The Salt Line Read online

  She kissed her mother’s forehead. She didn’t say anything—her voice was hoarse from the six hours of plaintive whispering she’d done into her mother’s ear—and drifted out of the hospital, drove across town, walked into O’Henry’s, and tied a green apron around her waist.

  “You sure you want to be here?” Stefano asked. It wasn’t a tender question, but a practical one.

  “I need the money,” she said, and he nodded.

  It was eleven, the clientele rowdy. She went to the computer to punch in an order and unbuttoned a couple of buttons on her blouse, feeling like a cliché, not even wearing one of her good bras. These guys didn’t care, though. What she needed tonight was to not go back to the apartment she and her mother had shared until her hospitalization six weeks ago. What she needed tonight was to not see the “Happy Halloween!” wreath her mother had hung on the door, or the Our Lady of Guadalupe candle she kept on the dresser next to her rosary, or the stack of paperback romance novels by her recliner, books with titles like Sultry Savannah Summer and A Lovers’ Pact. So when a man hit on her who met her three criteria for the night—not too old, not too disgusting, not too dodgy—she flirted back. And checked into a hotel room with him as soon as her shift ended.

  This was her life for a while. This was how, a couple of months later, she brought home Jesse Haggard for the first time.

  Edie owned only the most basic tablet, which operated at low speed and didn’t sync with most wall monitors and speaker systems, and her life, even before her mother’s illness, had been a slog of work and broken sleep. So she wasn’t very current on popular culture, had only the vaguest notion of who Jesse Haggard was, and recognized him not at all that first night, even after they’d exchanged names. He was dressed like the men at O’Henry’s always dressed—flannel shirt, jeans, lace-up work boots—and so she had no reason to guess that he rated thirty-seventh on the Atlantic Zone’s list of Deep Pocketz, or that the webshow he served as a judge on, Pop Sensation, was such a phenomenon that Jesse had renegotiated his contract to the record-breaking tune of five hundred thousand credits an episode. She’d just found him cute and charming. When another bartender, Inez, had cornered her at work the next night to quiz her about what had happened—“Oh my God,” she’d asked, “did you boink Jesse Haggard?”—and Edie had subsequently assembled the basic facts about his fame, her first impulse had actually been to not see him again, though he had scrawled his tablet’s quick-code on an O’Henry’s bar napkin, along with the message: I had a great time. Let’s have another. Her grief was an all-consuming thing right now, a thing that couldn’t accommodate the complications of keeping a pop-star lover, and she discovered that she did not much like his music, which Inez had proceeded to play on a loop throughout that night’s shift, until Stefano threatened to throw her tablet into the trash compactor.

  I’ve got this feeling and I don’t want to hide it

  This magic mission and I won’t be denied, oh, no no

  Not tonight is what you’re trying to tell me

  But this burnin’ yearnin’ make me go a little crazy

  If this hunger’s bad I don’t wanna be good

  ’Cause it’s the right night—the right night—for you

  It was kind of a disturbing song, if you really listened to the words.

  —

  To his expressed delight but obvious consternation, Jesse proved over the ensuing weeks of boot camp to be just as unimpressive to the rest of the Outer Limits Excursions travelers as he had been, at first, to Edie. Most of them, aged well beyond the perimeter of Jesse’s fan base, didn’t recognize him, even when Jesse would pretend to just absentmindedly hum “Right Night for You,” which had been picked up in a Burger Blitz marketing campaign. Those who did know who he was, or who figured it out, were, at best, amused by him, “pop star” being the most novel of novelties, a relic from another era almost, like those people who specialized in rebuilding electrical HVAC systems or the boutique gardeners who claimed they could trace their seeds’ lineages back to the preindustrial age. “That’s the young man who’s a judge on that show,” one of the men—a lawyer named Mickey Worthington—told his traveling partner, Lee Flannigan. “That singing contest.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Lee said. “What a hoot. I’ll have to tell my daughter. She’ll really think her old pop’s cool now.”

  “A hoot,” Jesse had grumbled that night in bed. “Better a hoot than a suit.” Then he’d grabbed his tablet from the bedside table and scribbled some notes. “That’s not bad, actually,” he murmured.

  Edie, of course, was practically invisible among these people who saw their financial bounty as proof of their superior intellects and talents. What do you do? they would ask her. Or: Are you Jesse’s wife? Because her answer to the first question was essentially “nothing,” and her answer to the second question was “no,” she had been relegated to the status of accessory: Jesse’s hanger-on, his groupie, his flavor of the month. She could see it in their eyes: Poor girl. She’ll go through this for him, come back with a shaved head and scars on those pretty arms, maybe even on that pretty face, and he’ll drop her as soon as he gets bored.

  But they didn’t know all of the story.

  Boot camp passed in a blur—marathons of rigorous exercise; primer classes on topics such as “Three Foolproof Methods for Building a Fire” and “Edible Plants and Fungi of the Eastern Appalachians”; fabulous, plentiful meals served with good wine and beer (but never liquor) in the Canteen. Goals that had at first seemed unattainable were suddenly achieved, and Andy brightened with delight and pride. It was the army on a cruise ship. Hard work, obliteration of the self, fidelity to a group, but also the pleasures and the exclusivity that such wealthy men and women had come to see as their due. Edie’s Stamp wound—she’d opted for the meaty upper buttock, where she’d once been administered her childhood vaccines—crusted into a scab, and then the scab fell off in the shower, leaving behind a wet-looking red maw.

  She had learned, over meals or during water breaks, that the majority of the travelers in the group were venture capitalists of some kind, or lawyers who were cagey about the kind of law they practiced and the names of the clients they served. The young man who’d thrown up on the first day—a nice guy, quirky, with a fast smile and a self-deprecating sense of humor—turned out to be the creator and CEO of Pocketz, the social web cooperative for safe credit storage, savings, and transfers. “This guy is bigger than big,” Edie tried to convince a dubious Jesse. “He basically changed the global economy.”

  Jesse, unimpressed, shrugged. “Fuck that. Pocketz is old-school. Everyone’s going to switch to Bank On It in a couple years’ time. I guarantee it.”

  One day about halfway into the training, as weightlifting ended and the travelers headed to their rooms to shower before dinner, Andy stopped her at the doorway. “Edie,” he said. “Got a sec?”

  Jesse, whose hero-worship of Andy had only compounded since that first day in the gymnasium, smiled eagerly. “She’s doing great, isn’t she?” he asked. “She’s lifting eight more kilos than she was last week.”

  “Yeah,” Andy said. “Super. You’ve really helped her. Hey, my man, would you try catching up with Tia and seeing if she needs a hand with the tent demo? I forgot to drag all of that stuff out of supply before the last sesh started.”

  “Uh, sure,” Jesse said, his smile faltering a little. “See you back at the room, Edie?”

  “Yeah,” Edie said. She couldn’t read the look on Andy’s face, and a tremor of fear passed through her: He knows. Something flagged during the medical exam. Don’t be paranoid, Jesse had told her. Even if they could tell, and they can’t, they have a lot of my money right now. No way they’d risk that.

  But they weren’t Andy. And maybe Andy wanted his cut.

  Jesse lingered in the hallway outside the weight room, and Andy smiled big, waving him off in an affable way. “We won�
��t be a minute, dude. Go help Tia.”

  Edie watched him go. When she turned her gaze back to Andy, he was leaned against the door frame, smiling in a knowing way. He held out his Smokeless in offering.

  She accepted it, feeling she had no choice, though she didn’t smoke much. She was so drained of energy that the NicoClean went straight to her head.

  “Your accent,” Andy said. “It sounds very familiar.”

  Edie shrugged vaguely.

  “My mom’s from the Gulf Zone,” Andy continued. “She got a vestment here forty years ago because she tested in the ninety-ninth percentile on the math AEs.” He smiled crookedly. “You some kind of genius?”

  Edie laughed sharply. “Hardly,” she said.

  “But you’re from the Gulf.”

  She nodded.

  “And now you’re here,” he mused. “I know you’re a citizen. You couldn’t get the papers for this excursion if you weren’t.”

  She nodded again, thrown by this line of inquiry.

  “I can tell you’re not like them,” he said, making a sharp gesture with his chin toward the living quarters. “You didn’t buy your way to Atlantic Zone, nuh-uh. So tell me, Edie. What’s your deal?”

  Sweat was running down her face, and she blotted it with a towel. “No secret,” she said casually. “My dad was an outer-zone contractor for a timber company. He caught a case of Shreve’s and died when I was eight. There were accidental death benefits.”

  Andy sighed. “And now you’re following Mr. Guitar out into the woods. My shrink would call that self-destructive behavior.” His face grew serious. “Do you mind if I give you some advice?”

  Edie checked the hallway for Jesse, wondering if he had gone on to Tia, as instructed, or if he lingered just around the corner and out of sight. “I have a feeling I’m going to hear it.”

  “Leave,” he said. She looked back at Andy, startled, and he was nodding, hard. “It’s his money, right? They’ll refund him seventy-five percent of it. Drop in the bucket to him. You take off and let that dipshit have his little adventure, and maybe you’ll even still be together on the other side of this. If you go, I guarantee you won’t be.”

  “And why do you say that?”

  “Because guys like that reveal themselves is why.” Andy switched off his Smokeless and pocketed it. “You’ll be carrying his ass, and you’ll resent it.”

  “But I won’t,” Edie said. “Resent it, I mean. That’s why I came. To look out for him.”

  Andy shook his head in a disgusted way. “It’s a shame. What a waste.” He started off toward the dining hall, and Edie grabbed his sleeve—emboldened, maybe, by her perplexed relief.

  “Wait. I don’t get it. What about this communing with nature stuff? This ‘you’re not human until you sleep under the stars’ stuff?”

  “I thought it would have been obvious to you, of all people.” Andy put out his forearms and made fists; the tight, scarred skin pulled into painful-looking little wrinkles. “I do what I’ve got to do to make a living. To feed my kids. Maybe once I was sold on that nature bullshit, but that goes away when you’ve been Stamped enough times. When you come home and your little boy’s crying because you look like a goddamn monster.”

  Edie remembered her own terror when her father had returned from a month-long contract with two new Stamps on his face. “What about you,” she said. “Do you want some advice?”

  “Sure,” he said sarcastically.

  “Quit,” she said. “Your kids need their father.”

  He broke eye contact for the first time. “As a matter of fact, this is my last tour.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And let me say this one more time—as a man who’s seen his limit and is on his way out. Take off. You want thrills, go to the water park. You don’t want to be on this excursion.”

  “I’m not abandoning him,” Edie said.

  “Well, honey, I hope he’s worth it.” Andy tipped an imaginary hat. “See you in the mess hall.”

  —

  Was he worth it? Well, yes. Jesse had saved her life, sort of.

  The math had been of the humiliating sort that you saw on webshows like Outta Wedlock.

  Two weeks late.

  Three different men, including Jesse, during what Edie had been able to calculate must have been her fertile window.

  You had to be careful whom you talked to about these things. Edie had heard the stories. The pierced, tattooed broad who’d worked at your side for four years and never hesitated to slam the president when the news crawl by the Pabst clock churned out some new story about him—she might be the first one to report you to Public Safety and Morals if you so much as made a little insinuation, floated a teensy hypothetical. In high school, Edie had known a girl whose parents sold both family cars to take a sudden vacation to Midwest Zone, though no one ever vacationed in Midwest Zone. There were the girls you saw on the news, dumped at emergency room bays or, worse, left in alleyways. Woke up handcuffed to their hospital beds. You were supposed to be able to find herbal abortion recipes on the dark web, but Edie had no idea how you even got on the dark web, and that was the sort of question you couldn’t go around asking, either. Not if you liked your freedom.

  She supposed she could pin it on Jesse, threaten to make a stink if he didn’t claim it, or at least give her money enough to go away. There was a good chance it was his, anyway. But she liked him. He was sweet. And Edie wasn’t built that way. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who could treat people like that.

  A while ago, she’d worked with a woman, a PU (pregnant and unwed), who found a sponsorship through LifeForce and actually made a tidy profit once the baby was born. This seemed, to Edie, like the best option. She had no money to raise a child. She had no desire to raise a child. And she wasn’t going to be able to bartend once she was showing. Stefano couldn’t legally fire her, and Edie thought he was a decent enough guy not to try, but he’d have the law on his side if he wanted to move her to the kitchen or something, and those jobs paid for shit.

  She supposed that another sort of person—another sort of woman—would see the pregnancy as a blessing. As a reincarnation of her mother’s spirit. Edie’s mother would have thought this way. Her mother had been religious; her church’s women’s group sent casseroles to Edie’s apartment throughout the hospitalization and did prayer circles over her mother’s writhing body a couple times a week. Her mother had always told Edie that she was blessed she could raise her daughter in a place that was not just safe but moral—Atlantic Zone was safe because it was moral—and this had been Edie’s father’s gift to them, bought with his death, his noble, tragic sacrifice. Edie had never believed in any of this, or most of it. But she loved and respected her mother, and she hadn’t fought with her. Not often.

  But no, Edie was more inclined to see the pregnancy like she’d seen her mother’s cancer: an invasion, unwelcome, to be survived and not embraced. It helped her, a little, to think of the pregnancy as a job. A hard job, like her father’s six-month tours out-of-zone. You could do anything for nine months, for money. Her pregnancy would be contract work, a deployment.

  She told herself this again, and again. She stopped answering when Jesse messaged her. This hurt, but it was easier, cleaner, than putting herself through his awkward reaction, the pain and humiliation of his rejection of her. She marked days on her calendar, careful to keep even these vague notations on print copies, never doing a search for LifeForce (or Caring Connection, or the Greatest Love) online. When she started showing—no sooner—she would walk into one of the clinics and start the process, let them tag and process and herd her, police what she ate and drank, her medications, the music she listened to, the webshows she watched. She would undergo the genetic screenings, the rigorous family history surveys. She had her looks going for her, but her mixed-race heritage might be a liability
, as well as her mother’s breast cancer, though a wealthy enough family could pay to have a gene like that shut off.

  Then, one Saturday night, she came home from her shift—so tired she had barely been able to lift her bus pass to the scanner—and nearly stumbled over Jesse Haggard, who’d parked himself on the floor in front of her apartment door. She gasped and jumped back, fumbling for her pepper spray, and Jesse leaped to his feet, hands lifted in surrender, and said, “Shh shh shh, it’s just me, Edie. It’s Jesse. Shit, baby. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, her heart booming in her ears. “Fuck, Jesse. You about gave me a heart attack.”

  “I didn’t know how else to catch you. You haven’t made it easy.”

  She shoved her key into the front lock, jiggled it in the funny way required to coax it open, and nudged the door with her hip. “Take a hint,” she said.

  He waited at the threshold. “Can I come in a minute?”

  Edie shrugged.

  “I won’t linger. Promise. I just wanted to see you again and hear from you direct what’s up. Then I’ll go and leave you alone forever, if that’s what you want. OK?”

  Edie sighed. “Fine. Sit.” She pointed at the couch. “I’m tired, Jesse, and I don’t have the heart to dance around this. So I’m going to be blunt.” She fell into her mother’s rocking chair and sighed, lifting one heavy foot, unzipping her boot. Then the other. Her sock feet, as always after a shift, emerged from their sheathes wrinkled and damp, and she peeled her socks off with a sigh. “I’m pregnant.” She saw him opening his mouth and put up a hand. “No. Let me finish. I don’t know whose it is. I slept with a couple of guys around the same time you and I started seeing each other. I slept with one of them after that first time with you. I sleep around. That’s what I do.”