by Kate Morris
She nods and packages all of the cut watermelon chunks into a plastic container she finds under the island. How she knows her way around this strange kitchen, he’ll never understand. Women just seem better at finding things. It’s okay with him because Simon knows men are better at other things like killing people. He doesn’t wish for a role reversal anytime soon. Women are naturally smaller and built differently, not for war and dragging men out of a firefight, but for giving birth and nurturing a baby. To him, their jobs seem a heck of a lot harder with a much grander amount of responsibility. He would have no idea how to raise a child. It would grow up more screwed up than him. People have always called women the weaker sex, but they must not have ever met any women like the McClanes.
“All done!” she announces. “Gotta go. I’ll be back tonight.”
“Wait,” Simon says to her and stands. “Where are you going?”
“The town’s having a party to celebrate the victory, and I’m going. Duh! It’s more of a necessity actually since so many people are here right now and away from their homes who need to be fed. Weren’t you wondering why I just cut up two watermelons?”
He looks around her in the sink and sees an excess of peelings. She must’ve cut the first one while he was rifling her panty drawer like some sort of perv.
“I’ll get those scraps later. Loretta’s chickens and ducks love them.”
He has no idea who Sam means, so it’s probably a woman in town she’s befriended. Sam befriends everyone. People just naturally love her. He can’t blame them, but he would like certain people to stop loving her quite so much. And stop inviting her to lunches and parties. If he sniped Henry from the roof of this house, would anyone know it was him? He smiles ruefully as she rambles.
“…then some of the townspeople are going to be playing their instruments. It’s going to be a relief, especially for the people in the medical house who will be able to hear the music. Music’s good for…”
“Are you going to be gone after dark? I need to sleep a few hours before I head to the clinic.”
“I’ll be fine, Simon. Everyone will be there, even the soldiers who are still here.”
“That hardly makes me feel better,” he retorts, his temper rising. He knows she is saying that Henry will be there. He’s sure there is no such luck that Henry left town, especially not while Sam is still in it.
“Well, bye!” she says with a huge, defiant smile on her face.
“I can carry that for you,” he offers, trying to stall her for any reason, reluctant for Sam to leave.
She laughs gaily and says, “Simon, I hardly need help taking these to the party. Goodness.”
All he can see is Henry kissing her in front of the clinic. It makes him so angry and disgusted. He doesn’t want her going to this party but can’t stop her, either.
“Right. I’m sure you can take that with you,” he says, his mind racing. Inspiration strikes and Simon leans in and tells her, “Take this, too.”
Then he slides his hand behind her neck and tips her mouth toward him for a quick kiss. It isn’t like the one that Henry gave her. It lasts much longer and is more intimate. She leans into him, the giant bowl of watermelon between them. Simon pulls back and stares down at her, at the flushed color of her cheeks, the dark hue of her soft lips.
“Have fun,” he whispers. “I’ll see you later tonight.”
She stutters and even stumbles forward, “Um…ok, thanks.”
Simon grins as he watches her walk awkwardly toward the front door, glance over her shoulder at him, to which he waves, and leave the house. Good. He doesn’t want her hanging out all day with Henry having fun and not thinking about him while he’s asleep so that he can stay up all night watching their patients. He doesn’t even want her going but knows he can’t stop her. Until she finds someone that he approves of, Simon will keep interfering in her interest in Henry. It may be the only tactic he can use to keep them apart. If this fails, then the sniping from the rooftop option is still on the table.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Reagan
“Reagan!” someone whispers in the stairwell to her and John’s bedroom.
He is dead asleep to the world, Charlotte is in her bassinette also asleep, and Jacob is in the basement being one of the big kids tonight, but she is studying at her desk with the small lamp still on. She looks at the time. Two-thirty a.m. Reagan rises and goes to the opening to the second floor and sees Paige.
After going carefully down the dark stairwell, she asks, “What is it?”
“I think I need your help. I didn’t want to wake your grandpa. He was so tired when they got home today.”
“Yeah, he was,” she agrees, worried about her grandfather, who keeps pushing himself too hard as if he is still twenty-five and can work the long, grueling hours of an E.R. physician. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had this problem before. I’m kinda’ freaking out,” she says, holding her stomach.
She realizes Paige has come to her with a medical problem. The way she’s holding her stomach makes Reagan worry that something has gone terribly wrong from her shooting incident, although that seems illogical since it was a while ago and she hasn’t presented any signs of long-term side-effects since then.
“Tell me your symptoms,” Reagan says and touches Paige’s shoulder briefly.
“I’m bleeding. Like really bad,” Paige answers.
“From where? Vaginally?”
She nods, her face a picture of fear and dread.
“Come on,” Reagan says, leading her downstairs. “Let’s go out to the shed.”
“No!” Paige whispers frantically. “I need to use the bathroom again.”
“Ok, I’ll wait,” she says. Then a thought hits her, and she grabs her arm and adds, “Paige, don’t flush, ‘kay?”
Paige shoots her a funny look as if she finds the idea unpleasant but nods anyway. She uses the first-floor half bath off the kitchen and comes out quite a few minutes later, so long that Reagan asks her twice if she’s doing okay.
“You didn’t flush, did you?”
“No,” she whispers, her color pale.
“Meet me in the shed,” Reagan says.
Paige shakes her head, “There’s no bathroom out there that works.”
“It’s fine,” Reagan reassures her. “We’ll use buckets to flush the toilet out there. Don’t worry. You can still use that bathroom.”
She’s referring to the toilet closet in the back of the building, which they rarely use. Paige nods reluctantly and leaves. Reagan hurries in to inspect the contents of the commode and has a terrible hunch. She flushes, washes her hands, and leaves out the back door where she runs into Kelly on the porch.
“Everything ok? I just saw Paige go into the med shed. What are you two doing up?”
“Um, yeah, everything’s cool, Kel,” she tells him and furrows her brow. “Don’t tell Cory we’re in there, ok?”
He frowns but nods and says, “Sure. What’s going on?”
“Just don’t tell anyone we went in there and don’t let Cory come in.”
Her brother-in-law frowns harder but says, “Got it. I’ll make sure.”
“Thanks,” she says.
Reagan rushes to the shed where Paige is sitting on the exam table already.
“Did you flush the toilet? I don’t want anyone to see that. What a mess. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Yes, I flushed it. Don’t worry. When did this start?”
“’Bout an hour ago. I thought I was just having a rough period.”
“Has it been heavy like this before?”
“No, never.”
Reagan sighs, “And the other times you went to the bathroom tonight, were they just as heavy and filled with clumps and clots and…tissues?”
Paige nods. “Am I dying or something?”
Reagan shakes her head and says, “Pass anything particularly large?”
Again, she gets a nod in return, “Yeah, the second
time I went to pee when I noticed bleeding. It felt like a ping-pong ball size. That’s when I really started freaking out. I didn’t wanna’ wake you.”
“No, you did the right thing. Wake us. Always wake us.”
Paige nods with frightened eyes and bites her lower lip nervously. Reagan takes her pulse and temperature. Her heart is racing, but she’s pretty sure it is from fright.
“When was your last normal period?”
Reagan doesn’t even start a chart on this. There’s no need.
“Um…let me see,” Paige says, clearly counting the weeks in her head. “I missed last month. Well, I didn’t miss. I just spotted lightly. And the month before about the same. I thought maybe I was just losing weight again like I did when I was on the road. I never had a period then.”
“Right, because your body weight dropped too low. Happens to anorexic and bulimic girls all the time, or apocalypse survivors,” she says, attempting light humor to relax Paige.
She smiles and nods. “Then, of course, as everyone knows, I thought I might be pregnant and took that stupid test and everyone found out!”
Reagan offers a sympathetic frown and says, “You were.”
“What?” she asks with confusion.
“You were pregnant. You’re miscarrying.”
“What?” she repeats much more loudly and in obvious shock, touching her fingertips to her lips.
Reagan frowns, tries to offer a comforting touch to Paige’s bare knee and says, “I’m sorry.”
“I took that test. It was negative. This has to be something else.”
Reagan shakes her head and says, “I should’ve insisted on a blood test. The pregnancy tests at the clinic are four years old. They might not be so reliable anymore. Or you tested too soon, and the hormones weren’t setting off the trigger. I’m sorry I didn’t more thoroughly test you.”
“It’s not your fault. If I’m not miscarrying, then what else could it be?”
“You are. I’m positive,” Reagan declares with confidence.
Paige looks at her hands in her lap and frowns. Her slim hands are shaking. “I can’t believe this.”
“It’s gonna be all right,” Reagan states.
Paige grimaces.
“Need to go again?”
She gets a nod before Paige scoots off the exam table and walks quickly to the bathroom.
“Damn,” Reagan whispers to the empty room.
Then she goes outside and pumps a bucket of water. When Paige has finished, Reagan pours it down the toilet to force it to flush. She returns to find Paige at the sink washing her hands. Over the next few hours, they repeat the process quite a few times. Reagan doesn’t mind the sleep she’s missing, but she only wishes it wasn’t happening for this reason. Paige is a dear friend now. She’s Simon’s sister and Cory’s love interest. She’s a part of their family, and Reagan hates to see her going through something so traumatic, especially alone. Of course, if Simon were here, this would be a lot worse. They’d all be dragging him back off of Cory.
“I know you aren’t going to want this, but I’d like to check you just to make sure everything is doing all right. If you don’t pass this entirely, you could get a very serious infection.”
“Sure,” Paige says weakly.
Her color is pale, which is also making dark circles stand out under her silvery gray eyes. She looks exhausted and spent.
Reagan checks her, careful to be as gentle as possible because she knows how raw everything is feeling right now. When she is finished, she presses sterile, thick cloths against her and helps Paige slide her panties up to hold them in place.
“I don’t think there’s much left to pass,” Reagan says, helping her sit upright again. “You’ll probably have something similar to a heavy period for the next few days. I want you to take it easy.”
“’Kay,” Paige says, her head hanging, her eyes avoiding meeting Reagan’s.
“Why don’t you lie down on the cot in the back of the building. I’ll stay in the one next to you. There’s no sense in going back to the house. I need to keep an eye on you for the next few days, tonight very closely.”
“Why?” Paige asks in a flat tone, following her like a zombie.
“Just in case you’d start hemorrhaging or having a fever. We don’t want either of those things to happen. Plus, I’ll help when you need to use the bathroom.”
“I don’t want you to have to sleep out here,” she argues weakly as she sits on the low cot.
“I’m fine. Used to it actually. I’ll just run up to the house and let Sue know to feed Charlotte when she wakes up.”
“Wait!” Paige blurts quickly and grabs Reagan’s hand with desperation on her face.
“What is it?”
She looks around before saying, “Please don’t tell anyone, Reagan.”
“I won’t. Not Cory, either.”
“I mean it. Your family probably already thinks I’m the biggest whore there is for coming here and sleeping with Cory. And then, come to find out, I really did get myself knocked up like a loser.”
Tears slip down Paige’s upturned face. Reagan squats to be at eye level with her. She is shaking, so Reagan slips off her own sweater and wraps Paige in it.
“Hey, don’t say that. Nobody, nobody thinks that.”
Paige shrugs as if she doesn’t believe her. Then her shoulders slump.
“I mean it, Paige. Nobody in this family believes that. And trust me, dear, there also isn’t anyone in this family without sin.”
“Your family is so old-fashioned and reserved, though. Plus, now they all know about me and Cory.”
“So? I slept with John before we got hitched,” she confesses softly, earning a surprised look from Paige. “Yep, it’s true. We had sex. Quite a few times, actually. He wanted to get married- kinda’ like Cory. I didn’t, so he left.”
“He did?”
“Yes, that asshole,” she admonishes jokingly. Paige smiles gently. “Went to live over on the Johnson’s farm because they were still driving around the country looking for their relatives. He took Jacob, too. That really pissed me off.”
“I’m sure,” Paige agrees.
“It all worked out. We got married. I even wore a damn dress if you can believe that,” Reagan jokes, getting another smile.
“But someone like Hannah…I don’t know…I really like her. I feel like such a skank when I’m around her now, now that she knows about me and Cory.”
Reagan chuckles. “Yeah? Hannie? Pure as the driven snow? I almost had to kill your boyfriend’s brother.”
“Cory’s not my boyfriend.”
“Yeah, whatever you say.”
Paige frowns, “Why’d you almost kill Kelly?”
“He was sleeping with my little sister. I found out ‘cuz she got a UTI,” she says. At Paige’s frown, she explains, “Urinary tract infection. Bladder infection. Same thing basically. You get it from not urinating after sex. Men are gross. They can give us cooties.”
Paige chuckles.
“No, I’m just kidding. But they were gettin’ it on under all our noses. Grandpa wasn’t too happy about that one, either. I’m sure it was all Hannie, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s Hannah!” Reagan says with a smile. “Once she set her sights on Kelly, he didn’t stand a chance.”
“I can see why he would’ve been so drawn to her.”
Reagan nods. She has no doubt that Hannie’s innocence is what drew Kelly to her. That and her big boobs, probably.
“But your grandfather…”
“Would never judge you. He doesn’t hate you. As a matter of fact, he likes you. He’s said it many times. He’s just strict about stuff, but don’t worry. It doesn’t make him dislike you. Grandpa’s got a past, too. Everyone has sinned. It’s what we do. We’re humans, sent here to do God’s works, but He knew we would never be without sin.”
“Some more than others.”
“Yep! You are flawed. You’re suppo
sed to be,” Reagan says, brushes Paige’s red hair behind her ear, and stands again. “And I’m as fucked up as the next asshole. We all are. Now, lie down and rest. I’ll be back.”
She leaves to the sound of Paige laughing. It’s a good thing. The not-good thing is that she finds Cory and Kelly standing near the shed outside.
“What’s going on? Is Paige in there? I just went up to check on her, make sure she was all right…”
Reagan frowns at Cory, “Why were you checking on her?”
He shakes his head. “She didn’t eat anything at dinner and looked sick or in pain. Is that who’s in there? Is she sick or something?”
“She’s fine.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Reagan looks at Kelly, then at his little brother, who is very distraught at the thought of his lover being ill. Unfortunately, as much as she’d like to tell him the truth, she made a promise to Paige.
“She’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“But what is it, Reagan?” Kelly asks this time.
She weighs her decision quickly and says, “Girl problems. You lugs gonna help with that?”
They both cringe, step back physically, and shake their heads.
“Oh, ok. Sure. No prob,” Cory says. “Just let us know if you need anything.”
“Buckets of water. Just leave them outside the door,” she says, knowing they won’t question.
Reagan laughs and walks around them. She calls over her shoulder to them not to enter the shed. She probably doesn’t really have to say this, though. With the looks on their faces, she doubts either of them would’ve done so.
She returns a short time later after she has pumped and taken Charlotte to Sue for her feeding. She brings Paige some hot tea laced with painkillers. She is lying down under a blanket, resting her head on a pillow.
“Were you talking to Cory?” she immediately asks.
“Yes, don’t worry. I didn’t tell him anything.”
She breathes a sigh of relief, “Thanks. Sorry I put you in that position. Can you not tell your family, either?”
“No, I won’t tell anyone,” Reagan says as she sits on the other cot near her. “Did you go again?”
“Yeah,” she answers. “It was a lot less this time.”