face, trapping strands of it in her lip gloss. She clawed them away. “She shouldn’t be out here. It’s cold,” she said. She turned her face this way and that, examining Marlow. Orla could tell Floss wanted to grab the baby but wasn’t sure how to hold her.
“No,” Orla said. “No, no, no.” She tightened her grip.
“Orla.” Floss backed her toward the door. “Stop being insane. This was the deal, and you know it.”
“How did you find us?” Orla said, her voice quaking. She pressed Marlow’s face into her chest, to keep her warm and one inch farther from Floss. “How did you know I left the hospital—how did you even know I had her?”
Floss was calm. “The cops said they would search our whole building,” she said. “I knew you had her, I knew you left, because the hospital tracked me down. One of your nurses follows me on Twitter. She saw me tweet, before all this shit went down, that me and Aston were at the St. Regis.”
“But why,” Orla spit, “would they call you?”
Floss bent her finger up and down in a tiny wave at Marlow. “You put me down when you preregistered at the hospital,” she said. “I’m your emergency contact. They didn’t call me because you took Marlow. They called me because you went missing.”
Andriy and a policeman reached them then—what had taken them so long? Orla would never know, just as she would never know why the cop took Floss’s side. She could guess. He was young, younger than them, and frightened by Floss, by the envelope of contracts she had with her, under her fur-collared parka, by the way she looked familiar-famous and carried herself like who she was—someone who didn’t mind ruining people. Orla knew, too, that the way she bled from her middle must have made her look crazy, and that it couldn’t have helped, the way Marlow started howling in a way that sounded scared. She knew it made things even worse when Andriy kept stammering, over and over, that he really didn’t know these girls at all. She knew it made a difference, the way the cop didn’t have any backup, because the backup was all needed somewhere else. Everywhere else.
The cop lifted Marlow from Orla’s arms. He kept repeating that it was standard procedure: he had to check the baby out.
“Support her head,” Orla choked out as she let Marlow slip from her arms. The cop nodded, then asked Andriy to please come with him back inside. The men walked away with the baby.
Orla and Floss stood alone, together, apart, waiting to see what would happen, on the smaller side of the roof. The part for everyone else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Orla
Atlantis
2051
At the age of sixty-two, Orla has made peace with her hair. It’s funny; now that it is old, her hair is the loveliest, the most tolerable, it has ever been. She still has so much of it, and its youthful frizz and bulk has mellowed, leaving her with mermaid kinks and more natural volume than most women her age. Not that anyone else has settled for natural. Most of Orla’s friends, those former revolutionaries, have quietly taken advantage of science. Their hair and faces look almost the same as they did when they came to Atlantis. But that’s one of the things Orla has always missed here: old people. There is something so uncertain, so home-alone-feeling, about a world without anyone white-haired. So, now that she can, she lets herself become an old woman. And Kyle swears he doesn’t mind.
Kyle is a good man, but he is still a man. It is why he doesn’t understand, even after he shows Orla how it would boost the store’s profits, why she refuses to diversify into baby gifts, stocking tiny smocked dresses and soft pink shoes. It is why he doesn’t notice that she always goes straight to a restroom when another woman, half joking, tells Orla she is lucky to not have any daughters. It is why he has to ask her where her mind is when her eyes glaze over each Christmas morning, only at a time that’s convenient for everyone. She is a mother—she knows how to keep her own thoughts waiting until everyone else has had breakfast.
If Kyle were a woman, he would intuit all of this. But he is a man, so he would tell anyone who asked that they know everything there is to know about each other, he and his wife. And he does