The Blondes (29 page)

IT’S COLD OUT THIS MORNING
, but the snow has stopped. Two days now without a flurry. You’ve woken me up, and even though it’s early, there’s nothing to do now but get up and eat something. You keep moving around, making that swimming motion down my side. My little remora. I can feel your squirms more when I haven’t eaten, as though you’re tugging on my sides, going, “Gimme my D vitamins and my morning sugar fix, bitch!” For a couple months when I felt you it was usually a distinct kick, but now the motion is changing. You bump more than kick. You flex, or pulse. The space you’re in is getting smaller around you, and I feel you when you roll over or swipe your arm this way or that. Of course, I don’t know if that’s what you’re really doing; I only know what it feels like. It feels like you’re doing a slow dog-paddle or maybe
a front flip through water. Sometimes, if I rub my fingers up and down my abdomen, it seems as if you float toward the touch and push against my belly button to feel me stroking you through the skin.

I remember having dinner at Larissa and Jay’s way back when she was pregnant with Devang. At the time, she must have been experiencing the first kicks and taps. Jay told me that the motion of the fetus in the uterus as it’s first felt by the pregnant woman is called “quickening,” and that “quick meant alive,” or showing signs of life. Jaichand was always reading thick nonfiction books from the library: cultural primers, biographies, whatever had recently come out that seemed important—the kinds of books that got reviewed in the Sunday news. In ancient times, Jay said, the fetus wasn’t considered living until that point when it could be felt by the mother.

I read in the WEE pamphlets that I should get exercise, like brisk walking, but avoid strenuous activities requiring balance and agility, such as riding a bicycle. Out here I have no bicycle to avoid, but chopping wood probably falls into a similar category. And I’ve chopped a fair bit of wood in the last little while.

When I realized that Karl had told Grace about our affair, I felt so ashamed and my face flamed so furiously that I put on my boots and walked outside. Thinking of it even now, my face gets hot and I feel light-headed. Out at the woodpile I chopped furiously, even though I knew my balance wasn’t so spectacular that I should be wielding a heavy instrument over my head. I brought the axe down on the stump where the log
stood upright and you squirmed when it split, as if you were nervous. I wielded the axe again and again, until I’d broken a thorough sweat and my muscles ached. I had thought, up until that point, that Grace had known about the affair by intuition, or by reading our emails, or by whatever other evidence married people leave for each other when they want to be caught at something. I had never considered that Karl might have told her outright.

I came back into the cottage and restocked the basket, where we keep the fuel for the stove, but I’d brought too much wood and it rolled over the floor. I remember I bent down to pick it up, but I was plump and winded, and the amount of time it took me to complete the task made Grace exhale impatiently from the couch and turn up the volume on the TV, where two talking heads were debating the development of a vaccine for SHV. We still had the TV signal then.

“Even if the vaccine can be developed,” one of the experts was saying, leaning over a gaudy illuminated desk that looked like it would better suit a sports commentator than a political one, “what we’re hearing is that people may have an allergic reaction, or possibly contract a mild version of the virus.”

“I’d like to know what a mild version of this looks like …” Grace huffed.

That little exhalation of Grace’s fired off a series of images in my mind: I imagined her making similar impatient sounds when Karl had told her about me the first time—months and months before I turned up on her doorstep, calling her husband’s name. It bothered me that he may have told her our
intimate details, down to the words, down to the sounds, down to—whatever you can go down to on that stuff.

“I’m going for a walk,” I informed Grace. “I need some exercise. I’m going to go to the lake.” I hadn’t been to have a look at it since I’d arrived, but I knew it was a walkable distance.

Grace looked up from her remote control, startled. “You’re not going anywhere.” She put out one hand like Moses must have when he parted the Red Sea. “Not unless you plan to walk all the way out on the lake and fall through the ice. Why do you think we’re holed up like this? It’s safe. If you go out there, you could bring the SHV back with you.”

I waited, prone on the couch, until Grace put out her bedside lamp that night. Although she’d given me an old toothbrush of Karl’s to use, there was no way she was going to let me sleep on his side of the bed. In my opinion even the couch wasn’t far enough away. Grace decided when the lights went out and when they came on again in the morning, when showers were taken, and when food was eaten. The only thing she didn’t decide was when you were going to kick me in the kidneys.

“Grace …”

There was silence.

“He didn’t know. About the baby. I never told him.”

I couldn’t hear her breathing anymore. The room felt tight and narrow. Then she said, “You dumb bitch.”

An hour passed in darkness as I tried to interpret that comment. Before I could, I realized the breathing in the room had changed. There was that high-pitched whine that sometimes occurred when Grace exhaled. She was asleep.

I remember the window in the girls’ bathroom at the WEE was smaller than I’d expected. It was also over my head, which is always awkward, pregnant or no. I’d stowed away a plastic butter knife from the catering truck earlier that day, and with this makeshift screwdriver, I flicked the latches on the screen. I had thought about using the window above my bed, but it didn’t open far enough, and even if it had, it was way too risky to use with fourteen other women sleeping nearby and a man out in the hall. So I’d settled on the bathroom as an escape route. It had taken me two bathroom trips just to get the room to myself, and that had also meant lying to the man in the hall about indigestion. Of course he believed me. What with the pregnancy I was irregular at the best of times.

By 3 a.m., I was still waiting for the night to settle. It had been excruciating—lying in the dark listening to the other women cough, my stomach knotted with nerves. Once in the bathroom it became clear to me that sound was going to be my biggest giveaway. When the screen fell, I instinctively grabbed it before it could clatter its way to the ground outside. I pulled it up against the brick wall with my palm and twisted around so I could get a better grip, then swept it in through the window, turned it on its side, and stashed it quietly behind a toilet. The questions facing me now were, Could I fit through the window? And more important, could I do it without making a shitload of noise? And how much time could I spend in the bathroom, before one of the men came looking?

I snapped off my glasses and put them in my shirt pocket for safekeeping. Then I grabbed the window frame, braced one foot against the sink, and jumped up. I kind of hung there, wedged, the bottom of the window frame pressing into my belly. My head was out, but not my shoulders. But I could see the blur of field and the highway just beyond the playground fence. The air smelled clean, sweet, kind of like whisky and clover. That was when I knew I was going to fit through that window—my size be damned. I could hear a whooshing sound: traffic. I couldn’t locate the headlights, but it was the sound of a car far off. I was going to have to be extra quiet. Quieter than I thought quiet was—if the sound could carry that far. I twisted to get through. The first shoulder was easy. The second caught and I felt the sting of what would develop into a long red scrape.

My hands searched against the building, and found if I stretched I could reach the roof. Coming through that window backward now, I walked my hands up the building and wriggled until my hips were braced on the ledge. One hand caught the roof, which jutted out from the building. Then the other. I jarred my hip bone inside on the windowframe and there was a rattle from the impact. I stopped. I breathed. I told myself, “Don’t breathe.”

Using the roof, I angled myself. I glanced back, and remembered my tenth-grade geometry, how I learned that you can take a measured space and fit various items within it depending how they are arranged, even if their dimensional value is the same. I knew my stomach was squishy and would
give no matter where I put it. My butt was the problem. There was some heft there. There was also the giant glowing question mark in my brain about what would happen if another woman walked in to use the bathroom. I sucked in my gut and gently rocked this way and that. Once I almost lost my grip on the gritty shingle and then, just like that, when I was most afraid of falling, my body gave and I was free.

Out came my legs and I dangled, butt out, my shoes still braced against the window’s edge. Down, I decided. Time to go down. One shoe fell off and hit the asphalt below me. It made a little
wallop
. It occurred to me that I would make a lot more sound when my whole body went. I flicked off the other clog and it fell. Then my sock feet hit the concrete and the jolt went into my knees and I remember I nearly ruined everything by yelping in pain. The knee with the stitches in it buckled and I went down and felt concrete under my palms. It was two or three feet farther to the ground from outside the window than it had been up to the window from the floor inside.

It was colder than I had expected. I hadn’t been out at night and we were now well into October. But I was out, I was out, and this was no time to worry about popping one goddamn stitch. I snatched up my shoes and ran with them in my hands. I didn’t look to see if there was anyone on guard; I just concentrated on the fence. Without my glasses on, it was barely there: a grey lattice about a hundred feet out and six feet high, and I raced for it, half sprinting, half hobbling, in socks over cement and stones. My chest was heaving from the effort—running while pregnant, even a few weeks pregnant,
was an entirely different thing from regular running, not that I was ever good at that either. I threw one shoe over the fence, then the other. They clunked on the other side. I felt the wire between my fingers. It was cold and it clinked under my ring, but the chain-link was new and it didn’t jangle or waver much. Rambunctious kids had not yet bent it down. My sock feet stuck in between the diamond spaces, which hurt without shoes. My toes hooked in. I hadn’t done this sort of thing in ten years or more, but up I went. At the top, one leg, then the other, then I dropped without looking for a toehold and fell. It was a longer drop than I had thought and I landed on one of the shoes and my ankle went, then my knee, and I went down again. Then I saw a shape over by the building and I grabbed my shoes. I didn’t even put them on. I just pushed myself off the ground and went, grass and twigs flying under my feet.

I heard the fence rattle. The soldier must have hit it harder than I had. He yelled, “Stop!” It was August’s voice. Oh Christ. But I didn’t have time to think; I just kept running in spite of the pain. Thing is, I’m not in the best shape, never have been, never was.

“Hazel!” August hollered. “Hazel!”

I stopped and looked back. He was still on his side of the fence but he had a hand up on it. I bent over, breathing hard. Was he giving me a head start? I knew I couldn’t beat him even so. I looked at the road, a fuzzy blue ribbon still a long way off. Longer than I’d thought. Away from the schoolyard lights, everything was gradients of grey.

“Don’t make me take you down!” He sounded like he meant it, the way that some men sound when they get drunk and angry. I wasn’t sure what he meant by “take you down.” He had a gun. Did he mean he’d use it?

I caught my breath and then, without thinking, started running. It was the only thing to do.

I heard August vault the fence easily.
Boom
, he was on the ground just like that. But I ran as hard as I could and I didn’t look back.

He kept calling my name as if I would stop again because we were friends. But every time he called my name I knew where he was behind me. He was gaining fast, so I started to weave. I remembered this tactic from grade-school games of tag and outrunning bullies. You can’t go as quickly but you’re harder to catch. I could hear his boots on the rutted ground. I dropped one of my shoes and kept going. I sank through mud, I stepped on a thistle, I whined, I kept going. I straightened out to go faster and try to gain some ground. That was when he took me down, tackled me around the knees, and my body skidded to the ground. I had a grass burn down one side, an object sharp under my ribs, and a mouth full of weeds. One front tooth impacted with something hard.