Chelsea’s stomach drops to somewhere around her feet, and she feels numb and woozy but fights through it. “Well, that’s great news!”
Even she can hear that the exclamation point at the end is a lie. Huntley looks gratified at her lack of enthusiasm, like it’s just confirming what he already knows about her—that she’s a shitty wife.
“So you’ll be real glad to see him, huh?”
“Of course!”
But what she’s really thinking is that if there is a God, he’ll let the Violence strike her now and punish this bullying little shit for showing up to make her impossible life even harder. Because he expects a victim of domestic violence to kiss the feet of the man who abuses her instead of being grateful every day that he’s gone. The only reason she’s playing along is because Chad can take her away for any reason, plant drugs on her or say she got violent or Violent, which would leave her girls all alone.
“And he’s getting vaccinated, too,” Chad says as if he’s remarking on the weather.
Chelsea’s head jerks up, and Huntley smiles smugly at finally having her full attention.
“Vaccinated? There’s a vaccine?”
“Oh, yeah. You haven’t heard? They announced it this morning. Big press conference. Some college kid figured it out. Price is crazy high and only selling to rich people right now, but Brian’s covering the cost. You know, our good friend Brian—David’s lawyer? He’s been building a case, too. Talking to our people at the lab, looking at evidence, all that. It’ll be real interesting if David doesn’t have the Violence, won’t it? One of these days, when the truth is out there, it’s gonna be a crime to turn someone in for the Violence if they don’t have it.”
“A man attacked me with a baseball bat,” Chelsea starts, her voice wobbling.
“A little girl’s softball bat,” Huntley corrects. “And he didn’t hit you with it, did he? He says he went for it after you locked yourself in the bathroom and started telling tales. People with the Violence don’t do that. They don’t leave their prey and run off to get weapons.”
“They don’t run off to get bigger weapons to inflict more damage, huh? So what kind of person does do that?”
With his sunglasses on, she can’t tell if he’s staring at her, can’t tell what he’s thinking. She just sees that tight, stubbled jaw working at the pink gum, the now nauseating scent of cinnamon rising in the heat of the afternoon.
“It’ll be real interesting,” he repeats. “Take care, Chel.”
“Will do, Officer Huntley.”
She watches him saunter to his car and look over her yard with a frown like he’s a big, important man who doesn’t approve. The yard is overgrown now, as they don’t have money to pay the landscaper, but the HOA letters stacking up are the least of her concerns. As she looks up and down the street, she’s not the only one. Plenty of yards are ragged, one house is half burned down and abandoned, and one flower garden has an upside-down car settled in the center of it. Nobody really wants to be outside like a sitting duck for Violence sufferers and Violence-carrying mosquitoes, so anyone doing outdoor work has raised their prices significantly to cover for the added risk.
From what she’s been reading online, the economy is changing, almost like Covid on steroids. No one is going to restaurants anymore, so the restaurants that want to stay open are doing a steady delivery service. Online business is brisk, and almost everything gets delivered in brown boxes or specialized grocery bags by desperate people in branded T-shirts. The mom-and-pop stores in the cool areas downtown are closing up due to a lack of foot traffic. Rich people like her mother are fleeing north, hoping for fewer mosquitoes, or barricading themselves in behind fences and walls and gates in their tropical paradises, going to ground in their mosquito-sprayed compounds and hiring guards and having their prescriptions delivered by drones. Everyone has to adapt or die.
And that’s what Chelsea has to do, too, because she can’t be here when David gets home. Either he’ll kill her or he’ll take the girls and throw her out, and if he finds out she has the Violence, he’ll take immense joy in the process of sending her to her own government facility and knowing she won’t pass the test and receive the gift of vaccination from a friend.
There’s only one thing she can think to do, and…God, she doesn’t fucking want to do it.
She goes back inside, back into the stale room where she’s lived a tortured, fearful, truncated life for the past few weeks to keep her girls safe. Funny, how her gilded cage got even smaller. She takes a long shower, fetches the blow dryer from the garage to smooth her hair, does her makeup. Even puts on pastels and nice sandals, glad that she’s been keeping her toenails painted in all the non-red colors that David hates.
You and Brooklyn need to shower and get dressed nice, she texts Ella.
We’re going to visit Nana.
16.
Patricia sits at the breakfast table with Randall, poking at Rosa’s attempt at an egg-white omelet as her husband rambles on about their plans. Oh, how she misses the food at the lodge.
She absentmindedly rubs the top of her arm, hating that she’s going to have another scar to rival the clumsy one from the smallpox vaccine when she was a little girl. Randall’s longtime physician, Dr. Baird, showed up at the house a few days ago to administer the vaccine for the Violence—they chartered a jet from Utah to get it as soon as possible. Patricia knows she should be grateful that Randall is so wealthy and well connected that they were able to receive the vaccination before the rest of the world even knew about it, but…well, honestly. A scar. And the ID card with her vaccine number printed on it has absolutely the worst photo of her she’s ever seen. She looks like she’s seventy and has jaundice in it.
“Are you even listening, Patricia?” Randall asks, sounding like a schoolteacher with a wayward and annoying student.
“You were saying we’ll have Rosa vaccinated,” she parrots.
Randall nods and squints, his jowls waggling and his belly dangling between his knees as he leans over. No one loves a breakfast steak like the judge, even if it’s been clumsily cooked to leather.