“I gave the room a once-over,” Anastasia said. She picked up something from the countertop and ripped it free from a paper sleeve. A syringe. “For all the difference it makes.”
Edie hadn’t talked to Anastasia much during the weeks of training. Why? Edie couldn’t say, though she had hardly noticed at the time their disinterest in each other, had found it natural, unremarkable. But it was strange, in retrospect. Women were a minority in the excursion group. Anastasia, thirtysomething, was the woman closest in age to Edie. And yet, for some reason, these facts had driven a wedge between them rather than bonding them. Edie tried now to reconstruct her first impression of Anastasia, the flutter of quick observations and judgments that had snagged in her semiconsciousness before she had a chance to second-guess them. Initially, she’d been uneasy. Anastasia, with her athletic build and long honey-colored hair (the cruelest sacrifice to the shears, in Edie’s opinion), had looked at a room’s distance like a potential rival, the kind of woman Jesse might fix his gaze upon. Closer, that anxiety dissipated. Anastasia’s age became more apparent in her freckled face, the lines around her mouth, an almost unnoticeable softness (to eyes less hungry for fault than Edie’s) around her jawline. Her chin was too long, her chest too flat. So then it was superiority Edie felt. Confidence in her own beauty and youth. And finally, though she’d acknowledged no dislike at all, having nothing real to base it upon, she had sensed the falling away of it when Anastasia linked hands with Berto, leaving in its wake amiable indifference. Married, some part of her had noted. Older than me. Not as pretty. Unworthy of her jealousy. Unworthy of her notice. Maybe she was exaggerating, being hard on herself, but she burned now with the shame of it.
Shyly, Edie took a couple of small steps forward, still looking at the mirror and not directly at Anastasia. “Um. What are you doing?”
Anastasia pulled a plastic cap off the end of the needle with her teeth and spit it out on the bathroom floor. “Heroin,” she said. Catching Edie’s look in the mirror, she laughed and shook her head. “Fertility drugs. I’m having my eggs harvested right after we get back in-zone.”
“OLE lets you bring those out here?”
“They didn’t have any choice if they wanted my money.” She lay the needle tip at an angle against her stomach, slid the point under the skin, and depressed the button, biting her lip with a little grimace. Then she pulled the needle free and sighed. “I’m almost forty. I can’t go on hiatus for eight weeks.”
“So why come at all?”
“You’re just full of questions,” Anastasia said.
“Well, it’s the question I’ve been asking myself.”
“And I bet my answer’s the same as yours. My man.” She said it in a jokey way, my mayun. “He wanted a last great adventure before I started chaining myself to the exam table. Well, really, so did I. To be fair. My preference would have been Iceland or something, but it’s cool. He drew the long straw.” She pitched the empty syringe into the wastebasket, hunched over, and grabbed the rumpled microsuit, wriggling into it and pulling the zipper to her chin. “Hood, you think?”
Edie touched her own head. “I’m not taking any chances.” She realized, embarrassed, that she was even still wearing her goggles, but her embarrassment didn’t motivate her to remove them.
Anastasia winked and donned the hood. Her amber eyebrows were just visible. “These things are ridiculous.”
“Better than the alternative,” Edie said.
“Are they? I’m dubious. But I suppose they can’t hurt.”
“So you must really want a baby,” Edie said, abruptly, unable to stop herself. “To be putting yourself through all that.”
The sly smile fell off Anastasia’s face. “We’ve been trying for four years. It’s a fucking nightmare. So yeah, I guess I want one. My advice, if you think you ever want to do it, is do it now, while you’re young.”
“I don’t want children,” Edie said. She ran water to wash her hands, thinking with a quiet fury about the unfairness of—well, everything. Everything.
“Even better,” Anastasia said. “It’s a shitty world, anyway. See you on the bus.” She slipped out, and Edie cranked the paper towel dispenser, dazed, unaware until she’d done it that a pile had folded back on itself several times. Ripping the end loose, she dried her hands, remembering, for some reason, how excited her mother would always get when Edie took her out to Sunday supper, a treat they indulged in once or twice a month, depending on how good Edie’s tips had been. Her mother would spend the week up to the outing thinking through restaurant possibilities—did Edie think she’d want the Chinese buffet, or Positano’s, or maybe that cute café downtown, where they’d once gotten the handsome waiter who brought them free dessert? (They never got that waiter or free dessert again; that had been a singular day, a magic that would never repeat itself.) The meals themselves always pleased her; never did she complain about the food, about bad service. It was all delicious, all delightful. She luxuriated in it the way a child would, and sometimes Edie would be grumpy enough to feel annoyed at her, but mostly, her mother’s moods were infectious. Her mother had made Edie see the good in a shitty world.
She trashed the damp mound of paper.
Jesse was waiting just outside the door with his arms and ankles crossed, a pose of false calm that went rigid as soon as Edie exited. “What happened in there? You fall in?”
“My stomach was bothering me,” Edie said, which was the right thing, because she knew he wouldn’t press her. Ten months of dating, and he still ran the shower whenever he had to use the bathroom for a number two.
“You just had me worried is all.” He pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, their microsuits making rasping sounds against each other.
“I’m fine,” Edie said. “Everything’s fine.”
And that’s when the screaming started outside the restaurant.
Five