“I won’t linger. Promise. I just wanted to see you again and hear from you direct what’s up. Then I’ll go and leave you alone forever, if that’s what you want. OK?”
Edie sighed. “Fine. Sit.” She pointed at the couch. “I’m tired, Jesse, and I don’t have the heart to dance around this. So I’m going to be blunt.” She fell into her mother’s rocking chair and sighed, lifting one heavy foot, unzipping her boot. Then the other. Her sock feet, as always after a shift, emerged from their sheathes wrinkled and damp, and she peeled her socks off with a sigh. “I’m pregnant.” She saw him opening his mouth and put up a hand. “No. Let me finish. I don’t know whose it is. I slept with a couple of guys around the same time you and I started seeing each other. I slept with one of them after that first time with you. I sleep around. That’s what I do.”
She paused here, unable to look at him. When he didn’t jump in, she continued.
“Anyway, I’m dealing with it. So let’s move on. You don’t owe me anything.”
Another silence, which she itched to fill—but she wasn’t sure what was left to say. She chanced a look at him. He seemed . . . thoughtful. Not shocked or panicked. Not angry.
“I mean,” he said, “do you want it? Like, to have it?”
“Of course I don’t fucking want it,” Edie snapped. “Of course I don’t want to fucking have it. What goddamn choice do I have? I’m going to go to one of those agencies and sell it.”
He cleared his throat. “You don’t want to have it.”
She felt a charge in the air—a sense that they were moving toward some new understanding. “I don’t want to have it,” she replied carefully.
“Because—you don’t have to.” He leaned over and rubbed his mouth. “This doesn’t have to be a big thing is what I’m saying. I know people. It happens all the time.”
“Has it happened to you?”
“Once,” he said. “A few years ago.”
“And you got it taken care of.”
“It really wasn’t a big deal.”
She rocked in her mother’s chair, absorbing all of this. The gulf between what was and wasn’t a big deal, and for whom.
“I’d have to go somewhere? Out-of-zone?”
“Oh, hell no. It would happen right here.”
“And this place—it’s safe? I mean. Clean? Sterile?”
He laughed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to make light of this. But yeah, of course. It’s totally up-and-up. They just offer certain after-hours services.”
“How much?” she said flatly.
He shook his head dismissively. “On me.”
“It might not be yours.”
“Or it might. If you want to feel better about this, it’s a lot cheaper for me to help you now than to take the risk you change your mind later about raising it.”
She started to cry. It was the first time she had cried since all of this—what she thought of as all of this—had started: her mother’s sickness, her death, Edie’s madness in the wake of the death, the dread news of the pregnancy. She cried hard, for all of it, and at some point Jesse put his hands on both of her upper arms, gingerly, and he said, “Shit. I didn’t mean that. It’s up to you. Of course it is, honey. I’m not trying to force this on you.”
Now Edie laughed, just as hard as she’d been crying, and she mopped tears off her face with her shirttail. “That’s not why I’m crying. Hell yes, I want this. Yes. I’m crying because I’m thinking about how lucky I am I fucked a rich guy.”
He didn’t reply right away—she supposed he wasn’t sure what tone to take, what was allowed—but then he said, “Glad to be of service,” and she hugged him. He hugged her back, firmly, and kissed the top of her head. He returned to her bed that night, and then they fell asleep, exhausted, and when Edie lifted a swollen eyelid ten blissfully blank hours later, he was still there. His narrow back, ridge of spine. The tattoo of a golden eagle taking flight across his rib cage. I think I could love this guy, she told herself. If love is what he wants from me.
A few months later, Jesse heard about Outer Limits Excursions, and he became obsessed with this excursion-into-the-wild-beyond stuff. There had been a session musician named Neil—a guy Jesse’s producer had hired to add a layer of classical guitar to a track on the new audio feed—and Jesse, who had never seen a Stamp in the flesh (or, as it were, on the flesh), was fascinated. Edie had been hanging out at all of the recording sessions by then (“Please stay, baby,” Jesse would say in his insecure, yearning way, and his producer would scowl), and so she had seen firsthand the mix of boyish emotions that had crossed Jesse’s face as Neil displayed the welts on his arm, stomach, neck, and ankle: the jealousy and crushing admiration, the thrill of possibility. “Experience of a bloody lifetime,” this Neil guy kept repeating, and by the end of the day, he had gotten paid for as many hours of storytelling as guitar playing, as Jesse had him recite and repeat the entirety of his eight-week adventure. Three weeks of boot camp. Three beyond the Salt Line, in what had once been the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Two weeks in Quarantines 1 and 2. Drinking water from pure mountain streams, eating rabbit charred over an open fire. An open, undisturbed sky crusted with millions of stars.