“Sounds wonderful.”
“No. Not so wonderful, Jake. It turns out that my super-vivid dream was nothing more than a false epiphany. In hindsight, I can see that I was already on the right path. I had made the right decisions, the right sacrifices. I was working toward my PhD in psychiatry. It was taking longer than I planned, and I was going into debt on the condo, but I should’ve stuck with it. It was Neil’s idea that I was ‘too smart’ to be a psychiatrist.”
I grin. “Thanks, says the lowly therapist.”
“Neil doesn’t have a clue. He’s the one who convinced me to get an MBA and take the job at Schwab, but I didn’t realize until later that it was because he had a really strong bias against psychiatry. Long story short—a few months after we met, I dropped out of my PhD program and started business school.”
“What a waste. You were so good at what you did.”
“It would have been nice if you’d been around back then to tell me so,” she says. I sneak a glance under the table. Both of her feet are pointed straight at me. “You remember I wanted kids, right?”
“You used to say you wanted a whole brood.”
“Well, it’s not going to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, not sure what she’s getting at.
“Me too. Here’s the thing, Jake. I’ve been pregnant. I can have kids. I probably still could, if I weren’t trapped with Neil. But Neil never wanted to talk about it, and then when we got careless and I got pregnant, he said it wouldn’t be a good fit for our life in The Pact.”
It occurs to me, for the first time, that no one at either of The Pact parties ever mentioned kids.
“Are you telling me that none of the members have children?”
“A few do. Most don’t.”
“Is it against the rules or something?”
“Not exactly. Orla has said, however, that children can be an impediment to marriage.”
“But wouldn’t children ensure more future Pact members?”
“Doesn’t work that way. Just because you grew up in The Pact doesn’t mean you automatically receive a nomination. Anyway, it’s about the marriage, not about kids. You must love your husband—with the kids you’re supposedly free to choose.”
“Have you ever tried to quit?” I ask bluntly.
She laughs bitterly. “What do you think? I got my courage up after the abortion and went to see a divorce lawyer. Neil reported me to The Pact. They called me in, showed me a long list of my failures. If I went through with divorce, they threatened, I’d lose the house, my job, my reputation. They said it would be easy to make me disappear. The crazy thing is, Neil didn’t even want to join The Pact. He’s not a joiner. By the time we received the package from an old flatmate of Neil’s, I was already regretting my decision to get married. The Pact seemed like a lifeline. Long story short, I talked Neil into giving it a try. We did, and for whatever reason, everything went sideways for me. Neil, on the other hand, the golden child, was loved by all. It wasn’t even surprising when he got the call from Orla, when they asked him to chair the North American Regional Board.”
“Regional Board?”
She swirls her half-eaten hot dog on a stick in a pool of ketchup, and I can’t help noticing that, despite the fancy nails, the cuticles around her thumbs are torn and bleeding. “There are three regional boards, each composed of seven people. All three boards report back to a small group in Ireland. Every three months, they meet.”
“Where?”
“It changes—Ireland at least once a year, sometimes Hong Kong, occasionally out at Fernley.”
“And what do they talk about?”
“Everything,” she says grimly. Then, leaning close, “Everyone. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I think of the bracelet, the collar. The way Vivian and Dave always seem to know so much more than we tell them.
“They make new rules,” she says. “They draft the yearly appendices, review the judges’ decisions, hear appeals. They manage the finances and the investments. They review the files of problematic members.”
“But why?”
“According to Neil, the purpose of the boards is to ensure everyone’s marriage succeeds. No matter what.”
“And what if a marriage fails?”
“That’s just it—they don’t.”
“Some must,” I insist.
She shakes her head wearily. “You know how they told you that no one in The Pact has ever gotten divorced?” She’s in my face now, whispering. I can smell the ketchup on her breath. “Well, that’s true, Jake. But what they don’t tell you is that not all The Pact marriages last.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Fernley crap is bad, really bad, but I can take that, as long as I get myself in the right mindset. I even like the rules—I like the mandatory dates, the gifts.”
“But?”
She seems overwhelmed by an impossible sadness, a cloud of hopelessness. “I have no facts, and even if I did I shouldn’t say anything. But one time, when a board meeting was being held in San Francisco, we had dinner with Orla. Just her, Neil, and me. I’d never met her before. Neil insisted on picking out my outfit. He made me promise not to ask any personal questions. Over the years, The Pact had sure asked me a lot of personal questions—in the forms I’d filled out, the counselors I’d had to see, the recorded interviews at Fernley. Integrity Checks, they called them.”
“They recorded you?”
JoAnne nods. “When I told Neil I was worried Orla might have heard the recordings of my Integrity Checks, he didn’t deny it. He told me to be on my best behavior. Let Orla lead the conversation.”
“So, what’s she like?”
“Charismatic, but also strangely removed. One minute she’d be so interested in me, and the next minute she just looked right through me—it gave me shivers.”
The more JoAnne talks, the more she seems to lose the thread. In the stuff I found about Orla online, she didn’t seem like the person JoAnne is describing. In photographs, she looked friendly, intelligent, and nonthreatening, like a great-aunt or the high school English teacher you always remember fondly. “You said that not all Pact marriages last. What did you mean?”
“The Pact has no divorces, but it also has more widows and widowers than you would expect.”
“What?” My throat goes dry.
“It’s just that—” She glances around nervously. Sweat appears on her forehead, and suddenly she starts to backtrack. “It’s probably nothing,” she evades, toying with her cellphone. “Maybe I’m thinking too much, like Neil says. Maybe my time at Fernley got me turned around. I don’t always think straight, you know.”
“The JoAnne I remember always thought straight.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but then you always put women on a pedestal.”
“I do?” I ask, temporarily sidetracked by this odd accusation.