Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

“Just following orders. Besides, it’s not like you had to go through hell to prove it. See you around.”

His steps echoed down the hall. They were on the second floor of a boxy brick dorm. It was eerily quiet; Cass supposed most people were working at whatever jobs they’d been assigned.

“How did you prove it?” Cass kept her voice casual, unwilling to let out any of her emotions, especially not the embarrassment and shame that came to the surface the minute she saw him.

Dor shrugged. “Jacked off into a Dixie cup. With a copy of Penthouse from 2012. You’d think they’d be able to find a few copies from last year, given all the raiding they do.”

Cass felt her blush deepen, but she was determined to keep things light between them. “Who was on the cover?”

“I didn’t notice. I just looked at her tits.”

“Ha.” Cass didn’t believe him. Something in her wanted to think he probably didn’t look at anything at all, that he closed his eyes, that his mind was somewhere far away and unknowable to anyone but him.

And if she imagined for a fraction of a second that it was her he saw when he closed his eyes, then she was the biggest idiot of all, pathetic Cassandra Dollar, wondering, as she had a thousand mornings after, if the man she brought home was thinking of her as he drove back to his own house or apartment or trailer or wife, wearing the clothes he’d had on in the bar or party or parking lot or wherever they’d met. No man ever did, of course, she knew that now. They thought only of making a clean getaway, of washing all traces of her down the drain.

But Dor couldn’t get away. Dor was stuck with her. Well, they were both adults-they would just have to find a way to deal with it.

“How did they know…you know?” Cass asked, aiming for nonchalance. “I mean, are you really, um…”

“Shooting blanks? Yeah, I had a vasectomy after Sammi. I think they just put some on a slide and check it out under the microscope. Hell, you could probably do it with one of those cheap scopes they use in middle school. The little fuckers are swimming around in there or they aren’t, you know?”

Cass wrinkled her nose. “Um.”

“Look, Cass, long as we’re on the subject…” His brief attempt at levity, rare enough for Dor on the best of days, was clearly over. He turned away from her, made a show of lining up the items on one of the two student desks-a pen, a pad of paper, a plastic cup-in perfect symmetry. “Just in case you’re wondering, I have no issues.” He cleared his throat. “Health issues.”

For a moment Cass didn’t understand-and then she did. There had been a recent outbreak of crabs in the Box; one of the most popular items being traded lately was RID shampoo. There had also been a couple of HIV-positive people in the box-once-hardy people who, deprived of their medication, were now getting sicker and sicker. Safe sex, once as easy as a trip to the drugstore, was a lost luxury-though most people were willing to take the chance, given the life expectancy Aftertime. Smoke had told Cass one day, shaking his head in amazement, that in the comfort tents sex with a condom brought the seller almost no premium over sex without-no one believed they’d live long enough to suffer the consequences. As one old-timer put it, a phrase he repeated every time he scraped up enough to afford a night’s entertainment, “I’d rather die with a smile on my face and a withered dick than with all my parts working and nowhere to use them.”

“Oh,” Cass said in a small voice. She focused on Ruthie, who had slipped over to Dor’s side and was looking longingly at the neat row of objects. Cass knew Ruthie had her eye on the pen and paper, her favorite entertainment in all the world.

“And you? You…and Smoke-everything…healthy?”

Anger rose like sap in Cass’s veins. None of your business, she wanted to say. The last time she and Smoke had made love, the morning before he betrayed her, she lay in his arms afterward-foolishly, obliviously-thinking that they would never be separated in this lifetime. That he was the last lover she would ever have.

But she’d been wrong, and now it was Dor’s business. Because she had made it his business.

This is wrong, he’d said.

I don’t want you.

But she had forced him.

And then last night he had punished her, and she’d fought him for it, demanding more.

She hung her head. “Yes. I, uh…before Smoke, before everything, I had a checkup, must have been a year and a half ago. Clean bill of health.”

“You haven’t-?” Dor said in surprise, then stopped abruptly, holding up a conciliatory hand. “I’m sorry. Not my business.”

Cass knew the source of his surprise-that she hadn’t been with anyone besides Smoke. She supposed she’d earned it. You didn’t sleep with two-hundred-plus men between the age of sixteen and twenty-eight-stopping only because you had a baby, because you believed God had given you one last chance by entrusting you with another life-without earning some sort of taint, some sort of permanent patina of promiscuity. When Cass had returned to A.A. for the second time, after her disastrous relapse, she took to dressing like a matron for a while, desperate to obliterate her past. She had been convinced that there had to be something she could put on-the rosewater cologne that reminded her of her grandmother, an unflattering skirt that hit her midcalf, a hair band that made her look like a soccer mom-that would disguise her. But no. The men still looked at her the way they looked at her. And Smoke had told her a hundred times that she was sexy, that she was hot, even now when she dressed only for survival. He whispered it when he came up on her watering her seedlings or rubbing dust off her ankles with the towel they kept by the front of the tent. But Cass knew what he was really saying: that she was marked, that she could never shake it, never make it go away. She could never know if he really saw her, the real her, past this other, the mark.

But this was Aftertime. She couldn’t let her lifelong shame, her old scars, stop her from doing what needed to be done. So she faced Dor squarely, forced herself to look into his flinty eyes. “I haven’t been with anyone besides Smoke for almost two years,” she said. In fact, it would have been since the moment she discovered she was pregnant, the moment everything changed, except for her one relapse, when she’d traded thirty-one months of sobriety for the bender that got Ruthie taken away from her by the people from Children and Family Services.

“All right then.” Dor gave the cup a final nudge and then, without comment, picked Ruthie up and settled her into the desk chair, smoothing down one of her shirtsleeves that had gotten twisted around her arm. He slid the pen and notebook into her reach. “We’ve got an hour before someone’s coming by. I’m going to lie down. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

He stretched his long, lanky form out on the bed closest to the windows, crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. Cass watched him with envy. He seemed to be able to turn off all the thoughts churning in his head, to make himself oblivious to everything around him. Obviously he preferred solitude-his self-imposed exile in his trailer was evidence of that-but he fell asleep almost immediately, as though he was alone in comfortable and familiar surroundings.

“Are you doing okay, sweetie?” she whispered to Ruthie, crouching down to look at the picture she was making. Like all her drawings, it was a series of scribbles, roughly round bubbles crosshatched with bold swipes of the pen. The day would probably come when Ruthie could draw a recognizable figure, but it was far-off. Still, she concentrated with the focus of a draftsman doing painstaking precise work and her every mark was deliberate.