Chapter_32

Every time she closed her eyes, searching for sleep, a key turned, her foot found the pedal, and she couldn’t pull it away. How many hours had passed since she’d seen Dylan? Thirty-six? Forty-eight? Now it was afternoon. Jordan was at a Swimmrs launch event in the city. Dylan led the way along the trail. This time, there was no fresh, mossy air. The trees were gray and dull. The ground was hard and frozen. The air smelled like metal. Rosie’s jaw was stiff from the cold. Her lungs burned.

“How’d he take it?” Dylan asked, holding back a branch for her.

“Which part?”

“That you want to stay.”

“I haven’t told him. I will.”

“Did you tell him anything else?”

“No.”

“And do you still feel like you’re...”

“Pregnant?” Rosie said.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. It’s still too early to know. But my entire body feels inside-out. I haven’t slept in...” She tried to count the hours, but they blurred together. That morning, she’d helped Jordan fill a storage cube with furniture. He kept referring to this as “Stage 1” of their move to Connecticut. They were getting rid of nonessential furniture, anything they could do without for their last three weeks in Scout Hill. He asked Rosie if they should keep the tiny guitar they’d bought on their wedding night, and she’d said yes, not really hearing him, her eyelid twitching from sleeplessness, which Jordan interpreted as excitement. He organized their things into three piles, each labeled with color-coded tape that indicated when they would ship.

Jordan had assured Rosie that Bridey’s guesthouse was a temporary solution—only until they found their own place nearby—and that they’d have plenty of space; it was nearly the size of the house in Scout Hill. Plus, they’d have privacy; the cottage was hidden from the main house by a row of dense hedges. “How are you feeling about it all?” he’d asked her, rolling down the cube’s metal door.

“I—” Rosie rubbed her eye. “It wasn’t my plan.”

“I know. Me neither.” He brought a hand to her shoulder, like a coach. “But we’ll adjust. We adjusted to this.” His attempts to hide his relief and joy were half-hearted, and he was being careful around Rosie in a way that made her feel like a child. So it gave her some satisfaction to keep something from him—that she had no intention of following him to Connecticut.

She also kept from him the possibility of her pregnancy. Were cells replicating inside her? A test couldn’t tell her anything yet, so she relied on signs and intuition. She searched the internet: Possible to know you’re pregnant before one week? and scrolled through online forums in which people described their first inklings of pregnancy, before a test could confirm. One woman woke in the night, craving a grapefruit, even though she hated grapefruit. Another dreamed her dog gave birth to a litter of kittens. One angrily sobbed over a salad her husband made for her. The more Rosie ruminated, the further away the answer seemed. Clouds took the shape of swaddled babies. And when she closed her eyes, grasping for sleep, the white images behind her eyelids looked like small, wriggling tadpoles. Was she? Was she? She didn’t know.

She ducked beneath a branch. Dylan drew the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and pulled the drawstrings tight. Above them, the drone followed, like a balloon on a string. They could track its movement, as if it were an Uber. They’d placed the order from the trailhead: a single vial from Donor #1. Dylan paid extra for expedited delivery. No patience? No problem ;) the app bragged at checkout. The FAQ had shown a map of “cryo-ATMs” nearby. There were several in the area, clustered around popular tourist destinations.

Rosie’s mother had been right—certainty had never come easily to her. But she knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to become like her mother or Jordan’s mother. She didn’t want her child to feel guilty and lonely all the time, and she didn’t want to raise a child amid an arsenal of plastic.

Dylan cleared the way ahead. The waterfall had frozen into a jagged wall of ice. “Careful here,” she said. Rosie took her elk skin–gloved hand and stepped across the rocks, her toes numb blocks. Finally, she spotted the sauna’s dark siding against the snow. Cherry-scented smoke lifted from the chimney.

“Hank came by earlier to warm it up for us,” Dylan said.

“He did?”

“Mm-hm. I thought we’d dip first.”

Rosie thought she might cry.

“I’m kidding,” Dylan said.

Black plumes of smoke thinned and disappeared into the gray sky. Her teeth ached from the cold. The drone hovered patiently overhead.

Dylan shaded her eyes and looked up at it. “All right, you little freak,” she said. She pulled out her phone and called it down with a few swipes. Obediently, it floated toward them. “I don’t like how this thing moves,” she said, grabbing it out of the air. Its propellers slowed. She opened the attached container and pulled out a blue-and-pink plastic box, shrink-wrapped and latched closed like a lunch box. “How much plastic...” she said, removing her glove and sliding a finger beneath the plastic sleeve. She undid the latch. Inside: a canister the size of a pill bottle, a syringe, a pregnancy test, and a rubber bracelet that read Swimmrs?. She held up the canister, which was wrapped like a candy in a semiopaque, pink-to-blue color gradient. She unfolded a thick square of instructions and read: “?‘Congrats, Daddy! You’re now the proud owner of high-quality, freshly thawed, rugged, life-giving Swimmrs.’?”

“Awful,” Rosie said, opening the sauna door for her.

“I think we’re supposed to keep it warm. Right?” She glanced at Rosie, then flipped through the instructions, stepping inside. They took a seat on the bench. “Size-four font, of course.” Rosie looked over her shoulder as Dylan paged through liability waivers that explained that Swimmrs was not responsible for genetic mutations, low-motility sperm, or cryo-ATM mix-ups. Rosie kept the vial between her thighs. Dylan set the syringe between them. The heat had begun to push against them, and she was desperate to remove layers. Dylan stripped down to her boxers. Rosie felt a pulse between her legs. She pulled off her sweater and then her socks. Then her T-shirt, pants, and underwear. The hot air filled her lungs. Dylan opened an amber jar and brought it to her nose. “Lavender,” she said, then inhaled again. “And eucalyptus. It’s from Lark.” She rubbed the paste into Rosie’s palms.

The intense heat forced out every one of Rosie’s thoughts. There was nothing to do but breathe and sweat. She lay across the bench and closed her eyes. The door creaked open and slapped shut once, then a second time. “Just me,” Dylan said, and she wrung out a freezing, wet towel over Rosie’s face. The water was icy and ran down her cheeks. It became warm, then hot, indistinguishable from sweat. Dylan pushed Rosie’s hair away from her face. “Ready?” She knelt at Rosie’s feet.

I was not a happy mother, Rosie’s mother had said. It’s just the truth. She thought of Jordan and his half brothers and their wives and their pretend jobs. She thought of Dylan and Lark, who built things with their hands and tended to their lives with joy and purpose. She thought of the toddler reaching his arms up to her, calling her Mom, and screaming with laughter. Was she ready? To be with them?

“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes again. “I’m ready.”