Fuck. I shake my head, staring at the floor now instead of the ceiling. I think I liked it better when he was crying.
“My wife, she … she lost it. The nightmares, the hormones, the fact that she was growing a child she’d never get to hold—it took its toll. You know how the announcement said that the April 23 hoax was designed to increase the global stress levels until the weakest members of society self-destructed?”
“Yeah,” I rasp.
“My wife was weak, Wes.”
Was. Past tense.
“Doug … fuck, man … I’m—”
“She … she made herself go into labor. I don’t know how she did it, but on April 20, I found her in a bathtub full of blood … holding our s-s-son.”
The sobbing starts again, and I can’t help but think about Rain. I think about the night I found her on the verge of death with a stomach full of pills. I think about the hours I spent with my fingers down her throat, saving her life. I think about her panic attacks and trauma triggers and the days she spent holed up in an abandoned mall because she was too scared to go outside without me. Then, I think about the baby she might be growing, and I realize that my girl and Doug’s girl have a lot in fucking common.
Maybe too much.
“I’m sorry for yer loss,” a third voice mumbles, pulling me away from my spiraling thoughts.
I look up to find Officer Hoyt standing outside our cells, holding a pair of ankle shackles and staring at the floor.
“Oh God. Is it time? I … I’m not ready!”
“Not yet,” Officer Hoyt mutters to my neighbor. “Governor Steele has a sentencin’ to do first.”
Then, he flashes me a remorseful, sidelong glance.
“Mr. Parker, I’m afraid I have to escort you to the courtroom now. Please stand with your back against the bars.”
Regret and panic shoot through my veins as Hoyt gestures for me to step forward.
“Stick your foot out through the bars, please.”
I do as he said and feel a metal shackle clamp down around my ankle.
“Other foot now.”
“Doug,” I ask, suddenly needing to know how his story ends, “if you’re in here, does that mean you saved your son’s life?”
Hoyt finishes shackling my legs and instructs me to stick my hands out through the bars next.
“Yes.” Doug sniffles as cold steel greets my wrists. “I think he’s going to pull through. My sister has him now.”
My cell door opens with a deafening squeak. As Hoyt leads me out by the elbow, I turn and glance at the man imprisoned beside me. He’s an older guy—maybe forty? Forty-five? His hair is thinning, and his skin is so pale I wouldn’t be surprised if the only light it saw was the glow of a computer screen. He’s wearing a blue button-up shirt with jeans and athletic shoes that have obviously never been used for athletics. He lifts his head as I pass and meets my sympathetic frown with one of his own, despair oozing out of his unshaven pores.
He looks like something I’ve always wanted. Something I’ll never get the chance to become.
He looks like a dad.
A damn good one.
Rain
Twenty-four hundred.
I take the last bottle of prenatal vitamins out of the plastic Huckabee Foods bag and place it on the floor of my tree house next to the others.
Twenty-seven hundred.
I don’t know how far along I am, but I’m guessing that two thousand seven hundred prenatal vitamins is more than enough to get me through.
I slump back in my beanbag chair.
If Wes had seen me, he would have been so proud.
And so pissed.
I smile, remembering how mad he got the last two times we went to Fuckabee Foods. He told me I was “impulsive” and had a “death wish.”
Yeah, and he got shot in the shoulder because of it.
My face falls.
And I let the wound get infected.
I pull my hoodie sleeves over my hands and press my fists against my mouth.
And then he almost died in Carter’s house fire because I rushed back in to get his medicine and he couldn’t find me.
I close my eyes and inhale through my nose. My sweatshirt smells like the vanilla candles I used to burn in my bedroom. The ones he brought with him when he came back to get me from the mall.
It’s all I have left of him now. These memories … this smell …
My stomach churns again, reminding me of one more thing he left me with. Something that, unlike a scent or a memory, will only grow bigger and stronger with time. Something that, God willing, I’ll be able to keep forever and ever.
My gaze drifts over to the spot across the yard where the red dirt is piled up in two neat rows as long and wide as coffins. The spot where the people who made me now lie. I stare at it for what feels like hours, waiting for the panic to come—the grief I’ve been running away from ever since that night—but it doesn’t.
All I feel right now is the still, silent, soul-crushing weight of acceptance.
I climb down the ladder and trudge across my backyard, picking my feet up high as I wade through the knee-high grass. The sun is directly overhead now, but it’s shady under the oak tree where Mama and Daddy are buried. I realize once I get over to them that I don’t know which is which. Wes buried them while I was passed out on the bathroom floor. The mound on the left looks a little bigger, so
