“Hmm?” She opened her eyes, and her lips snarled. She slapped at his face repeatedly with both hands. “Get back! Get away from me!”
Stunned, Ruppert barely managed to block her flailing hands as he retreated to the far corner of the bed.
“Look, Madeline, I’m sorry. Whatever they did to you, it’s over now.”
“They told me about it, Daniel.”
“What?”
“Don’t act innocent. They told me about her.”
“Who?”
“You know who, Daniel.” Her green eyes burned at him. “Your…girlfriend. How could you do that to me?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Ruppert hadn’t slept with anyone but Madeline since their wedding. “Madeline, there’s nobody else.”
“They had video!” she screamed. “I saw you doing…nasty things with that ugly brown girl. Unnatural things. Putting it in unnatural places, Daniel.” She looked at the crotch of his Bermuda shorts, and then her lips began to tremble and she turned her head away from him, leaving a wall of red hair between them. “Places God didn’t mean for it to go.”
“It’s not true, Madeline. They can fake video. Easiest thing in the world. You can’t believe something just because you see it on a screen.”
“So what does that mean? You’re on the screen every night. I guess the news is all made up, too.”
“Most of it.”
She let out a screech and hurled a pillow at his face. He didn’t bother knocking it away. At least she had the presence of mind to pick a decorative pillow laden with buttons and beads, a couple of which gouged at his cheek when the pillow hit him.
“Madeline, I’m telling the truth. I never cheated on you.”
“They told me. I know it’s true.”
“Why do you trust them?”
“You have to trust them, Daniel.”
“Even when they kidnap you out of your bed? Did they interrogate you? What did they do?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Madeline-”
“I don’t want to talk to you, either.” She sat back against the headboard and drew the blankets around her. “I need to ask my counselor at church about this. I think it would be best if you slept in the guest room for now.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
She just stared at him, her mouth a hard flat line. Ruppert stood and walked to the bedroom down to the hall, where he lay on top of the coverlet and throw pillows, but didn’t feel like sleeping. After a few minutes, it occurred to him that Madeline had been dressed in a bright, flowered blouse and a long grass skirt.
He awoke on his side, his right arm numb, daylight boring into his eyes from the guest room window. For a moment he thought it was a dream, that he would wake up again in the frigid Terror cell, and then he remembered how and why they’d brought him home.
He sat up, turned away from the window, and asked, “Time?”
“Six minutes until eleven A.M.,” the house’s voice said in its always-cheerful tone.
“Uh…what day?”
“Saturday, June 23, 2036.”
“Thanks.” He stood and stretched. His right arm was a rubbery dead weight. “Is Madeline here?”
“She is not. Her schedule indicates that she is attending her FaithCrafts group at church. Would you like to contact her?”
“No, that’s okay. Can you make coffee?”
“I would be happy to, Mr. Ruppert, but the coffee maker has not been prepared.”
“Forget it.”
Ruppert took a hot shower, scrubbing days and nights of his own filth off his body. He even used some of Madeline’s scented soaps and an exfoliant full of grape seeds to try and scrape his skin clean.
Afterward, he drifted from room to room in the house, not sure what to do. He figured out he’d only been gone for nine days, though it felt more like a year. The familiar walls and furniture of his home looked alien to him. He’d thought of his house as a safe place, barricaded by walls and digital security systems, but now he saw that any feeling of security was an illusion. The most dangerous people could get to him at any time. They might as well live out in the open, as Sully had.
Normally he would go out for a game of golf, but he wasn’t scheduled for anything this afternoon. He did not particularly want to leave the house, either. The world seemed full of danger. He wondered how Madeline had managed the drive over to church, if that was where she’d gone.
He took his wallet from the ridiculous Bermuda shorts. Everything had been replaced; he thought there might even be more cash than before. He slid out the plastic card Sully had given him, looked over the meaningless numbers and letters. Sully had said the person on the other end was a very close friend, somebody he cared about a great deal. If Ruppert contacted him, it would draw the attention of Terror. Of course, both he and the person on the other end clearly had Terror’s attention, anyway.
He remembered what Sully had promised him: “what you always wanted.” He still couldn’t guess what Sully might have meant by that.
He spent most of the afternoon laid out on the couch in the living room, conjuring up music and movies on the screen. He avoided the news altogether-it only offered confusion and lies.
Madeline arrived home in the evening, her makeup smudged and blotted. There was a dullness in her normally bright eyes that he hadn’t seen before. She sat in a recliner across the room.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“I’m…” Madeline’s voice was soft. She cleared her throat, then began to speak in careful, businesslike tones, as if dictating to a stenographer. “I met with my life counselor and told her about our problems.”
“You told her everything?”
“Of course not. Everyone seems to think we were on vacation somewhere, so I’m going along with that. I meant about the…the other woman.”
Ruppert wanted to protest again that there had not been another woman, but the hard, determined look on Madeline’s face warned him not to try.
“She pointed out that divorce is still a sin, and that a woman’s duty is to hold a marriage together. I don’t know if I’ll ever trust you again, Daniel, but we have to keep going.”
Daniel felt relief, but also a tinge of disappointment. Some little part of him had apparently been hoping she would leave him, but she would never do anything so strongly discouraged by the church.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked.
“She told me that the best way to heal a damaged marriage is to go back to the purpose of marriage, and that’s to create life.”
“You want to have a baby?”
“I want four.”
“What?”
“It’s not natural for people to put off children as long as we have, Daniel. I’m almost thirty. It’s our duty to have children, and anyway I’m tired of getting sneered at by the young mothers in my groups. I want to have so many children that nobody can question us. If we time it right, we can have at least four. She told me that I’d be so busy as a mother that I wouldn’t have time to be so self-centered and worried about my own feelings. So that’s what we’ll do, Daniel. I’m going to the doctor on Monday to get a schedule, and I expect you to make me pregnant.”
“Do I get any say in this?”
“You had your say when we got married.”
Ruppert didn’t feel at all excited about the idea, with Terror watching them so closely now. Children would make them even more vulnerable. Children would force them to be obedient citizens. He supposed that was the idea.
“Madeline, I really don’t think a child is going to solve our problems.”
“I’m not interested in your opinion. It is your duty to God to sire children, and mine to bear them.”
They sat in silence for a minute, and then Ruppert asked in a quiet voice, “What did they do to you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’ll tell you what they did to me. They threatened to drown me. They electrocuted me. They nearly beat me to death. They kept me in a freezing cell-”
“I don’t want to know!” she screamed. She bolted from the chair to her feet. “Maybe they were punishing you for your sins. Did you ever think of that? Did you ever think maybe you deserved it?”