by Neil Clarke
Sometimes I don’t like to look at the sky, so I sprawl belly-down on the ground, drink half of the warm water from my bottle and offer the rest to Tris. She finishes it and grimaces.
“Don’t know how you stand it,” she says. “Aren’t you hot?”
“You won’t complain when you’re eating cornbread tonight.”
“You made some?”
“Who does everything around here, bookworm?” I nudge her in the ribs and she laughs reluctantly and smiles at me with our smile. I remember learning to comb her hair after Mom got sick; the careful part I would make while she squirmed and hollered at me, the two hair balls I would twist and fasten to each side of her head. I would make the bottom of her hair immaculate: brushed and gelled and fastened into glossy, thick homogeneity. But on top it would sprout like a bunch of curly kale, straight up and out and olive-oil shiny. She would parade around the house in this flouncy slip she thought was a dress and pose for photos with her hand on her hip. I’m in a few of those pictures, usually in overalls or a smock. I look awkward and drab as an old sock next to her, but maybe it doesn’t matter, because we have the same slightly bucked front teeth, the same fat cheeks, the same wide eyes going wider. We have a nice smile, Tris and I.
Tris doesn’t wear afro-puffs any more. She keeps her hair in a bun and I keep mine short.
“Libs, oh Libs, things aren’t so bad, are they?”
I look up at Tris, startled. She’s sitting in the grass with her hands beneath her thighs and tears are dripping off the tip of her nose. I was lulled by her laugh—we don’t often talk about the shit we can’t control. Our lives, for instance.
I think about the field that we’re going to leave for crows so no one gets blown up for touching one of a thousand beautiful multicolored jewels. I think about funerals and Dad killing himself faster just so he can eat catfish with bellies full of white phosphorus.
“It’s not that great, Tris.”
“You think it’s shit.”
“No, not shit—”
“Close. You think it’s close.”
I sigh. “Some days. Tris. I have to get back to Meshach in a minute. What is going on?”
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
I make myself meet her eyes, and see she’s scared; almost as scared as I am.
“How do you know?”
“I suspected for a while. Yolanda finally got some test kits last night from a river trader.”
Yolanda has done her best as the town midwife since she was drafted into service five years ago, when a glassman raid killed our last one. I’m surprised Tris managed to get a test at all.
“What are you going to do? Will you . . .” I can’t even bring myself to say “keep it.” But could Yolanda help her do anything else?
She reaches out, hugs me, buries her head in my shirt and sobs like a baby. Her muffled words sound like “Christ” and “Jesus” and “God,” which ought to be funny since Tris is a capital-A atheist, but it isn’t.
“No,” she’s saying, “Christ, no. I have to . . . someone has to . . . I need an abortion, Libby.”
Relief like the first snow melt, like surviving another winter. Not someone else to worry about, to love, to feed.
But an abortion? There hasn’t been a real doctor in this town since I was twelve.
Bill’s mom used to be a registered nurse before the occupation, and she took care of everyone in town as best she could until glassman robots raided her house and called in reapers to bomb it five years ago. Bill left town after that. We never thought we’d see him again, but then two planting seasons ago, there he was with this green giant, a forty-year-old Deere combine—Shadrach, he called it, because it would make the third with our two older, smaller machines. He brought engine parts with him, too, and oil and enough seed for a poppy field. He had a bullet scar in his forearm and three strange, triangular burns on the back of his neck. You could see them because he’d been shaved bald and his hair was only starting to grow back, a patchy gray peach-fuzz.
He’d been in prison, that much was obvious. Whether the glassmen let him go or he escaped, he never said and we never asked. We harvested twice as much wheat from the field that season, and the money from the poppy paid for a new generator. If the bell on lookout hill rang more often than normal, if surveillance drones whirred through the grass and the water more than they used to, well, who was to say what the glassmen were doing? Killing us, that’s all we knew, and Bill was one of our own.
So I ask Bill if his mother left anything behind that might help us—like a pill, or instructions for a procedure. He frowns.
“Aren’t you a little old, Libby?” he says, and I tell him to fuck off. He puts a hand on my shoulder—conciliatory, regretful—and looks over to where Tris is trudging back home. “You saw what the reapers did to my Mom’s house. I couldn’t even find all of her teeth .”
I’m not often on that side of town, but I can picture the ruin exactly. There’s still a crater on Mill Street. I shuffle backward, contrite. “God, Bill. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
He shrugs. “Sorry, Libs. Ask Yolanda, if you got to do something like that.” I don’t like the way he frowns at me; I can hear his judgment even when all he does is turn and climb back inside Shadrach.
“Fucking hot out here,” I say, and walk back over to Meshach. I wish Bill wasn’t so goddamn judgmental. I wish Tris hadn’t messed up with whichever of her men provided the sperm donation. I wish we hadn’t lost the east field to another cluster bomb.
But I can wish or I can drive, and the old man’s engine coughs loud enough to drown even my thoughts.
Tris pukes right after dinner. That was some of my best cornbread, but I don’t say anything. I just clean it up.
“How far along are you?” I ask. I feel like vomit entitles me to this much.
She pinches her lips together and I hope she isn’t about to do it again. Instead, she stands up and walks out of the kitchen. I think that’s her answer, but she returns a moment later with a box about the size of my hand. It’s got a hole on one side and a dial like a gas gauge on the other. The gauge is marked with large glassman writing and regular letters in tiny print: “Fetal Progression,” it reads, then on the far left “Not Pregnant,” running through “Nine Months” on the far right. I can’t imagine what the point of that last would be, but Tris’s dial is still barely on the left hand side, settled neatly between three and four. A little late for morning sickness, but maybe it’s terror as much as the baby that makes her queasy.
“There’s a note on the side. It says ‘All pregnant women will receive free rehabilitative healthcare in regional facilities.’” She says the last like she’s spent a long day memorizing tiny print.
“Glassmen won’t do abortions, Tris.”
No one knows what they really look like. They only interact with us through their remote-controlled robots. Maybe they’re made of glass themselves—they give us pregnancy kits, but won’t bother with burn dressings. Dad says the glassmen are alien scientists studying our behavior, like a human would smash an anthill to see how they scatter. Reverend Beale always points to the pipeline a hundred miles west of us. They’re just men stealing our resources, he says, like the white man stole the Africans’, though even he can’t say what those resources might be. It’s a pipeline from nowhere, to nothing, as far as any of us know.
Tris leans against the exposed brick of our kitchen wall. “All fetuses are to be carried to full term,” she whispers, and I turn the box over and see her words printed in plain English, in larger type than anything else on the box. Only one woman in our town ever took the glassmen up on their offer. I don’t know how it went for her; she never came home.
“Three months!” I say, though I don’t mean to.
Tris rubs her knuckles beneath her eyes, though she isn’t crying. She looks fierce, daring me to ask her how the hell she waited this long. But I don’t, because I know. Wishful thinking is a powerful curse, almost as bad as
storytelling.
I don’t go to church much these days, not after our old pastor died and Beale moved into town to take his place. Reverend Beale likes his fire and brimstone, week after week of too much punishment and too little brotherhood. I felt exhausted listening to him rant in that high collar, sweat pouring down his temples. But he’s popular, and I wait on an old bench outside the red brick church for the congregation to let out. Main Street is quiet except for the faint echoes of the reverend’s sonorous preaching. Mostly I hear the cicadas, the water lapping against a few old fishing boats and the long stretch of rotting pier. There used to be dozens of sailboats here, gleaming creations of white fiberglass and heavy canvas sails with names like “Bay Princess” and “Prospero’s Dream.” I know because Dad has pictures. Main Street was longer then, a stretch of brightly painted Tudors and Victorians with little shops and restaurants on the bottom floors and rooms above. A lot of those old buildings are boarded up now, and those that aren’t look as patched-over and jury-rigged as our thresher combines. The church has held up the best of any of the town’s buildings. Time has hardly worn its stately red brick and shingled steeples. It used to be Methodist, I think, but we don’t have enough people to be overly concerned about denominations these days. I’ve heard of some towns where they make everyone go Baptist, or Lutheran, but we’re lucky that no one’s thought to do anything like that here. Though I’m sure Beale would try if he could get away with it. Maybe Tris was right to leave the whole thing behind. Now she sits the children while their parents go to church.
The sun tips past its zenith when the doors finally open and my neighbors walk out of the church in twos and threes. Beale shakes parishioners’ hands as they leave, mopping his face with a handkerchief. His smile looks more like a grimace to me; three years in town and he still looks uncomfortable anywhere but behind a pulpit. Men like him think the glassmen are right to require “full gestation.” Men like him think Tris is a damned sinner, just because she has a few men and won’t settle down with one. He hates the glassmen as much as the rest of us, but his views help them just the same.
Bill comes out with Pam. The bones in her neck stand out like twigs, but she looks a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw her, at Georgia’s funeral. Pam fainted when we laid her daughter in the earth, and Bill had to take her home before the ceremony ended. Pam is Bill’s cousin, and Georgia was her only child—blown to bits after riding her bicycle over a hidden jewel in the fields outside town. To my surprise, Bill gives me a tired smile before walking Pam down the street.
Bill and I used to dig clams from the mud at low tide in the summers. We were in our twenties and my mother had just died of a cancer the glassmen could have cured if they gave a damn. Sometimes we would build fires of cedar and pine and whatever other tinder lay around and roast the clams right there by the water. We talked about anything in the world other than glassmen and dead friends while the moon arced above. We planned the cornfield eating those clams, and plotted all the ways we might get the threshers for the job. The cow dairy, the chicken coop, the extra garden plots—we schemed and dreamt of ways to help our town hurt a little less each winter. Bill had a girlfriend then, though she vanished not long after; we never did more than touch.
That was a long time ago, but I remember the taste of cedar ash and sea salt as I look at the back of him. I never once thought those moments would last forever, and yet here I am, regretful and old.
Yolanda is one of the last to leave, stately and elegant with her braided white hair and black church hat with netting. I catch up with her as she heads down the steps.
“Can we talk?” I ask.
Her shoulders slump a little when I ask, but she bids the reverend farewell and walks with me until we are out of earshot.
“Tris needs an abortion,” I say.
Yolanda nods up and down like a sea bird, while she takes deep breaths. She became our midwife because she’d helped Bill’s mother with some births, but I don’t think she wants the job. There’s just no one else.
“Libby, the glassmen don’t like abortions.”
“If the glassmen are paying us enough attention to notice, we have bigger problems.”
“I don’t have the proper equipment for a procedure. Even if I did, I couldn’t.”
“Don’t tell me you agree with Beale.”
She draws herself up and glares at me. “I don’t know how, Libby! Do you want me to kill Tris to get rid of her baby? They say the midwife in Toddville can do them if it’s early enough. How far along is she?”
I see the needle in my mind, far too close to the center line for comfort. “Three and a half months,” I say.
She looks away, but she puts her arm around my shoulders. “I understand why she would, I do. But it’s too late. We’ll all help her.”
Raise the child, she means. I know Yolanda is making sense, but I don’t want to hear her. I don’t want to think about Tris carrying a child she doesn’t want to term. I don’t want to think about that test kit needle pointing inexorably at too fucking late. So I thank Yolanda and head off in the other direction, down the cracked tarmac as familiar as a scar, to Pam’s house. She lives in a small cottage Victorian with peeling gray paint that used to be blue. Sure enough, Bill sits in an old rocking chair on the porch, thumbing through a book. I loved to see him like that in our clam-digging days, just sitting and listening. I would dream of him after he disappeared.
“Libs?” he says. He leans forward.
“Help her, Bill. You’ve been outside, you know people. Help her find a doctor, someone who can do this after three months.”
He sighs and the book thumps on the floor. “I’ll see.”
Three days later, Bill comes over after dinner.
“There’s rumors of something closer to Annapolis,” he says. “I couldn’t find out more than that. None of my . . . I mean, I only know some dudes, Libby. And whoever runs this place only talks to women.”
“Your mother didn’t know?” Tris asks, braver than me.
Bill rubs the back of his head. “If she did, she sure didn’t tell me.”
“You’ve got to have more than that,” she says. “Does this place even have a name? How near Annapolis? What do you want us to do, sail into the city and ask the nearest glassman which way to the abortion clinic?”
“What do I want you to do? Maybe I want you to count your goddamn blessings and not risk your life to murder a child. It’s a sin, Tris, not like you’d care about that, but I’d’ve thought Libby would.”
“God I know,” I say, “but I’ve never had much use for sin. Now why don’t you get your nose out of our business?”
“You invited me in, Libby.”
“For help—”
He shakes his head. “If you could see what Pam’s going through right now . . .”
Bill has dealt with as much grief as any of us. I can understand why he’s moralizing in our kitchen, but that doesn’t mean I have to tolerate it.
But Tris doesn’t even give me time. She stands and shakes a wooden spatula under his nose. Bill’s a big man, but he flinches. “So I should have this baby just so I can watch it get blown up later, is that it? Don’t put Pam’s grief on me, Bill. I’m sorrier than I can say about Georgia. I taught that girl to read! And I can’t. I just can’t.”
Bill breathes ragged. His dark hands twist his muddy flannel shirt, his grip so tight his veins are stark against sun-baked skin. Tris is still holding that spatula.
Bill turns his head abruptly, stalks back to the kitchen door with a “Fuck,” and he wipes his eyes. Tris leans against the sink.
“Esther,” he says quietly, his back to us. “The name of a person, the name of a place, I don’t know. But you ask for that, my buddy says you should find what you’re after.”
I follow him outside, barefoot and confused that I’d bother when he’s so clearly had enough of us. I call his name, then start jogging and catch his elbow. He turns around.
“Wh
at, Libby?”
He’s so angry. His hair didn’t grow in very long or thick after he came back. He looks like someone mashed him up, stretched him out and then did a hasty job of putting him back together. Maybe I look like that, too.
“Thanks,” I say. We don’t touch.
“Don’t die, Libs.”
The air is thick with crickets chirping and fireflies glowing and the swampy, seaweed-and-salt air from the Chesapeake. He turns to walk away. I don’t stop him.
We take Dad’s boat. There’s not enough gas left to visit Bishop’s Head, the mouth of our estuary, let alone Annapolis. So we bring oars, along with enough supplies to keep the old dinghy low in the water.
“I hope we don’t hit a storm,” Tris says, squinting at the clear, indigo sky as though thunderheads might be hiding behind the stars.
“We’re all right for now. Feel the air? Humidity’s dropped at least 20 percent.”
Tris has the right oar and I have the left. I don’t want to use the gas unless we absolutely have to, and I’m hoping the low-tech approach will make us less noticeable to any patrolling glassmen. It’s tough work, even in the relatively cool night air, and I check the stars to make sure we’re heading in more or less the right direction. None of the towns on our estuary keep lights on at night. I only know when we pass Toddville because of the old lighthouse silhouetted against the stars. I lost sight of our home within five minutes of setting out, and God how a part of me wanted to turn the dinghy right around and go back. The rest of the world isn’t safe. Home isn’t either, but it’s familiar.
Dad gave us a nautical chart of the Chesapeake Bay, with markers for towns long destroyed, lighthouses long abandoned, by people long dead. He marked our town and told us to get back safe. We promised him we would and we hugged like we might never see each other again.
“What if we hit a jewel?” Tris asks. In the dark, I can’t tell if it’s fear or exertion that aspirates her words. I’ve had that thought myself, but what can we do? The glassmen make sure their cluster bombs spread gifts everywhere.