California(68)

If Toni were here with her now, she might tell Frida that human life didn’t begin until the baby was out of the womb, until it was breathing air. Whether that air was redolent with human feces and rot, or beautiful and pure, free of everything the city had burdened them with, didn’t matter. Until the child was crying in the room with you, it was just a parasite in the female adult’s body.

But, no. That kind of language was Micah’s. Toni might agree with him, but her words, her cadence, would be different. She was gentle, and she had the gift of making Frida feel okay about being so pragmatic, so shrewd.

Toni would understand the calculation.

If Frida didn’t care about this baby inside of her, if she could see it as something inhuman, then she might be able to rid herself of it. There were no children on the Land, but there had to have been accidents. They had to have access to the morning-after pill, at the very least. Or maybe there was some herbal remedy she could take—just something to make her bleed. She wouldn’t think of it as anything but her period, come late.

I took care of it, she’d tell Cal. Wasn’t that what women said?

She wanted to stay on the Land, and now they would be forced out. Back on the estate, she and Cal would become the Millers 2.0: starting a family in the woods, their kids hunting squirrels in loincloths, blissfully unaware of the world their parents had rejected.

Cal could fall in love with that life, but Frida knew how it turned out: some new settler would end up burying their bodies. For, surely, Sandy and Bo had eaten that poison because they’d finally faced despair head-on.

Cal twitched in his sleep. If she were to tell him what she was thinking, he’d be angry, afraid, worried. Already, he loved their child. It probably had no eyes or limbs, no intestines, but already there might be a heartbeat. Politics aside, she imagined him saying, that’s where life begins. My child’s, at least.

And, well, shit. She knew she was wide awake because she agreed with him.



Frida must have fallen asleep somehow, because when Anika knocked lightly at the door, whispering that she’d be waiting downstairs, Cal had to shake her awake.

“Bread,” he croaked, and turned over. The room was as dark as it had been at midnight, not even a bird cutting the silence. How had Anika woken herself up? Cal thought certain people on the Land had alarm clocks, though if that were true, he and Frida would have heard them by now. Frida joked that Anika probably slept with one eye open, ready to grab a weapon and fight off an intruder, never really surrendering to dreams.

At fourteen, Micah had become interested in Sparta. He downloaded a bunch of books on the subject and had even emailed a professor at USC for more information. Frida remembered him telling her about the military training for Spartan boys: how they were sent in groups into the wilderness with just knives to fend off wild animals. Perhaps this was how Anika, fierce protector of the larder, had been raised. She did seem tough. Micah had probably intuited Anika’s strength and promoted her himself. Anika, she imagined her brother saying, I pronounce you Leader of the Cooks, Protector of the Knives, Keeper of the Fire.

When Frida got to the kitchen, Anika was wiping down the center table with a rag. The room was lit with two large candles, and in the weak light, wise and solid Anika looked like a sweet old woman in a storybook, the kind who might lead lost little girls and boys back to her cabin for a warm meal, offering to dry their wet socks by the fire.

She glanced at Frida. “You took your time,” she said.

Frida was surprised Anika didn’t whisper.

“It was so dark, I had to feel my way down the hallway with my hands on the walls.” Frida smiled, even though Anika remained serious. “I took those stairs very carefully.”

“I forgot what it might be like for you, being new. This place is so familiar to me, I could cook in here with my eyes closed.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Anika put down the rag. “This isn’t when I usually make the bread,” she said.

“It isn’t? Burke said you’re in here baking practically every morning.”

“More like every night. I’m down here much earlier. Otherwise, there’s no time.”

“You could do it in the afternoon.”

“I don’t like people around.”

“No?”

She shook her head. “I have trouble sleeping as it is, so night is preferable.”

“I’m sorry to mess up the schedule.”

Anika waved her off. “It’s fine.”

Frida’s eye caught a pile of corncobs at the end of the table, stripped of their kernels, as square edged as honeycombs. Next to the pile was a glass bowl filled with the white and yellow kernels, strands of corn silk stuck between them like food in teeth.

“For cornbread?” Frida asked, gesturing to Anika’s work.

“That’s just prep. We’re having chowder tonight.”

“You sure do love soup, don’t you?”

Anika raised an eyebrow, and Frida knew she’d said the wrong thing. She couldn’t let Anika think her ungrateful or picky.

“We’re not making bread this morning, just so you know.”

“We aren’t?” Frida asked.

“I know you’d love to, but that’s something you have to earn.”

Frida wasn’t sure how to reply.