19. Two Lines
Chapter nineteen
Two Lines
Nova
The test was a First Response, purchased at six in the morning from the CVS on Mockingbird Lane while wearing Diego's hoodie with the hood up and paying in cash I'd taken from my own wallet and not from the compound's operational fund that I sometimes used for compound-related expenses, because this was not a compound-related expense.
I sat on the bathroom floor of my father's old room and held the test and waited.
Three minutes. The instructions said three minutes.
I sat on the cold tile and counted seconds in the way I counted things when I was nervous, which was by converting them into something else — in this case, converting them into the implications of each possible outcome, which was the criminologist's version of waiting and which was, I was aware, not healthier than ordinary counting but was the version available to me.
Two lines.
I looked at the test for a long time.
The information was real. It required integration before I could act on it.
I was a criminologist by training and I had failed, over the past weeks, to maintain chain of custody on my own body.
I had been saturated — in the compound, in the research, in the three men who had moved from the category of subjects to the category of the actual life I was living — and I had not tracked.
I tracked the freight invoices. I tracked the shell corporation structure.
I tracked Bishop's quarterly deposits to the third decimal place.
I had let the most basic biological tracking slip.
The information was in my hands. I began to process it.
Conception window.
The biological mechanics of it were clear. LMP approximately January 12, based on my last certain tracking date. Ovulation window approximately January 24-26. Standard cycle parameters.
January 26: Diego. Storage room. The end of the ovulation window. The probability was high — the highest of any of the three events that fell within or near the window. The biological mechanics and the timing aligned in a way that was the opposite of ambiguous.
February 14: Colt. His apartment. The cemetery first, then the apartment, the cold outside and the intel boards hidden behind the shelf. Later in the window — possible in a shifted cycle, which was not the expected scenario but was not biologically excluded.
March 4: Bishop. His office. The ledgers.
The trust fund. The desk. Outside the standard biological window.
I was aware that I was not a population average.
I was one person with one cycle, and standard windows were built on distributions.
Bishop's date was outside the standard window.
The story was honest about that in my own mind, and would never be discussed on the page of anyone's life.
I did not know.
I would not know in the way of certainty.
I sat with the not-knowing.
It had less weight than I expected. The not-knowing was simply a condition — like the fact that Dallas had hot summers and the compound's electrical system was aging and my father's chair was still at the head of the table and three men were, in different ways and at different rates, in the process of becoming something to me that I was still in the process of naming.
I thought about what the not-knowing looked like from outside, which was the criminologist's version of thinking about things: what would a researcher, looking at this situation from the outside, conclude about the decision not to pursue certainty?
She would conclude that the subject had decided that the answer to the question of biological parentage was less important than the question of actual parentage — which was a different question, a sociological one, and which had an answer that was already forming.
Three men. Different approaches. Different registers. The same compound, the same founding document, the same dead president's name on their cuts and in their histories.
Diego: who had learned to read a body as a system of foundations and weights and who treated the people he loved the same way he treated the kids in his gym — with the total attention of a man who understood that the specific thing in front of him was worth understanding completely.
Colt: who watched every door and catalogued every threat and had a constellation under the name of the woman he protected, filed and locked and carried. Who showed up at the cemetery every month for ten years for a man he had no obligation to remember except the obligation of love.
Bishop: who had built the trust fund at twenty-three. Who had been building the case since he was old enough to be useful. Who had been correcting his own notebook margins when he caught himself being wrong about a person.
The not-knowing contained: one child, in the earliest possible weeks of formation, whose biological parentage was technically uncertain and would remain so by the deliberate agreement of no one — there had been no agreement, there had been no discussion, there was simply the fact that I had been intimate with three men in a two-month window and was now six weeks pregnant and would not be having a conversation about who the father was because the answer to that question — one I was already certain of, was going to be all three of them, and the story I was building was not one in which that answer was revised.
The academic ethics violation.
I sat with this one longer.
A criminologist conducting field research in a community while pregnant by members of that community.
The IRB would have a framework for conflicts of interest in field research.
The framework did not extend to this specific scenario because no institutional review board in the history of academic ethics had anticipated the need to address it.
The question of whether my emotional and physical entanglement with subjects compromised the research methodology was one that I could construct arguments on both sides of and which would need to be navigated with Marisol Rivera at some point.
Not now.
I put the test in the small trash can under the sink. Buried it under tissue.
I pressed both palms flat against my lower abdomen. Flat. Nothing visible. Nothing to feel yet. Six weeks, the size of a lentil, the biology said. The size of the smallest legible unit of presence.
"I don't know your name," I said quietly, to the tile floor and the empty room and the six-week-old fact. "I don't know who you look like. I don't know what you're going to be." I moved my hands. "But you're here. We figure the rest out."
I washed my hands.
I went back to the thesis.
The freight anomaly was still there. The ghost hub was still there. The pattern I'd been building was still there and was getting clearer, and the clearness was pointing at a structure that had been operating inside my father's club for years and which had killed him when he tried to stop it.
The only person who knew about the two lines was the person in the room with me who was too small to tell anyone.
I had decisions to make first.
I stayed on the bathroom floor for another five minutes.
The cold tile was concrete and reality and the particular seriousness of a decision being made in an unsentimental space.
I had come to this compound with a research agenda and a legal framework and a careful academic distance from the community I was studying.
I had lost the distance so gradually that I hadn't noticed the moment of its loss.
The distance had been replaced by something that didn't have an institutional framework: a compound that was beginning to feel like home, three men who were beginning to feel like the specific kind of permanent I had not believed in before, and now a fact the size of a lentil.
I was fifteen years younger than Diego. Eighteen years younger than Colt. Eleven years younger than Bishop. I was twenty-two years old and I was Eduardo Santos' daughter and I was going to defend a dissertation in eight weeks that would help put my father's murderer in federal prison.
The lentil was part of the equation now.
"I don't know what to tell you about any of this," I said quietly, to the bathroom floor. "But I'm your mother. We figure it out."
The lentil had no response.
The compound was beginning to wake up outside, the generator's hum, the first bike starting in the lot, someone's boots on the gravel walk. The compound at dawn, which I had been listening to for weeks and which had stopped feeling strange and started feeling like the sound of things that mattered.
I had decisions to make first.
The decisions were: tell Marisol Rivera, who would need to know for the institutional framing; tell the three men, who would need to know for every other reason; tell my mother, who was now in the compound two doors down and had spent twenty-three years married to a man who kept secrets for what he thought were good reasons.
The order in which I told them mattered. The sequence mattered. Bishop had said that in the first week, the sequence matters, and I had spent the next several weeks understanding what he meant about the case and was now understanding it about something entirely unrelated to the case.
The lentil in my lower abdomen did not have opinions about the sequence. Not yet.
I had weeks before a dissertation defense that needed to be, in Colt's words, the trigger. Eight weeks in which this fact and that fact would need to coexist in the same body and the same compound and the same sequence.
I sat in the bathroom with my back against the tub wall and thought about the specific configuration of the next several months.
The thesis was in April. The national council was in May. Between those two events: the counter-operation's final phase, the six weeks during which everything the three men had been building would either land correctly or not.
The baby was a fact that did not fit inside the April/May configuration.
The baby would be approximately fourteen weeks along at the council, fourteen weeks from conception, not the clinical count, because the clinical count started from a date that was not the date that mattered.
And it would, by the time the summer arrived, be the dominant fact of my physical existence whether or not I had addressed it.
I had addressed it. I had addressed it in the bathroom floor language, the private language, the one that ran: I'm your mother. We figure it out.
I had also not addressed it in the other language, the one that involved the three men currently asleep in various parts of this compound.
That language would need to come.
I opened the laptop.
I went back to work.