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By

Sara Raab

Copyright 1995

I’ve got an ache in my back and a cramp in my side, though the headache is still the worst of all. Jared tells me I miscarried a couple of weeks ago, when I was deepest in my little blue pills, though I didn’t feel a thing and I still don’t. My stomach has gone down, though, so I believe him. It was going to be Isaac if it was a boy, or Anthea if it was a girl. I was hoping for a girl, but it’s much better off this way. We’re trapped, and what kind of world is that to bring a child into? I don’t think I could have tolerated the baby; I would be playing games like a sadistic God, creating a life when I knew it would be thrown aside.

The doctor came today and looked at me with those unamused fish-eyes he has, and poked me with his cold metal instruments. "I’m working myself to hell," he says.

"I’m sorry to hear that," Jared says.

"I wish there was something I could do to help." If I were healthier, I might offer to be a nurse, but I can’t leave the house. He knows.

"I’ve only got a couple of weeks left, myself," he tells Jared. "How do you feel?" "I’ve got a headache," I snap. "I’ve always got a headache."

"How are the pills helping?"

"They’re not."

"You want something stronger?"

"I don’t want to go crazy."

"You won’t go crazy." I wish he were a more comforting doctor. His voice is harsh and his face droops and he looks like the kind of man who would wake a rake at children if they played in his yard. "You may have delusions occasionally, or experience some disor—"

"You explained it to me. I don’t want that."

"The pain is only going to get worse."

"I’ll be all right."

"This might be your last chance to change your mind. You might want to get some, just in case."

I still won’t take them. I had a grandfather who dissolved into a raving, hallucinogenic painkiller addict, and that scared the hell out of me. I don’t want to die that way and I don’t want Jared to see me that way. I tell myself that I can get by on pride, but I’m very afraid of that pain. I expect there to be a lot of it.

The doctor tells me that I have a week left. Of course, he could have been confusing me with someone else, because I feel as though I have less than that. Jared watches over me and tells me that everyone is fine, but I can see in his eyes that he and Jeffrey are sick, too. He won't let me see Jeffrey, and he tells me that it's so that Jeffrey won't be traumatized by the sight of his dying mother. I think it's also so that I won't be traumatized by the sight of my dying son. I wonder if I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I wonder if Jeffrey will remember my face or who gave him his pink teddy bear. Jared says he still sleeps with it

I know I look like hell, losing several pounds a week now and developing bruises all over my body. The ones on my face are the worst; I look like I’ve been punched a few times. I keep picturing Jeffrey this way, skinny and sallow and bruised, blue-lipped and fatigued. I try not to, but it’s one of those demented images that harass me more horribly when I plead louder to be left alone. And then, almost worse than the image, comes the question: how long does my son have left to live?

I sneaked the television on last night when Jared was reading Jeffrey his bedtime story. The doctor told me to do nothing but sleep, because he says I’ll live longer that way, but I don’t see how another couple of weeks will help anything. There’s no cure coming; I know that. The news was halfway over, but they were still talking about the bombs. They found three in a silo in the middle of a desert and are looking for eight more. I hate myself for it, but I’ve started to suspect that everyone is going to die of this, eventually.

I wanted to be optimistic. I wanted to be cheerful for my family. Then again, since I can’t even see the most precious half of it, does it matter? I hate that. "Does it matter?" Everyone says that lately.

Avarrechi began letting loose the bombs last April, just a few weeks before our second anniversary. All of us managed to remain healthy throughout evacuation, but when we returned in September, people sickened again. I caught it this time – Kearne's Disease. It's a lot like cancer, from what I've read. At first, I kept it a secret, visited the doctor during the day and took lots of uppers to keep myself from tiring. Jared noticed anyway.

Now it's April again, and Avarrechi has let another one fly at the East Coast, but the government is leaving behind all those who may have been contaminated. Which includes the three of us. They’re quarantining us, to wait and see who survives. I don’t have a good feeling about that, either, and it infuriates me that I don't get to have a last summer. I missed the one last year and will be dead before this year's summer begins. It infuriates me than Jared will be alone for God knows how long, without me and without Jeffrey and without a doctor to keep away the pain. He has been stocking up on morphine, I noticed yesterday. The bathroom cabinet is filled with the drug, the tablet form, and I don't use that one. Most of all, though, it infuriates me that a psychotic like Avarrechi has the power to kill my baby boy, slowly and painfully.

I heard tonight on the news that Argentina sent a bomb back at the Middle East. Finally. I heard that they used so many explosives that were so powerful -- Argentina has more firepower than the next three most powerful countries combined -- that an entire chunk of earth was blown away. A big chunk. Avarrechi was in Canada at the time. But now there's a big hole in the side of the planet and, by initial calculations, we have twenty-eight years until the gravitational pushes and pulls are thrown off enough to smack us into Mars. Important math and science people are still figuring out exactly how hard we'll hit.