Chapter 16: One to Go

Jessica doesn't go back to school that afternoon, and the principal, who knows everything by lunchtime, doesn't ask her to.

They drive home from the harbor road with the windows down and don't say much. Peter sits in the passenger seat with his knees together, and then, as if he's only just noticed, crosses his legs, and laughs out loud at himself. She nearly runs a light. At the flat he goes up the stairs two at a time. She has never seen him take a stair two at a time on this island.

In the kitchen the November slip is still on the fridge under its magnet, the fee in bold. He takes it down and looks at it and puts it in the bin.

Then she's kissing him, against the fridge, with the magnet digging into her back. She has his shirt open before they're out of the kitchen. The balcony door is open and the fruit tree is moving in it, the leaves throwing shadows across the bed in the middle of the afternoon, and anyone in the yard below could hear them, and she doesn't care at all.

She pushes his trousers down, and stops, and looks.

Nothing. No steel, no tag, no slots, no little wire. Just him, the way he was in the shelter by the candle stub, the way she hasn't seen him once in all the time she's been his wife. He gets hard under her eyes, and there's nothing in the way, and she watches it happen as if it were the first time, which, here, it is.

"Oh," she says.

"Same as you remember?"

"I don't remember. I only remember the cage." She puts her hand on him, and he closes his eyes, and nothing stops him, and nothing hurts. "Now I'll remember this."

He lays her down on the bed, and then he stops, propped on one elbow over her, with the leaf shadows moving on his face. He's grinning.

"I haven't got anything," he says. "With me."

She knows exactly what he's doing. She pulls him down by the back of the neck.

"It's fine," she says.

And it is. It's nothing like the shelter, and it's exactly like it. No rain on the roof, only the fruit tree and a scooter in the street and the landlady's radio. No cold, no sleeping bag, no not knowing. She has wanted this for fifteen months, every night of it, with her hand on the steel, and she had begun to think the wanting was the whole of it. It isn't. He's inside her and she holds him there, all of him, with nothing between, and when he comes she keeps him there, her heels locked behind his back, as if he might be taken away again if she lets go.

Afterwards he lies on his back with his arm across his eyes and laughs at the ceiling, helplessly, for no reason.

She counts, because she has always counted. Day nine. Tomorrow is ten.

All her life the red days were the ones to keep away from. The school nurse colored them on the board as a warning. Dale sleeps on the sofa for them. Now, for the first time, she finds herself waiting for one.

"Tomorrow's red," she says.

He takes his arm off his eyes. "Is that good?"

"It's very good."

"Then I'm not sleeping on the sofa."

Her phone is somewhere in the kitchen, in her bag, on the floor by the fridge. She doesn't go and look at it. She doesn't go that night either. At half past five she wakes, and he's awake beside her, lying on his back, breathing slow, as he does every morning. She lays her palm on his chest.

He doesn't put it back.

---

Word reaches the plant before Peter does, and Leon is waiting on the bench outside the pump shed with his arms folded.

"Who's going to pay for Frank's patches now?"

"You are. Same as always."

"I know." Leon unfolds his arms and shakes Peter's hand, hard, with grease to the elbow. "Lucky bastard."

Dale says nothing at all about it in the pickup, because it's before eight, and then at the turn by the reeds he reaches over and grips Peter's shoulder for a moment, and lets go, and drives. Grace brings a cake that nobody admits to having baked. Frank shows him the card in his top pocket, out of habit, and then puts it away again, a little sheepishly.

On the boat the next Monday Peter stands at the rail, knees bent, before he remembers. Frank watches him from the tiller.

"You can sit, you know."

So he sits on the plank, and the lagoon comes up through it, wave after wave, and all it does is make his backside numb, like anybody's.

It's on the boat, in December, at the sixth buoy, that his phone buzzes in his breast pocket. He has a bottle in one hand and the log in the other, and Frank has to take the bottle off him.

*Peter*

*two lines*

He reads it four times. Then he types with one thumb, and deletes it, and types again, and can't think of a single word in English that's any use. In the end he sends her the only thing he has.

*Two.*

"Bad news?" Frank asks.

Peter shakes his head. He finds he can't explain, and that Frank, looking at his face, doesn't need him to.

"Ah," Frank says, and hands him back the bottle, and starts the engine for the seventh buoy with a grin like a split melon.

---

Jessica tells her mother on Sunday, at the kitchen table, and her mother already knows.

"Mr. Tane said you bought a test last week," Ruth says, and goes on cutting fish. "He winked. He said good luck."

"Mama."

"He's never winked at me in his life." Ruth puts the knife down. She wipes her hands on a cloth, and then she does something she hasn't done since Jessica was small: she takes her daughter's face in both her hands and holds it, and looks at it, as if she's checking it for something. Then she counts on her fingers, as she counts change at the market.

"August," she says. "In the long break. Good. It has sense already."

Peter comes in from the yard with a bag of the green fruit, and Ruth points him to his chair, the one at the end with its back to the window, and serves him first, as she has every Sunday since that first one. Nobody has to tell him which chair any more.

On the sideboard Sam grins out of his frame in his service blue. Next to him there's a new photo, smaller, of the wedding, Jessica in the cream dress with forty buttons and Peter beside her, red in the face, looking at her instead of the camera.

"I'll need to get the cot out," Ruth says. "It's in the shed, under a sheet."

"Mama. It's not till August."

"Then it will be aired," says Ruth, and goes to fry the fish.

---

The boy is born in August, at the hospital, just before dawn. He's long and red and furious, with a fuzz of hair the color of dry straw. There is no nurse at the end of the bed with a clipboard. Nobody asks Peter anything at all, except whether he'd like to hold him, and whether he's going to faint.

On a Friday late in August, Peter takes a ticket at Population Services, with his son asleep in a car seat on the chair beside him and Jessica in the chair beyond, and only then does he see who's sitting at the end of the row.

Marek has his hands between his knees. He looks at Peter, and at the car seat, and the corner of his mouth moves.

"Ten years today."

Peter doesn't know what to say to that. There isn't anything. He nods, the way Mr. Rewi nodded to him from the harbor wall in his first week on the island, one man to another across a waiting room. Marek leans over and looks into the car seat for a long time.

"What's his name?"

"Adam."

"Good name. For here." Marek sits back. "The first man in the Garden. They will like that at the ministry."

His number comes up first. He goes to the desk, and Peter watches him take his ticket to the same girl with the beaded chain, and ask, and listen. It takes less than a minute. Then Marek comes back past them, and touches the edge of the car seat with one finger on his way to the door.

"The same," he says, and goes out into the heat.

When it's Peter's turn the girl looks up and smiles at the car seat, a real smile, the one she doesn't use for the list.

"Oh, congratulations! Name for the birth record?"

He gives it. She types it with two fingers. Jessica holds the app out across the desk between them, and they watch it change. The green dot stays green. Underneath, the line that said two children now says one.

"There you are, sir," the girl says. "One to go!"

"And after that?"

"Then you're free to choose, sir. Like any gentleman." She beams at Adam. "We'll give you the leaflet with the second."

Out on the steps the heat is waiting, as it always is. Across the street Mr. Tane is taking in the board in front of his pharmacy for lunch, and he sees them and raises a hand. Jessica carries the car seat. Peter carries the bag with the nappies in it, and the app in his pocket, green, with one to go.

He knows how it goes from here. Dale told him in the pickup, a long time ago. A calendar on the fridge, the red days marked. A sofa, for a week a month, when the time comes. And then the second, and the three boxes again, the card and the cage and the little airplane. He has stood in front of them twice now. He doesn't know which one he'll choose. He has a few years to think about it, and Jessica will have a great deal to say.

His son sleeps through all of it, in the car seat in his mother's arms, his two already in his pocket, as far from the calendar as the moon.