Page 5 of Trade
He would never do that to me. Bennett is a good man.
Why isn’t he talking? Why is he sitting there like he’s said enough, face pinched like this is a meeting that has run over time?
I look to Neil. He gives Bennett an expectant stare. Bennett glowers at his yellow legal pad like he’s cramming for a test, and it’s blank.
Susan Jordan jumps into the breach. “These situations are unfortunate, of course, on a personal level, but as leaders, our first consideration must always be COG and the good of the bunker.”
She waits for me to nod in agreement, and so help me, I do. COG. Continuity of government. The good of the bunker. The most important thing. The reason we’re all alive and safe while the rest of humanity was scattered to the wind like dust.
I blink, my wide-eyed gaze staggering from point to point around the windowless room. The four pieces of sepia-toned tape stuck on the wall from some long-ago notice. The threadbare spot on the orange carpet, right in front of Neil’s desk. My husband, the line of his thick black hair only a few centimeters farther back from where it was when we were young. Wrinkles only showing at the corner of his mouth because he’s frowning.
“What are you doing?” I ask him. “They’ll put me in the lottery.”
The rock in my stomach bursts to life, sprouting wings and talons, leaping up my throat. They’ll throw me outside, into the moldering decay, and while the air poisons me, savage men will use me—rapeme—maybe until I die.
And my husband is talking like he did when he decided not to let Neil move lab-grown protein from AP to Food Services.
“Listen, Gloria, I’m sorry,” he says, drawing himself up like, despite his regrets, he simply has no choice. “I didn’t go out looking for it. It just happened. It really has nothing to do with you—or us—but Meghan is pregnant now, and she and the baby need my full support. You’ve got to understand.” He says that not as a plea, but as a statement of fact.
Of course, I can do nothing but agree—mothers and babies come first. They’re the future.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he adds with all the certainty of a man who cannot meet my eyes. “Meghan didn’t mean for it to happen this way, either. She feels terrible.”
“Why the hell would I care how Meghan feels?” I hardly even know her. She’s the long-haired junior tech who killed our oldest ficus by the end of her second month on the job. I reassigned her to the office.
Where Bennett works.
Oh God.
“Now, Gloria,” Susan warns like I’m the one getting out of hand, like of all the things happening in this room, the wordhellis what crosses the line.
I don’t take my eyes off Bennett. “You said she’s annoying. You can’t stand her.”
He’s always telling stories about her. Meghan spelled phlox with an “f.” Meghan answers the phone “yell-low” instead of “Department of Agricultural Preservation.” Meghan called out sick because she had her period, and she didn’t understand why that wasn’t an excused absence.
“Meghan is pregnant? By you?” Of course by him, by my husband who suddenly became so swamped at work, even though there has never in the history of the bunker been a rush job in Agricultural Preservation. Oh my God, it’s so painfullyobvious. How did I not see? I can read people. That’s my thing.
“I asked her if she’d consider a plural marriage,” he says, finally meeting my eyes so I can see his sincerity, so I know he didn’t just throw me into the lottery without a second thought so he can sex up Meghan with the nipped-in waist and hair so long she must trade at least five food rations a week for the water to keep it shiny and clean.
“Plural marriage,” I mumble, my fingers rising to my forehead like if I rub, I can make this bullshit make sense in my brain.
My husband—who asked me to pluck an ingrown hair from his sweaty thigh crease two days ago, who laid on his back and lifted his knees so I could get in there with the tweezers—he’s been banging an eighteen-year-old. He got her pregnant. No one gets pregnant these days.
“She feels like that kind of situation wouldn’t be a good environment for her to carry the baby, considering—” Bennett trails off, and once we’ve had a moment of silence for his morals, I guess, he continues. “And, of course, with the Fertility Initiative, our priority must be doing everything we can to bring every pregnancy to term, and that means keeping Meghan’s stress low and supporting her in any way we can.”
Why is he talking like he’s reading from the COG manual? And like Meghan is somehow my responsibility? As if,of courseI would want to support my husband’s mistress in any way possible. For the baby.
“How could you do this?” A wave of pain crashes over me, stealing my breath.
This is Bennett.MyBennett. When we were angsty teenagers, we’d hide in the access ducts, propping ourselves up with our backs pressed against one wall and our feet on the other, singing to hear our voices echo in the tubes and talking for hours about nothing until our thigh muscles went numb.
One time, early in our marriage, my period was late, and I’d believed with all my heart I was pregnant. When it turned out I wasn’t, he traded a week’s worth of rations for a bathtub full of water and held me while I soaked and cried.
We love each other. We know each other like the backs of our hands.
The pain slowly gives way to horror. “You’re sending me out to die.”
Bennett looks up at me with the sad bad-news eyes he summons up when a plant has died, an AP request was denied, a budget item was slashed.
