Emmy Laybourne - Savage Drift

I glance up.

“Are you okay?”

I put my hands up to my face. Get yourself together, a part of me shouts to myself. This is ridiculous. You haven’t seen him in weeks and now you’re blubbering like a baby. He’ll want nothing to do with you.

But another part of me is somehow softening. Letting down my guard.

Niko is here. And he comes over to my side of the bed.

He takes me in his arms and holds me.

For a long time, I just cry.

Being in his arms is my heaven.

Being in his arms can be my last meal and I’ll be happy for it.

“You know you can tell me anything, right?” he says when I stop crying.

We’re lying on the bed. He has his muddy boots up on it. Who cares? This will probably be the last night I spend in this room, one way or the other.

“I’m sorry I got your shirt all wet,” I say.

“That? You did me a favor. I haven’t had a shower in almost a week.”

“There’s a shower here. In the bathroom. Do you want to take one?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Maybe later.”

I can tell he wants me to talk, to tell him about what happened to me since we lost each other, but I don’t want to talk.

When I tell him my story, he’s going to find out that I’ve agreed to the testing, and he’ll get upset.

“Tell me about the kids. How are they? What’s Canada like?” I say.

He tells me everything. About how they got to DIA. Saw Mrs. Wooly! How he sent Sahalia ahead on the plane to Canada while he and Alex found someone who would take them back to the Greenway for Dean, Astrid, Chloe, and the twins. And then about Quilchena, which sounds like a beautiful place.

Chloe sent me a message: “Quack, quack.”

It’s an old, dumb private joke. It make’s me laugh. She’s such a rascal.

Niko tells me about Captain McKinley flying him, Jake, Dean, and Astrid to Fort Lewis-McChord. Imagine it—Caroline and Henry’s dad in the Air Force—pretty lucky. He tells me about the second flight to Texas and the trucker and the first drift they saw, in Vinita, and about the toddler in the trunk of the car.

I wish I had a clock or a phone—I don’t know what time it is.

He tells me he hitched a ride with a bunch of Lutherans from Oklahoma City heading to the East Coast to volunteer rebuilding homes. Then he stole a minivan to get the rest of the way to Mizzou.

And that after he saw me there, he drove his stolen minivan until the gas ran out near Indianapolis.

Then he got a ride from another trucker. He had to give the man his protective suit in barter.

But Niko says, who cares—he’s never going to the Midwest again. He won’t need it.

We lie there on the bed and he strokes my fuzzy head.

He tells me he loves my hair like this. He says I have a beautiful skull. It’s a one-hundred-percent Niko compliment and I love it.

“When we leave here,” he says to me, “we’re going to go straight to the farm. Look.” He gets up and takes a paper map out of his backpack. It’s the kind you can buy at gas stations.

“It’s less than three hours from here! We’ll be there tomorrow, no question.”

He sits next to me and traces the little red lines running over the paper with his pointer finger. I-83 to 222 to 322.

I watch his finger. The nail is short, bitten down. I never knew he bites his nails. Maybe he didn’t before.

I close my eyes and lie back on the bed.

“What?” he asks. “Don’t you want to go there? We don’t have to. We can go wherever you want. I just thought—”

“It’s not that,” I say.

I sit up, taking the map away from him and holding his hands in mine.

“I need to tell you something. No, two things, okay?”

“I told you, Josie. You can tell me anything.”

I swallow.

“I want to say that it means everything to me that you came here to find me.”

He nods. The dim light twinkles in his eyes and I love him so much.

“It is the most beautiful thing that anyone has ever done for me. And you should know that I felt broken before, before you walked in that door. I had pretty much given up hope that I’d ever feel good again, but when you came in I felt so happy. You have to remember how much that means to me—”

“Josie, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“To see you,” I say. “To get to see you and have this time together, I had to sign a form.”

He looks puzzled. I hate what I’m about to tell him.

“Tomorrow, they’re going to do a test on me. They’re going to take a sample of spinal fluid. And it’s possible—I was told the chances of me surviving—”

Niko is as white as a sheet.

“No,” he says. “That’s not going to happen.”

His jaw is tight, his teeth clamped together.

“I’m not going to let that happen.”

“Sir, I understand the objective, but surely a low dose of magnesium sulfate wouldn’t affect the fetus—”

A woman is on the phone.

I’m in a car. No, bigger than a car. Couldn’t remember what it was called.

We are driving fast.

“This is one of the worst cases of preeclampsia I have ever seen—” She gets cut off.

“The protein levels—this girl is in danger—” She’s cut off again.

“Well, sir, that’s not the problem. The fetal heartbeat is very strong.”

We are moving fast and I hear a siren.

Oh. My head. It hurts.

“Yes sir,” she says and she hangs up.

I open my eyes again.

I am looking up at a ceiling. In my field of vision there is the underside of a metal cabinet and a black square on the ceiling with lights flashing in it. Red, white, red, yellow. Red, white, red, yellow.

“Those friggin’ jackholes,” the woman curses.

“I know, I know,” says a man’s voice.

“Under no circumstances are we to administer any drugs to that poor girl! Not even a little magnesium sulfate for the convulsions! I mean, really?”

I feel warm and relaxed, like I am swimming in soup.

It is a skylight, I realize slowly. It is nighttime and I am seeing the sky and the red, white, red, yellow pattern is the reflection of lights. They are pretty.

“What if she dies?”

“We save the baby.”

The man I can’t see curses.

Astrid. Astrid. Where is she?

I turn my head and I moan.

The pain cuts through the warmth. Slices right through. God, what happened to my head?

I see Astrid there across from me, an IV in her arm and her belly exposed with some kind of belt with electrode cords running this way and that and machines monitoring and beeping. I remember her.

“Astrid,” I say.

I hear movement and then there is a face above me, an Indian lady with a lined face and gray hair cut short.

“Hey,” she says. “Can you hear me? Do you know what year it is?”