29. Lily #2
"Somebody closed a laceration on your hairline, and they did it well, and they did not do it in any building I would license.
" He said it as mildly as a man discussing tire pressure.
"Those were field sutures. Good hand, no anesthetic, judging by how they have healed.
I did eleven months in a place I do not discuss at parties, and I have put in about nine hundred of them myself. "
"I drove my car through a gate in a blizzard."
"Then that is what happened." He was still holding the paper out. "The advice stands regardless. You need rest, food, iron, and a great deal less of whatever the rest of it is."
I took the prescription and found myself laughing again, and it was the ugly kind that comes out sideways.
"I'll put that at the top of my list," I said. "You say it like it's a food group I can give up."
"I say it because it is the only prescription anybody has ever thanked me for in twenty years.
" He capped the pen. "Then there is your man on the ridge.
Three winters up there, no church, no county fair, and no woman until you.
Half this county has him down as a widower and the other half has him down as a fugitive.
" He put the pen in his cardigan pocket. "He is full of surprises, apparently."
"He is about to be the most surprised man in this county."
"He does not know."
"He will know tonight."
"Then tell him before the county does, because the county is faster than you are." Then he did the thing I'd been waiting for him to do since I sat down, and he did it without any change in his voice at all. "Is anybody hurting you?"
"No one has laid a hand on me." I didn't have to think about it, and I'm not softening it. I've asked that question two thousand times, and I know what the pause before the answer sounds like. "He is the reason I am alive. That is true twice over."
"Then here is the last of my medicine, and it is free." He stood up to see me out. "You are allowed to be glad about this, and nobody has to countersign it. That includes the timing, the circumstances, and the man."
It caught me in the yard, halfway to the truck.
I got in and shut the door and sat in front of that white house with the canary going behind the glass, and the fear arrived first, because fear is always the fastest thing in the room.
He has four days on his clock and possibly three.
There's a man coming to that county who wants to stand in front of him and watch.
There's no floor under any of it. I have no address, no insurance card that means anything, no doctor of my own, no crib, and no idea what country any of us will be in when this ends.
Underneath that came the grief, and it was worse, because grief doesn't knock.
Her locket was in my pocket, where it has ridden since he dug it out of a snowdrift for me.
I got it open with my thumbnail and looked at the woman inside.
She is thirty-four in that picture and has no idea what is coming for her.
I told her out loud, in a parked truck, in a voice I didn't recognize.
"You're going to be a grandmother."
She should have been in that hallway. The hand on my wrist should have been hers.
Every good thing that happens to me from now on happens in a house she's not in, and today is the first one that would have made her cry, and I got a canary and a stranger with paper hands instead.
I would have given a year of my life for four minutes of her being unbearable about it.
And then, right underneath the grief, where I had no business keeping such a thing, something else stood up.
I was glad. It wasn't resignation and it wasn't courage. It was gladness, and it started somewhere under my ribs, and it had teeth in it.
Here is what makes that unforgivable, and I've thought about it the whole way home.
I have built two years out of not being attached to anything.
Everything I own fits in one bag, my job ends every thirteen weeks by design, and I haven't put a nail in a wall since I was twenty-two.
That was never grief management. That was inventory control.
You cannot lose what you never checked out.
And now I'm carrying the one thing I wouldn't survive the loss of.
So I drove home and rehearsed, and I'm going to write down all three attempts, because they're hilarious in hindsight and none of them were funny in that truck.
The first attempt was, "I have some news." I threw that one out on the next curve. It's what a doctor says with a chart in his hand before he ruins your year.
The second was, "Sit down." That's what I have said to two hundred families in two hundred corridors, and every one of them started dying a little before I reached my second sentence.
The third was, "You're going to be a father," and I got four words into that one out loud before I heard the stork on the greeting card.
So the plain one wins. It's two words, with no runway in front of them and no cushion underneath. "I'm pregnant."
Here is what I know, and it's the whole reason my hands were sweating on that wheel.
Telling a man like him that there's a child doesn't automatically make him fight harder to keep it.
It can just as easily make him decide that the ground he's standing on is not safe enough for either of us, and that man doesn't negotiate once he has decided a thing is for my protection.
He has three passports and a plan I haven't been shown.
There's every chance that the news gets me a warm coat, a full tank, and a state line by morning.
I'm telling him anyway. I made that man promise at his own stove that nothing false would ever pass between the two of us, and I've been in breach of it for two days, once with his hand resting on my stomach in the dark. Nobody gets to keep that promise and this secret at the same time.
Everything I have now hangs on two pink lines.
My mother's whole theology was that the universe never bothers with cruelty when timing will do the work for it.
I'd stood in a stranger's bathroom in the middle of nowhere, hunted, in love, and pregnant, and I finally understood the joke all the way to the bottom.
What I couldn't tell yet was whether it was on me or for me.