California(67)

Sailor had blanched when Cal asked him about the Group. No way this was an idyllic ghost-town kibbutz.

A place that banned children had to have a streak of insidiousness at its center.

These men were up to something.





13



In the dark, Frida held the sweater to her cheek. It itched and made her eyes water, her throat tighten, but maybe that was the point. She’d been nineteen when her father had given it to her, explaining it had magical properties. He was wearing it the night he met Frida’s mother, and when the old Mercedes broke down for good on the 405. “This thing kept me from having a panic attack,” he said as he held out the ratty sweater for her to take. Now that she was old enough to appreciate it, he said, he wanted her to have it. “You’ve got a job, right?” He’d rolled his shoulders back and forth, and shook out his neck, like he was getting ready for a boxing match. “Adult problems are just around the bend.”

But tonight, the sweater wasn’t working. Her eyes were open, and even her blood felt awake.

Cal was snoring next to her. He’d fallen asleep soon after telling her what had happened earlier that day, as if confessing had exhausted him. No wonder Micah and the others—Peter, August, even Sailor—had acted strangely at dinner. They knew about the baby. She and Cal might not be able to stay.

There were rules, apparently.

“And if we have to leave,” Cal had whispered, before turning over in bed, “we’ll never be able to come back.” Frida tried not to hear the relief in his voice.

He told her he wasn’t angry at her for lying to him, but she knew he was. At dinner he hadn’t poured her a mug of tea as he usually did, and once it was just the two of them alone in their room he’d answered her questions curtly, hardly looking at her. He’d snuffed out the candle before she was even in bed.

She had apologized more than once because it didn’t seem like he’d really forgiven her. He wasn’t ready to accept what she’d done, and she got that. So she didn’t push it. It was easier this way.

Cal thought she was sorry for misleading him—and she was—but she was also apologizing for the thoughts that had whiplashed through her mind as he explained what had happened in the Church. She didn’t want the baby anymore. Just like that, she gave up that future. She was ashamed by how easily she let it go.

It’s not even a baby yet, she told herself now. It was an embryo. It was a ball of cells.

She remembered something Toni had asked her, on one of their runs. Toni and Micah had been dating for four months by then. “When do you think life begins?” This would’ve been a weird question from anyone else, but not from Toni, who loved to muse and pontificate. Shallowness in conversation made her impatient. She had no use for small talk.

“There’s a reason they call it small,” she liked to say.

Toni had asked her this question as they jogged around the dirt track of the Silver Lake Reservoir. To get there meant a rough and sometimes dangerous bike ride, but it was worth it: it was one of the only tracks left in the city, and it was clean and wide, even if the reservoir itself was filled with debris instead of water. The homeless, rising in number, often used it as a toilet, and people said corpses were buried under all that trash: the rusted-out shopping carts and car parts, the gutted desktop computers, and the hundreds of plastic bags, porous with holes, swollen with brown rainwater, hanging from orphaned tree branches.

Cal didn’t like her going, worried it was too dangerous, but she insisted it was fine. If Frida squinted her eyes toward the hills that overlooked the Reservoir, she could transport herself to a neighborhood that had once been beautiful, insufferably so, the wrecked houses above her transformed again to million-dollar bungalows of yore, painted in sage, avocado, pumice. She was good at editing the frame.

“Did you just ask me when life begins?” Frida remembered saying to Toni.

“Sure did,” Toni said.

Frida could see her friend’s tattered sneakers, hitting the dust of the track.

“I think it begins with consciousness,” Toni continued. “The fetal brain really doesn’t develop until the final months.”

Frida hadn’t had an opinion back then. But now, what did she think? She wanted to say she agreed with Toni.

“A person isn’t a person until it can use its lungs,” she had told Frida. “And those also don’t develop until the final trimester.”

“How do you know so much about this?”

Toni’s voice was breathy from the run. “It’s my job. In the Group. I read up on issues. I’m one of the researchers.”

From Toni, Frida had learned a lot more about the Communities than she’d ever be able to discern from gossip sites. Toni was the one to tell her that Community members were encouraged to have one or two children, and if they wanted more, they needed a permit, which was pricey. “Because of the pull on resources,” Toni explained. But if a couple couldn’t have children at all, their status was threatened. “Calabasas, for instance, and Purell up north, really see parenting as the key role for every adult member of society,” Toni said. “Some Communities are way more family focused than others, though.”

“How do you know all this?” Frida had asked.

“I told you,” Toni said. “I’m a researcher.”