Christina Dalcher - VOX

Tonight, let it be all quiet. Full silence. A void.

I am now in two places at once. I am here, under Patrick, the weight of him suspended above my skin, part of him and also separate. I am in my other self, fumbling with my prom dress buttons in the back seat of Jimmy Reed’s Grand National, a sex car if there ever was one. I’m panting and laughing and high on spiked punch while Jimmy gropes and grabs. Then I’m singing in the glee club, cheering on our no-star football team, giving the valedictory address at college graduation, shouting obscenities at Patrick when he tells me to push and pant just one more time, babe , before the baby’s head crowns. I’m in a rented cottage, two months ago, lying beneath the body of a man I want desperately to see again, a man whose hands I still feel roaming over my flesh.

Lorenzo , I whisper inside my head, and kick the three delicious syllables away before they hurt too much.

My self is becoming more and more separate.

At times like this, I think about the other women. Dr. Claudia, for instance. Once, in her office, I asked whether gynecologists enjoyed sex more than the rest of us, or whether they got lost in the clinical nature of the act. Did they lie back and think, Oh, now my vagina is expanding and lengthening, now my clitoris is retracting into its hood, now the first third (but only the first third) of my vaginal walls are contracting at the rate of one pulse every eight-tenths of a second.

Dr. Claudia withdrew the speculum in one smooth move and said, “Actually, when I first started medical school, that’s exactly what I did. I couldn’t help it. Thank god my partner then was another med student; otherwise, I think he would have zipped up and walked out and left me laughing hysterically under the sheets.” She tapped my knee and removed one foot, then the other, from the pink-fuzz-covered stirrups. “Now I just enjoy it. Like everyone else.”

While I’m thinking about Dr. Claudia and her shiny steel speculum, Patrick orgasms and collapses on me, kissing my ears and throat.

I wonder what the other women do. How they cope. Do they still find something to enjoy? Do they love their husbands in the same way? Do they hate them, just a little bit?

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.