29. Lily
LILY
It was two lines that did it. After the blizzard, the bounty, and the man, two small pink lines were what finally, completely stopped me running.
The box had come with two sticks in it, which tells you that somebody in that industry has met a woman before. The first one is there to be argued with. The second is the ammunition for the round after the argument.
I had the second stick in the inside pocket of my coat at six in the morning while he laced his boots, and I stood there with a mug I wasn't drinking out of and watched him do it.
"I will be out until the middle of the afternoon."
"Where does a person go at six?"
"I want the far shore first, then the launch road, and then a walk I mean to do twice." He pulled the second lace tight. "Put the bar across the door."
"You have said that to me every morning for a week."
"I will say it every day I have."
Then he straightened up and didn't leave, which is not a thing he does. That man is never motionless in a doorway. He kept one hand on the bar and looked at me the way you look at a road you're about to commit to.
"There is something I have to say to you tonight."
My whole chest went cold. "Say it now."
"Not while you are holding a mug you have no intention of drinking."
"Sacha, if you have news, I would rather have it standing up in a warm kitchen than lying awake at two."
"It will be tonight," he said, and something moved behind his face that I couldn't put a name to, and I've spent three weeks studying that face. "I would like one ordinary day first. That is all it is."
He went. I heard the truck door and then nothing, and I stood in the middle of the room and knew, without any doubt at all, that whatever he meant to hand me tonight, mine weighed more.
Then I put the mug down and went to get the keys, and let me be honest about which of those two things I did faster.
He had gone out on foot. The truck was still under the woodshed with the tarp half off, and there's a particular kind of woman who calls that a sign, and I'm not her, and I took it anyway.
I'd done the drive once already and I knew the parts that would tell on me.
The gauge will tell on you. The odometer will too, and there's no fixing that one.
Road salt in the wheel arches is the third witness, and nothing gets sanded up here but the county roads.
So I put four gallons into it at a pump twenty miles out where nobody has ever heard of me, and I stayed well clear of the Gas-N-Go, because Earl Dombrowski could deduce a pregnancy from a windshield.
Cutter's Hollow sits at the bottom of a long grade with the grain elevator on the near end.
Somewhere in it there's a friendly man in a brand-new flannel shirt with a professional interest in which of my windows has a lamp in it.
I never got as far as the main street. A mile short of it there's a white house set back off the county road with a maple in the yard and a sign nailed to the porch post, hand-lettered, gone gray with weather.
It read A. HALVORSEN M.D. RING BELL AND WAIT.
So I rang it, and I waited, and I got a full ninety seconds to consider what I was doing before the door opened.
He was somewhere north of eighty, in a cardigan with a pen in the pocket, and he had a canary in a cage behind him that started up the moment the cold air came in.
"That is Marilyn," he said. "She only sings for weather and strangers. Come in out of it."
"Are you still practicing?"
"I have not seen a patient on purpose since the clinic in town closed for good." He shut the door behind me and looked at my face for about as long as it takes to check a pulse. "You are not selling anything and you are not from the county. Take the chair by the stove, and give me your coat."
His front room had a rolltop desk in it and a shelf of medical books with the spines gone soft.
What used to be a sun porch had been made over into an exam room, with a table, a paper roll, and a blood pressure cuff hung on a nail.
There were two framed photographs on the desk, and the nearer one was a woman on a dock, laughing at whoever was holding the camera.
"I need to know something for certain," I said. "And I need it not to be written down anywhere with my name on it."
"Then you have come to the right retirement." He sat down and pointed at the chair again until I used it. "You are the one from up the ridge."
"How does everybody in this county know that?"
"Marge at the diner tells it as a romance. Earl tells it as a business opportunity. Ronda Dombrowski over in Otter Bend has been telling it as a medical mystery." He settled his glasses. "There's a nurse called Denise in that version. Denise has been the talk of two counties for a week."
I put my face in my hands, and I laughed until my eyes stung, and it came out of me sounding like something else at the end.
"Denise is not real," I said.
"She never was. I worked Denise out inside of a minute, and I have kept the conclusion to myself, and I intend to go on keeping it." He waited until I looked up. "How late are you?"
"That is the problem. I have no idea. I stopped tracking two years ago and I know how that sounds coming out of a nurse."
"You are a nurse."
"I finished my training the same season she died, and I have been on the road ever since. Two years of it, and almost all of it nights."
"Then I am going to talk to you like one, which will save us both an hour." He rolled his chair a foot closer. "Give me the last date you would swear to."
"I have not got one. What I have is a night I would put money on."
"How long ago was that?"
"Fourteen days have gone by, and I have counted every one of them twice."
"That is early, and it is not too early." He got up, went to a cabinet, and came back with a foil packet the size of a stick of gum. "Mine is the laboratory kind. I have three of them left and no reason on earth to be saving them. The bathroom is at the end of the hall on the left."
"I have my own in my coat."
"Then run them both and stop giving yourself the option of arguing later," he said. "Take your time. The old ones take four minutes."
I've never spent a longer four minutes anywhere.
There was a grab rail bolted beside the toilet, and a jar of cotton balls with a rubber band holding the lid on, and a bottle of lavender hand lotion on the shelf that had gone thick with age.
A woman had lived in that house and didn't any more.
I laid both tests flat on the edge of the sink with the window behind me.
Then I counted the seconds off in tens, which is what I do at a bedside when a family is watching my face and my face has to hold.
They came up together. His showed two lines, dark as ink and past arguing with, and mine showed two as well, and this time the second one wasn't faint at all.
I lowered myself onto the edge of a stranger's bathtub, in a room that smelled of old lavender, and laid my palm over my own stomach for the first time without taking it away again.
I had nothing left to bargain with. That's the part I keep coming back to. For two days I'd been cross-examining a fact that never once took the stand, and the fact had gone on quietly with its work the entire time, dividing, indifferent, wholly uninterested in my opinion of it.
I came out with both sticks in my fist, having failed to think of anywhere else to put them.
"What have you got there?" he said.
"You already know."
"I would like you to say it out loud once in a room with a doctor in it. That is the whole of the service I still provide."
"I'm pregnant."
"You are pregnant," he said, and he took the sticks off me and set them on a paper towel on the desk, tidy, the way you set out specimens. "That is either congratulations or condolences. You will tell me which one it is, and you may take as long as you like getting there."
And then the room tilted, honestly and physically, and it had nothing to do with my blood pressure.
He reached over and put two fingers on the inside of my wrist as though he meant to take my pulse.
Then he simply left his hand there, dry and light as paper.
He didn't say one comforting thing to me until I had finished doing what I was doing.
"There you are," he said at last. "Your pulse is ninety-six and your mother is not in the room. Which is it?"
"How did you know about my mother?"
"I had no idea. I put the word in the room to see where it would land, and it landed where it nearly always does." He let go of my wrist. "That is not a trick. When women get this news, the first person they look for is almost never the man."
"She died two years ago, after fourteen months of it, and I did every hour of the nursing myself.
" My voice did what it does at a bedside, which is to go level and stay level.
"She would have been unbearable about it.
There would have been shopping inside the hour, and about four hundred photographs of my face today, every one of them printed badly. "
"And she is the one you drove forty miles to sit with."
"There isn't anybody else."
He nodded once and let that be what it was, which is what a man learns after enough hours in rooms like that one.
Then he swung back to his desk and started writing on a pad that had the wrong year printed at the top of it.
"Take prenatal vitamins, and start them today rather than at some tidier date.
Any pharmacy will hand them over without a word.
Eat when you are not hungry. Your appetite is about to become a liar.
You will be tired in a way that sleep does not touch.
" He tore the sheet off and held it out, and then looked at me over the top of his glasses.
"And less getting shot at, if that is on the table. "
"I beg your pardon?"