If he didn’t stop her now, Grey knew, he’d never get her out of here. “Lady—”
“Please.” Holding up a hand, she gave him a warm smile. “It’s Lila.”
“Lila, okay.” Grey drew a breath. “Have you noticed anything… strange?”
A puzzled frown. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Best to back in slowly, Grey thought. “Like, take the electricity, for instance.”
“Oh that,” she said, and waved a hand dismissively. “You already mentioned that, at the store.”
“But doesn’t it seem odd that it’s still out? Don’t you think they would have fixed it by now?”
A vague disturbance moved across her face. “I haven’t the foggiest. Honestly, I don’t see where you’re going with this.”
“And David, you said he hasn’t called. How long has it been?”
“Well, he’s a busy man. A very busy man.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason he hasn’t called.”
Her voice was absolutely flat. “You don’t.”
“No.”
Lila’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Lawrence, do you know something you’re not telling me? Because if you’re a friend of David’s, I hope you would have the decency to tell me.”
Grey might just as well have tried to snatch a fly out of the air. “No, he’s not a friend of mine. I’m just saying …” There was nothing to do but just come out with it. “Have you noticed there aren’t any people?”
Lila was staring at him intently, arms crossed above her pregnant belly. Her eyes held a look of barely contained rage. She rose abruptly, snatched her bowl from the table, and carried it to the sink.
“Lila—”
She shook her head emphatically, not looking at him. “I won’t have you talk this way.”
“We have to get out of here.”
With a clatter she tossed the bowl into the sink and turned on the tap, violently pumping the lever back and forth, to no avail. “Goddamnit, there’s no water.
Grey got to his feet. She spun to face him, her fists balled with anger.
“Don’t you understand? I can’t lose her again! I can’t!”
Did she mean the baby? And what did she mean by “again”?
“We can’t stay.” He took another cautious step, as if approaching a wary animal. “It’s not safe here.”
Furious tears began to spill down her cheeks. “Why do you have to do this? Why?”
She lurched toward him, fists raised like hammers. Grey was thrust back on his heels. She began to pummel his chest as if she were trying to break down a door. But her attack wasn’t organized; it was an expression of pure panic, of the storm of emotion breaking inside her. As she reared back again, Grey regained his balance and pulled her into him like a boxer into a clinch, encircling her upper body and pinning her arms to her sides. The gesture was reflexive; he didn’t know what else to do. “Don’t say that,” Lila pleaded, thrashing inside his grip. “It isn’t true, it isn’t true.…” Then, with a rush of breath and a whimper of surrender, the air let out of her and she collapsed against him.
For a period that might have been a full minute they stayed that way, locked in an awkward embrace. Grey couldn’t have been more astonished—not by her violent reaction, which he could have foreseen, but by the mere presence of a woman’s body in his arms. How slight she was! How different from himself! How long had it been since Grey had hugged a woman, hugged anyone? Or even been touched by another person? He could feel the hard roundness of Lila’s belly pressed against him, an insistent presence. A baby, Grey thought, and for the first time, the full implications of this fact dawned in his mind. In the midst of the chaos and carnage of a world gone mad, this poor woman was going to have a baby.
Grey relaxed his grip and backed away. Lila was looking at the floor. The brisk, officious woman he’d met in the paint aisle was gone; in her place stood a frail, diminished creature, almost childlike.
“Can I ask you something, Lawrence?” Her voice was very small.
Grey nodded.
“What did you do before?”
For a moment he didn’t understand what she was asking; then he realized she meant what job. “I cleaned,” he said, and shrugged. “I mean, I was a janitor.”
Lila considered his statement without expression. “Well, I guess you’ve got me there,” she said miserably. She rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I was anything at all.”
Another silence descended, Lila staring at the floor, Grey wondering what she would next say. Whatever it was, he sensed their survival depended on it.
“I lost one before, you see,” Lila said. “A baby girl.”
Grey waited.
“Her heart, you understand,” she said, and placed a hand against her chest. “It was a problem with her heart.”
It was strange; standing in the quiet, Grey felt as if he’d known this about her all along. Or, if not the thing itself, then the kind of thing. It was as if he were looking at one of those pictures that made no sense when you saw it up close, but then you backed away and suddenly it did.
“What was her name?” Grey asked.
Lila raised her tear-streaked face. For a moment she just looked at him, her eyes pulled into an appraising squint. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, asking this. The question had just popped out.
“Thank you, Lawrence. Nobody ever asks me that. I can’t tell you how long it’s been.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know.” Her shoulders lifted with a tiny shrug. “I guess they think it’s bad luck or something.”
“Not to me.”
A brief silence passed. Grey didn’t think he’d ever felt so awful for anybody in his life.
“Eva,” Lila said. “My daughter was Eva.”
They stood together in the presence of this name. Outside, beyond the windows of Lila’s house, the night was pressing down. Grey realized it had begun to rain—a quiet, soaking, summer rain, pattering the windows.
“I’m not really who you think I am,” Grey confessed.
“No?”
What did he want to tell her? The truth, surely, or some version of it, but in the last day and a half, the idea of truth seemed to have slipped its moorings completely. He didn’t even know where to begin.
“It’s all right,” Lila said. “You don’t have to say anything. Whoever you were before, it doesn’t make much difference now.”
“It might. I’ve had… some troubles.”
“So that would make you just like the rest of us, wouldn’t it? One more person with a secret.” She looked away. “That’s the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You’re just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.”
Grey nodded. What was there to say?
“Promise me you won’t leave,” Lila said. “Whatever happens, don’t do that.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll look after me. We’ll look after each other.”
“I promise.”
The conversation seemed to end there. Lila, exhaling a weary breath, pushed her shoulders back. “Well. I guess I’d better turn in. I expect you’ll want to be leaving first thing in the morning. If I’m reading you correctly.”
“I think that’s best.”
Her eyes wistfully traveled the room with its shiny appliances and overflowing trash bags and dirty dishes in piles. “It’s too bad, really. I did want to finish the nursery. But I guess that will have to wait.” She found his face again. “Just one thing. You can’t make me think about it.”
