Jake Morrison's Arc

Chapter 24 of 54

The skiff shrank to a dot and then vanished. Marisol stood on the armored dock long after Jake was gone. Her stomach turned. She told herself it was nerves. He would be back in three days. Food, and maybe a second home. She pressed a hand to her belly and walked up toward the cabins, the radio bumping her hip. By afternoon the sickness won. She barely reached the cabin bathroom before it hit her. She knelt on the cold floor and heaved until her throat burned. A knock came at the cabin door. "Marisol?" It was Sofia, the supermarket girl who had barricaded doors beside them for weeks. She never knocked twice. She pushed the door open and found Marisol hunched over the toilet. Sofia crouched and pulled her hair back without a word. "How long?" she asked. "Since this morning," Marisol said. "I don't know why. I'm not hurt. I wasn't bitten." Her voice cracked on the last word. On this island, sickness meant one thing, and both of them knew it. Sofia's face stayed level. "Then we find out for sure." She helped Marisol stand. "There's a doctor here. She worked in the city before all this. She'll check you." Marisol wiped her mouth and nodded. Sofia kept an arm around her the whole walk down the row of weathered cabins. The doctor had set up in a corner cabin with a cot and a shelf of salvaged supplies. She was small and quick, her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She took one look at Marisol's gray face and pointed at the cot. "Sit." She wrapped a band on Marisol's arm and drew blood into a glass tube. "No fever," she said. "No swelling. That's good." She held out a second thing, a slim white test. "Bathroom's there. This too." Marisol's hands shook as she took it. "You think it's the bite thing." "I think nothing yet," the doctor said. "I test. Go." Marisol did what she asked. Then the three of them waited. Sofia held her hand on the cot. The doctor bent over the blood and the test at her shelf, saying nothing. Hours crawled. Outside, someone hammered a fence board. The radio sat silent on Marisol's knee. No word from the skiff yet. When the doctor finally turned, her hard face had softened. "It's not a bite," she said. "Your blood is clean." Marisol let out a breath that shook her whole body. Sofia gripped her hand tighter. "Then what?" Marisol asked. The doctor set the white test on the cot. Two lines. "You're pregnant," she said. Marisol stared at the two lines. Relief and fear ran together in her chest. She thought of Jake, out on the water, eighty miles of danger between them. She pressed both hands to her belly. "He doesn't know," she whispered. Sofia leaned her head against Marisol's shoulder. "Then we keep you safe," she said, "until he comes home."