by Nicole Snow
13
Hard Won (Kara)
Eighteen Months Later
It's starting to feel normal.
Coming home to our beautiful castle on the shore after a long day at Grounded, only rivaled by our lovely corporate condo in Seattle. I take over for our nanny and put dinner on, usually having an hour or two for our little boy and me, before Ryan comes walking through the door.
When I huddle on the sofa with our son, Joseph, I marvel at the beautiful boy we've created.
He's calm, strong willed, and has his father's eyes. He'll have a sibling in another year, one more beautiful link in the long chain of our love.
These evenings alone, I think about the past a lot. I remember what he said on our honeymoon – you're priceless.
But it's wrong, even if it makes me smile. It's our love that's truly special, irreplaceable, a love like I've never had and never will have with another man.
When you meet the one, you know. You'll fight to bring him home when he lays out his heart, miss him when he's gone, and embrace every second chance.
I'm nodding off with our baby boy in my arms when I hear the door open. I don't look up until he's standing behind me, laying his hand on my shoulder, his intoxicating scent filling the space between us.
“Welcome home.”
“Where's my kiss?” He brushes his lips against my neck, a reminder that words are cheap every time we get to have another evening together.
Smiling, I turn my face up, and we kiss. He runs strong fingers through my hair, tugging loose strands down my back, running his stubble against my neck when he pulls away.
He still excites me in a way that should be impossible.
Hell, impossible is what all of this should be.
Ryan Caspian has taught me about faith in his love. It happens whenever I start doubting him, whenever I wonder if this lifestyle will last forever, or if he can really keep spreading happiness to our whole family, and our town.
“You're a little late,” I tell him, noticing the time.
“Your brother called before I left the office. He wanted to set up the installation next week, and I told him I'd check it out personally after it's done.”
“You're crazy if you think anybody can afford to bring a driverless car into his new garage,” I say, letting my tongue tease him between my teeth.
“No, not now. But in five, ten years?” he says, pulling my hair again. His fingers always make me yearn for more. “I'm planning for the long-term, Kara-bou. Just like I do with everything. And your brother's graciously decided to set up his business with the first prototypes designed to service the new models.”
“Sure, Nostradamus.” I stand up, turning our little boy to face his dad. Ryan leans down and kisses his forehead. “It makes me sad to think there probably won't be a part-time job in Lilydale Garage someday. It'll all be robots in fifteen years.”
“Babe, he'll do anything he wants, and so will the rest of our children. Love is enough for any future, robots and all,” he says, moving in, resting his forehead against mine.
He's there so long I can't help but smile. “I guess. Love, and money, is surely enough.”
“Well, there's always plenty of that.”
He isn't kidding. His company has exploded the last couple years. It's easily worth another billion, maybe more. I don't obsessively follow the articles anymore, like I used to, when I was settling into my role as a billionaire's wife.
I know how to act in public at his corporate events in Seattle and throughout the U.P. It scared me at first, but I learned to adapt. Every dinner feels more natural, and my smile is real every time I lift my glass for a toast.
Thankfully, amid all the changes, some things stay the same.
In Split Harbor, I'm still just Kara. Not Mrs. Caspian, married to a celebrity. I'm the girl who serves up the best coffee and cherry pie on this slice of Superior shore.
“What'll it be tonight?” I ask. I love that he lets me cook for him, even though we could easily hire a caterer for every meal.
“How about that new Mediterranean recipe you've been wanting to try? We haven't had lamb since Easter.” He smiles, taking our baby boy from my arms. Joseph bounces up and down until he cracks a smile and giggles. “We're as rich as most Greek billionaires. Might as well eat like them, too.”
I pour him a glass of wine and get to work. He chills on the couch with our little boy, relaxing for ten minutes, before he puts our baby in the play pen and joins me at the counter.
He's humming along with the radio while we chop vegetables. It takes me a few minutes to recognize the song, but when I do, I'm joining him.
It's a miracle I can hum anything through my smile, which couldn't possibly get any wider.
It's Stairway to Heaven. The Zeppelin tune that always used to play over the radio in daddy's garage, the same song I remember hearing the day I fell face down in the oil slick, tumbling into the love of my life.
It's taken years to reach this love, this happiness. Time for thousands of songs, just as many tears, and two marriage proposals. Sometimes, like now, it hits me all at once in a giant wave that makes my head spin.
I have to focus, moving the knife on the cutting board, flashing him a smile when I get up to grab something from the refrigerator. His rich blue eyes remind me there's one thing embedded in my mind and in my heart.
I'd marry him again.
I'd do it a thousand times over.
Through tears, through grins, through countless winding years, I love my Ryan. Loved him when he was just the orphan kid working in my father's garage, and when he came home a billionaire, going from heartbreaker to hero before my eyes. I'll love him when he's seventy, everything on his face going silver and pale except those gorgeous blue eyes.
Every day I have on this earth, I'm his alone. I'll still be smiling, wiping away tears, next year when I'm holding our next born or renewing our vows.
Second chances are real. Every hour since embracing mine, I'm reminded how lucky I am.
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Kisses,
Nicole Snow
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I: Tick-Tock (Penny)
It's only ten o'clock in the morning, and I'm completely boned.
No, not in the way I want to be. There's nothing handsome, alpha, or inked about the middle aged doctor rattling off my lab results, and they're not pretty.
I'm sitting in his office, trying to listen to what he's saying, before I ask if there's been a horrible screw up.
Wishful thinking. Dr. Potter, a thin balding man who can't stop giving me the most sympathetic look in the world, doesn't make mistakes.
“Just to confirm, we ran your blood test three times before reporting the results to the CDC, as required under Federal law. There's no mistaking it.” He holds a finger up, as if he's read my mind. “I'm sincerely sorry to deliver the bad news, Ms. Silvers. The fever and sweats you've been complaining about should have already diminished. They won't be back. As for the long-term consequences –“
He stops when I choke up. Long-term...that's really what he wants to call it?
He's just told me my blood test came back positive for the fucking Zeno virus. I'm never going to be a mom.
Not unless I get pregnant next month, which seems about as likely as the wiry old doctor ripping off his face and revealing an Adonis underneath. One who'll wink at me and volunteer to be a donor.
Yeah, nobody's that lucky. And if there's anything I'm sure about today, it's my luck running out.
It's my fault for taking that humanitarian trip to Cuba, where one bad mosquito bite was waiting to change my life forever. I can feel the spot under my elbow where the hot red welt used to be. Biting my lip, I reach down and scratch it, even though there's nothing there anymore.
Hot blood races through my cheeks. I'm shaking. Sixty seconds away from breaking down.
Another embarrassment I don't need while I'm glued to this chair, unable to put as many miles as I can between myself and this hellish consultation.
“Ms. Silvers, please...it's going to be all right,” he says in his best dad voice, reaching over, pressing a reassuring hand down on my shoulder. It's not helping. “If you'll allow me, I'd like to review the positives in your situation: infertility is the only clinically known side effect of Zeno syndrome. You won't suffer anything more dire. Plus everything I've read in the journals lately sounds promising. They're working on a treatment. There's a real chance Zeno induced infertility may be reversible with good time, if the research pays off.”
If? Until now, I've held in the tears. Now, they're coming, wet and ugly and full of angst.
“Easy for you to say!” I sputter. “I never should've taken that trip. I wouldn't have even thought about it if I'd known it meant giving up my chances to ever be a mom. God, if I'd just stuck to Miami for the beaches, gave myself a normal getaway like most people...”
“No. You can't beat yourself up. Besides, Zeno has been working its way into our coastal communities, Ms. Silvers. The CDC report on my desk says as much. A hundred cases in Florida this week alone.” He's still rubbing my shoulder, as if the most boring, detached man in the world can comfort me. “Listen, if you'd like, we can explore what the university has to offer in terms of egg preservation. There's no guarantees, of course, but it's entirely possible –“
“That what?” My voice shakes. “I'll magically find a way to pay a bunch of quacks to stab me with needles, and then pay them ten times more to keep my unborn children in test tubes? I'm a secretary for a third rate company, Doctor. I make fifteen bucks an hour. You might as well tell me I'm about to meet Mr. Right when I walk out this door, have him propose tomorrow, and knock me up by next Friday.”
Potter looks nervously at the wall. His hand drifts off me. Well, at least I'm not the only one here who's embarrassed, not that it's much satisfaction.
He clears his throat, and folds his hands, leaning toward me over the desk. It takes me a second to realize he's eyeing the medical degree on the wall behind me. Okay, maybe I regret throwing the quack word around in front of him. I'm sure he'll forgive me.
“You do have eighteen months before the full effects of Zeno in your reproductive system make the odds of conceiving virtually zero.”
A year and a half. Lovely.
Not even enough time to build up a serious relationship from coffee dates or – God forbid – Tinder. Much less rest assured I've really met the one, the man I want to have a baby with.
And that's assuming I'd have better prospects than the usual idiots I've met before. Like the boy a couple weeks ago, who showed up late to our dinner at an overpriced French place, bearing gifts. Gifts, in this case, being the cheap purple dildo he buried in a bouquet of plastic roses.
It takes real talent to embarrass a girl in public, plus insult her intelligence in one go.
I'm shaking my head, pushing away date nights I wish I could forget, holding in the verbal sting I want to unleash on the entire world, using the doctor as a proxy.
But it isn't his fault, or his problem. Dr. Potter isn't here to listen to my disasters in dating, or fix my non-existent sex life.
He's a general practitioner, not a psychologist, and having an incurable tropical disease means he can't even help with that.
I want to leave. But there's another horrible question on the tip of my tongue. “So, does this virus affect anything else downstairs? Like my chances of enjoying...you know.”
As if sex should even be on the radar. I've been celibate for so long it shouldn't matter, twenty-three years. Maybe the disease will give me one more reason to keep my V-card.
Dr. Oblivious takes a few seconds to get what I mean. Then his eyebrows shift up. “Uh, no, not at all. You're free to involve yourself with any partner using the usual precautions. There's no risk of human-to-human transmission, Ms. Silvers. Your partners can't catch the disease unless they walk through the wrong mosquito-infested areas at the wrong time, just as you did, and the odds of that happening are exceedingly low.”
Low. Yeah, just like me.
Lucky, lucky me, with my dead love life, boring job, and distant family. Add shattered dreams to the list.
There's nothing to celebrate here. The only place I ever beat the odds was contracting a rare Caribbean virus, destroying my future without even knowing it at first bite.
Why couldn't it have been the lottery instead?
I need to get out of here. I just want to go back to work, punch in my last few hours, and then go home and pull the blanket over my head.
When I'm in my cocoon, I can pretend I never ignored all the half-assed CDC warnings to have a great time in an amazing country that's just opened up to Americans again. I can pretend my junk hasn't just been trashed by a thumb-sized vampire bite, that I'm going to get my shit together, and be an amazing wife and mother whenever the right boy comes along and proves to me he's a man. I can pretend I still have time, more than eighteen months before the sword falls, obliterating the future I always imagined.
And I can pretend the holidays aren't coming, that I won't cry over the dinner table when mom taps my foot with her cane, and asks me why the hell I haven't found myself a boyfriend yet.
“Ms. Silvers?”
“Jesus, just call me Penny, Doctor! That's what everybody else says,” I tell him, giving into the sarcasm pulling me deep into the black pit in my gut. “I read you loud and clear. I get how screwed I am. There's nothing you can do for me, right? Can we be done?”
He doesn't say anything, just turns his face to the small tablet in his hands, and begins scrawling a sloppy signature with his finger. A second later, he hits a button, and the device prints out a tiny prescription slip, which he tears off and hands to me.
“This will make you feel better in the interim,” he says. “Simple pain relievers, on the off chance your fever returns. Until then, it should help minimize your discomfort from our talk today. While your viral load is dropping to acceptable le
vels, it could be lower. Please be sure to rest, and drink plenty of water.”
If only guzzling water like a desert explorer would flush it all out of my system. I'd drink Lake Michigan dry. It's visible outside his window, behind the Chicago skyline, rippling in grey and gloomy November shadows.
“Thanks,” I mutter, crinkling the paper in my fist as the doctor stands, ushering me out the door.
If I were him, I'd be relieved to see the last of me, too. I'm sure I'm about to become the latest statistic in a medical journal, one more faceless person tracked by the outbreak that's been making inroads in the country thanks to people like me. I should be grateful tropical mosquitoes are the only way it spreads, and so far they haven't found any in the Midwest that can carry it.
At least I won't have to worry about infecting anybody else. Small comfort when I'm out the door, heading for the train so I can get across town, back to the office. Frankly, no one else deserves to have this curse inflicted on them if they can avoid it.
But I'm not thinking about them, the lucky ones. I'm being selfish, focusing on myself, and quietly hating every healthy woman in America who will never have to worry about their biological clock going up in a fireball.
The worst day of my life gets predictably worse.
By afternoon, my right heel comes apart. I'm distracted, lost in my own head, mourning the babies I'll never hold in my arms because there's not enough time to make them happen. I don't see the small break in the marble floor that trips me, threatens to send me crashing down face first, or worse.