Chapter 37
Twenty stories underground, Allie Merritt placed the memory card on her tongue.
She tilted her head back.
Swallowed.
The hard-edged little plastic square cut her throat on its way down, pricking her eyes with tears. She coughed. Gagged. It
almost came back up, like regurgitating a razor blade. But she clenched her muscles and held it down until the sensation faded.
It was done.
Allie’s life had changed in Costa Rica.
Symptoms first appeared on days one and two, in the dry lowland forests of Guanacaste. Traveler’s stomach, she’d told herself,
or maybe too many sugary drinks while writing by the pool. By day three she was hiking deep in the dense rainforests of the
Northern Zone and the heat and humidity were nauseating. She barely saw the capuchin monkeys her guide pointed out, or the
poisonous blue jeans frogs, or the rare sloth. She’d hardly taken any photos, no notes, no sketches, no local profiles. She’d
been too sick, unable to focus.
Don’t throw up.
Eventually the trail opened up to a hundred-foot suspension bridge.
She gripped the bungee-cord railings with sweaty fingers, the footbridge sagging and swaying with every step.
The treetops were far below her hiking boots, like walking on a slippery chain-link fence.
She counted down the hours until she’d be back at her hostel.
Don’t you dare throw up.
On her way back, the crowded public bus lurched up the mountain pass, and Allie’s seat belt had been too tight, her insides
now cramped and watery. The single-lane road was all switchbacks, washed out with streams of red volcanic clay. The bus heaved
with every turn, and rainwater blurred the windows, and other passengers’ elbows kept bumping her side. She gripped her seat
and tried to focus on the murmuring Spanish voices around her.
I will not throw up on a crowded bus.
But there was no lavatory. Asking the driver to stop wasn’t an option; the bus was currently finessing its way up the cliff
like a ten-ton mountain goat.
She couldn’t fight it. Her mouth was salivating. She kept swallowing spit.
I will not.
I will not.
I will not.
Days later, after she’d cut the trip short and returned home exhausted and sick with aching breasts, it was still too early
to take a pregnancy test, but she’d told Ethan anyway when he picked her up from the airport. He’d processed the news in silence—and
then with a growing boyish excitement she’d never seen before. By the time he dropped her off at her apartment, the sky was
graying with dawn and she only wanted to sleep, and he’d kissed her forehead and told her it was the best news of his life.
This shattered something inside Allie. Of course Ethan would be enthusiastic about having a kid. It wasn’t his body or career.
Allie’s career was every airport, rail station, and bus stop in the world. She’d built her identity around traveling hundreds
of miles a day, fast and thrifty and light. She imagined navigating customs with a stroller and a diaper bag, washing formula
bottles under rural water spigots, installing a twenty-pound car seat in every bus and taxi—and she had to stop, because the
anxiety became a physical weight atop her chest. How would she adjust to this? What would happen to Keep Calm? Allie’s life, her identity, everything she’d worked so hard to build over the past decade, was all about to be obliterated
by the time bomb growing inside her.
She’d been too embarrassed to tell anyone else, even Tess. She’d researched her condition in private like it was a shameful
disease (and, she’d reasoned, isn’t pregnancy just the ultimate sexually transmitted disease?). At some point, she saw an
online chart breaking out fetal sizes by week—week six was a lentil, week seven was a blueberry, week eight was a raspberry—and
the lovey language and saccharine colors made her want to puke all over again. She hadn’t been afraid of the fer-de-lance
bite that killed her or the deepest, blackest caves her grotto could find, but miles into the Northern Zone of Costa Rica,
she’d finally found her personal worst-case scenario, a thing that truly scared her.
Back on that crowded public bus, she did throw up—but quietly, into her satchel.
Only one passenger noticed.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he’d said in Spanish as she zipped her bag up, the fabric full and warm. But Allie Merritt had
always prided herself on solving her own problems. Even then, she already knew she wanted to terminate her pregnancy.
Now, shivering and alone inside an ancient chamber hundreds of feet underground with mud-slick hair, bruised elbows, and a MicroSD card in her stomach, it occurred to Allie that it was a Saturday, which meant she was now exactly five weeks along.
Five weeks.
According to that stupid pink chart? The size of a sesame seed.
Well, this isn’t an ideal situation for either of us. But if we’re stuck here together, we might as well introduce ourselves.
Nice to meet you, sesame seed.
I’m Allie.