He was irritating, but he had a point. And I wanted to show Joseph I wasn’t completely incompetent.
Cal devised a plan. He started asking me questions, personal questions. The first being—how did you feel when you first found out you were pregnant? I eyed him suspiciously, replying that I was really, really angry. Violated. Seeing that was not a great line of questioning, he continued to ask me about the baby. How I felt, when did it change, what made me think I could be a mother?
“Stop. None of this will help me,” I said crankily. My patience was not thin, but non-existent.
“Ok, ok. I know,” he said. Rubbing his chin, he pointed at Joseph. “How does he make you feel?”
I closed my eyes, dreaming, thinking of Joseph’s warm arms around me, his soft lips parting mine. The way he pressed me up against a tree and buried his face in my hair, kissing my neck, sliding his hand down my arms to my waist.
“Like gold,” I whispered, forgetting I was answering a question, forgetting there was someone staring at me. I opened my eyes and my cheeks flushed hot at Cal’s intense gaze.
“Hmm. Like gold,” Cal grinned with a faraway expression. He paused and I waited for him to snap out of it. When he didn’t, I rattled the arm of his chair. “And you are of Spanish origin right?” he said chirpily, coming back to reality.
“I suppose. I mean, in old terms, I guess I’m half-Indian, half-Spanish.” It felt strange to say it. These terms were rarely used in Pau, banned outside of the classroom. They were considered inflammatory.
Cal stared at me a long time, picking over my features, his eyes pausing over my nose, my ears, my neck, and to my chest. I wanted to kick him. He returned to my eyes and kept peering, until I coughed and turned away, giving my attention to the baby as I wrapped him and tried to rock him to sleep. The way Cal looked at me was completely foreign. I didn’t know whether to be scared or flattered.
“Interesting,” he said, peculiarly fascinated. “Those eyes…” He stopped talking mid-sentence and pulled out a small reader from his pocket. At least that’s what I thought it was, until he started typing things in and reading. I was curious but something told me not to get too close, so I hovered above him from my bed.
“What about Hema?” I screwed up my nose; it sounded too much like Hessa. He laughed, a low sound that didn’t quite touch his eyes. It sounded like Joseph and I didn’t want to put the two together in my mind. “Ok, maybe not.” He returned to the screen. “Oriole, Orville, Hemen, Kunal, Orlando, Kin, Jin, Paz.”
“Wait. Go back a few.”
“Kin?”
“No.”
“Orlando?”
I paused. Orlando. I turned it over in my head, pulling it out and laying it across the child like a blanket. Orlando. He opened his eyes and looked at me. One blue and one brown eye framed with long, blond eyelashes. My eyes, Joseph’s frame. I wondered if there was a nice-sounding name for defective. Probably not. I let out a giggle. No, Orlando fit, a beautiful name for a beautiful child, a one-of-a-kind child. Something materialized in me, or maybe was there all along, and now it was making its presence strongly felt. When I looked at this baby, I saw beauty. I saw love. The connection was there. I took his tiny hand in mine and put it to my face. Soft and sharp.
I nodded. “Orlando is good.”
Cal was looking at me with a quizzical expression. He opened his mouth to speak but Matthew entered the room, flanked by two women I didn’t recognize.
He just stared at me with tired, worried eyes and I knew what he was going to say. I watched his lips moving slowly, noticing the dryness in the corners. The words came out like they were underwater. A dull thrumming noise that I understood to mean ‘Apella will probably lose her baby’ and the words not spoken, ‘It’s your fault’. I felt the pain of his words, each one smarting like the lash of a cane. Leaving a message slapped into my skin, a debt I could not repay.
“Can I see her?”
He shook his head. “Give her some time,” he said, his usually bright face looking worn, tired. I felt so very sorry for him. He seemed to have invested so much in our well-being and I could tell this was weighing on him heavily. If the operation wasn’t successful, Apella’s sacrifice would be for nothing.
I wanted to say something comforting but all that I could think was: You have to make this work and you better make this work. So I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to add to the pile of rocks and bodies Matthew already had teetering atop his shoulders.
He managed a weak smile, thin-lipped, no teeth. “We’ll take him now. If you want to say something, now would be the time.”
I nodded. “I just need to put the baby, I mean, Orlando, to bed.” Matthew raised his eyebrows at the name but didn’t comment. I padded off quickly. I laid the child down in his cot across from my room. My eyes washed softly over the tiny bundle. If Joseph didn’t survive—at the thought of this I felt my insides turning to stone, like a snap frost it crept up my spine and spread like poison—would I be able to make this work? Unfortunately, I knew the answer, so I didn’t finish my thought.
I walked back to my room slowly, inching my feet forward. I felt like I was moving through high grass and there were animal eyes on me, waiting to pounce. Matthew was watching me too, hands on his hips, tapping his feet. He was anxious to get moving. Drawing it out was not going to help. Invisible arms shoved me forward. I tripped over myself and into the room.
Cal was still sitting in a chair, looking at his feet. I moved to Joseph.
His face was a memory. I filled in the spaces, inserted pink to his yellow skin, added weight to his thinner body. I leaned down and kissed him. The smallest glint of gold sparked through me. He was still there. I leaned down to his ear and whispered, “I named our son. But I’m not going to tell you his name until you ask me.” An ache shot through me as I remembered one of our first conversations back in Pau. Joseph had said he wouldn’t bring up the subject of my father until I asked him. We still had so much to talk about, so many things to learn about each other. It wouldn’t end here. It couldn’t.
The nurses disconnected him from the machines. One put a suction cup over his mouth attached to a balloon and squeezed it at even intervals. I let my hand trail the edge of the bed until it connected with nothing. They disappeared.
“This will take all night, Rosa. I suggest you try and sleep,” Matthew said, rubbing his tired, creased forehead.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, sure thing.” As if I could sleep.
Now it was just Cal and me.
“Do you know what they are going to do to him?” I asked, blinking away stray tears.
He looked up from his feet, his eyes hopeful. “No, but Matt’s very good, the best.”
Something was stirring in me. Old feelings of curiosity long suppressed. “How did he get that way? I mean, do you have Classes like we do?”
Cal laughed at me, and I hardened. I glared at him and he swallowed the laugh like a bitter pill. “No. No Classes. Matt wanted to be a doctor so he studied to become one.”
This was an amazing and confusing revelation for me. People could choose their path in life? The idea of that amount of freedom was, surprisingly, a little terrifying. And like that, the seductive distraction of finding out more about the Survivors took over. I leaned into Cal intensely. “What else can you tell me?” His cheeks were pink, surprised by my sudden closeness.
“Not much, I’m afraid. I’m not supposed to say much until you take the pledge. Besides, you really need to see it for yourself.”
“The what?”
Cal explained that all survivors had to take a pledge. It was a way of securing your allegiance, to the secrecy of their home and also to each other. Everyone had to take care of each other and help any other survivors who came along, which was not many, apparently. We were the first in many, many years and the only known escapees of the Woodlands. So that’s what Matt meant when he said it was his duty. It sounded nice but a tiny warning light was flashing, a faint, red glow. Was I swapping one cult for another?