1910 #3
Dixie scribbled. Her pencil sounded like a whip as it scratched the paper. Bertie wiped her brow with her glove. She began stumbling backward toward the door, holding her middle.
“Her condition,” Opal heard someone murmur.
“You’re married?” Jenkins asked.
She tried to face the Colonel, but the wires impeded her movements.
The band was too tight. Her headache was a rock in her skull; if she could unzip her skin, it’d tumble out.
She found it hard to concentrate on anything other than the pressure there, and then the pressure migrated lower, to her abdomen.
“To whom?” one of the men asked.
Opal didn’t answer. Now her whole body was throbbing, thumping, cramping. What did it matter, to whom? She tried to catch Bertie’s attention, but she was heading toward the door. She could feel the heat of the Colonel at her back.
“It’s her condition. You see what we’re dealing with here.” Jagr tried to get closer to Opal, but Jenkins stopped him. “She is lucky I’ll allow her to come home at all. Opal,” Jagr commanded. “Stand up. Opal.”
But she wasn’t Opal right then.
I am not Opal. I am not me. Let her be anyone else. Let her be far away. And for a moment again, she felt it—the vacuity, a sense she occupied a different body in a different life.
The Colonel continued to observe readings from the Mind Box, jotting down his findings in a notebook. His eyes darted back and forth. His cheeks were flushed.
“My wife is hysterical, clearly. It must be her pregnancy—the hormones can lead to psychotic stupor,” said Jagr.
“She has a condition. A nervous condition. Headaches. Blackouts. I’ve always told her pregnancy would make it worse.
I believed her to be sterile. But—” He scratched his beard, calculating an equation in his head.
“Pregnancy?” said Tuttle. More audience members found their way to the exit.
The pressure in her head was now too much for her. Her whole body tightened, and she braced herself. She heard a strange noise in her head, a waa-waaing, like the cry of her baby making its way to the light. She still had more than a month, according to her calculations.
“To whom is she married?” the mayor asked. Now the entire committee faced Opal, whose head was bound up with straps and nodes. She couldn’t speak for the pain.
The Colonel made a few more notations in his log. He set down his pen and looked up at the men.
“Please,” said Jenkins. “Tell us, please.”
“To whom are you married?” asked Tuttle.
“Answer immediately,” said the mayor.
“A woman who’d lie about this is capable of any sort of lie,” said Tuttle.
“Tell us,” ordered Jenkins.
The audience waited.
“To me.” The voice that spoke came from behind her, from the final committee member who now stood to join his partners.
She felt a pair of hands, a warm harness at her shoulders.
The Colonel. “And now I have it. Proof. My Mind Box has given it to me.” He held up the logbook above his head, like a priest holding a Bible.
“She is my wife. And the child is mine.”
At that moment, Opal felt it rising up in her—an earthquake that began at her feet. Her whole body began to tremble. She could feel froth at the corners of her mouth. Her body was a foreign object, no longer in her control.
The gasping of the crowd again. Dixie closed her notebook.
Chairs toppled to the floor as spectators jumped up.
Now Opal was on the floor. Jagr tried to reach her.
She could see his boots, caked with mud, drawing near.
“My wife,” he yelled, but he was blocked by the Earthshine Girls, who’d run to the front.
The Colonel peeled the contraption off Opal’s head and helped her up.
From his pocket he produced a ring: Hazel’s wedding ring.
She recognized it from the portrait, the way the artist had drawn it to look like it was catching light.
The Colonel now held the ring between two fingers, and he pushed it onto Opal’s knuckle.
That the ring fit seemed to be of some comfort to the Colonel, who bent over her, weeping.
He kissed her neck, her cheek, her eyes once more.
His tears were warm and wet against her skin.
“It’s me,” she whispered.
Outside, Opal’s body trembled with exhaustion, with the worry that Jagr was not far behind. He’d produce documents, proof. He’d have the law on his side.
“I will not lose you twice,” the Colonel said. “We’ll go away.”
She imagined her life as Hazel. He’d save her, his wife.
They’d leave the next morning, enough time for him to make travel arrangements and get his affairs in order.
She touched his arm. He felt solid beneath his coat, immovable.
“Did the Mind Box—” Opal said. Her throat was raw. “Give you the truth?”
“Science is incapable of lying,” he said.
Yes, she thought, but it can be wrong.
THE NEXT MORNING, SHE GATHERED her trunk and began filling it with her belongings. She folded her clothes; she collected her papers and letters and pens and little trinkets—how easy it is to accumulate effects. From her icebox, she retrieved the coffee tin with her savings.
As she was locking the latch on the trunk, a pain seared through her side, as though the baby were pulling at her ribs. Opal lost her breath and sat on the trunk and covered her eyes and, for the first time since she’d run away from Gallipolis, allowed herself to cry.
She didn’t want the neighbors to hear her.
She contained her sobs, and it occurred to her that’s how she always felt—contained—her whole life: to kitchens and factories and houses and special elixirs and this body of hers, which now doubled her over, thick with discomfort.
She wanted to be big, but not in this way.
She wanted to be as wide as the world, but here she was in her apartment, dark except for the orange light of the streetlamps that cast long rectangular lines on her wall.
The Colonel would be here soon. The baby kicked again.
He told her not to answer to anybody. When he arrived, he’d whistle, as he did now, outside her door.
The sidewalks were crowded with evening walkers.
The entire city seemed to be outside tonight, skygazing, searching for the comet that would swoop into the earth’s atmosphere with its toxic tail.
May 19. The day the scientists said the world would end.
They walked to the Colonel’s car, parked around the corner because the street vendors had set up their food carts. “We’ll take a train to Baltimore,” he explained. “From there we’ll board a boat.”
“France?”
“London. I know a doctor there who specializes in—” He stopped talking and looked up toward the sky.
Then, Opal saw it, too, smoke from the direction of the Earthshine factory.
The plume looked fat and wormlike, gray against the black.
She thought of the Earthshine Girls—Maria and Ruth and Gilly and the others.
How when the séance had concluded last night, they’d formed a wall of their bodies so Jagr couldn’t get to her.
“Take me there,” she pleaded. “Something awful’s happened. I feel it.”
“But, Grouse,” he said. He checked his pocket watch. “It could be fireworks.”
“Please. Five minutes. It’s all I ask. Five minutes and then the rest of my life.”
She wondered how far London was from France, and if a boat could take her there quickly. The car moved toward the factory; the fat worm of smoke faded from the sky.
When they arrived, a crowd had gathered outside. The Colonel instructed his driver to get as close as possible, then he opened the door and helped Opal down. From here, they couldn’t see any smoke, but they could still smell it, acrid in the air.
“Five minutes,” he said. “And be careful.”
Opal made her way through the crowd to the entrance of the factory, where a group of Earthshine Girls stood.
The chain on the door had been cut.
She stood on her toes now and spotted the Colonel waiting near his car. He held his hat over his heart; his hair was mussed. She must be quick. “Who did it?” Opal asked.
“Amanda,” Maria said. “She’s locked it from the inside.”
“I saw smoke,” Opal said.
“She said it was foolish of us all to fight for some old factory that belonged to his wife. I told her that’s not what we’re fighting for.” Maria gestured toward the building, and if Opal had the powers of clairvoyance, she could see it, what would happen in just a few minutes.
Now the Earthshine workers formed a circle around her. They looked as somber as they did the day Betsy died. A siren blared in the distance. Others must have seen the smoke. Opal strained her neck in the direction of the Colonel’s car, but he was no longer there.
Above her, the stars were a thing of beauty, and she searched for the comet beyond the factory, beyond the large chimney that poked at the black fabric of sky. That’s when she saw movement in a window, a flash of light, but not the electrical kind.
“Look!” Maria shouted.
“What?” Pearl yelled. “What do you see?”
Just then Opal spotted a hand. In the hand was a yardstick and some rags. The window began to glow.
Smoke soon filled the sky again. Maria knocked out a window with her megaphone, threw her cloak over the ledge, and climbed inside. Within seconds, the door swung open. Gilly and Pearl and a few others raced inside. Opal stumbled forward behind them.
Inside, the smell of smoke and soap. Everywhere.
Pungent. Above her, she heard footsteps on the walkway, where the floor manager usually stood.
Smoke quickly filled the building, greedy for space.
She couldn’t see through it. Opal covered her nose and mouth with her shawl.
A blur of movement. “Maria! Amanda!” she yelled.
She heard Sudsy barking in the distance.
She used her hands to guide herself to the stairwell, where she grasped for the railing.
Her foot met the first step, and she tried to heave her weight upward, but then a cramp jolted through her body.
Her baby. The smoke. She heard footsteps, the quick-ringing sound of boots on metal.
“Maria!” Opal yelled again, then more footsteps from above.
She remembered Jagr’s formulary tucked in the ceiling tile, and now she imagined it darkening around the edges, curling inward to destroy itself.
“Get out!” Opal’s middle seized. “Get out!” She heaved one last time.
She managed to make her way up one single step, but when she tried to lift herself upward again, the weight of her body pulled her back.
She slid off the stair, holding tight to her middle.
Smoke caught in her throat. She stumbled backward and clung to a wheeled cart full of uncut soap as she made her way toward the door, coughing. She could barely breathe.
She felt the mild sensation of a balloon popping inside her, then wetness between her legs. A stream of fluid ran down into her shoe.
She’d run out of time.