“So you brought the gun to the mall.”
“I did.”
“And then the Rending.”
“And I thought, Mira, I really thought I had done it. One minute this place was bustling with people talking to one another, touching each other. A mother helping a boy with his shoe. A high school kid touching a girl’s necklace. I remember seeing you, Mira. Your little brother was bouncing off the walls and you were kind of looking at him but mostly looking at the boys. Those assholes.”
“Those assholes,” I murmured in agreement.
“Your eyes slid over me. Your eyes and the eyes of hundreds of people. They did not register me. Not with pity or attraction or disdain. Nothing. I was like carpeting. And then the Rending. I opened my eyes and the world was the way I thought it should be. Everyone gone.”
“And we saw you.”
“And you saw me. You actually wanted me with you.”
“Of course we did.”
“No, Mira, not of course. That’s what I’m telling you. ‘Of course’ came after the Rending. I became a human being after the Rending. For the first year I had to hide my glee. Everyone was grieving and I was just so happy I got to be a part of the world.”
“I’m sorry, Chester.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. I still feel guilty that I don’t regret it, the Rending. I have never wished it away or wished for a return to the Before.”
The sparrow lifted from the ground, flew out of my range of vision. Behind its departure there was another movement. Drake was approaching. I could see the knives on his belt and the burlap sack he carried over his shoulder.
“Chester,” I said.
“I see.”
We watched the scene in complete silence. I held on to the handle on the inside of the door as though we were taking turns at eighty miles per hour, as though there were an embankment we might go tumbling down.
Rodney stood as Drake approached. Drake set down the sack gently and then opened it. Rodney squatted down and looked inside for what seemed like a long time but didn’t reach forward to touch. He straightened up again, nodded, reached around behind his back, and pulled the gun from the waist of his pants. He held it out to Drake with his hand wrapped around the muzzle. Drake tucked the gun out of sight. They shook hands and then Rodney lifted up the sack. Both of them turned and walked away. If there were words exchanged, we didn’t hear them. The whole interaction took a few minutes at most. Chester made me wait ten whole minutes before opening the door of the Volvo, before flying across the parking lot to Rodney. To my Baby.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
My Baby was beautiful. My Baby was a blue glass vase, eight inches tall, made to hold only a handful of blooms. My Baby was a crush of cold from Lake Superior, cousin of the Grecian urn, companion to the vases my mother tucked away in boxes. The body fit perfectly into my palm; my fingers curved naturally around her, my thumb fit into the rise of her neck. I ran my thumb around her lip the way my mother would have. There was nothing but air inside but that air smelled faintly like saltwater. Holding my Baby felt like holding everything on my list I’d been missing: stars and foam, blue raspberry slushies and the scent of a sun-warmed dock. My Baby was buoy and plum, pinecone and letterhead. All of it returned to me and was in me when I held my Baby.
It took all the strength I had, all the kindness, to offer the Baby to Rodney and Chester, to let them feel what I felt. They each took her in turn and I could see that nothing entered them. I could see from their faces that what they held in their hands was a vase. This made me a little sad but also pleased; it meant they wouldn’t want to hold her, wouldn’t need to touch her.
I held her while they sat me in a chair in the middle of that parking lot and washed me. I held her while Chester ran a wet rag over the bits of blood on my forehead, my cheeks, my thighs, while Rodney held out underwear, pants, shoes for me to step into. I held her while Chester gathered our supplies, while Rodney held a water bottle to my lips. I held her while we walked and all of those things I’d missed were spun, patterned, dappled inside me: my father’s mixed-up lullabies and his gaze holding mine while he bandaged my knee; Bim chugging a Thomas train down the length of my calf; my mother brushing my sweaty bangs aside to plant a kiss on my forehead. These weren’t just memories. This was the Before springing up alive and living inside me.
I held her in my right hand and Chester took my left arm. I held her in my left hand and Rodney took my right. When we stopped to eat, I placed her on my lap. I smiled a full smile. I saw Rodney and Chester cast concerned glances back and forth and I let their concern float away from me.
We camped for the night and I curled on my side and pressed her to me, against my pliable belly. Rodney was near me but his warmth was a different kind of reminder than hers. I wondered if this is the way mothers felt in the Before, as though a baby were a transmutation of all that they had loved before that moment. Is that what my mother felt when she held me?
The next day was the same: the walking, the road. Except I fashioned a sling so that I could hold her against me without using my hands. All the questions I had thought to ask, everything I’d been rabid to know had vanished. The Baby was enough.
When I woke on the morning of the third day an emptiness was whistling through me. I was a wind tunnel of doubt and grief; a persistent throaty loneliness sailed along my being. Rodney was holding the Baby. He was studying her bottom, as though it contained a sign or clue. Her base was thicker glass and there were a few scratches there. The Watchers would have tried to decipher them as clues. Everyone so intent on the surface of things when it was the essence that mattered.
“I’d like my Baby back now,” I said carefully. I kept the anxiety out of my voice, knew that might cause him to keep her from me.
“OK,” he said. He handed her to me carefully, a little sadly.
Chester hefted his backpack onto his shoulders and Rodney helped me to my feet; we kept walking.
It was the afternoon of the fourth day, when we were about three miles from Zion, that we saw them. We had just crossed a set of railroad tracks, climbed the steepest hill that Highway 77 offered the flat Midwest landscape. We were eating turnips we’d cooked in the fire the night before. She was in her sling, lightly against my chest; there was nothing I needed.
“There,” said Chester, pointing.
Rodney stood. He sighed. “They’re coming.”
“Who?” I said.
“The Watchers.”
I stood too. I could see people. A group of them. Ten? Twenty? It was impossible to say. But enough that this was not simply a band of travelers. I squinted to see if I could decipher Michael among them.
“They want her,” I said.
Chester nodded.
“They want my Baby.”
Rodney ran his hand through his hair, pulled it upward as though trying to detach it from his scalp.
“But you shook on it. I saw you and Drake shake hands.”
“We did.”
“And Michael promised.”
“Mira,” said Chester. “You can’t tell a bunch of people who want a sign to forget the most obvious sign they’ve seen in the last five years.”
“You think Michael’s told them about Zion? About the other Babies?”
“They were always going to come,” said Rodney. “It was just a question of how long we had before they arrived.”
“They’re not moving,” I observed.
“I don’t think they want a confrontation,” said Chester, “at least not here.”
“They want her,” I said again.
“They might want you, too.” Rodney put his hand protectively around my shoulders. His touch was fine. Neither welcome nor unwelcome. My Baby hummed her warmth against my chest.
“They want all the Babies,” said Chester.
“It will be fine,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
“We could try to move at night. Head in a different direction. Find a place to hide out.
She’s less obvious now that she’s not pregnant.” Rodney spoke as though I were a five-year-old or a dog, someone incapable of making rational decisions about her own safety. I knew I should be furious but my Baby broke up the anger and replaced it with the drip of a strawberry milkshake down the side of a tall glass, my mother’s lap full of clean but unmatched socks, the feather-light pages of my father’s Bible.
Chester nodded, staring at the Watchers as he spoke. “I could go on to Zion. That’s true. Maybe they’ll be ready for this by now.”
Rodney studied Chester’s profile. “But you think they need me. You think I’d be abandoning them.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“This isn’t the time to speak in fucking fortunes, Chester. Tell me what you think.”
“I think you’d be abandoning Zion, yes, but you’d probably be saving Mira and your Baby.”
“Probably?”
Then something passed between them that I felt but didn’t see because I was studying the reflection of the sky on her, canoes of lighter blue that skimmed up her sides.
“Let’s build a fire.” Rodney sluffed his backpack off his shoulders.
“It’s four p.m.,” said Chester.
“It signals to them that we’re staying here for the night. We’ll go the rest of the way tonight. After they’re asleep.”
“Presumably asleep,” Chester interjected.
“That should give us a couple hours, at least, before they find us tomorrow.”
“If they find us,” I countered.
“Mira, there are roads. The distance from here to Zion can be summarized in a description of two turns. They know how to get to Zion.” Rodney’s voice had an edge but my Baby rounded it out. Smoothed it down.
“Just don’t let them take her,” I said.
Chester squeezed my hand. Rodney had already turned to look for kindling.
For me, walking at night was not so different from walking during the day. I carried her in the sling and the feeling of fullness, wholeness remained. Images swished through me, not simply as memory but as essence. Bim laughing, the edges of his lips tinged with chocolate milk. My father, letting me practice tying knots using the rope of his alb. Over, under, around. On my mother’s palm, three small piles of spice: cumin, cinnamon, salt. I am wrapped around her hip and she instructs me to add the spices to the pot of chili in any order I please.
And then came images untethered to any certain moment: snow squeaking below boots, our garage door pulled up and lowered, the sun casting squares of light on floorboards, couches, tiles. Before I had her, to remember meant to see the image but also to feel the distance between that moment and the one in which I resided. I couldn’t conjure the Before without conjuring sadness or nostalgia, grief or guilt. But now the distance had collapsed. Everything that I remembered inhabited me: chilled cantaloupe, cheeks rubbed with dandelion petals, the pull of the tide around my ankles, the rattling of change in pockets.
The rattling. I heard it now. The way a dream changes to reflect the waking sounds around it. Chester was beside me. Had there always been that rattling? The last few days? Had I only just now noticed it?
I stopped. Whispered because night seemed to ask for whispering. “What is that, Chester?”
“What is what?”
“That rattling sound?”
He looked at Rodney, who shrugged. Chester reached into his pocket and pulled out the bullets. The four remaining bullets he had pulled from the chamber of the gun before returning it to Drake.
“They weren’t stings,” I said.
“No. They’re bullets.”
“In Michael’s pockets. He was always rattling them. I assumed they were stings. But he never put a thing in his mouth. Never once.” I bent over and as I did, the Baby fell away from me slightly. The place where she had touched my chest felt raw.
“That’s why Drake didn’t check the chamber,” said Chester quietly.
“What?” said Rodney.
Chester was standing very still. Arms at his sides. Eyes closed. “When you gave Drake the gun he just took it. He didn’t check. It’s because it didn’t matter. Michael had ammunition all along. He only needed the gun.”
I straightened up and felt the bulb of the vase lodge back between my ribs. “We keep going,” I said, as though someone had presented another option.
Rodney threw his head back then and screamed. A scream mixed with a groan. Like some superhero unable to emerge from his human form, his transformation curtailed. Chester kept his eyes closed.
I began to walk. At some point, they followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
And then there was Zion. At first it made me sad to see it. The Zoo, for all its internal monstrosities, still occupied structures that were substantial, tall. An aura of permanence drifted around them although, like all structures post-Rending, they carried the signs of absence. But we’d made Zion from scratch. I’d forgotten how low the buildings were, how insubstantial. The Center, the Clinic, the cobbled walls of the barracks where we slept—all huddled within reach of Larry and Curly and Moe. Zion looked like a shantytown, a sulking child. In spite of my Baby’s presence against my chest, when I first saw Zion again, I felt despair.
But as we grew closer, the familiar began to exert itself. In the orchard, picked ghost fruit covered the bottom of the bin with the thin gray crack. I touched the scabbed bark of a tree, picked a piece of the fruit and let it shrivel to nothing on my tongue. At the edge of the orchard stood the baby buggy, its wheels slightly sunk into the saturated earth. There was Rodney’s house, stilted and dumb. There were the Sorting Stations. In the household pile a few Tupperware lids and plastic cups, strands of Packer football lights, a silver toaster in which someone (probably Cal) had placed two torn cereal boxes, likely to suggest decorative possibilities. There, pressed to the outside of the Clinic, was the garbage can Asher and Rodney had been attaching the day Lana told me she was pregnant two and a half years earlier. There were the blue stadium seats that bridged the space between Chester’s room and mine. There, in front of me, the Nesting Facility. And a single, familiar figure holding vigil in the gray half-light of dawn.
Lana was wearing her Dodgers sweatshirt and a pair of polyester bell-bottom pants. A lantern dangled from her arm. Her hair was down, long and frothy around her shoulders.
“You’re here,” she said.
“I’m here,” I said.
She set down the lantern.
“They’re coming,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me.
“Who? Chester and Rodney?”
“Yes. And the Watchers.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “We thought—” she let her voice trail off. The presence of my Baby made me feel benevolent but not particularly interested in what she or they thought.
“Because of my Baby,” I said.
“May I see her?” she asked. And you will think it absurd but when she said “her” she said it with the right weight, with the understanding that the object possessed significance, importance. Rodney and Chester had not understood this.
I pulled her out of the sling. Lana stood very still, looking. I turned her in my hands, touching the curve of the neck and the edge of the opening, running my thumb over the scratches on the dark blue bottom.
“She’s beautiful,” said Lana, her voice lined with velvet.
“We need to have a meeting.” It was Rodney, behind me.
“Hi Lana,” said Chester.
“Hi Chester,” said Lana quietly. Then: “Hi Rodney.”
Rodney didn’t say anything. If he made a gesture to acknowledge her presence, I didn’t see it.
“We need to wake people up. We need to meet,” he said again.
“We have to do the ceremony first,” said Lana.
“We don’t have time.”
“If we don’t do the ceremony, the rest is no good.” Lana took my hand. “This way,” she said. Rodney and Chester headed toward the living spaces.
/> A Nest was on the pedestal in the center room, but behind the pedestal the shelves of the Nesting Facility were empty. Each shelf had been extended so it could serve as a bunk for a visitor instead.
“Where are they?” I asked, gesturing at the shelves.
“They’re safe,” she said.
The Nest on the pedestal was a lampshade turned upside down. The shade itself was dark gray but Lana had cut slices out of the fabric: stars, a sun, a comet, even a collection of tiny holes that I took to be rain. She’d backed each place of absence with a piece of fabric in a different color so that the celestial figures stood out as yellow and red and gold and blue against the gray. Inside the Nest the pieces of backing hadn’t been trimmed but instead padded the base, loosely swirled together to create a place of bright comfort. Lana reached her hand into the Nest and moved the fabric to the side so I could see that the base itself was one of Zephyr’s mixtures, not smooth but peppered with little indentations. “Those are fingerprints,” said Lana, “everyone in Zion.”
“How did you finish this so quickly?” I asked.
“I had help,” she said.
I held my Baby to my chest with my left hand and touched the tiny indentations with my right.
“May I hold her?” asked Lana, so quietly and tentatively that I wasn’t sure I’d heard.
I took a deep breath and handed the Baby to her and the world came back to me as I knew it would. The complex mixture of anger and grief and fear I felt so acutely that had Lana not been holding the Baby I probably would have hugged her until her ribs cracked. Because I loved her and I also wanted to hear the sound of her breaking.
She looked like the same Lana who had put her feet in my lap, who had touched my belly and said I’ll be back for this. But she hadn’t come back. And when I’d tried to rescue her, when I’d gone all that way, she hadn’t even looked at me. And she hadn’t told me, ever, that she’d known Rodney. Or that she’d had a baby, an embryo, growing inside her. Or what it had been like to lie on a table having that embryo sucked out of her.
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