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Authors: Harry Turtledove

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The thanks in Japanese must have done it. That wasn’t a corporate thing for him to say, but maybe a nice guy lurked under the salaryman after all. Louise wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. “Thank you very much, Mr. Nobashi!” she said, and then
“Arigato!”
one more time.
She was out of there before he had the chance to change his mind. When she got back to the condo, she lay down on the couch for a little while and closed her eyes.
Just to rest them
, she told herself. Next thing she knew, Teo was unlocking the door.
He laughed when he saw her confusion. “Hello, sleepyhead!” he said, hurrying over to kiss her. “You must have had a tough day if you sacked out as soon as you came in.”
“Mr. Nobashi let me off a couple of hours early,” she said. “On the company’s dime, if you can believe it.”
The way he blinked said it wasn’t easy. “Why’d he do that?” he asked. Louise explained about
arigato
. Teo was still puzzled when she finished, wondering, “Okay, but why did he want to let you off early to begin with?”
“I was all tired, and I guess I looked kind of green around the gills, too,” Louise said. She hoped the morning sickness wouldn’t be too awful this time around. Colin had dubbed her the Duchess of York for the way she kept tossing her cookies when she was pregnant with Rob. She’d hardly been sick at all with Vanessa, and kind of in-between carrying Marshall.
“You look fine now,” Teo said. “You always look good to me, love.”
That made her smile. Teo had a knack for making her smile. She wasn’t surprised to hear she looked all right now. She’d been asleep for—what?—close to two and a half hours. She wondered if she’d be able to sleep later on tonight. From what she remembered, she wouldn’t have any trouble at all.
Teo went on, “But what made you so out of it at work? It must’ve been bad, or he wouldn’t’ve turned you loose like that. You need to go to the doc or something?”
She would need to see her gynecologist soon. Frank Russell, who’d delivered her babies, had long since retired. Last she’d heard, he was living in Palm Springs, painting watercolors of the desert, and selling some of them for pretty good money. She didn’t like Dr. Suzuki so much, but she thought he knew his business.
“I think I know what’s cooking with me,” she said.
“Yeah? Tell, love, tell.”
You couldn’t be a little bit pregnant. You couldn’t break the news by easy stages, either. Louise wished you could. Her life was about to get more complicated. No. Her life had already got more complicated. Now she had to announce the fact. She wanted a drink—but that wouldn’t be good for her passenger. She took a deep breath instead: as inadequate a substitute as you could find. “I’m going to have a baby, Teo.”
He giggled. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in I don’t know when! I didn’t know you could do a straight face like that, either. Oh, my God!” He was practically holding his sides.
“I’m not kidding,” Louise said. “I’m pregnant. I’m sleepy like you wouldn’t believe, my coffee tastes weird—tastes lousy—”
“That stuff doesn’t mean squat,” Teo broke in. He didn’t want to believe it. Well, how could she blame him when she didn’t want to believe it herself?
“I wasn’t done,” she said. “My period’s late. I know it’s getting erratic”—
I know I’m getting old
lay behind that—“but still. And today at lunch I got a pregnancy test at the drugstore, and I peed on it in the head at work. I’m pregnant, all right.”
He stared at her. For the very first time since they’d been together, his dark eyes seemed opaque. She couldn’t tell what was going on behind them. “You mean it,” he said slowly, and his voice was as guarded as his expression.
“I sure do.” Louise nodded. “You’re going to be a daddy, Teo.”
“Well . . .” If he was pleased, he did a mighty good job of not showing it. He licked his lips. He’d never been a father before, and he hadn’t looked to be a father now. She’d already been through pregnancy three times.
Not out of wedlock, though
, she thought. Maybe this would make him do something about that. Louise hadn’t worried about a piece of paper, but it mattered when a child was involved. He pulled in a deep breath of his own, then expelled it in a sigh. “It’s still real early, right? You could, um, dispose of it, like?”
“Yes. I could.” Louise didn’t know why she was so disappointed. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had the same thought. But she hadn’t looked for it to be the first thing she heard from him. “I don’t know that I want to, though. It’s something we made together, after all, something wonderful.”
“It’s an oops. We didn’t intend to do it,” Teo said.
“No, we didn’t,” she agreed. And if that didn’t win next year’s Oscar for Best Understatement, whoever did take the statuette home was bound to have cheated. “But it happened, and we’ve got to deal with it.”
“Getting rid of it is dealing with it,” Teo said. “Then we don’t have to worry about it any more.”
“I’m not sure I want to do that,” Louise repeated. “You shouldn’t make up your mind right away, either. We don’t have to decide anything tonight. We’ve got some time to think about it.”
“What’s to think about? It just messes everything up. You ought to know that better than I do,” Teo said.
Kids did mess up your life. Louise sometimes thought that was their sole function in life. They didn’t stop when they got to be self-winding, either, the way you thought they would. Even so . . . “They give back more than they take away,” Louise said. “Ask your folks.”
“What do they know?” Teo said. His father was a carpenter, his mother a housewife. They weren’t educated people, but they were plenty nice enough. “They went crazy trying to keep us all fed and in shoes and like that. Who needs the hassle if you don’t have to put up with it?”
“Let’s talk about it later.” Louise had never seen Teo like this. Plainly, he needed some time to get used to the idea. He didn’t want to look at it yet, much less to like it. She could see him outside jogging with a little boy who looked just like him. She could see the little boy staring up proudly at the great big man who was his daddy. How sad Teo couldn’t picture it, too.
Later
didn’t happen the rest of the evening. They slept together, the way they always did, but it didn’t feel as warm and loving as usual to Louise. Teo might have been on the far side of the country, or on the far side of the moon. Louise tried to tell herself she was having the vapors, but she had trouble convincing herself. She also didn’t have long to do the telling; she fell asleep as if someone had slipped a Mickey Finn into the water she drank after she brushed her teeth.
Next morning was no better. She staggered around like a zombie, awake but not alive. She made coffee, but she couldn’t get more than a third of the cup down. It tasted nasty, so nasty she wondered if she’d give it back.
And Teo was out the door in nothing flat. He did remember to kiss her good-bye. She didn’t think he’d missed a day since they got together. But if ever anyone was going through the motions, he was then. Again, Louise tried to think she was seeing things that weren’t there, or it was nothing but her hormones running wild (which they were, and would be), or—anything. Again, she had trouble believing it.
Mr. Nobashi greeted her at Ramen Central with, “You better today?”
“I sure hope so,” Louise answered. “Thanks again for giving me some time off yesterday. It helped a lot.”
“Good,” he said gruffly, and went back into his inner office. Which was a good thing, because not thirty seconds later Louise yawned almost wide enough to make the top of her head fall off.
Wondering how she’d ever make it till half past five, she sat down and started messing around with the inventory spreadsheets. She wondered what would happen if she just entered numbers at random. Would ramen-scarfers all over the country start pining for their favorite flavors, or else find themselves swamped with them? Would she get fired and find herself unemployed as well as knocked up? Or would nobody notice or care?
Mr. Nobashi bawled for coffee. Then he bawled for sweet rolls. Then he hollered for sweet rolls
and
coffee. Hopping up to bring him goodies every so often kept Louise from sacking out at her desk. Nice to think Mr. Nobashi was good for something.
When she carried in the sweet rolls and coffee, he was just getting off the phone after a conversation with headquarters in Hiroshima. “Weather very bad in Japan,” he said. “Very cold. Hiroshima is warm. Like Los Angeles warm, only sticky. They have snow there, thirty centimeters snow.” He paused. “A foot, you say.”
“Wow! That’s a lot of snow,” she said. It hadn’t snowed here, but it was the rainiest winter she remembered.
“Only get worse, too. Supervolcano number-one bad,” Mr. Nobashi said. She couldn’t very well argue with that.
Patty came by her desk to yak for a bit. After a little while, she asked, “You feelin’ okay, sweetie?”
“I’ll live,” Louise said, as dryly as if she were Colin.
“Well, okay. You seem a little peaked, that’s all.” Patty was gossip-hungry. She’d have something to gab about when Louise’s belly started swelling. For now, though, Louise didn’t feel like sharing the news. Patty eventuay went away.
Somehow, Louise staggered through the day. She was fixing dinner when Teo came in. He was bright and cheerful—in a superficial way. He talked about how his day at the exercise studio had gone. He told a dumb joke he’d heard. He didn’t say word one about the elephant in the room.
After dinner, Louise tried to bring it up. Teo changed the subject. He hardly even seemed to have heard her. If he kept on doing that, Louise knew she would get mad at him. If she’d had a little more energy, she might have got mad then and there. Or she might not have. He’d built up a lot of capital with her. A couple of days of acting like a jerk—even if it was about something important—didn’t come close to burning through it.
She wondered if making love would help. But, even though she did everything except send up a flare, he didn’t take the hint. He just went to sleep, earlier than usual. Disappointed, so did she. Disappointed or not, she zoned out as if knocked over the head. She’d always thought you slept a lot while you were pregnant because you sure as hell wouldn’t afterwards.
He was gone the next morning before she got up. That was funny; they usually woke up together. Maybe he’d told her why the night before, but she was too sleepy to recall. The condo felt strange with her fixing breakfast alone.
Another day at the ramen mill. She survived it. She didn’t doze off or do anything to give Patty more ideas than she had already. It was raining again when she went out at half past five. On the way home, somebody rear-ended the VW in the lane next to hers. No one got hurt, but neither car would be going anywhere without making a body shop happy.
When she walked into the condo, her first thought was that a burglar had hit it. Then she realized the only stuff missing was Teo’s. Favorite chair. Clothes. DVDs. CDs. Computer. TV. Gone.
A note lay on the bed.
I am sorry
, Louise read,
but I am not made to be a father. If you can make the payments, keep the place. I won’t give you no trouble about it. It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it? But nothing lasts forever
.
He’d scribbled a signature under the last four words. No forwarding address. She could try his cell, but what were the odds he’d answer? She tore the note into little pieces before she started to cry.
XX
 
“B
een a while since the Strangler did anybody,” Gabe Sanchez remarked. “Not since the supervolcano went. Maybe he was at Yellowstone when it blew.”
“Too much to hope for,” Colin said. All the same, he imagined the son of a bitch watching Old Faithful when everything for miles around fell down onto the magma. Yes, he knew that was ridiculous. The area around Old Faithful had been off-limits for months before the big eruption. All the same . . . “Less than he deserves, too, you know.”
“Oh, yeah. Lethal injection!” Gabe snorted contempt. “If we ever do drop on him, here’s hoping some of the big, muscle-bound studs at San Quentin get some action with him. Let him find out about some of what he gave the old ladies.”
“That’d be nice,” Colin agreed. Before he could go on, his phone rang. He picked it up. “Lieutenant Ferguson.”
“Hello, Colin.” His former wife had been calling this number since before either of them had a cell phone. No doubt she did it now from force of habit.
“What’s up, Louise?” he asked. Whatever if was, it wasn’t good. She sounded as if she’d just watched a cement mixer run over her puppy.
“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,” she said. “Could you pick me up here at the ramen office for lunch?”
“Okay.” He tried to hide his astonishment. Since she left him, she’d made a point of
not
wanting to see him. “What time? . . . Twelve straight up? All right, I’ll be there.... Yes, of course I know where it is. ’Bye.”
“Your ex?” Gabe knew the variations on this theme, too—probably better than Colin did. His kids were young enough to live with their mother most of the time, so he had to keep dealing with her. However painful it was, Colin’s break was clean. Or it had been, till now.
“Yeah, that was her. Something’s wrong. I don’t know what yet, but I’ll find out at lunch,” Colin said.
“Lucky you.” Sanchez rolled his eyes. “What’ll you do to help?”
“Damfino.” Colin shook his head. “Have to see what it is first. I don’t aim to buy a pig in a poke. Things aren’t the way they were right after she trotted out the door.”
“Nope. You found somebody else.” Gabe didn’t sound—very—jealous. He’d dated a double handful of women since his breakup. Nothing lasted long.
“Uh-huh. If she thinks she can walk back in the same way she walked out . . .” Colin shook his head again. If Louise had wanted to do that a few months after she left, chances were he would have dumped Kelly to get his old life back. Now? The train had rolled on.
He thought it had, anyhow.
“Luck,” Gabe told him.
“Thanks a lot.” For the rest of the morning, Colin went through the motions at his desk. He went through the emotions inside his head. When the time came, he drove north up Hesperus Avenue to Braxton Bragg, then hung a right to the ramen place. He shook his head when he turned in to the lot. He hadn’t remembered how heavily fortified the perimeter was. One more sign of San Atanasio’s changes—not for the better.
Louise came out at twelve on the dot, a couple of minutes after he got there. She looked the way she always looked—which is to say, she looked good to him. But no, not quite the way she always looked: she was pale and she’d been crying.
“Thanks,” she said as she got into the Taurus.
“It’s okay. Where do you want to go?”
“How about that Carrows on Reynoso Drive?”
“You got it.” Colin nodded. “Want to tell me about it now or after we get there?” Colin pulled back onto the street. He noted the way the armed guard kept an eye on him till he did. If that guy wasn’t a vet, and likely a combat vet, he’d eat his shoes.
“Teo left me yesterday,” Louise said. “He skipped. He’s gone. He took his things and he bailed. I have no idea where he is.”
“Okay.” Colin didn’t say anything more until he got into the left-turn lane that would put him back on Hesperus. Then he asked, “Did he . . . hurt you before he left? Am I looking at a domestic-violence case? Last time I talked to you, you said everything was fine with you guys.”
“The last time we talked, everything
was
fine.” Louise laughstreet. tterly. A moment later, she yawned and covered her mouth with her hand. “I keep doing that,” she said, as if annoyed at herself. “No, he didn’t hurt me, not the way you mean. Not so you could bust him for it.”
“Then what do you want from me?” He tried to sound patient, not pissed off. “If you need a shoulder to cry on, I’m not your number-one candidate any more. I’m sorry, but I’m not. When I called you, you know, it was to tell you I’m gonna marry Kelly.” Louise was the kind of person who could forget things like that when forgetting them looked convenient.
“Colin, I’m going to have a baby. That’s why he ran out on me.”
It was a good thing traffic on Hesperus was light, with no cars anywhere close to his. The Taurus jerked out of its lane for a split second. He had to haul it back over the yellow stripes. He hadn’t been so surprised since—since the day she walked out on him.
He started to ask if she was kidding, but he swallowed that question. She wasn’t. She’d never hurt him for the sake of hurting him—if anybody in the family enjoyed pulling wings off flies, it was Vanessa. He asked something else instead: “Are you sure?”
“Oh, you betcha,” Louise said. “The home pregnancy tests they have nowadays are just about as good as the ones doctors use. It says I am. And I feel like I am. I know what it’s like, even if it’s been a while. You don’t forget.”
“If you say so.” Colin hung a right on Reynoso Drive. “Do you, ah, know what you’re going to do about it?”
“No. Teo wanted me to get rid of it right away. I may, but I’m not going to do it like that—” She snapped her fingers. “I didn’t mean to get pregnant, but I may have it anyway.”
The Carrows was on the south side of the street. He waited in the center lane till he could turn left against the eastbound traffic without getting creamed. Most of the shops and eateries in the little center catered to Japanese. The lot was crowded. He finally found a space and slid in. He and Louise walked to the restaurant a few inches farther apart than they would have before they broke up.
He didn’t say anything till they were seated at a table that gave them a fine view of the cars going back and forth on Reynoso Beach. “What exactly do you want me to do about all this?” he asked then, picking his words with great care.
“Are you ready to order?” The waitress couldn’t have been more than twenty, and sounded as if she had not a care in the world. That was what twenty was for. Too goddamn bad it didn’t last.
“I’ll have the BLT,” Louise said.
Colin ordered a cheeseburger. The waitress went away. He repeated the question.
“I heard you the first time,” Louise said sharply. “Can you find out where he’s gone? Phone records or his plastic or whatever? His parents don’t know or they won’t say—I’ve already tried them.”
“Maybe,” Colin said. “If he’s left the county, I don’t have so many contacts. If he’s out of state, it gets a good bit harder. I can try, I guess. Where does he have relatives?”
“Some down in San Diego. Some in Mexico, too.” Louise looked rueful. “If he’s south of the border, it’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“Pretty close,” Colin agreed. “Nobody down there would get excited about that kind of case.” Not many people up here would, either, although he might be able to call in some favors. On the other hand, he might not. The supervolcano and its disruptions made small stuff too small to worry about. And if Teo felt like disappearing into a refugee camp, he might not surface for years, if he ever did.
The food came then, interrupting his gloomy thoughts. The cheeseburger was . . . a cheeseburger. Better than fast food or Denny’s, nothing to jump up and down about even so. The way Louise demolished her sandwich said morning sickness hadn’t kicked in yet.
“Why did he just split like that?” Colin asked. “You two have—uh, had—been together a while now. Wasn’t it something you could have worked out between you?”
“I thought so, but he freaked. He didn’t want to be a daddy—no way, nohow.” Louise’s mouth twisted. “Sometimes you don’t find out what somebody’s really like till it’s crunch time. I got crunched, all right.”
“Yeah, you did. Sorry about that.”
“What am I going to do?” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Either you’ll have the baby or you’ll decide you don’t want to have it and you’ll take care of that.” Colin was no enormous fan of abortion. He could see, though, that a woman might not want to bear the child of a man who’d abandoned her—especially if she was a woman with some gray in her hair unless she touched it up. Raising a kid on your own was never easy. It got harder as you got older and tireder.
Through the tears, his ex looked indignant. She eyed him as if this were somehow his fault—or, at any rate, anyone’s but hers. “I can figure that much out for myself, thank you very much,” she said tartly. “What I wanted to know was how much help from you I could count on.”
“Huh? What kind of help? I’m not made of money, especially when I’m putting Marshall through school and he never seems to graduate.”
“But he sold that story! To a magazine! For money! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Well, it’s pretty good. But what he got is not quite a week’s rent on his place, and that’s before you chop taxes out of it. Besides, you pretty much cleaned out my bank account when you left.” He’d kept the house. She’d taken just about everything else they’d built up over all the years they were married. The lawyers called it a fair split. Colin hadn’t loved lawyers before the divorce. He was even less fond of them now.
“You’re being mean!” Louise exclaimed.
He exhaled through his nose to try to hide how angry he was. “Louise, you walked out on me. You were in love with Teo, and he was in love with you, and the two of you were going to live happily ever after. You got your half of the community property. Except for that, you didn’t want thing one to do with me any more. Months could go by without us talking. But now Mr. Happily Ever After finds out you’ve got a bun in the oven, so he takes off. And all of a sudden I look a lot better by comparison, huh? Is that where we’re at, or did I miss something?”
“You’re not going to help me?” If the Mask of Tragedy had a voice, it would have been hers then.
“You were the one who didn’t want me darkening your towels any more. You called me every name in the book. We
are
divorced, remember? Why should I care about the bastard of the guy you left me for?”
“Never mind the baby,” she said impatiently. “Didn’t you love me?”
“Yeah. I did. Past tense. I loved you longer than you loved me, as a matter of fact. I was a mess after you dumped me.” Colin bit back several other things he might have said. This was more than bad enough without looking for ways to make it worse. The waitress chose that moment to bring the check, too. After she hurried away, he went on, “Now I’ve found somebody else, too. I’ll do the best I can with Kelly. I think we’ve got a decent chance. That’s about as much as anybody can hope for these days.”
“And so you’ll throw me under the bus.” Louise would have been a star in Victorian melodrama.
You did that to yourself
. One more thing Colin swallowed. “Look,” he said, “if I have a little extra, maybe I can chip in something. But if you think I’m going to go one inch further than that, I’m here to tell you it ain’t gonna happen. It’s over, Louise. I’m sorry—Christ knows I’m sorry—but it is.”
She glared at him. “You are a cruel, hard man. Your Kelly doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s getting into, poor thing.”
“For all I know, you’re right,” he answered. “But I’ll tell you one other thing.”
“What is it?” Louise spat the words at him.
“If I’d knocked you up, I wouldn’t’ve run out on you. And you know darn well that’s so.”
She did. He could see it in her face. He could also see that she would sooner have been dropped into the supervolcano than admit it. “Maybe you’d better take me back to work,” she said glacially.
“Okay.” He tossed a five on the table, then paid the bill at the register. Rain started spattering down as they walked across the lot to his car. He held the passenger-side door open for her. She got in with the air of Marie Antoinette heading for the guillotine.
Neither one of them said much as he drove north to Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Just before he turned in to the fortified lot, Louise murmured, “I wish . . . I wish things could have been different.”
“A lot of people do,” Colin agreed. Cops saw that every hour of every day. “But by the time they make the wish, it’s already too late. Take care of yourself, Louise, whatever you decide to do.”
“Like it matters to you!” she flared.
“It does,” he said. “We can’t go back to square one, though. You’ve got your life to live, and I’ve got mine, and they aren’t on the same track any more.”
She slid out and slammed the car door. Then she hurried inside; the rain was coming down harder now, and she didn’t have an umbrella with her. The guard nodded to Colin as he left the lot. He gave back a wave that was half a salute.
When he sat down at his desk again, Gabe asked, “Do I want to know how that went?”
Colin thought for a moment. “Even worse than I expected,” he said judiciously.
“Aii!” Gabe winced. “They said it couldn’t be done!”
“Oh, it could, all right.” In a few bleak words, as if he were summarizing a case on the witness stand, Colin explained how.
“Oh, man. Oh, wow, man.” Sanchez shook his head. “That happened to me, I wouldn’t’ve come back here. I’d’ve found somewhere quiet and got loaded.”
“I’m on city time now not on mine,” Colin said. “And I did too much drinking right after we broke up. It’s a bitch, all right, but she’s just not my problem any more.” He packed the words with more emphasis than he usually used. Was he trying to convince himself as well as his friend? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

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