. . . wishes to provide them with an appropriate two-parent family . . .
I sink to the floor and read.
In support thereof, it is hereby stated:
1.The plaintiff is the biological father of these pre-born children, which were conceived during a heterosexual, God-condoned, constitutional marriage for the purposes of being raised in a heterosexual, God-condoned, constitutional marriage.
2.Since these pre-born children were conceived the parties have divorced.
3.Since the final judgment the defendant has engaged in a meretricious, deviant, homosexual lifestyle.
4.The defendant has contacted the clinic for possession of the pre-born children for the purpose of having them transferred to her lesbian lover.
“Zoe?”
Vanessa sounds like she is a thousand miles away. I hear her, but I cannot move.
“Zoe?” she says again, and she grabs the paper out of my hand. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. There is no language to describe a betrayal this big.
Vanessa starts flipping through the pages so quickly I expect them to burst into flame. “Whatisthis garbage?”
Equilibrium is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. You can be punched without ever fielding a blow. “It’s from Max,” I say. “He’s trying to take away our baby.”
VANESSA
Just after Thanksgiving 2008, a woman on her deathbed confessed to killing two girls forty-two years earlier, who had bullied her for being a lesbian. Sharron Smith had gone into the ice cream shop in Staunton, Virginia, where they all were employed to say she couldn’t work the next day. According to the police transcript, one thing led to another, and she shot them.
I don’t know why she was packing a .25-caliber automatic handgun when she went into the ice cream store, but I understand her motivation. Especially while I am standing here, holding this ridiculous legal allegation from Zoe’s ex-husband.
One that calls me meretricious and deviant.
I am flooded with a feeling I thought I left behind in college, when I was called a freak by girls in the locker room, who would move away from my changing area because they were sure I was staring at them; when I was pinned into a dark corner at a dance and groped by some asshole on the football team, who had bet his friends he could turn me into a real girl. I was punished just because I was me, and what I wanted to say—what I neverdidsay, until my throat was sore with the effort of silence—wasWhy do I matter to you? Why can’t you just worry about yourselves instead?
So although I don’t condone violence any more than I am truly meretricious and deviant, in that moment I sort of wish I had Sharron Smith’s balls.
“I’m calling that son of a bitch,” Zoe announces.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her this upset. Her face is flushed a dark red; she is crying and spitting mad all at once. She punches the buttons so hard on the telephone handset that it tumbles out of her hands. I pick it up, hit the speakerphone button, and set it on the counter so that we can both listen.
To be honest, I’m surprised Max even picks up.
“I can’t talk to you. My lawyer told me not to—”
“Why?” Zoe interrupts. “Why would you do this to me?”
There is a long pause—so long that I think Max may have disconnected the call. “I’m not doing this to you, Zoe. I’m doing itforour kids.”
When we hear the dial tone on the other end of the line, Zoe picks up the phone and throws it across the kitchen. “He doesn’t evenwantkids,” she cries. “What is he going to do with the embryos?”
“I don’t know.” But it’s clear to me that this might not be about the babies, to Max. That it’s about Zoe, and the lifestyle she’s living.
Or in other words, punishment for just being herself.
I have a sudden flashback of my mother bursting into tears, once, when she took me to the doctor’s office for vaccinations. I was five or so, and clearly I was terrified of needles. I’d practically been hyperventilating the whole morning in anticipation of how painful this would be, and, sure enough, I was twisting my tiny body into knots to get away from the nurse practitioner. The sound of my mother’s sobbing, though, immediately made me stop. It wasn’t as ifshewas getting the shot, after all.
It hurts me,she tried to explain,when you hurt.
I was too young and too literal to understand it at the time, and, until now, I hadn’t loved someone enough to know what she meant. But seeing Zoe like this, knowing that what she wants most in the world is being yanked out of her grasp—well, I can’t breathe. I can’t see anything but fire.
