“A little hard for me, but I was eight. I went to school, I made new friends. My mother, she worked and took care of me. She got the laundry job. Paid the rent. She did it alone. She didn’t date. She didn’t remarry. She was like you, Marta. She had no other purpose in life but keeping me alive. Then, you know, she got cancer, like everybody does, and she got the treatments she could afford to, and there might have been enough money to save her if we’d stayed in Gulf. But we didn’t. So she finished up in terrible pain, and what she has to show for it at the end is a daughter who waitresses at a bar.”
“I can guarantee you that she was proud of you,” Marta said. “You’re a wonderful girl. Any mother would be lucky to have you.”
“Oh, she was proud,” Edie agreed. “I’m not trying to say her sacrifice was pointless or that I’m ungrateful. I’m not entirely sure what I mean, actually.” She thought. “I’m trying to explain why I don’t think I want kids. It probably sounds like I’m going to say I don’t want to sacrifice the way my mother did. That’s not it, though. I’m willing to sacrifice. I just don’t know if a child is what I want to do it for. For one person. Or even a couple. And everything you do is for them, and then they have children, and everything they do is for them. If I had a child, I think I’m the kind of person who would live in this world in a really narrow way. I would only want what would make my kid happy. And fuck everything else. That’s not how I want to be.”
Marta stared at her long enough that Edie started to feel uncomfortable. “I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said finally. “I’m only talking about how I see myself.”
“No, you’re right. I don’t disagree at all.”
Edie waited to see if she’d say more.
“You saw my husband. The kind of person he is.”
Edie shrugged a little, nodded.
“I called Berto and Ken monsters. I’ve been lying here thinking of how unfair that was. I’ve been married for over twenty-five years to a monster. A real monster. But he’s good to our sons, and he gives them a good life. I’ve never been willing to think past that. I’ve never had the courage to.”
“I think you have courage,” Edie said. “I think you’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met.”
Marta reached across the little space of floor between their beds, and Edie met her halfway. Their fingers linked.
“Well, I don’t know about all that. But I’ve already broken one promise to Wes. I told him I’d do whatever I had to do to get back in-zone. Locking myself in a room with a young man having a hatching probably isn’t the best way to go about it.”
“We could switch places.”
“No. This is how it’s supposed to be,” Marta said hoarsely, voice thick with emotion. Edie wondered if she was thinking about that thing her husband said just before Violet shot Joe. About her sons.
There was a buzz at the door. Edie rose from the bed to open the vac seal.
Andy. “I checked on Wes. If you still want to go in with him, I think now’s the time.”
Marta and Edie exchanged looks.
“Yes, I still want to go in,” Marta said. “Show me what to do.”
—
A couple of hours later, Edie sat in the downstairs living area with Violet, Andy, Berto, and Ken. They had been drawn in unspoken consensus not to the couches by the fireplace or the formal dining table but to the bar stools around the kitchen island. Andy made a pot of coffee. They rummaged in the pantry and freezer and pulled out a random assortment of snacks: butter cookies, pretzels, some kind of weird unrefrigerated cheese product that didn’t smear on crackers so much as collapse onto them, dates, mini-quiches that heated up quickly in the convection oven. They ate in silence at first, ravenous; it was at least 9:00, and they’d had nothing since those sandwiches back at the house in Lenoir. Andy had set up a camera in Wes’s room—it worked on an old-fashioned wireless system—and they watched the stream of video on a tablet, muting the audio when Wes started groaning with pain. It was strange to surveil him and Marta like this. Shameful, even. And yet it was the only way to know how and if the situation had progressed, and Edie wanted to be able to spring to action if Marta needed her. To outrace the others to the door if she had to.
“This is going to sound weird, but you know what this reminds me of?” Andy asked, finally breaking the silence.
“What?” said Berto.
“Waiting for my boys to be born.” He unwrapped another foil wedge of cheese and bisected it with a cracker. He took a big bite, a shadow passing over his face. Served him right, Edie thought. He probably didn’t deserve to get to come back to his family, to reenter their lives as if he’d never planned to leave them forever. Would someone sitting here rat him out? Edie didn’t plan to—she wasn’t interested in meting out justice—but she couldn’t imagine Berto staying silent, especially after Andy insisted on bringing Wes into the chalet.
“Yes,” Ken said. “It does.”
“You have kids?” Edie asked, shocked. He’d never once mentioned them.
He nodded. “Four.” He didn’t elaborate.
Violet set down her coffee mug with a sigh, stood.
“You OK?” Edie asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just going to stretch my legs.”
When she’d wandered off toward the fireplace, Berto leaned in and lowered his voice. “So getting back over the Wall,” he said. “What’s the plan?”
“Well,” said Andy, “I’m of two minds about that. So I’ll tell you my ideas, and you all tell me what you think.”
“Spit it out,” Berto said.
Andy frowned, made a show of refilling his coffee, doctoring it again with sugar and powdered creamer. “The first option is to use the satellite phone in this house.”
For a pregnant few seconds, no one knew what to say. Then, Berto exploded: “A phone? In this goddamn house?” Edie thought he was going to fly over the island and start pummeling Andy, but he seemed to remember at the last moment that Andy held all of the passcodes to the storage closets and safes. Trying for calm—though his face was blotchy-red with anger, or maybe excitement—he said, slowly, “Is there a reason we’re not placing the fucking phone call—I don’t know—four hours ago?”
“Yes,” Andy said, “there’s a reason. For one, our pal Wes is still doing his thing upstairs.”
Berto shook his head in disgust. “I wish I knew why you have such a hard-on for that guy.”
“I wish I knew why you don’t have more of a hard-on for him. I mean, if we place that call, who do you think is likeliest to get the good guys here to help us on the double? You?” He pointed to Violet and whispered: “The scarecrow over there?”
“Ken’s a big shot in his own right,” Edie said.
“That’s true,” Andy said. “And yeah, if Wes dies, it’s a good thing we got Ken. But better for us if they’re both alive.”
“Why?” Berto asked.
“Because the rest of us aren’t worth the fuel it’d take to get us.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Berto said sorely, but he turned his attention to folding a foil wrapper. A little bird formed in his big hands. “I have the money to cover that. OLE was going to airlift us out in case of emergency, anyway.”
“That’s the claim, but I don’t know if it’s true. It’s never once happened. Which leads me to the other option. And I guess all of this depends on how cynical you are. Or paranoid. Me, I’m a lot of both.”