introduced a new brand of humiliation into their ritual. Reverend Carl stands beside her, sober and sad, and begins reciting the relevant bits from the Pure’s manifesto.
“Look you not on your own self, but on others, as Christ did in taking upon himself the form of a servant, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
And:
“If you suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are you. For it is better, if the will of God be so, that you suffer. For this affliction, which endures but for a moment, is your key to eternal light and glory in the kingdom of heaven.”
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Sonia sits up, even more attentive than she was when the cartoons were on. “Julia?” she says.
I lie. “No. Just a girl who looks a little like her.” And I click the television off as Reverend Carl begins another of his rants.
“Come on—let’s get you ready. We’re going to see some new friends today.”
I do three things. First, get Sonia to brush her teeth for more than five seconds. Then I run to my own bathroom and spill toast and tea into the toilet. Then I unfold the scrap of advertising material my mailman gave me and read.
There’s an address. Also, a note.
Don’t be too surprised.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Sharon Ray’s house is more barn than actual house, a weathered wood structure that looks as if someone has beaten it with a giant ugly stick.
I follow twin dirt ruts from the road, past a vegetable garden the size of a small farm, and kill the engine behind a Jeep with vanity plates. The Virginia tags read IMPURE.
Sonia unstraps herself from the car seat and vaults out in the direction of two goats.
“Whoa, little girl. Wait a minute,” I say. In the forty-five-minute drive out here, I explained that the girls she’s about to spend her day with might not talk very much. “Just like school,” I said. “Remember that.” But then, of course, the Ray girls would be at school on a Friday.
A screen door, tilted on its hinges, swings open, and Sharon steps out onto a porch that isn’t quite parallel to the ground. She’s in frayed overalls and a checked cotton shirt; a blue bandana tied on her head with the knot on top keeps her hair in check but doesn’t cover it. Ropes of muscle line her forearms, where the shirt cuffs are rolled back, and in one hand she’s holding a wrench. In the other, a plastic drywall bucket.
Sharon Ray could be a modern Rosie the Riveter, if Rosie had been forty-something, black, and wearing a silver-toned word counter on her wrist.
She smiles from the porch, sets the bucket and wrench down, and walks to where Sonia and I are standing. Then she tilts her head slightly to the right, toward an outbuilding that seems to be in better repair than the family’s house. We walk in silence to the barn, Sonia wide-eyed at goats and chickens and three alpacas roaming freely around the property.
“What’s that?” Sonia says, pointing toward one of the furry beasts.
“Shh,” I say.
Sharon smiles again but says nothing until we’ve reached the barn. She slides a wooden beam as thick as a man’s thigh aside and pushes the door open. Smells of sweet hay and not-so-sweet manure hit me like a slap.
“Nothin’ like a little horseshit to wake you up, is there?” Sharon says. “Sorry. I mean poo. I forget myself sometimes.”
“It’s okay.” I’ve never been one to mince words around my kids.
“So, you’re Sonia?” She bends down and takes my daughter’s left hand, running a thumb where Sonia’s wrist counter should be. “I’m Ms. Sharon, and I think we’re gonna be good friends, you and me. You like horses?”
Sonia nods.
“Use your words, girl. You got ’em, right?”
“I told her—,” I start.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m talking so much.” Sharon unsnaps the silver band on her left wrist and slides it off. “Fake. Del made it for me last year, once he figured out how to get the real one off. Made three more for our girls.” She turns back to Sonia, as if nothing she just said could possibly be more interesting than livestock. “So, that one in the back, he’s Cato. Next to him is Mencken. And that bullheaded roan mare over on the side is Aristotle. How ’bout you go say hello to them while I talk to your mama?”
Sonia doesn’t need to be asked twice, and runs off toward Aristotle’s stall.
“She won’t bite, will she?” I say, nodding to the mare.
“Not unless I tell her to,” Sharon says. “You look surprised, Dr. McClellan.”
“Jean. I guess I am.”
“Del’s an engineer in mailman’s clothing. Got things all set up here so it looks like we’re following along, nice and quiet like. Good man, my Del, even if he is a white boy from town. Come on over here, and I’ll show you something.” She leads me past Cato and Mencken—odd names for horses, I think; not as odd as naming a mare after a classical male philosopher—and opens a door at the back of the barn.
Del’s workshop is both a science lab and the antithesis of any lab I’ve ever seen. Most of the machinery looks as if it were cobbled together from spare game console parts and kitchen equipment. On my right is an old
slide projector that has been gutted; on my left, on a clean worktable, are five CPUs from the 1980s, their insides arrayed neatly in rows.
“What does he do in here?” I ask.
“He tinkers.”
“Why?”
Sharon stares at me. “Why do you think? Take a good look at me, Jean. I’m a black woman.”
“I noticed. So?”
“So how long do you think it’s gonna be before Reverend Carl and his holy Pure Blue sheep get it in their heads that it ain’t just women and men who were made differently under God’s eyes, but blacks and whites? You think mixed marriages like mine are part of the plan? If you do, you’re not as smart as I thought.”
I feel myself going red. “I never thought about it.”
“Course you never. Look, I don’t mean to be unkind, but you white gals, all you’re worried about is, well, all you’re worried about is you white gals. Me, I got more to fret over than whether I have a hundred words a day. I got my girls, too. We still send ’em to that school and do what we can on the weekends, until we can figure out a way to get out of here and over the border, but Del and I know a tide’s comin’ in. I guess before the year’s out, we’ll start seein’ more than just separate schools for boys and girls. And just like now, they ain’t gonna be equal.”
There’s no emotion in her voice, no self-pity, only cold, clear observation, as if she were reciting a recipe or reporting the weather. I’m the one who’s sweating.
“Anyway,” Sharon says, opening up a cooler and taking out a handful of fat carrots. She feeds them to the horses, showing Sonia how to hold one hand out, palm up, so the beasts can take the carrot without taking the hand along with it. “Anyway, how about you go off to work and Sonia and I will do a little farming? Any idea when this magic potion of yours might be ready? I’d like to talk to my mother. Well, Del’s mother, but she’s the only one I’ve got now.”
“Yeah. So would I.” I explain about Mamma and her aneurysm.
“Looks like you and me are in the same barrel of pickles, Jean,” Sharon says, and takes Sonia by the hand. “I don’t envy your position, though. You get the cure done, that little bracelet goes back on. You don’t, and your mama keeps babbling. One or the other, one choice to a customer, as my daddy used to say.”
“I could set something up for early next week. Maybe Tuesday?”
“That’d be real nice.”
We exchange numbers, and Sharon tells me Del will call over the weekend, if that’s okay.
“Meanwhile,” she says, “you don’t say anything about our little talk here, all right? Del’s got a lot to lose, with him being the errand boy for the resistance. I don’t want him in trouble. Or anyone else.”
“There’s a resistance?” The word sounds sweet as I say it.
“Honey, there’s always a resistance. Didn’t you go to college?”
As we walk back to the house, the woman beside me seems more and more like Jackie. I imagine her carrying posters and organizing sit-ins while I stayed home with my nose in a book, or while Patrick and I went out for cheeseburgers and rolled our eyes at the latest campus protest. Sharon, even with her mud-caked boots and torn overalls, makes me feel dirty.
“I’ll pick her up at six, if that’s not too late,” I say before kissing Sonia goodbye.
“That’s fine. We’ll be here.”
On the way to my doctor’s appointment, I think of Del, my mailman, running errands for some underground group of anti-Pure people, and I laugh.
They would use a mailman.
THIRTY-NINE
It’s official. I’m pregnant.
The gynecologist who stepped into Dr. Claudia’s place at the clinic tells me I’m about ten weeks along, give or take a few days. You never really know exactly when conception happens, he says before giving me a sealed envelope addressed to Patrick. It contains the date of my next appointment, some general literature, a schedule, and other information I might find useful. This is what he tells me.
My words tumble out like a geyser. “What if there are complications? Unexpected pain? What if I need to describe symptoms?” All I can think about is what will happen when the counter goes back on.
What I don’t say is: What if I don’t want this baby? I already know the answer.
Dr. Mendoza waits for me to finish, eyes calm, mouth drooping slightly at the edges. I can’t tell whether this outburst of mine annoys him or invokes sympathy. “Mrs. McClellan,” he begins.
Not “Dr.,” not “Professor.” “Mrs.”
“Mrs. McClellan, you’re a healthy woman and we’ve picked up a strong, regular heartbeat. We’ve marked you as advanced maternal age, yes, which would worry me if this was a first pregnancy. But it isn’t. You have nothing to worry about. I’m confident you’ll carry to term and, let’s see”—he pauses, spins some dials on that little wheel doctors use, even though they have computers to do the work—“deliver a fine baby around December twentieth of this year. A nice Christmas present.”
I don’t want a fine baby around December 20 of this year. I don’t want a baby at all. Especially if it’s a girl.
“Dr. McClellan will have all the information.” He taps the sealed envelope. “He’ll be on the lookout for signs of trouble, loss of appetite, changes in skin tone or weight, and so forth. And we’ll be monitoring your progress regularly. If you like, I can set up a chorionic villus sampling for you early next week. You’ll find out the sex then.” The doctor consults a schedule on his iPad. “How is Monday afternoon?”
I nod. Monday, Wednesday, next month, December 20. I might as well find out sooner.
Now he taps my knee. A fatherly tap. Or the kind of touch you’d use on a well-behaved dog. I wish the tap would send my foot shooting out and upward, smack into his groin. I could always say it was an involuntary reflex, a spasm. “Okay. All set. Congratulations, Mrs. McClellan.”
He leaves, and I rush into my underwear, jeans, blouse. The smell of latex and hand sanitizer in this room has become unbearable. My sex is slippery with K-Y Jelly, or whatever they use for the ultrasound, because I didn’t take the time to wipe it away. But I can’t breathe here. I can’t breathe at all.
I drive the long way back home, stopping at a 7-Eleven to pick up a pack of Camels. I could smoke it out of me, I think, poison the little palace, practice Teratology 101 in the privacy of my own home. Abortion the old-fashioned way.
An abortion is not an option.
It isn’t just Reverend Carl and his pack of Pure fanatics. They have to put limits on choice for other reasons, for pragmatic reasons. The way things are, the way women are, no one would want a girl. No sane parent would want to choose a wrist-counter color for a three-month-old. I wouldn’t.
In three days, I’ll know if I’ll have to.
FORTY
By the time I arrive at work Lorenzo and Lin are in the lab, heads together, arguing over protein extractions and whether we need to add a primate to the menagerie of lab animals.
“We don’t,” I say. “What we need to do is check out the second MRI room.”
There’s no reason to check the MRI equipment; Lin has already done that. But I’ve been around the machines enough, and heard one subject after another complain about the banging, even with ear protection. Lying in an MRI tube is like snuggling up next to the amp while Eddie Van Halen wails out a guitar solo. In other words, almost painful.
When we’re all in the room, I fire up the machine. The force of some sixty thousand times the earth’s natural magnetic field shakes my bones. I tell them above 125 decibels of ear-splitting noise about my mother and about the envelope I found in Patrick’s office last night.
“Three teams?” Lin shouts. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” I yell back. My voice is barely audible, but Lin gets it. “Anyway, we’re done. I have all the numbers at home and I want to set up the
first trial on Mrs. Ray for Tuesday. Monday, if we can manage it. It means we’ll have to work through the weekend, dose up a few mice. I mean, Lin can dose up the mice.”
“I knew you were finished,” Lorenzo says, and hugs me, which feels wonderful and awful at the same time. “I saw it in your eyes that day at Georgetown.”
Right. I wonder what else he sees in my eyes. “Lin, I need a minute alone here.”
She raises an eyebrow but says nothing. In a moment, Lorenzo and I have the MRI room to ourselves.
“I have some news. Not very good news,” I say over the banging. I don’t know when, or why, I decided to tell him.
Lorenzo’s face goes as white as the walls. He punches the casing of the machine beside us, and the banging shudders, then steadies again. A flood of Italian cursing fills the room. “What is it, Gianna? What do you have?”
“No. I’m not sick. I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine, but—”
He checks all the corners of the room, examines the tile floor and the ventilation unit on the ceiling. For five full minutes, I’m standing in a sea of noise while Lorenzo combs the area around us. When he’s satisfied, he comes to me, tangles his long fingers in my hair, and presses his mouth to mine. His hands roam down, stroking the nape of my neck, playing silent musical notes on my back. The skin under my blouse prickles and tingles and now I’m in the kiss, all of me is lips and tongue and saliva and mute love, and it’s not a Patrick kiss, but a Lorenzo kiss.
I never want to leave this place.
When we break, we’re both panting. His hardness presses into my belly, like he’s probing to feel what’s inside, what secrets I hold in that dark female place.
It’s moments before either of us speaks.
“Is it mine?” he asks, moving slightly so there’s room for his hand where that other part of him was. “Gianna, tell me.”
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