“Nothing that would benefit you,” said Thomas.
“Let’s go,” Skylar said.
“She ain’t your wife,” Daryl said. “Is she?”
“No, she isn’t,” said the leader. “If she was, you wouldn’t give her up so easily.”
Thomas wouldn’t budge. He stood there like an oak tree, as if her fate was in his hands.
“Do you have a doctor in your town?” Thomas asked.
“We have a veterinarian and a kid who aimed to start medical school. Why?”
“I wanted to know if we could come back here for medical help.”
“For her, yes. I’m sorry to be so tough about it, but we can’t take every person who comes along. Ain’t enough food. We expect more hungry folks coming down from Greenville and we’ll fight them the way we fought off the first batch.”
“All right,” Thomas said. “Thanks for your help.”
He finally relented and turned to leave.
“We’ll figure out something else,” Skylar said to them.
She wanted to rebuke Thomas for his casual condescension, but by now what was the point?
Every morning Thomas took the shotgun and disappeared into the woods looking for game: rabbits, birds, deer, anything. The first problem he faced was that local wildlife had fled to regions even more distant. But the bigger complication was the constant influx of hunters, almost all of whom were desperate fathers chasing game with handguns or pellet guns or knives. These men stomped through the woods, cursing to themselves, as if noise was the secret to attracting prey. Most of them, Thomas reasoned, would be dead by August. And so would their families.
In the afternoon Thomas rested on the shaded porch of the cabin. In the evening he prowled along the lake shore, tossing lures at the water and reeling them in. When he was a boy, Thomas told her, he would catch largemouth bass with spinner bait and plastic worms. But that teenage experience didn’t seem to help now. And though he offered Skylar most of the fish he caught and cleaned, taking it made her feel guilty. He was barely producing enough food for one person, let alone two adults and a growing fetus.
The first time she picked up the pistol, she was impressed with its smoothness, with its heft. Here was a weapon built for one purpose—to extinguish a human life—and its solid mass and elegant design seemed to honor the gravity of such a crime. Still, wasn’t it worse to curse a newborn baby to a lifetime of misery? By now she’d missed her period and there was no doubt she was pregnant.
One afternoon while Thomas napped on the porch, sweat beading on his upper lip, Skylar tiptoed to the bedroom they shared and retrieved the pistol from the nightstand drawer. She sat on the bed and hoped her parents were dead. She didn’t want to think about them hungry and struggling against the humid urban heat.
If she’d been recording the days correctly, the date was June 30, six weeks and four days since the pulse. The fetus would be forty-one days old.
She picked up the pistol and pointed it at her nose. The interior of the barrel was a tiny black hole of oblivion. Of infinity. It was a singularity where nothing, not even life, could escape.
She raised the gun to her forehead and pressed it there. The barrel wasn’t cool the way she expected. It was warm and felt almost wet, as if it were sweating the same as she. She slid her thumb over the trigger. She wondered about her brother. She wondered about Roark. If anyone could survive this, Roark could. He was a man who never went quietly. She remembered the drunken night when he lowered her to the carpet of the Wynn hotel, in the hallway outside their suite, when he hiked up her dress and shoved himself into her and she liked it. She liked it. A tenant in a nearby room had opened her door. Had seen them fucking like animals on the hotel carpet. The tenant calmly placed her dinner tray on the floor not three feet from Skylar’s head and went back into her room. The click of the door lock had sent Skylar over the edge, had sent her tumbling down the waterfall. And while Roark grunted and shuddered, she thought to herself If I die tomorrow, at least I lived today.
Thomas had been different. He held her and caressed her and coaxed her to orgasm twice before he took anything for himself. Maybe he was truly tender or maybe he always submitted to the memory of his mother. Either way, the outcome was the same: He had given her a child and now the only thing left in the world was a choice.
Death? Or life?
She lowered the gun and stared again into the barrel, into the round and infinite darkness. She imagined she could see swirls of color in that warm emptiness, swirls that eventually morphed into the smiling, drunken faces of Beth and Deidre and Molly. She remembered how her drama friends had been blissfully miserable as mothers, and despite her reluctance to admit as much, Skylar understood now why she’d felt so empty around them. Because the cliché was true—you couldn’t understand the biological suction of motherhood until your body was preparing to bear a child. And you couldn’t know if you would end a pregnancy until that pregnancy was yours.
She returned the gun to the nightstand drawer and went outside to talk to Thomas.
The next morning he walked her to the city limits of Kiowa Village, where the redneck color guard stood waiting. She cried when she turned away from Thomas and was led into town. Even as she was met by a group of concerned women, who marveled at her celebrity and offered food like bread and fried catfish, she cried.
Every day brought another single man who offered to protect her, who hoped to become her husband. There was a playground in town, and in the center of it stood a roundabout painted in alternating colors of red and white and blue, six pie-shaped pieces. She watched children spin in circles, laughing and squealing and cajoling each other. She stole glances at the mothers and fathers and marveled at how unmoved they seemed by external forces of danger that were all around them. She was struck by a feeling of togetherness, of social connection, and in certain moments she could detect a congruity with the world that previously had been unknown to her. The roundabout spun in a circle, sort of how life was a circle, and she could sense—only barely, but it was there—that the meaning of this terrible event wasn’t what had been lost, but what had been gained. That maybe the frenetic life she had lived, the things she had acquired, the glittery recognition by the world at large, had distracted her from a fundamental truth. The only point of life, as she previously believed, was not eventual death.
When you were poised to bring someone new into the world, the only point of life was life.
FORTY
My Diary: Natalie Black
July 202-
I first realized something was wrong with Brandon when he refused the Mounds bar. The boy won’t touch an Almond Joy, but he’ll eat six packages of Mounds if you don’t watch him.
We had been walking for eight weeks and two days (I think). None of the rest of us were sick, so I assumed Brandon had eaten something we didn’t notice. The boys get hungrier than we do, and they always bring stuff to us and say, Can I eat this? Can I eat that? It’s so sad. I try to feed them as much as I can, but if Paige and I don’t eat, we can’t take care of them.
After the warehouse, and after we regrouped at Tim’s place, Paige took us to her house to gather supplies. Like the rest of the food in her pantry. A mess kit. A tent. Matches and a lighter. Extra weapons and bullets. Jugs to store water in and tablets to purify it. We stop on the regular to refill, because water is so heavy, and we can’t carry much of it.
Then, even though I begged her not to, Paige took us back to the warehouse. She promised to maintain a safe distance, and approach only if it looked safe, but all I could think about were those bullets whizzing past my head as that awful man tried to kill us. When I tripped, I thought for sure we were dead. But instead, for a reason I’ll never understand, he stopped shooting and let us go.