She had apologized more than once because it didn’t seem like he’d really forgiven her. He wasn’t ready to accept what she’d done, and she got that. So she didn’t push it. It was easier this way.
Cal thought she was sorry for misleading him—and she was—but she was also apologizing for the thoughts that had whiplashed through her mind as he explained what had happened in the Church. She didn’t want the baby anymore. Just like that, she gave up that future. She was ashamed by how easily she let it go.
It’s not even a baby yet, she told herself now. It was an embryo. It was a ball of cells.
She remembered something Toni had asked her, on one of their runs. Toni and Micah had been dating for four months by then. “When do you think life begins?” This would’ve been a weird question from anyone else, but not from Toni, who loved to muse and pontificate. Shallowness in conversation made her impatient. She had no use for small talk.
“There’s a reason they call it small,” she liked to say.
Toni had asked her this question as they jogged around the dirt track of the Silver Lake Reservoir. To get there meant a rough and sometimes dangerous bike ride, but it was worth it: it was one of the only tracks left in the city, and it was clean and wide, even if the reservoir itself was filled with debris instead of water. The homeless, rising in number, often used it as a toilet, and people said corpses were buried under all that trash: the rusted-out shopping carts and car parts, the gutted desktop computers, and the hundreds of plastic bags, porous with holes, swollen with brown rainwater, hanging from orphaned tree branches.
Cal didn’t like her going, worried it was too dangerous, but she insisted it was fine. If Frida squinted her eyes toward the hills that overlooked the Reservoir, she could transport herself to a neighborhood that had once been beautiful, insufferably so, the wrecked houses above her transformed again to million-dollar bungalows of yore, painted in sage, avocado, pumice. She was good at editing the frame.
“Did you just ask me when life begins?” Frida remembered saying to Toni.
“Sure did,” Toni said.
Frida could see her friend’s tattered sneakers, hitting the dust of the track.
“I think it begins with consciousness,” Toni continued. “The fetal brain really doesn’t develop until the final months.”
Frida hadn’t had an opinion back then. But now, what did she think? She wanted to say she agreed with Toni.
“A person isn’t a person until it can use its lungs,” she had told Frida. “And those also don’t develop until the final trimester.”
“How do you know so much about this?”
Toni’s voice was breathy from the run. “It’s my job. In the Group. I read up on issues. I’m one of the researchers.”
From Toni, Frida had learned a lot more about the Communities than she’d ever be able to discern from gossip sites. Toni was the one to tell her that Community members were encouraged to have one or two children, and if they wanted more, they needed a permit, which was pricey. “Because of the pull on resources,” Toni explained. But if a couple couldn’t have children at all, their status was threatened. “Calabasas, for instance, and Purell up north, really see parenting as the key role for every adult member of society,” Toni said. “Some Communities are way more family focused than others, though.”
“How do you know all this?” Frida had asked.
“I told you,” Toni said. “I’m a researcher.”
If Toni were here with her now, she might tell Frida that human life didn’t begin until the baby was out of the womb, until it was breathing air. Whether that air was redolent with human feces and rot, or beautiful and pure, free of everything the city had burdened them with, didn’t matter. Until the child was crying in the room with you, it was just a parasite in the female adult’s body.
But, no. That kind of language was Micah’s. Toni might agree with him, but her words, her cadence, would be different. She was gentle, and she had the gift of making Frida feel okay about being so pragmatic, so shrewd.
Toni would understand the calculation.
If Frida didn’t care about this baby inside of her, if she could see it as something inhuman, then she might be able to rid herself of it. There were no children on the Land, but there had to have been accidents. They had to have access to the morning-after pill, at the very least. Or maybe there was some herbal remedy she could take—just something to make her bleed. She wouldn’t think of it as anything but her period, come late.
I took care of it, she’d tell Cal. Wasn’t that what women said?
She wanted to stay on the Land, and now they would be forced out. Back on the estate, she and Cal would become the Millers 2.0: starting a family in the woods, their kids hunting squirrels in loincloths, blissfully unaware of the world their parents had rejected.