Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  Well, now I have a pulling problem.

  The foot-pounds I exert on the drawer would have been enough to unstick it. Would have, if the brass handle hadn’t popped off.

  I fly backward, hardware in hand, and my head hits the floor. Patrick stops snoring.

  “What you doing, babe?” he mutters.

  “Just tripped on the rug. Go back to sleep.”

  Amazingly, this works, and I wait a full five minutes listening to his breathing become shallower before going to the kitchen in search of a screwdriver.

  It’s nine o’clock by the time I’m able to pry the nightstand drawer open wide enough to snake my hand inside, feel for the closed but unlocked safe door, and get a fingernail into the crack. The safe swings open, and I palm the cool metal of Patrick’s keys before pushing the drawer closed.

  Time to send Sam and Leo to bed.

  They resist, Sam telling me he’s got just one more trick.

  “Now,” I say, and wait until I hear them settle. Then I walk to the end of the hall, to Patrick’s locked office door.

  I have the lie already prepared, ready to go, in case Patrick wakes up and finds me sitting behind his desk, rifling through stacks of papers and envelopes. After all, my mother’s in a hospital thousands of miles away, the language center of her brain possibly damaged beyond repair. Of course I need to call, even at the late hour. Papà won’t be sleeping tonight.

  But I’m alone, me and my sticky fingers and Patrick’s neatly squared piles arranged like paper soldiers in rows across his desk. Everything looks exactly the same as it did last night, and it would, since no one has been in this room today. Olivia’s gruesome self-electrocution left no time for such banalities as paperwork. Attempted electrocution, I remind myself, trying to put the image of her burned arm out of my mind.

  Everything is exactly as it was, except for the manila envelope and its TOP SECRET stenciling.

  By eleven, I’ve been inside every drawer and cabinet, examined under the two fake Persian rugs, felt along each inch of baseboard molding for a loose board. Finally, I give up and lie back on the hard floor, head still pounding from my earlier fall.

  I’m so tired. Like, bone tired. It would be nice to stay here, limbs stretched out and eyes half-closed, until morning.

  It would be nice, and it would get me in a shitload of trouble, even with the ruse of trying to FaceTime my father.

  I push myself up, willing my legs to take the weight, and go over Patrick’s desk one final time, squaring up the stacks of reports and memos with flat palms. If he says anything in the morning, I’ll tell him he tried to work while he was drunk.

  As the office door key turns in its lock, the other keys jangle together. I close my fist around them to keep them still and silent, and rack my brain for what they might unlock. There are three keys in all: one for the office and two smaller ones. I suppose one of these others fits the lock on the trunk in the attic, where most of my books are. But the smallest, with its round bow, reminds me of Jackie.

  We kept a key hanger, a kitschy little job Jackie picked up at a yard sale, on the wall next to our apartment door. She repainted it in a Native American motif, coloring over the paw prints and the text that proclaimed ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE . . . AND A DOG, replacing the lettering with our names, DOOR, and MAIL. I was always misplacing the mailbox key, she said, so from now on the sucker gets hung up on the hook. I can still picture it, that tiny key with its round bow.

  When I’m sure Patrick’s office is locked, and Steven hasn’t emerged from his room in search of a midnight bowl of cereal or a Snickers bar, I slip out the front door. Night air hits my skin, and it prickles, reminding me that I’ve been sweating.

  Next door, the Kings’ house is blacked out, not even a porch light on. Of course, Evan had left in the ambulance with Olivia while the sun was still high in the sky. Perhaps he hasn’t come back yet. I feel around the inside of the doorjamb for the switch that turns our light off, flip it, and wait for my eyes to adjust to the night. Above me, over the Kings’ roof, hangs a sliver of crescent moon. It looks like a hook.

  Wiping the sweat from my palms on my skirt, I fumble for the smallest key on the ring. With one trembling hand, I find the lock on our mailbox, the steel container Del Ray peered into only this morning, finding a single envelope. The key turns easily, once I get it into the lock, and I hold my breath.

  What the hell are you expecting, Jean? I think. Top secret government documents in your mailbox?

  And yet, under that fingernail moon that looks as if it might float down and whisk the house next door away, into the night clouds, I see the outline of a manila envelope.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  As of two minutes ago, my name isn’t Jean.

  My name is thief.

  Or traitor, I think, and wonder for a moment what sort of punishment Reverend Carl and his pack of Pure Men might have set aside for subversives. In a world where women are sent to the Siberia of North Dakota for crimes as petty as fornication, where Jackie serves a life sentence in a concentration camp for homosexuals, surely there must be some fresh horror for women who steal state secrets.

  They’ll take me away; that’s certain. I’ll never see my kids again, or Patrick, or Lorenzo.

  I try to imagine a life, somewhere on what cons used to call the inside, where I spend every new day watching the mental photographs of everyone fade and silver with time until nothing but the faintest outline is left. Or maybe I won’t have to do that. Maybe my last image will be of the inside of a hood as a noose slips around my neck, or the gel-smeared cap of an electric chair is strapped firmly onto my shaved head, or a needle slides into my vein.

  No, it wouldn’t be a needle. That would be too kind.

  The clock inside chimes twelve, counting out my heartbeats. There’s no need to count them; I can feel each beat in my ears like a kettledrum.

  But I’ve gone this far, so why not a bit further?

  I lock the mailbox after taking out its contents, only the single envelope, and go back into the house. Despite the still, warm air inside, a chill runs up and down my arms, raising the flesh into a braille of goose bumps.

  We don’t have it as bad as Winston Smith, having to crouch into a blind corner of his one-room flat while Big Brother watches through a screen on the wall, but we do have cameras. There’s one at the front door, one at the back, and one over the garage, aimed at the driveway. I watched them being installed a year ago, on the day Sonia and I were fitted with the wrist counters. No one could possibly monitor every household all the time—there isn’t enough manpower for constant surveillance; nevertheless, I’m careful to keep the manila envelope flat against my body as I turn from the mailbox and slide back through the front door. Then I walk from living room to dining room and toward the half bath at the side of the kitchen. It seems a private enough place.

  Inside, I sit on the floor, my back to the wall, and pry up the prongs on the metal clasp.

  The cover sheet is there, the same memo I read last evening. Under it are three separate sets of documents, each paper-clipped to a colored cover page, one white, one gold, and one red. I flip the white cover first, revealing an outline of my team’s goals:

  Develop, test, and mass-produce anti-Wernicke serum

  Behind this page, there are the usual Gantt charts—the project manager’s tool of choice—stipulating deadlines for interim reports and clinical trials. The rest of the packet consists of the team’s CVs. Nothing new here, but I note Morgan’s curriculum vitae is only one page long, while the rest of ours span half a dozen sheets. I flip the pages back, square them, and adjust the paper clip before setting the white batch aside on the bathroom tile.

  The gold packet is almost a duplicate of the one for my own team. Under the yellow cover page, the goals read:

  Develop, test, and mass-produce Wernicke serum

  More Ga
ntt charts and five CVs, all documenting the publication histories and academic positions of various biologists and chemists I don’t know, are also in this set, along with Morgan’s credentials. So they’re doubling up, hedging their bets, it looks like. Hell. It’s typical government. Why have one team when you can pay for two?

  The gold set goes on the pile next to me, and I move to the Red team’s packet, expecting another redundancy, but this one is different.

  For one, its goal is singular:

  Explore water solubility of Wernicke serum

  The team members on the following pages—all six of them—are also scientists, all PhDs. Below each name is a military rank and branch. I squeeze my eyes shut to the harsh light above the bathroom’s sink and think back to this afternoon, to all the doors I passed as Poe led me down the fifth-floor corridor toward Morgan’s office.

  One of the names—Winters—rings a faint, but clear, bell at the same time the clock in the living room chimes the hour. One o’clock.

  Carefully, I assemble the packets as they were: white, gold, and red. Before sliding them back into the envelope, I check the Gantt chart in the white set. The timeline, a color-coded horizontal bar chart of tasks, goes back to the previous year, to November 8, the date our lab equipment was requisitioned.

  So I was right. The Wernicke project wasn’t conceived yesterday. It was started seven months ago.

  My legs don’t want to stand. They’re disobedient limbs, all cramped and prickly with pins and needles from sitting cross-legged on the floor for so long. I lean against the sink and stretch out my hamstrings.

  “Jean?”

  The voice on the other side of the bathroom door is muffled, but it’s unmistakably Patrick’s. He knocks once; then the doorknob turns.

  I didn’t lock it. I didn’t think I needed to.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Quickly, I turn on the tap, letting the manila envelope slide into the narrow space between the vanity and the wall. When Patrick opens the door, I’m bathing my face in cold water.

  “Holy Christ, babe,” he says. “You’re a mess.”

  My reflection agrees. Sweat-smudged mascara circles my eyes, the cotton blouse I put on this morning sticks to me like a thin coat of glue, and my hair is either matted down or sticking out in all the wrong places. I twist the tap and towel off, smiling a little sheepishly at Patrick, who seems much less drunk and much more concerned.

  “Didn’t feel so hot,” I say. “Must have been the pizza.”

  He holds a hand up to my forehead, a cool, clean doctor’s hand, the skin of it pink and scrubbed. For an instant, I think of Lorenzo’s hands and how different they are. I think of how Patrick’s hands might not be as clean as they seem.

  “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.

  I’m also thinking about what Patrick would have done if, instead of Julia, it was me who Reverend Carl tore from my home and made stand in front of television cameras before shipping me off to a life of silence and servitude. Would he come after me?

  Lorenzo would, but not Patrick.

  “Where do you think he went?” I say, turning on the shower. “Steven, I mean.” Julia might be anywhere—up the coast, inland, across the country in a California orange grove. “Finding her would be like finding a black cat in a coal cellar.”

  Patrick shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Let me show you something.” He leaves me in the bathroom and goes to the nightstand on his side of the bed. “What the hell?”

  The lie’s already prepared, and easier to recite when I’m not looking him in the eyes. “Damn handle came off last night. Don’t you remember?”

  There’s a pause while he thinks this over. Finally, I hear the jangle of keys and a single, perplexed “Huh” from the bedroom before I escape into the shower.

  “I’ll make you some tea if you want,” Patrick calls. “When you’re done, come to my office. I think I know where Steven’s headed.”

  I take the quickest shower of my life, comb out unwashed hair, and dress in loose jeans and a linen shirt that I don’t have to tuck in. Screw the dress code; I’m hot, rushed, and pregnant. Then I go down the hall into Patrick’s study.

  Reverend Carl’s face fills the screen, and his hands are held up as if in prayer. It’s his preferred speaking pose. The news camera trained on him tracks back, opening up the shot to reveal the rest of the stage. Julia King is unrecognizable.

  They’ve shaved her, of course—I expected that. I didn’t expect the job to be so half-assed, like an amateur sheepshearing by a blind man with palsy. Clumps of remaining hair stick in rusty patches on her head.