“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelled. Dogs joined in chorus.
His eyes were unapologetic. “You just looked so beautiful lying there I couldn’t help myself,” he said with a shrug.
“Help yourself?” I should have followed my instincts in the first place. My instincts were now telling me to get out of here as soon as I could.
His face fell. “Sorry. It just gets lonely here. I thought we could be friends.”
Friends? I was furious. What was I going to tell Joseph? “Friends don’t kiss!” I said damningly.
He nodded.
I stormed out of the cave, embarrassed, angry, and ashamed. People were horrible. I thought about going back in there and punching him in the face, but thought better of it. There was a sense of violence to that kiss, a forcefulness I didn’t want to revisit. Stumbling around in the dark cursing, I found the ladder and made my way back to my room.
I popped my head into the baby’s room. He was still sleeping soundly. The clock read almost midnight. That idiot let me sleep for hours. I crawled into bed, my eyes falling upon the empty one beside me. Doubt slunk its way into my head like a burglar. If he died… No I wouldn’t think it.
I pulled the sheets up over my knees. Sitting. I was too scared to sleep. I shuddered as the memory of Cal’s slobbering lips on mine. It sent sharp shakes of disgust right through me. I didn’t feel guilty. I was just plain angry. Why would anyone do such a thing? Maybe there was something wrong with me that made him believe I was an easy target. I wanted to scrub the memory off my face and take a layer of skin with it. No one was allowed to touch me like that, not without my permission.
A nurse came in and gave me an update. My angry face gave her pause. I tried to relax it, forcing it into a calmer set, but it felt like trying to push air from a barely blown-up balloon, squishing things to the sides awkwardly. She looked tired, her light brown hair pinned back messily, and her eyes squinting as she talked. The operation was going well, very well. Then she said a whole pile of medical stuff I didn’t understand. I just nodded. I didn’t need to hear anything other than ‘going well’. She said they were halfway through and then she hurried off. I sighed. It would be a long wait.
I wandered across the hall. Orlando’s eyes were half open but he was asleep, his little chest moving up and down faster than an adult’s. I grimaced at the thought that Cal had helped me name him. But it was his name now. Hopefully, I would forget the rest. I picked him up and brought him to my room. Lying on my side, I placed him in the crook of my arm and watched him sleep. He had been a good baby so far. Better than I deserved. He had more personality than I remember Hessa having at this age, but maybe that’s what a mother sees in her own child. A mother. The word made me feel deathly frightened and comforted at the same time. The responsibility of it was heavy in my chest.
I whispered to him, “You’ll look after me, won’t you? We defectives have to stick together.” He sucked in a breath and shivered. I pulled him closer.
I recalled my conversation with Alexei, when he told me that if my baby had my eyes, we both would have been ‘disposed’ of. A small fire started inside me that grew to a blue-and-white flame. A rage I couldn’t name. I smiled, a solid sternness to it. If this is what it felt like to be a mother, maybe I was more suited to it than I thought.
There was never any easy way to tell whether it was morning or night in here. The lights always glowed, footsteps travelling softly past the door. Someone was always busy doing something, but what? I didn’t know.
I had been watching Orlando sleep, breathing in and out, rolling his little eyes, the pink of his cheeks strange compared to my dark ones. He was so warm and comfortable. I was quite the opposite, wound up like a tight coil ready to spring headfirst into the rocks above me. My mind wandered in different directions. I worried about what Joseph would be like when he woke up—would he be weak? Would he be upset? Would he still want me? The last question, I didn’t dwell on too much. I had in my mind that I would remind him he did, somehow. When my thoughts went to Cal, my hands turned to fists—a hard feeling wrapped around a soft one. I wondered what he was after. If I hadn’t stopped him, what would he have done? Strangled by the idea of telling Joseph, I became angrier still.
And Apella. How was she feeling right now? It felt odd to worry about her. I had spent so much time hating her, despising every single thing she did, and taking pleasure in her discomfort. All these new feelings assaulted me like a spray of cold water. Things I never thought I would feel, waking me up, making me want to defend my old self, hold onto it, even as I watched it wash away. It was impossible. I used to say nothing changes, but I was so wrong. Everything changes so fast you feel like you’re grabbing the edge of the train as it takes off, your feet scrabbling to lift up onto the platform, your hair swirling about your face. I wondered whether I would ever catch up.
I abandoned it all in favor of counting the points on the rock wall above our heads. Watching the light bounce off the shiny black, the way it looked like a dark sea of oil almost moving and swelling in a nonexistent storm, mesmerizing. I pulled Orlando in tighter. He wheezed. My eyelids were heavy. I didn’t want to sleep but my body had other ideas. After the last time I slept with a child, I decided to put him down in his cot. Memories of the burning heat in my hands as I held Hessa out over the flames woke me up enough to drag myself reluctantly out of the room. I laid the baby down and backed out quietly. I retreated to my bed, and into a dream.
“Should we wake her?”
“Let her sleep.”
“Anything we need to do before we go?”
“No, thankfully, for better or worse, it’s over.”
Something familiar was missing. My brain was still under a cloud of exhaustion. I was listening for it, although I wasn’t sure what my ears were searching for. Monotony had trained them. Thinking about absence, no beeps, no blips. I exhaled slowly.
I felt a hand brush my face, collecting strands of hair and pulling them away from my forehead. Warm hands. Fear jolted through me. I snapped my eyes open and slapped at the hands. “No!”
Blinking, it took a while to focus. And then I was staring at those eyes. Those beautiful green eyes with flecks of gold in them. I was melting and on fire at the same time. Tears filled my eyes and I sprung at him from my bed, embracing him, squeezing him hard until he let out a small squeak of pain as he struggled to keep his feet. I relaxed my grip a little and he chuckled.
“You had me worried for a second,” he said as he stepped back to look at me. He ran his hands down my arms and then brought the backs of his fingers across my now-flat stomach. I shivered. I smiled. I could have burst through the ceiling! This was the closest we had ever been and yet it wasn’t close enough. I looked up at him and gave him a toothy smile. I touched his beard, tracing his jaw. He looked better than I’d expected, his strength was not immediately apparent but his color had returned. Whatever they did to him was remarkable. He was standing in a hospital gown and cotton pajama pants that were too short. He swayed a little and steadied himself against the bedrail. I moved to him. “You should sit down before you fall down,” I said.
“It feels so good to hear your voice,” he said as he obliged me and sat with a thump on the edge of the bed, his knees wide apart. I sort of shudder-shivered at the sound of his.
I felt brave. He did that to me. I fit myself between his legs and stood on my tiptoes. Pulling his head down towards my face, I laced my fingers in his hair. He smelled like antiseptic, but also of Joseph. Of all the things I had craved for weeks, even if was I imagining them: wood fire, pine, fresh air.