“And why do you say that?”
“Because guys like that reveal themselves is why.” Andy switched off his Smokeless and pocketed it. “You’ll be carrying his ass, and you’ll resent it.”
“But I won’t,” Edie said. “Resent it, I mean. That’s why I came. To look out for him.”
Andy shook his head in a disgusted way. “It’s a shame. What a waste.” He started off toward the dining hall, and Edie grabbed his sleeve—emboldened, maybe, by her perplexed relief.
“Wait. I don’t get it. What about this communing with nature stuff? This ‘you’re not human until you sleep under the stars’ stuff?”
“I thought it would have been obvious to you, of all people.” Andy put out his forearms and made fists; the tight, scarred skin pulled into painful-looking little wrinkles. “I do what I’ve got to do to make a living. To feed my kids. Maybe once I was sold on that nature bullshit, but that goes away when you’ve been Stamped enough times. When you come home and your little boy’s crying because you look like a goddamn monster.”
Edie remembered her own terror when her father had returned from a month-long contract with two new Stamps on his face. “What about you,” she said. “Do you want some advice?”
“Sure,” he said sarcastically.
“Quit,” she said. “Your kids need their father.”
He broke eye contact for the first time. “As a matter of fact, this is my last tour.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And let me say this one more time—as a man who’s seen his limit and is on his way out. Take off. You want thrills, go to the water park. You don’t want to be on this excursion.”
“I’m not abandoning him,” Edie said.
“Well, honey, I hope he’s worth it.” Andy tipped an imaginary hat. “See you in the mess hall.”
—
Was he worth it? Well, yes. Jesse had saved her life, sort of.
The math had been of the humiliating sort that you saw on webshows like Outta Wedlock.
Two weeks late.
Three different men, including Jesse, during what Edie had been able to calculate must have been her fertile window.
You had to be careful whom you talked to about these things. Edie had heard the stories. The pierced, tattooed broad who’d worked at your side for four years and never hesitated to slam the president when the news crawl by the Pabst clock churned out some new story about him—she might be the first one to report you to Public Safety and Morals if you so much as made a little insinuation, floated a teensy hypothetical. In high school, Edie had known a girl whose parents sold both family cars to take a sudden vacation to Midwest Zone, though no one ever vacationed in Midwest Zone. There were the girls you saw on the news, dumped at emergency room bays or, worse, left in alleyways. Woke up handcuffed to their hospital beds. You were supposed to be able to find herbal abortion recipes on the dark web, but Edie had no idea how you even got on the dark web, and that was the sort of question you couldn’t go around asking, either. Not if you liked your freedom.
She supposed she could pin it on Jesse, threaten to make a stink if he didn’t claim it, or at least give her money enough to go away. There was a good chance it was his, anyway. But she liked him. He was sweet. And Edie wasn’t built that way. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who could treat people like that.
A while ago, she’d worked with a woman, a PU (pregnant and unwed), who found a sponsorship through LifeForce and actually made a tidy profit once the baby was born. This seemed, to Edie, like the best option. She had no money to raise a child. She had no desire to raise a child. And she wasn’t going to be able to bartend once she was showing. Stefano couldn’t legally fire her, and Edie thought he was a decent enough guy not to try, but he’d have the law on his side if he wanted to move her to the kitchen or something, and those jobs paid for shit.
She supposed that another sort of person—another sort of woman—would see the pregnancy as a blessing. As a reincarnation of her mother’s spirit. Edie’s mother would have thought this way. Her mother had been religious; her church’s women’s group sent casseroles to Edie’s apartment throughout the hospitalization and did prayer circles over her mother’s writhing body a couple times a week. Her mother had always told Edie that she was blessed she could raise her daughter in a place that was not just safe but moral—Atlantic Zone was safe because it was moral—and this had been Edie’s father’s gift to them, bought with his death, his noble, tragic sacrifice. Edie had never believed in any of this, or most of it. But she loved and respected her mother, and she hadn’t fought with her. Not often.
But no, Edie was more inclined to see the pregnancy like she’d seen her mother’s cancer: an invasion, unwelcome, to be survived and not embraced. It helped her, a little, to think of the pregnancy as a job. A hard job, like her father’s six-month tours out-of-zone. You could do anything for nine months, for money. Her pregnancy would be contract work, a deployment.
She told herself this again, and again. She stopped answering when Jesse messaged her. This hurt, but it was easier, cleaner, than putting herself through his awkward reaction, the pain and humiliation of his rejection of her. She marked days on her calendar, careful to keep even these vague notations on print copies, never doing a search for LifeForce (or Caring Connection, or the Greatest Love) online. When she started showing—no sooner—she would walk into one of the clinics and start the process, let them tag and process and herd her, police what she ate and drank, her medications, the music she listened to, the webshows she watched. She would undergo the genetic screenings, the rigorous family history surveys. She had her looks going for her, but her mixed-race heritage might be a liability, as well as her mother’s breast cancer, though a wealthy enough family could pay to have a gene like that shut off.
Then, one Saturday night, she came home from her shift—so tired she had barely been able to lift her bus pass to the scanner—and nearly stumbled over Jesse Haggard, who’d parked himself on the floor in front of her apartment door. She gasped and jumped back, fumbling for her pepper spray, and Jesse leaped to his feet, hands lifted in surrender, and said, “Shh shh shh, it’s just me, Edie. It’s Jesse. Shit, baby. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her heart booming in her ears. “Fuck, Jesse. You about gave me a heart attack.”
“I didn’t know how else to catch you. You haven’t made it easy.”
She shoved her key into the front lock, jiggled it in the funny way required to coax it open, and nudged the door with her hip. “Take a hint,” she said.
He waited at the threshold. “Can I come in a minute?”
Edie shrugged.