Vox

All my words ricochet in my head as I listen, emerge from my throat in a heavy, meaningless sigh. And all I can think about are Jackie’s last words to me.

Think about what you need to do to stay free.

Well, doing more than fuck all might have been a good place to start.

“You think I should garden and cook more? You think the work I do is less important than—I don’t know—crafts?”

“Not you, Mom. Other women. The ones who just wanna get out of the house and have some kind of identity.” He picked up the book and kissed me goodnight. “Anyway, it’s just a stupid class.”

“I wish you’d drop it,” I said.

“No way, José. I need the AP credits for college.”

“Why? So you can major in modern Christian thought?”

“No. So I can get into college.”

And that was how they did it. Sneaking in a course here, a club there. Anything to lure kids with promises of increasing their competitiveness.

Such a simple thing, really.

“I had no idea,” she said.

“No idea about what?”

“These numbers.” She pointed to one of the charts, now being televised with a prepared voice-over of Baby Blue’s voice. She had moved on from rape and was reciting statistics on antidepressant usage. “Jeez. One in six? That’s awful.”

No one in the studio audience was paying attention to Jackie’s claims of skewed statistics, of the correlation-causation fallacy, of the fact that of course no one was taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in 1960, because they didn’t exist.

That was how it started. Three women with a stack of pie charts and people like Olivia.

Instead of standing next to Patrick, or even at the far end of the family line, bookending our kids, I’m fifth. After my husband, after Steven, after the eleven-year-old twins. And Sonia has made me smaller than everyone except for her. I manage a forced smile and take her into my arms, pressing her head against me so she can’t see the tears that are welling up, that I won’t be able to contain.

[...]

And so here we are. Me, my daughter, and the wrist counters that keep us in line. I wonder what Jackie would have to say about it. Probably something like Good work, Jean. You gassed up the car and drove it straight into hell. Enjoy the burn.

[...] I’m thinking I did a crackerjack job on the behavioral part, conditioning Sonia with bribes of cookies and marshmallows to keep her words unspoken. Someone should take away my mothering license.

I keep reminding myself it isn’t my fault. I didn’t vote for Myers.

I didn’t vote at all, actually.

And here’s Jackie’s voice again, telling me what an acquiescent shit I am.

What would Jackie do? Speed after him? Probably. Spit back? Likely. What’s on my mind, though, is what Patrick would do: absolutely nothing.

He’d sigh and shake his head at the barbarism, and then he’d clean up the mess of phlegm and forget about Mr. Midlife Crisis. And Lorenzo? Lorenzo would beat the living shit out of the bastard.

Only after I’ve shut down FaceTime do I notice the manila envelope with its TOP SECRET stenciling on Patrick’s desk. Whoever came up with the idea of labeling classified documents with larger-than-life red stenciling that advertises—or at least hints at—the contents was a shmuck, I think. You might as well put a tag that says OPEN ME! on it. If it were up to me, I’d hide all secrets in back copies of Reader’s Digest.

“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.”

“Did you do it?”

“I had to, Mom. If I didn’t, they’d all think—” He stops short, and a smile creeps up one side of his mouth. “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. That’s what they say, right?”

He’s got the essence of Burke’s quote, if not the exact words. But I know what he means, and I nod.

Jackie would like that.

Gone to look for Julia. Love you. S.

“Someone should shut that woman up,” Olivia says. “Permanently.”

Oh, Olivia, I think, what the hell did you expect?

Reverend Carl Corbin must be insane, truly insane. Has he thought ahead to the inevitable outcome? Does he realize the havoc, not only in Europe, but everywhere, his plot will wreak? Supply chains—gone. Banks and stock markets—gone. Mass transit, any transit, really, other than foot traffic and the occasional horse—gone. Factories—gone. Within weeks, most of the world’s population will die of hunger or dehydration or violence. The ones who are left will be eking life out in a twisted Little House on the Prairie existence, building from the ground up, one haystack and corn silo at a time.

A million years ago—it was only twenty, but it feels like a million, it feels like tens of millions, like all the lifetimes of the entire world—Jackie asked me what I would do to stay free. Last night, over a kitchen counter that seems as distant as that Georgetown apartment, I asked Patrick if he would do anything, if he would kill.

Right now, with a half-baked formula on the table and Reverend Carl scolding Steven on the television, I put all the questions together and come up with a single answer.

Yes, I would do anything. I would kill.

The woman who thinks these words doesn’t sound like me at all.

Or maybe she does.

Patrick is number thirteen. The Judas Iscariot of the Oval Office. As I lie here in bed, numbed by the spin of the ceiling fan, these religious coincidences strike me as funny. Water, wine, thirteen men. Reverend Carl and his insanity.

Imagine, Jeanie, she wrote. Twenty-five percent in the Senate and the House. Twenty-five! You should come back and get in on it.

Maybe next year, I wrote back. And I meant it.

For now, though, Jackie has my financial and moral support. I’m not ready to get into politics, not just yet.