Jake’s narrative trails off abruptly at this point. I know what has happened, of course. The look on his face tells me all I need to know.
“I think we’ll stop there tonight, Brian. It’s late. There is a long day ahead of us,” Jake says quietly as he gets up and moves to the door. I know there will be no discussion on this. I carefully collect my papers into a neat bundle, wish him goodnight, and walk quietly out into the evening.
2
CEDAR CITY
Amanda Contreras is a single mother in a world where all parents from before the Plague have been rendered single by default. She is a compact 5’5” woman, twenty-six years old, with naturally brown skin and hair from her Hispanic heritage. Her eyes are a striking light-grey with sharp cheekbones. Her daughter, Elizabeth, is nine years old and favors her mother’s appearance. If there is still such a thing as a helicopter parent in this world, Amanda is of the Apache Longbow variety.
I am sitting with Amanda on the porch of the small, three-room cabin that she built with the help Oscar and some of the others who live in the commune. Her daughter sits a short distance off from us on a stump, happily making cordage by twisting together the shredded leaves of cattails. She hums a tuneless song to herself as she works in the dying light of the day. There is already several yards of the strong coil at her feet. Her feet are bare; she uses her toes to control and coil the rope as it is produced.
Amanda has served us both a cup of tea, a rare delicacy. It is possible that someone somewhere is still cultivating the crop, but the resurgence of the beverage is not something we anticipate seeing any time soon in Wyoming. She has produced some scavenged bags of Lipton and boiled water over a fire. There is no sugar to spare for this treat, but it does not matter. It is delicious, and I feel myself invigorated by the caffeine almost immediately.
I inform her that we can take as little or as much time for this as she would like and that I am at her service for as long as she is willing to go. She smiles at me, sips at her drink, and watches Elizabeth a while. Finally, she says, “That little girl is the only reason I’m still alive, you know?”
The plague took everything from us. I mean more than just the people it took. It took our certainty. I’ve been thinking about this a really long time, now, and I think I have a good idea what it was that made it so horrible besides… the obvious.
I got pregnant with Elizabeth when I was seventeen with my boyfriend, Eddie. Before that, I wasn’t certain about anything. I didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going. Everyone around me from my parents to the counselor at school, all my teachers; everyone told me I had to get ready for college, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t really have any hobbies besides hanging out with girlfriends. I was just a kid, anyway.
I wasn’t certain about Eddie. He wanted to be a Marine. He told me we were going to get married and all the rest but I knew how that went. He goes off to Basic, then training for his MOS. At some point, he ships out on a boat, maybe spends time in the Philippines. The whole time I’m back here being not with him. Not a recipe for a strong marriage. I knew where I was going to be in a week, but I didn’t have any idea when it came to a few years later. No matter what, the smart money said I’d still be stuck in Beaver, Utah.
Then Lizzy happened, and things started getting “certain” real fast. I certainly wasn’t going to college, for one thing. I was certainly keeping the baby, though my dad pleaded with me to “take care of it” when I told him about it. I also learned that Eddie was certainly the man I was going to marry, as you’ll see.
I was afraid to tell him the most out of anyone—even more than my mother. I had seen this happen before (Beaver is a small town with not a lot of privacy). The boyfriend always gives the same lines. “Yes, I’m going to be involved. I want to be a part of the kid’s life. I’m going to contribute. Do my part.” All that. They’re gung-ho during the pregnancy and maybe a few months after but that all dries up once the whole situation becomes more work than fantasy. I loved Eddie, and he was always good to me. He said he loved me, but I was terrified to put his future as a Marine up against my need. A part of it was that I didn’t want him to have to give up that future but, in my secret heart—that place I don’t like to admit exists—I was mostly just afraid to see which would win out: the Corps or me and the baby. I really, really didn’t want to know what it felt like to be discarded. Not telling him at all was tempting but also not possible. At some point, he was going to notice something different about me.
I told him before anyone else. We were over at his place (actually, his parents’ place) in the backyard sitting on his little brother’s swing set (“I never got a swing set, the little shit,” Eddie used to joke while messing up the kid’s hair… Dillon was his name). There were a lot of things I admired in Eddie, but there were none so much as how he reacted to the news. Keep in mind: he was seventeen like me. The plan was for him to head down to the recruiter’s office in Saint George on his birthday to enlist and, if I remember right, that was coming up in something like three months. He’d been talking about this for years—for as long as I knew him—like some people would talk about a guaranteed spot at MIT. I was a part of his planning too, but the way he talked was always that the Corps was something that happened first and then he could have me (like I was the prize at the end of the ordeal or something). I liked that he included me in his future, but I also knew that a lot happens on deployment; I had spoken to some military wives on the Internet and what I heard made me feel scared. And honestly, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to sit around waiting for a husband I rarely saw to come home and spend short stretches of time with me before shipping out again.
I told him straight out. I didn’t try to soften the blow or make a little joke or anything. I tried really… really hard to keep the panic out of my voice but I don’t think I did the best job. I just wanted to be straight with him. He was such a good guy; he was always straight with me. He never jerked me around, and I just wanted to give him that same kind of respect.
I’m never going to forget the look he had on his face. I think I counted about five seconds where he looked like the wind was knocked out of him. Like, just literally knocked out of him and he couldn’t breathe or even move. Then, he sucked in air sharply, let it out, and finally nodded his head once. And that was it. That was all it took for him. Five seconds, a breath, and a nod to completely re-plan his whole life trajectory.
He reached out across the swings and took my hand in his (his hands were one of my favorite things about him; they were strong, a little scarred on the backs from the ranch work he did to earn extra cash, and big—big enough to disappear my hands when he held them) and asked, “Will you keep her?”
Not “him” or “it.” “Her.” I didn’t even have any idea what I was having yet—I was only something like six weeks in. It was like he knew, though. She was already a person to him. So I said, “Yes.”
He squeezed my hand and said, “Thank God. Will you marry me, then?”
I started crying. Not hard or hysterical… just some tears and some effort to keep my voice steady. “I don’t know if I can be a Marine wife and a single mom, Eddie.”
“Oh, that shit’s over,” he scoffed. “There are more important things to deal with now.”
That was when I started to lose it. “Oh, no, no, no, no. You can’t,” I said. “That’s your dream. You can’t. You… baby, you can’t.” I was starting to blubber. He made all the soothing noises you’re supposed to make when your girlfriend falls apart (he was probably also afraid one of his parents would see what was happening out the window and come interrupt).