Page 62 of Chaos

I try to think of a way to ask if Ben died too, but before I can, Sheila steps into the hallway, looking harried and exhausted. Her usually tidy, curly iron-gray hair is pulled back in a messy bun.

Len claps his big hand down on my shoulder. “I need to go write up my report.”

“Report?”

“For Colleen,” he says tiredly. “We’re trying to create a system for things now. Should have done it back when Nando showed up dead.”

Nando. I almost forgot about him. It seems like a lifetime ago that we found that corpse in the lobby, Sebi’s brother, a knife wound in his back.

Unease trickles down my spine at the smatterings of bureaucracy I keep seeing everywhere.

Sheila speaks softly to the other two women in the waiting room, then gestures me toward her office.

“How did he die?” I ask as soon as we’re alone together.

“I’m honestly not sure.” She takes a sip from what looks like old, cold coffee, sitting on a stack of papers on her desk. “He appears to have suffocated.”

“You can tell that?”

“Yes. We can see petechial hemorrhaging … tiny red dots on his skin and eyes.”

“So I killed him?” I look down at my fingers, still bruised and scabbed over. I want to hear her say it. “When I hit him? When I tried to escape?”

“I wouldn’t worry about him or how he died right now. Just focus on yourself and healing.” She lifts the coffee then seems to think better of it and plonks it back down and reaches instead for hand sanitizer, then indicates my injured fingers. “May I?”

She’d have mentioned Ben by now if he were dead. Right?

I hold out my hands.

She checks them, then changes the bandaging on my elbow and the angry knot on my head where I hit the stair, and uses a stethoscope to listen to my heart, takes my temperature, then climbs up a step ladder and pulls down a small glass vial.

“The antibiotics seem to have worked. We’ll do a full round, so you’ll need to come back for the next six days.”

That reminds me of the real reason I’m here. “Can it hurt a baby?”

She swivels around, the vial in one hand, a syringe in her other. Her gaze drops to my waist like she half expected to find my belly swollen like a beachball. “Are you …”

“Maybe?”

“It won’t hurt the baby, but I’m glad you told me.” She climbs down and silently loads up a syringe, tugs down the edge of Yorke’s hoodie, swabs alcohol along my biceps, cold and potent smelling, the silence thick as she injects me.

When she’s done, she asks, “Have you taken a test?”

“No.”

She returns to her stepladder and retrieves a small box from the top shelf there. White and lavender, wrapped in cellophane, about the size of a TV remote.FAST RESULTS!it says.THREE DAYS SOONER.

She hands it to me. “I’m sorry in advance for asking this, but do you know who the father is?”

“Yorke.”

“Does he know?”

I shake my head. “I wanted to talk to you first.”

She’s so quiet, I start to feel like a kid in a classroom taking a standardized test, the only possible answers I don’t understand, ones that feel terrifying.

My lower lip starts to quiver, so I clamp it down between my teeth and squeeze my free hand into a tight fist. “I feel likeyour ability to deliver a baby in this world is relevant to the answer to that question. And I know it will be for Yorke too.”

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