DESPITE ALBUQUERQUE George’s obvious disapproval, Ingrid left her Smith & Wesson in the truck. “It should never leave your side,” he said.
“This doctor’s an ally, right?”
“Yes, but who knows about the people around her?”
“There’s a time and place for everything,” she told him as she got out. “One day you’ll be old enough to understand that.”
During the hour’s drive from the safe house to the little clinic in the middle of nowhere, he’d played country music and, instead of asking why she needed to see a doctor, lectured her on the difference between Keynesian economics and the Stockholm School, and how both were doomed to fail. “Once we’ve dealt the big blow to the system, someone’s going to have to come up with something else.”
“The big blow?” she asked.
“When we crush it.”
Ingrid wondered how George thought their little band of outcasts would bring down a two-hundred-year-old system that had been bought into by 320 million Americans. That was a future discussion. As Waylon Jennings sang about some good ol’ boys never meanin’ no harm, they parked in front of a little block of building with a weathered sign that said WOMEN’S CLINIC. When she opened the door he said, “Don’t forget your gun.”
The sight of Dr. Hernandez—a bald woman with huge brown eyes and a lab coat, tattoos emerging from under her sleeves, no older than thirty—filled her with anxiety. The ultrasound was already set up in the back room. “You’re nervous,” said Dr. Hernandez. “Don’t be. Women have been doing this a very long time.” Then she showed off the most beautiful smile Ingrid had ever seen.
She’d spent four days with strangers like George whose time was filled with intellectual adrenaline, self-righteous anger, and little splatters of utopian hope, everything seasoned with the fear of capture. The safe house was rich with emotion, but only the strident emotions of radical debate and sudden paranoia. It was refreshing to simply fall in love with a smiling face.
“See that?” Dr. Hernandez asked, and Ingrid looked at the fuzzy screen. Nothing but static. The doctor adjusted the probe, pushing it through a puddle of clear gel on Ingrid’s belly. “There,” she said, now touching the monitor, and Ingrid really could see it, just barely. Oblong head, curved back, fragile extremities …
“Oh,” she said.
“Would you like to know the sex?”
Ingrid nodded.
“You’re sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
The doctor hesitated. “Well, your life is different now, isn’t it?”
“You could say that.”
“You’ll be moving around a lot. I don’t know what you’ll be doing each time you reach a place—I don’t want to know—but I’m guessing it could be strenuous.” Dr. Hernandez was a sympathizer, but not even sympathizers wanted to know the secrets and methodologies.
“What’s your point?”
Dr. Hernandez settled her hands in her lap. “Do you want to keep the baby? If you don’t, I won’t tell you anything else, and I’ll take care of it right here, right now. It’s your choice.”
An hour later, clutching a paper bag with a printout of the inside of her belly and a big bottle of pills, Ingrid climbed down from the pickup truck and thanked George for the ride. In reply, he opened the glove compartment and handed over her pistol.
As he drove around the back to where they kept the cars under a shelter of leafy trees and green tarp, she approached the ruggedly beautiful cabin that overlooked Lolo Creek Road. In the distance, higher up in the mountains, she could hear her housemates shooting at their targets, playing army. She’d been up there herself, learning to use the Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm that she’d been presented on Day 2 by Mary—real name Yelena—the unofficial house mother.
Reggie had moved on to other parts of America, and she hadn’t seen Martin since Chicago and the boom box that had been playing, she learned, a band called the Downtown Boys. Though her new companions were welcoming, Lolo Creek didn’t feel like a destination. It felt like a pit stop on the way to somewhere—both metaphorically and literally. They shot guns and made vague and sometimes outrageous plans to export the Revolution outside their cabin. It reminded her of the conversations at Bill and Gina’s parties. But the devil was in the difference. At Lolo Creek, they were all fugitives, and because of that their conversations, no matter how outlandish, had the ring of possibility.
She was in the kitchen boiling a pot of twenty eggs when Albuquerque George returned. “You never told me how it went with the doctor.”
“Well,” she said.
“What are those drugs she gave you?”
“Prenatal vitamins.”
“Oh,” he said, then blinked. “Oh, shit.”
He was the first person she’d told, and the flash of worry in his face reminded her of Dr. Hernandez’s concern. She was bringing a baby into a world where fugitives shot at trees, and eventually their talk of revolt might actually turn into action. George’s face said what the doctor had been too polite to ask: Are you fucking crazy?
Maybe, yes.