Owle had let out a halting laugh. “Well,” he said. “Look at that.”
Look at that. She did. She looked and looked, a thrill racing through her body and setting her heart to pounding. Still, it didn’t sink in. It didn’t sink in then, or each of the times she came to Owle’s house so he could check her blood pressure and question her about how she was feeling. Only this morning, when she first felt that distant chord getting played deep within her, did she trust what Owle insisted was happening to her. Her body—her abused, broken, pain-racked body, this body she had spent most of her lifetime hating—had done something good. Her baby. She had done this.
“Hello in there,” Violet said, more terrified than ever.
She rose, slipped her tunic over her head, drew up her trousers. They pinched her waist; she would have to let them out again soon. Before leaving, she took the chipped white mug of tea Meg had made for her, walked to the front door, and peered out. No one around. She dumped its contents in the dirt. She had forgotten a few times, and once, Meg noticed. “You missed your Salt dose this morning,” she said, motioning to the full cup on Violet’s nightstand. A fly floated in the cool brown liquid.
“Oh. Yeah. I remembered later, at Vic’s. So I had a cup then.”
“Cool,” Meg said. She had taken the cup, grimacing at the fly, and flung the tea out the door.
—
Violet had thought, for a long time, that fear was something she would no longer feel. Would, yes: it was an act of will, this relinquishing of fear, because her poor brain insisted on it long after she had nothing, or close to nothing, left to lose. She lived on, through the loneliness and constant pain, for June’s sake. Out of love for her. Which made her hate June sometimes, and she had wanted more than once to say, “If you really cared about me you would let me go.” The problem, though, was that June would let her go. If Violet put it that way. And then June would have to live on with the guilt of letting her go, of the consequences of such letting go, and Violet wanted, despite everything, to spare her that.
Long back she’d started regularly using Salt—in grain form, taken orally—for pain. Owle dispensed it to her. If the initial trauma of the burn had been an all-encompassing, months-long ROAR, and her day-to-day baseline now was like trying to have a conversation with someone while some other person at your side shouted nonsense, the Salt sent the shouter across the room, sometimes even across the house. On the rare occasions when Violet had shot up, the shouter was banished entirely, leaving behind a calm so eerily perfect that Violet knew the risks of indulging more often, knew that to do so would be as good, ultimately, as firing a gun into her own skull. She had lived with pain so long that its absence seemed a kind of death.
Still, she’d come to depend on her low-level dosage—both the reprieves it offered and the anticipation of a reprieve, which gave her hope, something to aim for, a way to muddle through even when the medicine wasn’t in her system. Owle’s plan, then—his offer—had stopped her cold.
“I’d have to do without all of it?” Violet had asked. They were sitting at his kitchen table—the same table where Owle had outlined for June the full scope of Ruby City’s fertility problem only the previous week. “Not just the tea but the pain meds, too?”
“All of it,” Owle confirmed.
“And there’s not even a guarantee?”
“Nope,” said Owle. “That’s the whole reason for even trying this, Violet. We have to know if the contraceptive effect stops when you stop the Salt. And even if it does, there still aren’t guarantees. You’re what, thirty-six?”
“Around that,” Violet said.
“It’s not your fertile prime.”
“Then why are you fucking asking me, then?”
“Because I trust your discretion,” said Owle. “I know you wouldn’t want this getting out and causing June trouble. And because I thought you might be interested.”
It was true. She had come to him a year earlier asking—haltingly, unable to meet his eye—if she might be going into early menopause or something. She hadn’t had a period in over six months, she said, and normally she’d just say fuck it and good riddance, but in the back of her mind—way back, far off, just a hypothetical, mind you—she’d wondered if maybe, someday, some way or another, she might think about having a child. Owle had looked at her in a way she hadn’t much liked: shrewdly, pityingly.
Now, she asked—unable, again, to meet his eye—“Who’d father it, then?”
His turn to look away. “Me, I guess, though I’m most definitely not in my fertile prime. I’m not talking about laying you down on a bed of roses, either, so don’t worry about the old man trying to romance you. We’d do it with syringes. That’s assuming you start menstruating again, of course.”
“If there is a baby,” Violet said. “We—what? Share it?”
Owle shook his head emphatically. “No, ma’am. I’m not interested in that. I’m too old to start daddying, and I’m too busy doctoring. If you have some other candidate in mind, that’s fine, but I’m operating on strictly a donor basis.”
Hell of a proposal. Stop your medicines, both the one that saves you from deadly disease and the one that saves you from constant pain. Wait an indeterminate amount of time. If, if your period returns, come in a couple of weeks later for a syringe of old-man spunk. Repeat. Repeat. Wait some more. And at the end of it all, maybe you’ll have a baby to raise. Out here. Alone.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
It took eight months for her period to resume. Eight months with the pain shouting over her shoulder, eight months having to keep up with her regular responsibilities—for June could not, must not, know what she was trying—without the protection from tick bites. Doc Owle got her a jar of NO-BITE and a Stamp; she had to use it four times. “You need to make some excuse to June to stay closer to home,” he kept telling her, and Violet kept refusing. If June thought that something was wrong, that anything had changed, that something was happening in Violet’s life without her knowledge or approval, she’d go into lockdown mode. June hated anything she couldn’t control. She would try to stop Violet. She would pressure and cajole and lay down guilt trips on Violet until Violet capitulated to her demands, because after all, she’d be right, wouldn’t she? What business did Violet have trying to become a mother? What child would want to nurse at her breast, look up into her ravaged face?