“Shawn.” The driver, a skinny, rickety man, tall with cavernously beautiful brown eyes, in his thirties, puts a hand out. He’s a heron man with a big pale beak. And those eyes. You could fall into his eyes. Hands on the wheel in tattered fingerless gloves. “We’re going to our new MRF, Material Recycle Facility. First stop on the underground.”
As soon as he says this, fatigue hits me like a drug. I’m falling asleep, with my head against my mom’s back. As I drift off, I have this feeling of sweetness and security, an ease so intense that I know it must go back to my earliest days with Sera, before I could talk or even knew whether I existed, before an I had formed into a me. There was this goodness, this care, this presence, this dozing sleep. She is still stroking my hair as I come to and the sky is a pre-dawn gray, pink lifting at the edges. We enter what Shawn calls the Merf through its gated checkpoints. There are two fairly new trailers at the entrance, at the edge of the truck parking lot. A huge garage door at the other end opens automatically, and Shawn drives us in. The outsize door closes behind us with an echoing boom and Shawn says, “It’s okay now. We can get out.” So we step down from the truck, dazzled. At the end of the garage, there is a partially enclosed area with a woodstove.
“Go ahead.” Shawn motions past a mountain of recycled stuff toward the bathroom. “I’m gonna beef up this fire, to take the chill off. Just jump back in the shitter if the big door opens again, okay?”
Shawn stalks over to the stove, uses a can opener to neatly remove the top from a can of baked beans. He puts the can on top of the woodstove with a pair of tongs, and looks at us with his calm, melting brown eyes. I can smell the rich sauce and little white globs of pork before the stuff is even warm. We go to the bathroom, a big locker room filled with greasy coveralls and bins of stinking boots. We use the toilets and wash, just with water, not the scratchy slabs of Lava soap streaked black. Our hands are now rope-burned as well as blistered and chapped. Sera stays out with Shawn, keeping watch. Before leaving the bathroom we poke our heads out. All seems quiet. The beans heating in their tin bean can exude a summery hot-dog fragrance. Shawn spoons out half a can each of bubbling and hissing beans, into steel bowls.
“We’re safe here,” says Mom. “For now.”
Tia and I sit against the wall on overturned plastic tubs. We sip at each spicy brown spoonful, suck down each soft bean. You stir and roll as if you feel how good I am feeling right now. Sera brings us mugs of hot raspberry tea, and we find out the rest of the plan. Which Sera and Shawn are making up as they go along.
“Okay,” says Shawn, “I’ll get you back down to the post office later on today, or early tomorrow. Depending. Then we’re putting you three on a mail truck running up north. Your people”—he nods at Sera—“will be up there, somewhere, you know where. I don’t want to know.”
I am assuming that Sera is in touch with Eddy and that he has his own plan in place for getting us farther north, deeper into the bush, maybe out to the islands in the boundary waters.
“I’m not going,” says Tia.
Her pointed chin juts out, her expression is fixed. “I’m going to find my husband.”
Sera nods carefully, sighs. Her eyes go a sweet, faded denim blue. Her white hair tousles from under her cap. She’s such a pretty winter-spirit mom, with her pink cheeks and delicately curved, berry-sweet red lips.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She takes Tia’s hand. “I know how you must feel, but it’s so dangerous. They’ll be watching your family so closely.”
“I know that he’s figured something out. Even if he hasn’t, I’m not going. Leave me in the post office. I’ll hide out in the basement and send a message to him. He’ll come and get me.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. They can’t watch everybody. I just know it’s going to be all right. I feel safer in the city than out in the sticks. We won’t be obvious, especially once my baby’s born.” She strokes her lovely down slope. Smiles. She only smiled once in the hospital that I remember—the first time I stole her a blanket. I hope her child will be a girl. She wants a girl.
“Anyway, I just won’t go. And you know that if I’m not committed to your plan, I’ll be a drag and a danger. So let me off at the post office.”
“Think it over,” Sera begs. But I am quite sure that Tia, who had the idea first of braiding a rope and descending down the side of the hospital building, has made up her mind.
Shawn puts out his big, rangy, skeletal hands. “Let’s just all think about it. Talk it over. We’ve got some time. Cookie?” He opens a battered package of macaroons—stale and utterly delicious.
Shawn brings us back to an equipment storage area and shows us a walled-off secret room, just behind two giant sorting machines. One conveyor pulls off soup cans with magnets. Another shoots aluminum cans down a chute using what Shawn calls an eddy current. The secret room is filled with drums of food, he says, scavenged stuff. You’d be surprised what people still toss into the recycle bins. Behind the drums, there’s a little nest of patched mattresses and couch pillows covered with heavy subzero sleeping bags.
“Okay, you two,” says Shawn, “cuddle in. Your mom’s got some heavy-duty paperwork to attend to. You’ll be safe here. This whole compound’s guarded.” He puts his hands in his pockets and pulls out two platinum-colored automatic pistols—the kind you see in movies. “Yep,” he says, grinning, “you’d be surprised at what people get rid of. Sleep tight now, little mice. No fear.”
“I don’t know why,” I say to Tia, as we pull ourselves into the sleeping bags, “but I think Shawn’s Irish and I have always trusted the Irish.”
“How about the Chinese? Have you trusted us?”
“Hey, we’re related, and you know it. I taught you all about the land bridge and you just smiled enigmatically. So mysterious. I didn’t know what the fuck you were.”
She laughs at me. “B-movie inscrutable’s my thing, right? I wanted to talk to you so bad. It was the hardest thing I ever did. Climbing down the wall was easier. Braiding that rope was easier. I really wanted to be friends with you.”
“Well, now you’re deserting me for your husband.”
“Dicks before chicks.”
“It’s the other way around.”
“I know. I do want to stay with you. We never talked about your guy, either, and I wanted to ask you so bad.”
“Okay. I’ll tell, but you first. You tell me about your guy. Is he Chinese too?”
“Nah. We went to high school together, never dated then. But I feel like I’ve known him, well, always. I went to kindergarten with him.”
“Private school?”
“Mmm.”
“I was Waldorf, then public school. My parents are that kind of liberal.”
“Mine moved to Arizona, and Clay’s died. His dad was a cereal company CEO—big house on Lake Minnetonka. Second house in Costa Rica, the Pacific side. If we can get down there.”
“With a baby?”
“I know. Maybe California.”
We’re quiet. “But you really love him.”
“I do. Maybe he’s a waspy Wayzata guy, but he’s smart, kind, sexy, makes me laugh. All that.”
Her voice drifts off. I try to reel her back. “I’m surprised they caught you. I mean, you seem so protected, right? Out-there suburbs in a big fort couldn’t you have just disappeared?”
“I took a chance, went to my studio. I just didn’t get . . . I really couldn’t believe that it was happening. That’s the problem with privilege, money, in this sort of situation. False sense of security. But they got me in the street, no ID, and I pretended to have no English. I know Clay is waiting for a sign from me. I’ll have him come and get me. Clay and I always planned that if one of us disappeared or there was a third world war or something went wrong in a big way, we’d stay home, guard the house, wait for the other person as long as possible. So I’m sure Clay’s there.”
“Tending the home fires.”
“Sort of, yeah.?
??
We sleep like the dead, a raw, black, hallucinatory sleep. We sleep away the afternoon and when we wake up it’s dusk—around five or six o’clock. Sera has sandwiches—real bread, real sliced turkey, even mayo. And canned milk heated up with cinnamon and chocolate. She leaves us alone with the food and we eat in little bites, sip the hot chocolate.
“So tasty, I could cry,” says Tia.
“It feels sort of sacramental, eating real food again.”
“You haven’t told me about your husband,” Tia says.
I look at her and don’t know how to start, but my expression must tell her quite a bit.
“That’s all right,” she says, after a moment. “We’ll catch up some other time.”
October 20
This notebook has become my life, or perhaps better to say that this notebook has become the way I remain connected with my life, and with you. The black hardbound cover has peeled in places, or scratched down to the gray pulp. But your tape-protected ultrasound looks perfect. The back, with its blank for your name or picture, surrounded by sticker garlands of roses, doves, and pointing cherubs, is smudged. These foolish little signs of romance are showing the wear of much handling. As is the photograph I took of the sign in the empty field. I have picked up bits of paper from the now and from the before, as mementos of the curious world you will be entering soon. Many tiny pieces of paper, blown from bags, fluttering off the giant pile, lie in drifts here and there in the Merf. I smooth them out and add them to the envelopes of scraps that I taped to the inner cover of your book. They have made their way here from all corners of the earth. Lemon candy wrappers from Spain and many tags—marked Made in China, Taiwan, USA, Sri Lanka, Berlin. There are cards printed in Korea and little decorative bits of gilt and lavender wrappers from France, Australia, Indonesia. Torn and smudged photos. Wine labels from New Zealand. Erection instructions to some long-lost tent manufactured in Taiwan. There are scraps of iconic American soup, mac & cheese, scouring pad, and laundry soap packaging. Envelopes with beautifully printed stamps juxtaposed for merely utilitarian purposes—yet bearing along some mysterious effect. In the facility’s medicine cabinet I find a bottle of glue, and a pair of tiny nail scissors. Fitting and gluing my little tag-bag of treasures together occupies me. Tia’s sleeping. Sera, I’ve barely seen.
Among the many items stored or jettisoned in the back room there is a small oil painting on masonite. The little painting is well done, though one corner is smeared with what might be congealed egg. Perhaps it was thrown out by mistake, the victim of a household purge. On the other hand, it may have been rescued from a flood or fire, for the background is dark. But looking closely, I see that is the result of careful work, not mud or flames. The painting is simple. A pomegranate and a water glass (either empty or full to the brim) are set upon a spotlighted piece of vast and perhaps even endless tabletop. When I first looked at the pomegranate and the water glass, I thought of two people. The water glass, one of those large bistro glasses good for iced tea, looks perfect from a distance and chaotic up close. The pomegranate is a swirl of tiny strokes—rose and mandarin pink and a smoky scarlet. It does not touch the glass, but casts a shadow into its interior. There seems to be a tense but loving relationship between the pomegranate and the water glass. Perhaps, I think now, like the relationship between you and me.
You decided to exist. I don’t really figure into your decision. Life is all for life. All for selfish continuance. And the two objects sit, one ripening, upon a tabletop that stretches into the shadows.
* * *
Tia wakes up and rubs her hands across her face. She is, of course, accustomed to watching me write in this book, and so she doesn’t ask what I am doing, she snuggles back down and dozes as I scratch on. The ceiling is high and the air is very cold. I’ve cut the fingers from a pair of mismatched, cheaply knitted, scavenged gloves, like Shawn, so that I can hold this pen. I’m afraid we won’t get out. Afraid that the night is not deep enough to hide us. We may run endlessly, even after you are born. And I am afraid that my mom’s absence means that something out there is going wrong.
All of a sudden, Tia says, “Hey, I’m bleeding.”
But it’s not blood, or there’s not much blood. It’s clear—maybe amniotic fluid, I think.
“I’m going out, to get my mom,” I tell Tia. “Don’t worry. She knows what to do.”
I give Tia a stack of paper towels, settle her into my sleeping bag, and hang hers off a hook in the wall. Tia’s face is a bloodless white, a gray color, and between her eyebrows a crease suddenly forms. Her forehead is scored with a knifelike shadow. She seems smaller, and I see with chilling clarity that the huge baby will not make it out of her. It’s trapped, a sailing ship in a bottle. She will have to break. This stuns me—I can’t catch my breath as in equal fear you jam yourself high in my rib cage, just under my heart, shouldering my lungs aside.
“Go, go, then,” cries Tia, her face crumpling.
I move, fast as I dare. The floor is slippery with torn wet newspaper. I edge through the door into the gray and green industrial hallway. From there, I slip along the rubber treads set in the painted cement, to the windowed door that leads into the big garage. Through the smeared yellow pane I see my mom. She is dressed in coveralls, and she’s talking to someone I haven’t seen yet. He could be dangerous. She could be heading him off, feeding him a story, explaining us away. I should wait, and I do try. Her focused stillness as she listens to the man tells me that she’s playing a part, acting out the role of a listener. She is never this nonparticipatory, this quiet, in a real human interaction. But I need to get her attention. So I walk down the hall a bit farther, try one door, which is locked, and then the next, which opens into an office. An office that juts into the garage, with a window, which is how I succeed finally in attracting Sera’s attention. I wave my arms like semaphores through the window until I’m pretty sure she sees me. I point. I leave. Surely she will get the message and she’ll follow me back to the storage room, to find out why I’m panicked.
Back in our hiding place, Tia is a little better, breathing carefully and curled up with an old fake fur pillow—gray shearling, matted and gnarled.
“That’s really dirty,” I say, upset because she’s usually so fastidious.
“Don’t take it away,” says Tia.
Uh-oh, I think.
“I’m feeling something. I think I am feeling a twinge. A squeezing sort of feeling.” She puts the pillow aside and her baby juts between us. “Here.” Tia takes my hands and puts them on the base of her stomach where the bands of muscle tighten as she speaks, and she says, “See?”
“Yeah, but maybe,” I say, “they are those Braxton Hicks contractions that don’t mean you’re going into labor yet.”
Still, if she doesn’t, I know that there’s a risk of infection after the baby’s waters break. I hold her wrist and take a look at her watch, timing her next contraction, and the interval between that one and the next, and so on. They’re quite mild, she says, no pain. But they are only five minutes apart. And as four of them go by they seem too unmistakably regular and synchronized to be anything but labor. Still, she is in no pain. And now I hope that Tia is one of those phenomenons, women you hear about, even before getting pregnant, women who barely have time to lie down on the kitchen floor, the women who have their babies in the backs of taxicabs, the women who don’t feel any pain, either, or just a little, the women whose babies practically fall out of their bodies. We all long to be these women.
“There’s another one,” says Tia, and she looks even better, now, like she’s amazed, happy, pleased with herself. “Is that good?”
I’m pretty sure that the onset of contractions has also released some sort of natural opiate in her brain, the chemical that mercifully dulls fear, inflates courage, and makes us eager above all else to see our babies.
Only Tia isn’t all that much farther along than I am, and we have no way of knowing, since they wouldn’t tell us what
they saw on the ultrasound, if her baby is ready to survive yet all on its own. So I don’t know which to hope for—that she have the baby, or not go into labor—not that my hoping makes a difference, after all. I’m also hearing that noise as she fell to the roof. I wonder how hard she landed, but don’t want to remind her. The only thing I can do is sit with her and time her contractions, which stay at exactly five minutes apart for half an hour of awful mental strain—I’m desperate for Sera to come and tell me what to do. Finally, she knocks. I jump up, run to the door, and push the dead bolt back. Sera puts her arms around me.
“For godsakes, don’t ever go out again,” she says. “That was a regional manager who may or may not be ready to spill the whole thing. We don’t know how much he knows or what his opinions are, politically speaking. He could be ready to report us all. Or he could be . . . What’s going on?”
“Hi,” says Tia faintly. “I’m having my baby.”
“Her contractions are five minutes apart, regular.”
“My water broke,” says Tia, her hands about her stomach, eyes deep. She’s lost in sensation.
Sera kneels beside her and asks questions, professional-sounding questions. It’s a relief. She smoothes Tia’s hair back, off her forehead, and smiles. She holds Tia’s wrist reassuringly between her fingers, and says that her pulse is excellent.
“Do you know how many weeks you are?”