Roz leaned her head back into the motion of June’s fingers, sighing.
“Those deaths have been wearing on me,” June said. “Even that woman, Tia’s.” She paused, her finger pads resting on Roz’s head. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Shreve’s is a terrible way to go.”
“Andy was tore up about it,” Roz said. “It made me wonder if something was going on between them.”
“Maybe there was. I wouldn’t have thought less of him for it.”
Roz made a dubious grunting sound.
“We’ve asked a lot of him. Everything of him. And he’s delivered.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Roz said.
“What went wrong wasn’t on him. I can only blame myself for that.”
Roz twisted on the stool to turn and give her a hard look. June used her hands to firmly turn Roz’s head facing forward again. She’d finished cutting, more or less—maybe shy of a few corrective touches—but she liked the feel of Roz’s close-shorn layers under her fingers, and she liked talking to the back of Roz’s head about this stuff more than she did meeting her eye. “I was stupid. I told myself I could work with them. I told myself I needed to treat them with respect if I had any hope of getting Feingold’s cooperation. But the truth is that I didn’t have the stomach for what needed to be done.” June dropped her chin to the crown of Roz’s head. Roz leaned back, and they kissed softly. “I still don’t, Roz. But we’re in it up to our eyeballs now.”
“What needs to be done?” Roz said. They were still face-to-face, Roz craning her neck back, June hunched over. June could smell the bitter earth of the tea on Roz’s breath. Instead of answering, she kissed her again.
—
By 10:00 a.m. it was hot. Summer hot. Second half of October and you couldn’t stand to be out unless your shirtsleeves were rolled up. Each year June allowed herself to be lulled by the occasional runs of seasonally appropriate days into thinking: well, it’s not so bad, maybe. There’s hope yet. And then she’d see steam wafting off the kudzu, or she’d forget to wear her bonnet and come home with her neck sunburned again, and the despair would settle on her once more. The flowers thrived in the heat, though. There was that. As she so often did, June thought, as she passed the flower crop to the village, about how the world offered its cures in its diseases, and its diseases in its cures. The hotter climes that the ticks liked so much? They extended the growing season, making it possible to produce enough Salt to bankroll Ruby City and inoculate its residents against tick bites. June had been tempted over the years to see harmony in that. Proof of some bigger, elemental force of balance. Divine planetary engineering. But she knew better.
Especially these last few years, when she could no longer deny the evidence right in front of her. The last birth in Ruby City had been three years ago. Hap Hollander, Mose and Ivy’s youngest. Even before him there had been cause for worry, but these things were clearer in retrospect than they were in the living, as so many things are. The birth rate had been slowing for years before Hap marked the onset of its standstill, but in a community of fewer than five hundred people, a couple hundred of them women in their childbearing years, fewer than that number paired off, much less actively trying for children—theirs was a world, after all, where plotting parenthood required some magical thinking, or dogged unthinking—this hadn’t seemed so strange. For a long time, it hadn’t even registered as something to notice.
The first to notice was Harold Owle—“Doc,” everyone called him. Not that he was really a doctor, though what qualified as “real,” really, in this day and age? He’d supplemented some passed-down folk knowledge with a lot of self-education—his house was full of old medical books and encyclopedias, some literature and digital files (including a bank of video tutorials) smuggled from in-zone. June, through her connections, could get her hands on certain medicines, pieces of equipment, and Harold and his two apprentices put these items to use fairly successfully, though they were never going to be able to administer chemotherapy or an MRI out here. Harold’s chief roles were sawbones and midwife, and, as he told June nearly two years ago, he was not getting as much practice at the latter as he used to.
“You know, I was checking on Marianne Worth the other day, and her older boy—the ten-year-old—he was out in the yard playing with the Ventry twins, the girls, and I had this funny thought. I thought, those kids are all going to be trying to fool around with each other in four or five years, and how’re we gonna handle that? Getting ahead a myself, like I do. Thinking we’re going to have to start teaching ’em sex ed. Trying to smuggle rubbers out a the zone. God help us. ’Cause you know, there was that bumper crop of them. The Worths, the Ventrys, the Redferns’ three, Mary Sue, Terry’s girl, whatever her name is, the Pullman boy with the harelip, the Esquillo twins, and them’s just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. Seemed like there was a couple years there where I couldn’t just about put my head down at night without someone pounding at my door, yelling me to come out and catch another one.”
June, remembering this time, had smiled. The baby boom had been a morale boost in the camp, evidence of Ruby City’s legitimacy. Life out-of-zone was hard, but they’d made a sweet little town for themselves, and what better testament to that—to their hopefulness—than babies?
“But you know, my next thought after that was—well, gosh, I can count on one hand the number of births in the last five years. Well, OK, maybe that’s normal, I think at first. You know, a crop of little ’uns is born, then everybody has their two or three and quits it, and the original settling group had a lot of twenty-some-year-olds in it. So you have to grow the next generation up before there’s another boom. Even so, it don’t add up.”