Chapter 7 #2
“Then why do you know where Eden’s inhaler is from two buildings away?” He turned toward the clubhouse, the bad leg marking every step. “You’re watching her breathe and acting like the worry belongs to Jess. I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but a baby doesn’t explain it.”
I reported the intake and let Aris run the building-wide check.
Eden took the instruction from him after she saw the filter, used her inhaler once in the yard by the water table, and looked straight at me while she did it, so that I would know I had seen it and had no standing to come closer.
I stayed at the mechanical hall door and counted her shoulders until the rise flattened out.
Fourteen. That was coverage, not control; somebody in that yard needed to be counting, and Aris was inside with a prospect who had cut his hand.
Leah came through the mechanical doorway afterward with Tessa behind her.
“You told her that keeping her alive had worn you out,” she said.
I had picked that wound before the porch. Telling her otherwise would hand the truth to a woman close enough to Eden to give it away with one look. “I told her why the marriage ended.”
“Your marriage hadn’t ended when you got into her bed Saturday night.
” Leah came closer, her eyes bright and none of the anger going out of them.
“She woke up Sunday believing you loved her. By breakfast there was a pregnant woman at her door and her car was packed for a highway. Don’t say ended like both of you got there. ”
“And stop watching her use the inhaler,” Tessa said from the door. “You don’t get to look at her like you’re waiting for permission to save her.”
Jess found me in the corridor an hour later, after Jax and June were finished with her. She had gone gray around the mouth and she was carrying her purse with both arms, the way you carry something in a bus station.
“Forty minutes,” she said. “June wrote down every answer and read them back to me twice.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“She asked when I found out. I said the second week of June, the way you told me. She asked what test, and where I bought it, and whether I still had the box.” Jess pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. “I don’t have the box. She wrote that down.”
“That’s nothing. Nobody keeps the box.”
“Jax asked where I lived the six weeks before I came here. I gave him the motel on Ninety-Two. He knew the manager’s name.” She let out a breath that shook on the way. “Then June asked what you call me. Not what I call you. What you call me, when it’s just the two of us.”
The corridor went narrow. Ten weeks of manufactured message history and I had never written that down.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I sat there. For a moment I sat there with my mouth open and Jax stopped writing.” She looked up at me. “I said you don’t call me anything, you say my name, and June wrote that down too, and she wrote down how long it took me.”
“That reads as a woman ashamed of a married man.”
“Is that what it reads as.” Jess said it flat, no question in it.
“After that she asked when I last saw a doctor, and whether I wanted Mia to arrange one, and she said it kindly. Nobody has offered me anything kindly in a year. I nearly said yes.” She opened the purse, took out the clinic packet she had been carrying since long before I found her, and put it on the sill between us. “Here. Before I do.”
The envelope had a practice name printed across it, an intake booklet nobody had filled in, and an appointment card with a date and no provider. It was the shape of proof at a distance and nothing at all up close, and it would hold for exactly as long as the gate stayed shut.
I took it to Bear before Jax could reach him. He looked at the printed address, the card, the closed gate, and my face, in that order.
“Gate’s shut,” he said. “No clinic runs while there are shooters on the county road.”
“So the seventy-two hours starts when it opens.”
“The seventy-two hours ends when it opens.” Bear put the envelope in the folder under his arm and kept it. “First vehicle out of this compound carries that woman to that appointment, and Jax drives, and Jax comes back with paper. You want the club treating her child as yours, that’s the price.”
The blast came off the west side at four ten.
The floor jumped, ceiling dust came down the length of the corridor, the lights went and the alarms started calling from three directions.
Jess dropped against the wall with both arms over her head.
I took the jacket off my arm, crouched in front of her, and put it around her shoulders while men ran for the perimeter.
“Look at me.” I kept my hands on the collar where anybody coming out of the common room could see them. Jess lifted her head with the argument gone out of her face. “You stay in the center hall. Nobody moves you unless Bear or I say so. I’ll keep you and the baby out of it.”
The lie needed witnesses, so I made every word carry, and I knew Eden was standing inside the common-room doorway before I turned my head. Leah had a hand near her elbow. June had the medication pouch. Tessa stood in front of all three of them.
Jess’s fingers closed on the collar. She saw Eden over my shoulder and said, so quietly it barely cleared the alarm, “You could stop.”
I stood. Bear was already sending me west.
The device had gone into the maintenance shed and taken the fuel store behind it.
The shed was empty. The drum rack was not.
Eleven hundred gallons of diesel burned into the drainage channel for the better part of two hours, and when the crews had it down to steam we had ninety gallons in the pump tank and a generator plan I could count on one hand.
Clubhouse. Infirmary. Pump. Nothing after that got a wire.
The county feed had come down Sunday night.
By dark the east row had no power at all, which meant no window units and no way to move July air through a house I couldn’t enter.
I spent the hour walking teams off the smoke, checking the fence, and following tire tracks that quit on county gravel eight hundred yards north.
The strike came from outside. The cut wire came from inside.
Whether those two facts shared a man was still open, and the not knowing gave me enough fear to keep spending my wife.
She was waiting by the garage corridor after dark, near the door that opens toward our house. Leah, June and Tessa had gone ahead to check the path, which left her alone inside the sightline of one armed prospect. Her right hand held the purse strap near the knife.
“I need to know where the second rescue inhaler is,” I said. It was wrong before I finished it, and the smoke had reached three buildings. “Not to touch it. If this place takes another hit, whoever moves you has to know.”
“Leah knows. Aris knows. You don’t.” She came one step closer, far enough to keep it private and not an inch past that. “If you go in my bedroom to look for it, I’ll put you through the garage wall. If you send a prospect, I’ll tell Tessa you volunteered him to demonstrate how.”
“The east row has no power tonight and the exterior wall is thinner than the clubhouse. Bear may move your group.”
“Bear can ask me.” Eden set herself on my left.
She used to stand on my right without either of us deciding it, because a pipe bomb outside a bar took most of that ear years before I met her and the aid has never done anything useful in a room with radios in it.
On the porch Sunday she had stepped right out of habit before she remembered what I had done.
Now she watched me lose the back half of a sentence and would not repeat it. “Did you hear me?”
“Enough.” I turned to face her square rather than ask for the accommodation she had taken away. “I won’t go in. I won’t send anybody.”
“And you won’t ask about my medication again. You were tired of it.” Her eyes went past me toward the common room, where Jess sat with my jacket over the back of her chair and a prospect setting down water. “Go make sure the healthy family has everything it needs.”
She walked. I followed as far as the clubhouse door and watched Leah and June take her across the secured path with Tessa looking back twice to be sure I stayed.
Eden went into our house and turned the dead bolt, and the sound came across the yard after the radios had quit and the shooting had moved off the fence.
I stood there and counted it out. Six days, if Denver confirmed on schedule. Locks open, and my wife has never once refused a fact she could measure. When she had the photograph in her hands with the range written on the back of it, she would understand exactly what the six days bought.