Blood Test

It had taken on the first try. He’d rejoiced at the cessation of her menses, the swelling of her belly. A new cultivar had been created.

I told her what I knew, wording it gently and hoping the empathy came through. She listened with a blank look on her face, drank Southern Comfort until her eyelids drooped.

“He victimized you, Nona. Used you and discarded you when it was over.”

Her head gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“You must have been so frightened, carrying a child at that age. And being sent away to have it in secret.”

“Bunch of dykes,” she muttered, slurring her words.

“At Madronas?”

She took another drink.

“Fuck yeah. Las Fucking Madronas Home for Bad Little Fucking Girls. In Mexi-fucking-O.” Her head lolled. She reached for the bottle. “Big fat fucking beaner dykes running the place. Screaming in beaner. Pinching and poking. Telling us we were trash. Sluts.”

Maimon had remembered vividly the morning she’d left town. Had described her waiting with her suitcase in the middle of the road. A scared little girl with all the mischief knocked out of her. About to be banished for the sins of another.

She’d come back different, he’d noted. Quieter, more subdued. Angry.

She was talking now, softly, drunkenly.

“It hurt so bad to push that baby boy out. I screamed and they covered my mouth. I thought I was coming apart. When it was over, they wouldn’t let me hold him. Took him away from me. My baby, and they took him away! I forced myself to sit up to get a look at him. It near killed me. He had red hair, just like me.”

She shook her head, baffled.

“I thought I could keep him after I got home. But he said no way. Told me I was nothing. Just a vessel. Just a fucking vessel. Fancy word for cunt. Good for nothing but fucking. Told me I wasn’t really the momma. She’d already started being his momma. I was the cunt. All used up and tossed in the trash. Time to let the grownups take over.”

She dropped her head on the table and whimpered.

I rubbed the back of her neck, said comforting things. Even in that state she reacted reflexively to the touch of a male, lifting her face and flashing me an intoxicated, come-hither smile, leaning forward to expose the tops of her breasts.

I shook my head and she turned away shame-faced.

I had so much sympathy for her it ached. There were therapeutic things I could have said. But now was the time to manipulate her. The boy in the back room needed help. I was prepared to take him out of there against her will but preferred to avoid another abduction. For both their sakes.

“It wasn’t you who took him out of the hospital, was it? You loved him too much to endanger him like that.”

“It’s true,” she said, wet-eyed. “They did it. To stop me from being his momma. All these years I’d let them treat me like garbage. Stayed out of the way while they raised him. Not saying anything to him about it cause I was afraid it would freak him out. Too much for a little kid to handle. Dying inside all the time.” She raised one slender hand to her heart, reached down with the other and drained her glass.

“But when he got sick something tugged on me. Like a hook in my guts with someone reeling in the line. I had to reclaim my rights. I stewed about it, sitting with him in that plastic room, watching him sleep. My baby. Finally I decided to do it. Sat them down in the motel one night, told them the lies had gone on too long. That my time had come. To take care of my baby.

“They — he laughed at me. Put me down, told me I was unfit, a piece of shit. A fucking vessel. I should get the hell out and make it better for everyone. But this time I didn’t take it. The pain in my guts was too strong. I gave it all back to them, told them they were evil. Sinners. That the ca — the sickness was God’s punishment for what they’d done. They were the ones who were unfit. And I was gonna tell everyone about it. The doctors, the nurses. They’d kick them out and hand my baby over to his rightful momma when they found out.”

Her hands trembled violently around her glass. I walked behind her and steadied them with mine.

“It was my right!” she cried out, whipping her head around and begging confirmation. I nodded and she slumped against my chest.

During Baron and Delilah’s hospital visit, Emma Swope had complained the cancer treatment was dividing the family. The cultists had construed it as anxiety about the physical separation imposed by the Laminar Airflow room. But the woman had been worrying out loud about a far more serious rupture, one that threatened to rend the family as irreparably as a guillotine on neck-flesh.

Perhaps she’d known, then, that the wound was too deep to heal. But she and her husband had attempted to patch it anyway. To prevent the leakage of the ugly secret by taking the child and running...