Page 34 of Chaos

I find nail clippers and a file in her bathroom and clean up our toes and fingers as best I can.

When I’m done, she says, “Tell me about your hellhole.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Don’t lie.”

I look reflexively down at my stomach like I’ll be able to see a baby growing there, but it looks the same as it always has.

Since she can’t see anything, I touch it, low down, just above the rise of my pelvic bone over the clean leggings I’m wearing, soft and smooth under my fingertips, and nothing like the filthy jeans I wore for so long.

What if I bring a baby into this world, and she has to go through something like that? Or something worse? It could have been worse. So much worse.

I don’t think I can do it. The very thought has claustrophobia tearing at my lungs.

I let my hand drop away, a headache suddenly splitting across my skull. The concussion probably. “I’m not here to talk about me.”

Her hand pats its way up my thigh to my hip and shoves at me gently. “Go away if this is one-sided. It wasn’t a cakewalk. That shitty would-be dictator held you hostage. I’m blind, but I can see you’re different. Talk to me.”

Inexplicably, I find my face saying the words, “I think … maybe I’m pregnant.” My whisper echoes and spins into the lingering messes in the sitting room, the piles of sorted clothes, the splintered wood I have yet to clean.

She lurches. “What do you mean youthink?”

I squeeze my palms. “My period is two weeks late.”

“Holy shit,” she breathes. “Is it … did they … there wasn’t enough time if ... Have you told Yorke?”

“No. And they didn’t. I’m not even certain I am. I haven’t taken a test yet.” I left the box Renata gave me under the stairs back in my cellar.

“If you are, would you keep it?”

I hadn’t thought about it as an option yet. My fingers tighten and my skin ripples.

What kind of life could I give a baby?

It will be like ripping my heart out and exposing it to the world—a world with Bens and Scraggles—and saying, ‘here, do you worst.’

“I don’t know,” I breathe. “I’m not brave enough for this.”

“You need to tell Yorke.”

“I know, but I want to be sure first.”

“Then you need to talk to Sheila,” she says quietly, her voice as scared and quiet as mine.

I nod, then remember she can’t see it. “I do.”

“What about Ben?”

“What about him?” I ask.

“Yorke didn’t tell you about how everyone here is all pissed off?”

“There wasn’t time.”

With a heavy voice, she tells me everything Church has told her about in the last month—how the army’s disgruntled from searching for a woman they’d never met, fighting battles against the Butcher, some bloody, some deadly. She tells me about how Wendell took a bullet to the leg this morning, and the ex-townees who joined after Ben smashed Shane’s hand are on the edge of revolt, and how Yorke beat three men nearly to death and burned down the town.

It’s hard to reconcile the violence of those actions with the man who just washed my hair and communed over a Flower-verse to comfort me. And while I was blabbering and feeling sorry for myself that they locked me in a cellar and let me go hungry, Yorke’s best friend had just been shot.

---