“And you’d just stand by and let it happen?”
A shadow moved across the curtain between the ward and the waiting room. Carol? Allie?
Ben took a deep breath and when he spoke again, his voice was raised so he could be heard in the next room, and probably halfway to the cafeteria. “Almost everyone in this camp has been taken from someone. Almost everyone is an orphan in some way. Your baby would fit right in. I wouldn’t like to see it happen, but there’s a lot of things I’ve had to live with that I didn’t like. I’m sure I could manage one more. What I won’t do is bargain in secret with you, or be part of a whispering campaign against Mother Carol. People who are whispering aren’t in harmony with the rest of the camp, and the only way we’ll survive is if we all speak with one—”
“Oh, give it a fucking rest,” Harper told him and poked him in the face with the needle to give him a stitch he didn’t really need.
9
It was close to a week before she turned on the phone.
For all that time she kept it on her in the pocket of her sweats. Several times a day she would put her hand on it, to reassure herself it was still there. It comforted her to move her thumb along its glassy face and smooth steel curves.
She didn’t dare attempt to use it. For those first days after they returned from the raid, she was uncomfortably aware of being under watch. There was always a Lookout in the waiting room—supposedly to protect Father Storey—and her guards had a habit of yanking the curtain aside at random moments and sticking a head into the ward on one pretense or another. Harper didn’t even have the courage to try and hide it in the ceiling with Harold’s notebook. She felt there was too great a chance of someone walking in on her while she was standing on the chair, reaching to move a drop ceiling panel.
Harper settled on a date to risk making a call. Her father’s birthday was the nineteenth. He would be sixty-one, if he was alive. Only her self-restraint didn’t hold out until then.
She woke early on the morning of the seventeenth with contractions, sharp enough to make her gasp. Her insides were raw dough in the hands of a burly baker who was tediously, methodically, brutally intent on kneading every centimeter of tissue. It was a sensation not unlike being overcome with the cramps of diarrhea, and a sweat prickled on her face while she waited it out.
The nurse inside her identified this rhythmic clenching-up as Braxton-Hicks contractions, just a little practice for the oncoming main event. The mother-to-be entertained sickening notions of premature birth. She was at twenty-eight weeks. Such a thing was not impossible, especially for a woman who had been exposed to all manner of stress, gunfights, and slaughter. The idea that she might be going into labor—that the baby might be coming right this instant—made her feel as if she were in an elevator that had begun to fall, the cables giving way.
But before she could get too worked up, the contractions subsided, leaving her insides as fizzy as if she had chugged a cold Coca-Cola. Blood boomed in her ears. And the thought occurred to her that she ought to make that call today, now, and let her father know she was hoping to give him a grandchild for his birthday. It was incredible to think her parents didn’t know she was pregnant . . . let alone that she was still alive. Her mother would scream, actually scream.
Nick was asleep on his side in the next cot, one hand curled beneath his cheek. She had no fears of waking him. He would sleep on even if she made the call right next to his bed. The floor was so cold it hurt to walk across it on bare feet. She shifted aside the curtain for a peek into the waiting room. The boy out there, a kid named Hud Loory who often drew fishing duty with Don Lewiston, dozed on the couch, his rifle on the floor. That boy would be eating a rock for breakfast if Ben Patchett stopped by on a spot inspection.
Harper let herself into the bathroom and locked the door. She sat on the lid of the toilet and turned on the phone. It had less than a quarter power and only a single bar. She stared at the flat, glassy, impossibly brilliant screen for ten seconds, then typed in her mother’s cell from memory and pressed SEND.
The phone produced a grainy hiss that lasted for three seconds. A recording played of a woman with an aggrieved, accusatory voice: “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the listing and try again.”
She tried her father’s line next. The phone made a series of rapid beeps, like someone telegraphing a message in Morse code. This was followed by a hideous angry blatting and she had to hang up.
Her next thought was e-mail. She pulled up the Web browser on the phone to sign into her Gmail account. She waited, breathing shallowly, for the log in page to appear. It never did.
Instead, she was redirected to the Google main page. Only it was different now. Instead of a big blank white page with the word
Google
in the center, she arrived at a page with the word
Goodby
on it instead. Beneath was the search box, and the two familiar buttons. When she had last visited Google, one of those buttons read Google Search and the other said I’m Feeling Lucky. Now, the button on the left read
Our Search Is Over.
The button on the right read
We Were So Lucky.
For some reason—maybe because she was still emotionally jangled from her intense bout of contractions—it made Harper damp-palmed and anxious to see the Google page defaced in such a way. She had a feeling that nothing good would come from attempting a search, but she typed in Google Mail in the search box anyway and hit RETURN.
Instead of bringing up her results, the words she had typed into the search box hissed, blackened, and crumbled to pixelated ash. Black trails of digital smoke wavered up from a pile of burnt crumbs.
It was ludicrous to cry because there was no more Google, but for a moment Harper felt very close to weeping. The idea that Google could collapse and be gone was as hard to imagine as the fall of the Twin Towers. It had seemed at least as permanent a part of the cultural landscape.
Maybe it was not just Google she felt like crying for, but all of it, all of the good, smart, clever creations that were sliding away now, sinking into the past. She missed texting and TV and Instagram and microwaves and warm showers and retail therapy and quality peanut butter. She wondered if there was anyone even growing peanuts anymore and felt very blue, and when she swallowed she tasted tears. She missed it all, but most of all she missed her mother and father and brother, and for the first time she allowed herself to consider the real possibility that she would never hear from any of them again.
Harper did not want to wake the Lookout in the waiting room with a sudden sob. She clutched the phone between both hands and pressed her knuckles to her mouth and waited out her grief. Finally, when she was sure she had herself under control, she planted a wet kiss on the screen of the phone, said, “Happy birthday, Dad,” and turned it off.
When she returned to the ward, she hid the phone in the ceiling with the notebook. She slipped back under her sheets and had a nice little cry into her pillow.
Soon enough she was done with tears and feeling sleepy and comfortable. The baby pressed a tentative hand against the stiff, fibrous wall of his cell, fingers spread—she could feel them, she was sure—and seemed to give her a clumsy comforting pat. She pressed her hand to his, less than half an inch of tissue between them.
“Just you and me now, kid,” she said, but of course it had been just the two of them for months.
10
That night, she dreamt of Jakob again, for the first time in months. She dreamt of Jakob and the Freightliner, of the headlights rushing toward her and the engine screaming in a way that seemed to express more hate than any human voice could manage.
But Jakob wasn’t riding alone anymore.
In the dream—how curious!—Nelson Heinrich was riding with him.
11