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SEVEN

The first time she screams, I think I’m dreaming. Patrick snores beside me; he’s always been one to sleep heavily, and his schedule for the past month has run him into the ground. So snore, snore, snore.

My sympathy has already expired. Let them work twelve-hour days to pick up the inevitable slack that canceling almost half of the workforce brought about. Let them bury themselves in paperwork and administrative nonsense and then limp home only to sleep like the dead and get up and do it all over again. What did they expect?

It isn’t Patrick’s fault. I know this in my heart and in my mind. With four kids, we need the income his job brings in. Still, I’m all dry on sympathy.

She screams again, not a wordless scream, but a blood-curdling waterfall of words.

Mommy, don’t let it get me don’t let it get me don’t let it get me don’t let it get me—

I’m out of the bed in a tumble of sheets and quilts, nightdress tangled around my legs. My shin slams into the hard corner of the bedside table, a bull’s-eye on my bone. This one will bleed, leave a scar, but I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking about the scar I’ll own if I don’t make it to Sonia’s bedroom in time to quiet her.

The words continue pouring out, flying through the hall toward me like poisoned darts from a million hostile blowpipes. Each one stings; each one pierces my once-tough skin with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, driving directly to my gut. How many words has she said? Fifty? Sixty? More?

More.

Oh god.

Now Patrick’s up, wide-eyed and pallid, a picture of some silver-screen hero fresh with fright on discovering the monster in the closet. I hear his footsteps quick behind me matching the thrum of blood pulsing through my veins, hear him yell, “Run, Jean! Run!” but I don’t turn around. Doors open as I fly past them, first Steve’s, then the twins’. Someone—maybe Patrick, maybe me—slaps on the hall light switch, and three blurred faces, pale as ghosts, appear in my peripheral vision. Of course, Sonia’s room would be the farthest from my own.

Mommy, please don’t let it get me don’t let it get me don’t—

Sam and Leo start crying. For the smallest of moments, I register a single thought: lousy mother. My boys are in distress, and I’m moving past them, uncaring and oblivious. I’ll worry about this damage later, if I’m in the condition to worry about anything.

Two steps into Sonia’s small room, I vault onto her bed, one hand searching for her mouth, clamping onto it. My free hand gropes under her sheets for the hard metal of the wrist counter.

Sonia moans through my palm, and I catch her nightstand clock out of the corner of my eye. Eleven thirty.

I have no words remaining, not for the next half hour.

“Patrick—,” I mouth when he switches the overhead light on. Four pairs of eyes stare at the scene on Sonia’s bed. It must look like violence, a grotesque sculpture—my writhing child, her nightgown translucent with sweat; me, lying sprawled on top of her, suffocating her cries and pinning her to the mattress. What a horrible tableau we must make. Infanticide in the flesh.

My counter glows 100 over Sonia’s mouth. I turn to Patrick, pleading mutely, knowing that if I speak, if the LED turns over to 101, she’ll share the inevitable shock.

Patrick joins me on the bed, pries my hand from Sonia, replaces it with his own. “Shh, baby girl. Shh. Daddy’s here. Daddy won’t let anything happen to you.”

Sam and Leo and Steve come into the room. They jostle for position and all of a sudden there’s no more room for me. Lousy mother becomes useless mother, two words ping-ponging in my head. Thanks, Patrick. Thanks, boys.

I don’t hate them. I tell myself I don’t hate them.

But sometimes I do.

I hate that the males in my family tell Sonia how pretty she is. I hate that they’re the ones who soothe her when she falls off her push-bike, that they make up stories to tell her about princesses and mermaids. I hate having to watch and listen.

It’s a trial reminding myself they’re not the ones who did this to me.

Fuck it.

Sonia has quieted now; the immediate danger has passed. But I note as I slip backward out of her room that her brothers are careful not to touch her. Just in case she has another fit.

In the corner of the living room is our bar, a stout wooden trolley with its bottled assortment of liquid anesthetic. Clear vodka and gin, caramel scotch and bourbon, an inch of cobalt remaining in the curaçao bottle we bought years ago for a Polynesian-themed picnic. Tucked toward the back is what I’m looking for: grappa, also known as Italian moonshine. I pull it out along with a small stemmed glass and take both with me onto the back porch and wait for the clock to chime midnight.

Drinking isn’t something I do much of anymore. It’s too goddamned depressing to sip an icy gin and tonic and think about summer evenings when Patrick and I would sit shoulder to shoulder on our first apartment’s postage stamp of a balcony, talking about my research grants and qualifying papers, about his hellish hours as a resident at Georgetown University Hospital. Also, I’m afraid to get drunk, afraid I might develop too much Dutch courage and forget the rules. Or flout them.

The first shot of grappa goes down like fire; the second is smoother, palliative. I’m on my third when the clock announces today’s end and a dull ping on my left wrist gives me another hundred words.

What will I do with them?

I slide back in through the screen door, pad over the living room rug, replace the bottle on the bar. Sonia is sitting up when I enter her room, a glass of milk in her hands, propped up by Patrick’s palm. The boys have returned to their own beds, and I sit next to Patrick.

“Everything’s all right, darling. Mommy’s here.”

Sonia smiles up at me.

But this isn’t how it happens.

I take my drink out on the lawn, past the roses Mrs. Ray chose with care and planted, out into the dark, sweet-smelling patch of grass where the lilacs bloom. They say you’re supposed to talk to plants to make them healthier; if that’s true, my garden is moribund. Tonight, though, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the lilacs or the roses or anything else. My mind’s on a different brand of creature.

“You fucking bastards!” I scream. And again.

A light flickers on in the Kings’ house, and the vertical blinds twitch and separate. I don’t give a damn. I don’t care if I wake up the entire subdivision, if they hear me all the way to Capitol Hill. I scream and scream and scream until my throat is dry. Then I take another swig from the grappa bottle, spilling some on my nightgown.

“Jean!” The voice comes from behind me, followed by the slam of a door. “Jean!”

“Fuck off,” I say. “Or I’ll keep talking.” Suddenly, I don’t care anymore about the shock or the pain. If I can keep screaming through it, keep up my anger, drown the sensation with booze and words, would the electricity continue to flow? Would it lay me out?

Probably not. They won’t kill us for the same reason they won’t sanction abortions. We’ve turned into necessary evils, objects to be fucked and not heard.

Patrick is yelling now. “Jean! Babe, stop. Please stop.”

Another light goes on in the Kings’ house. A door squeaks open. Footsteps. “What the hell’s going on out there, McClellan? People are trying to sleep.” It’s the husband, of course. Evan. Olivia is still peeking through the blinds at my midnight show.

“Fuck you, Evan,” I say.

Evan announces he’s calling the cops, although not quite so politely as all that. Then the light in Olivia’s window goes dark.

I hear screaming—some my own—then Patrick is on me, wrestling me down to the moist grass, pleading and cajoling, and I can taste tears on his lips when he kisses me quiet. My first thought is whether they teach men these techniques, whether there were pamphlets handed over to husbands and sons and fathers and brothers on the days we became shackled by these shiny steel bracelets. Then I decide they couldn’t possibly care that much.

“Let me go.” I’m in the grass, nightgown stuck to me like a snakeskin. It’s then I realize I’m hissing.

It’s also then I realize the pulses are closer together.

Patrick grasps my left wrist, checks the number. “You’re out, Jean.”

I try to wriggle away from him, an act as empty of hope as my heart. The grass is bitter in my mouth, until I realize I’m chewing on a mouthful of dirt. I know what Patrick’s doing; I know he’s set on absorbing the shock with me.

So I stay silent and let him lead me back inside as the wail of sirens grows louder.

Patrick can talk to them. I don’t have any words left.