“Someone has to do that, too, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, yeah. Alright, don’t take it the wrong way.”
“I’m not. All I’m saying is he didn’t have any other choice. None of them did—those who were raised on lies, with the natural course of life violated. Arbitrarily warped. Can you imagine what a flimsy existence he must lead—without roots, up in the air? A sort of a show that he plays for himself over and over and over. And there’s no way to keep it going other than to guard, sledgehammer in hand, against the natural order of things reasserting itself, because if you miss a blink—it’ll break through, like mud through that dam….”
“Yeah.”
“His dam will break too, one day… and sweep away the whole house of cards he’s worked so hard to build around his child. It’s leaking already—first his mother-in-law, then it’ll be something else: the further his child ventures into the world, the more risks there are. That’s why he’s so afraid.”
“So much wisdom. So much understanding. Where can I get myself some of that?”
“Why? You disagree?”
“You women just kill me… just sit there, philosophizing, like it’s all water off a duck’s back!”
“It’s all because you covered me. Shielded me bravely with your own body, you could say. Took the brunt of the negative-energy assault. Or, maybe more appropriately, of the informational assault?”
“You just keep kissing up to me…”
“I’m not kissing up; I’m telling you like it is. You are my hero. My knight in shining armor. My Chip and Dale. My Ninja Turtle.”
“Shut up. You’re mean.”
“But wise—you said so yourself.”
“You know I’ve got a whale of a headache… from back there, on the water.”
“You poor thing. Take an Advil.”
“Nah, a cup of hot tea—and off to bed. Lord. Some freaking day we had… I have to say, you seem to be just generally super calm recently. Sort of distanced…”
“I must be slowly developing the ability not to give a damn. What else can I do?”
“No, I’m serious. I noticed it back when you came home from your meeting with Vadym, and I was telling you about Yulichka. Things don’t seem to get to you the way they used to; they don’t affect you as much….”
“Is this a bad thing? That they don’t?”
“Hey. Kiddo. What if you are pregnant?”
“Oy!”
“What’s to oy about? What would be so terrible about that?”
“My dictaphone!”
“What about it?”
“I just saw this… apparently, I left it on—after I erased the stuff…. Or did I not lock it, and it came on accidentally in my purse?”
“You mean, it was recording the whole way home?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, look, it’s on! It’s still rolling…”
“No shi—”
CLICK.
Daryna is sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding the test stick in her fingers—carefully, like a rare insect, a wingless dragonfly with a delicate blue fuselage. She sits and looks, unable to take her eyes off of it: to her, the strip seems to be alive. About to move. Or do something else to reveal itself, something completely unpredictable. Especially since, as the instructions claim, after ten minutes, the reading can disappear. Still, what she is seeing is beyond doubt.
It is real. It exists.
Two lines. Two blood-red vertical lines, exactly in the middle. Like a pair of tiny, very straight capillaries that have swelled up and begun to pulsate, instantaneously, and of their own volition.
Over 99% accuracy.
This has happened. And it cannot be undone. She can close your eyes, flush away the test, not tell anyone, and pretend for a while (How long?) that this did not happen; it was just an illusion, a mirage, a sudden instance of astigmatism, double vision. No one else has seen this; no one could testify that there were two lines.
But two is how many there are.
And this is indisputable. Regardless of whether anyone else has seen it. It just—is.
This cannot be replayed. She cannot delete it from her computer, she cannot set the clock back to the “time before,” she cannot say to the darkness, where she cannot see either the director or the cameraman, “I’m sorry, I misspoke there, let’s go back and record again from this point, here, yes.”
It is.
Well, hello then, she thinks—a single breath of her entire being.
And instantly feels terrified.
Who are you?
Somewhere there, inside her, in an invisible cranny, in the self-propelling churn of her hot cells. (Are they actually hot? What is the temperature, pressure, the relative moisture of air in there? Is there even enough air?) Still no one, still not an existence. No machine can find you. But you already are; you are already there. Here.
Like looking into the wrong end of a telescope—a dizzying flight, an immensely long, spiraling tunnel with a golden speck of light at the far end, and coming from there, a moving black dot. She can’t see its shape yet from this far away, but that’s just a matter of time: its approach is irreversible, its velocity known.
Two red vertical lines on the narrow strip of the test stick. The first portrait of a future person.
Of her child.
Ripened: the word surfaces in her memory, something dropped there like a seed from what seems like a thousand years ago. No one speaks like that anymore—ripened—who spoke like that, Grandma Tetyana?
And right away—the next frame, scorchingly vivid, as if it’s just been digitally remastered (Where does it all lie hidden, in what vaults?): little Darochka, Odarka, as her grandmother called her (and she didn’t like it, pouted at Grandma: how crude!), listens, with a massive down blanket pulled all the way over her head (when you dive under a down blanket, you must tuck your feet under you right away and pull your nightdress over them, so as not to lose the warmth: the sheets are stiff and cold, the bed boundless like a snowy desert; in daytime a fluffed-up pyramid of sundry pillows towers on its expanse, pillowcases decorated with strips of embroidery and openwork, whose patterns are also imprinted in her memory as they were on her cheek when she woke up in the morning—you could run your finger over every stitch). The doors are open from the dark around her (a tunnel) to where the fire glows in the stove, where they are talking: her mom (she is the one who brought Darochka to visit Grandmother), Grandma Tetyana, and Aunt Lyusya. Grandma talks loudly as rural people, unaccustomed to whispering so as not to wake someone else, usually do, and Mom keeps shushing at her—every time she does, all three peer from their end of the tunnel into the room with the enormous wooden bed, where Darochka has hidden. Then Grandma Tetyana inquires—loud as a churchbell—“Is she asleep?” and the conversation resumes at the same volume as before.
Darochka is waiting for Mom to come to bed with her (then it’ll be warm), and words she doesn’t quite understand, the resonant and mysterious ripened among them—at first Darochka thinks it’s about a plant, but then realizes it is not—waft toward her, churning her sleep like oars beating on water: “When I was ripened with you, it happened to me too,” rises Grandma Tetyana’s voice (a contralto), and Darochka wishes desperately that her eyes weren’t so heavy and that she could grasp what it is they are talking about, but she can’t—all she gets is a tinge of something unattainably mysterious and solemn, so solemn that Mom has forgotten about Darochka and says something to Grandma Tetyana in a lowered voice, while tossing one new log after another into the stove, to keep the fire going, like in Darochka’s fairytale rhymes, burning high and bright, and Grandma goes on “and I knew I’d have a girl because I had a dream….”