Burke lifted both eyebrows and said, “Nice.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Frida said to him, and Cal felt himself blush. She slipped from his embrace and turned around. With a hand to his cheek, she held her eyes on him for a moment longer than usual.
“Those onions are strong,” he said, his eyes tearing.
“Aren’t they?”
Cal tried to put his arm around her on the walk over, but she said she wanted to wash up first. “I smell too much like onions,” she said. “You better stay away.” He nodded, and they were silent the rest of the way.
Even once they were alone in the Bath, they didn’t speak. Cal tried to figure out what to say.
“You okay?” she asked after a few minutes, as if she were waiting for him to unleash the darkest contents of his soul.
Cal told her what he was doing that night.
“Security?” she repeated. After a moment she said, “You know, only men are on that detail.”
Frida was tweezing her eyebrows. As she spoke she looked at her reflection in a hand-mirror that had been taped to a bowling pin. Whereas in the kitchen she’d been keen to meet his gaze, now it was as if she couldn’t pull herself away from her own reflection.
“It makes sense,” Cal replied, eyes on his fingernails. He loved the clippers on the Land; it was so much better than using his teeth to bite his nails down. The clippers were sharp and precise, with a little plastic reservoir that caught the cut nails.
“It does?” Frida said, finally looking up. “Cal. I weigh more than Sailor.”
“It’s about upper-body strength.”
“To fire a gun?”
Her voice was louder now, and when Cal spoke again he was careful not to match her volume, even though he knew she hated how calm he could be. Unflappable was the word he’d use to describe himself, but she had once called him robotic.
“Would you even want to stay up all night to watch nothing happen?” he asked.
“Probably not,” she said. “But why would my brother be interested in a male-run world? Hasn’t history taught him anything?”
Cal caught her gaze in the mirror. “What’s got you so riled up?” He put down the clippers and sat up straight. “Do the other women feel the way you do?”
Frida lifted the tweezers to her face. If she wasn’t careful with those, her brows would be as curved as his fingernail clippings.
“You think I’d tell you what the women think?” she said. “You’re a narc.”
“And you like that about me,” Cal said. “Admit it.”
She didn’t smile. “We’re doing this a lot lately.”
“Doing what?”
“Bantering. Bickering, really.”
She was right. “I guess I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“What have you noticed? Or wait, no, don’t tell me. You can’t tell me.”
Cal looked away. All the concern he’d had for her in the kitchen, that she might be feeling alone, that she felt tense, seemed suddenly inconsequential next to his annoyance, his anger. She’d been the one treating the Land like sleepaway camp. She’d been the one to make him look like a moron in front of her brother.
“How many times do we have to go over this, Frida?” he asked.
“Go over what? We hardly talk.”
“Do you want me to stop going to the morning meetings? Is that it?”
“Today when you grabbed my shoulders,” she said, “I thought I might faint, it felt so strange. You never look at me. You hardly touch me.”
“Stop being so dramatic,” he said, and he stopped before he said anything meaner. He made his voice as even as he could. “I’m going to make things okay. You have to listen to me and promise me that you won’t say anything about the pregnancy.”
“I already promised you that.”
“You have to trust me. If you don’t trust me, none of this will work.”
“Do we want it to work?” Frida said. She was still seated at the mirror, and she looked up at him, tweezers poised. “Every day our child becomes…I don’t know…more and more itself. More part of us, Cal.” She paused. “At first, I didn’t even care if it lived or died, as long as we got to stay here.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. If she wanted him angry, if she wanted his voice to fill this tiny space, well, he’d give her that.
“It’s not how I feel now. Now I’m more and more nervous about the Land.”
“Baby,” he said.
She let go of the tweezers, and they clinked against the counter with a little pitiful sound. She said his name, so quietly he thought he might have imagined it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Don’t you know what went on here?” she whispered.
Micah and the other men didn’t spend much time talking about the past: their meetings were obsessed with day-to-day details, with securing communication with Pines and making sure the settlers around them behaved, stayed put, didn’t try to conquer the area or head for Pines. Cal had never thought to ask about what had gone on before. Before what?
“What did you find out?” Cal asked softly. “You can tell me.”