normal to you—you must seek immediate medical attention. Understand? The risk is low, but the sooner you report to an urgent care facility, the better.”
One word plays on my lips, and I find myself saying it out loud. “Sepsis.”
Mender sighs. “Like I said, the risk is infinitesimally low. But it isn’t zero.” I’d like to tell him what Alex said. He might rework his risk calculations. “That’s what this one is for.” He taps the other slip of paper, already typed out and signed. “You can have it filled when you get home and start the course tonight.”
“What is it?”
“Just Augmentin. High dose, strong antibiotic. Should zap anything.”
Doctors and nurses are not politicians. They don’t have time to watch their words. As Mender tidies up the remnants of my treatment, disposing of the speculum and insertion device in a lined container marked Biohazard, he talks. I suppose he thinks he’s being soothing.
“You won’t be alone, dear,” he says, patting my hand. “A lot of women will be making the same choice as you before long.”
“Doing what?”
He shrugs. “Going in for an appointment at WomanHealth. If the trials work and the risk assessment is as low as we think it will be, hell, my wife’ll be thirty-five in December. Christmas baby, actually. She’ll go to her local clinic and take care of things. All for the good, if you ask me. I mean, the prevention’s easier than the cure, right?”
“So it’s on a volunteer basis, then?”
Mender continues. I hope to hell this contraption of Lissa’s has storage capacity larger than it looks like it does.
“Oh, I think so. In most cases. Everyone wants to keep the breeding with the young and fit. Thirty-five’s too old, they say. Too many things can go wrong.”
In most cases. “What about the other cases?”
He clears the rest of the debris from the stainless steel countertop and washes up. “Don’t you worry about that, dear. There’ll be plenty of incentives.”
I really hope Lissa’s pen is getting all of this.
Because as soon as I get back to Washington, I’m going to make sure it’s blasted over the airwaves so loud they’ll hear it on the fucking moon.
SIXTY-FOUR
I sleep through most of the three-hour flight from Kansas City to Washington. When I’m not sleeping, I’m pretending to, so I don’t have to look at Alex. We step off the plane near the general aviation building into a field of tarmac and concrete. I wrap my coat around me, tight against the windchill, as Malcolm emerges from one of the doors and begins a slow walk toward us. I don’t remember DC ever being so cold in early November.
Inside the building, Malcolm and Alex leave me for a moment. I can’t hear them, but I watch my phone exchange hands. I’d forgotten about it, sitting in that little storage room next to Martha Underwood’s office, keeping company with others of its kind. There’s a bit of backslapping and laughter before they part.
Malcolm’s mood matches the weather when he takes me by the arm and leads me out to the hourly parking lot. Without a word of greeting, he opens the passenger-side door and watches me climb in before rounding the front of the BMW and taking his own seat. When he starts the engine, I’ve got so many words I want to scream at him I don’t know where to start.
He seems to read my mind. “Just don’t say a word, Elena. Not a goddamned word.”
I turn up the heat on my side and stay quiet, counting the cars we pass as he navigates us out of the airport and onto the parkway, thinking about what I’ll say to Anne when we get home. Really I’m thinking about what she’ll say to me, if she says anything at all.
Malcolm cracks the driver’s window; I turn up the heat to eighty. He lowers the window a further two inches; I twist the dial again until the digital readout glows eighty-five. We argue in this way for the half-hour drive to the house, a wordless battle of wills, and the cold air curling around the back of the