Charlinder's Walk (34 page)

"I guess it's a convenient...anomaly, at least."

"I don't deny that it makes living alone much easier. Listen, tomorrow morning, I'm going to teach you how to do a little bit of magic," she said, smiling brightly.

He nearly dropped the basket. "Can it be learned that easily?"

"It'll just be a bit of mental exercise," she explained. "Most areas take a lot more instruction, but this much is very straightforward to learn. Just make sure I don't forget, will you?"

From what he'd seen of her so far, he couldn't picture Gentiola forgetting to do anything. As the evening wore on, however, he saw where she was coming from.

Charlinder was happy to let his hostess pull him into discussions over dinner that encompassed poverty, genocide, wars and other such cheerful subjects. As absorbed as they became in their talk, he could understand how some things might slip her mind.

They worked the discussion to the end, and for a while they had nothing to say. Charlinder helped Gentiola put away the dishes, she settled into his arms on the sofa and put a bowl of strawberries in front of them. They were content to stay there and not say anything, until she asked him, "How is it that you're so well-informed? I didn't think that was possible anymore."

"Wait here a moment. I want to introduce you to Eileen."

Though it was already late in the evening, they spent a couple of hours reading Eileen's journals. Gentiola would occasionally pause to ask him a question, and he would tell her about the role Eileen played in her community.

"Oh, look at this," she said, a few minutes after Charlinder showed her the entry of Marissa's death. She began reading aloud the first entry that Eileen wrote after that.

May 19, 2026

I haven't spoken to anyone since Marissa died. Not that I'm avoiding people, either. I'm just not talking. I have things to do, not to say. At first I tried looking after Marissa's kids, and they were okay with me not talking, but I guess the rest of the farm wasn't so okay with it, because I was just putting the youngest down for a nap when Sarah, Laura and Saul swooped in and grabbed the kids away from me. They think I'll have a psychotic episode and hurt them, or scare them, or something.

She read through to the end of that day:

It's all kind of half-assed, anyway, the way they're all trying to get me to talk. Usually they just give me my space. Sometimes they try to make conversation with me, but then I look at them, and they back off. They're probably afraid of me, after the way I blew up at Mark. Speaking of Mark, he's actually keeping a respectful distance through all of this. That old man has really behaved himself since we found out about Marissa. He doesn't look like he's scared, or resentful, just like he knows I don't want to be around him. And the funny thing is, as long as I don't have to hear about sin, or damnation, or God, or the Plague from him, I don't mind being around him. Of course I'm still not going to talk, but if this is the way he's going to change his attitude, then I'm not asking him to go away. He and José are the only ones who understand that I just don't want to talk right now. I lost my little sister. Why can't the rest of these idiots let me be?

And then the next:

May 20, 2026

I'm back to teaching the children now. Laura must be relieved, I'm sure. She's too old to be playing schoolmarm to a bunch of kids of all different ages. It wasn't Laura who got me back to work, though.

When I was skimming the milk this morning, Mark came to see me. He said Ryan and Molly were working on a way to make condoms out of deer intestines. I asked him how long they'd been working on this. It was the first thing I'd said in four and a half days. He said they started working on it two days after Marissa died. They just realized they'd been waiting too long, he says.

I asked Mark if he agreed with what they were doing. He said it didn't matter whether he agreed, they were going ahead no matter what he thought, and the other adults were all asking what they could do to help. I said that was good, and it was about time, but he hadn't answered my question. Was he okay with us using birth control?

He said that if it meant no more families ended up like Marissa’s, then it was the right thing to do. I asked him, then, What about God's will?

Mark said he really didn't know what God wanted of us on this point; we would need to find that answer for ourselves. Just like I'd found it for myself years ago, he said.

Okay, so I'm forty years old and haven't exactly grown up yet; I was feeling a little immature. I crowed some business about what do I hear but Mark admitting he doesn't know everything about what God wants, and how he was actually in favor of us thinking for ourselves, oh the sky is falling, and so on. And he took it like a wise old man, for a change. But in all seriousness, anyone else could have come and told me about this without expecting me to speak. It didn't have to be Mark, especially after the way I lit into him over Marissa. It took some real guts for him to come to me, and I said, thanks for sharing the news.

There was more, about how Eileen missed teaching the children. Gentiola read it silently; Charlinder knew it from memory.

"I find it fascinating how she writes about Mark," Gentiola said after putting the journal down. "Sometimes it looks like they did nothing but clash, but I've been getting the impression they were actually quite close."

"Closer than most of the survivors were to each other, you mean."

"Yes, closer than most. Notice how no matter how much they disagree, they never manage to leave each other alone."

"Yeah, I notice that, and Eileen never claims that she and Mark do nothing but clash. She just didn't write much about the times when they got along. Now let me show you something else; you'll like this."

Charlinder flipped through the journal to an entry written months later. He and Gentiola read it together, silently.

August 12, 2026

I don't know why he was the first one I told.

It doesn't really make sense. You'd think I'd tell José, or Sarah, or Bianca, or at least Laura or Andrew first. I just couldn't really find the right moment with any of them. I didn't feel ready to say it out loud until Mark found me trimming the sheep's hooves.

He said it was odd, how I didn't feel up to cleaning fish that morning, but I could handle trimming hooves. I explained that the sheep may be big and heavy, but they don't smell like fish. He said if I'm feeling sick, maybe I shouldn't be working so hard. Patricia and George must have told him how I'd run away from the fishnet looking ready to vomit. The smell has never been a problem for me before, obviously.

So I told Mark that I'm not sick, I'm just pregnant. I was about to say, "I'm having a baby," but it's too early to be so confident. I don't know just yet that I'll have a healthy baby. For now, I'm just pregnant, though as I said to him, if I lose the baby, everyone will find out anyway. He wanted to know, out of purely good-natured curiosity, if I knew who the father was, so I told him, probably José, possibly Andrew. What about Ryan?, he wanted to know. I was just testing the new condoms with Ryan, actually. It's really a testament to how much he's adjusted his attitude since Marissa died that he now finds that funny. Six months ago, I wouldn't have even considered telling him I'd slept with three men in a one-month period, with the can of worms that would have opened up. Now, he just laughs and says he hopes it's José.

I hope so, too. But even more, I hope I'm not too old to have a healthy baby and live to tell about it. I hope I'll be at least half as good a mother as all the other girls have been.

Something Mark said to me during this conversation, that I wasn't really comfortable answering, was that my timing on this is really strange. The others probably think the same thing, and I know what he means. It is really odd that I would turn up pregnant just a few months after my best friend and honorary sister dies in childbirth when I've been campaigning for birth control all these years. The funny thing is, I don't think it's just an ironic coincidence. It's not despite her death that I'm getting ready to have a baby now. It's more because of it.

After all those years of either sleeping with women or only having intercourse right after my period, I just let it happen, and I think I didn't really change my mind so much as accept that Laura was right. I had to do this eventually. I'm not living under the same rules anymore. And I think Marissa had as many children as she did partly because I didn't want any. While she was having enough kids for both of us, I kept telling myself I didn't need to do this. It's still not fair that I need to become a mother to do my part for this bunch, but this life is unfair on all of us.

It certainly took me long enough, but even I couldn't hold out until menopause. The oddest part about this is that it didn't feel real until I talked to Mark this morning. Now everyone knows, of course, but I had to say it to the old man before I could feel it for myself. There's no more wondering if I've really gone and gotten myself knocked up. This is the real thing.

"It's a very good thing," Gentiola said after they closed the journal, "that he didn't gloat when she told him."

"Oh, if anyone gloated about her getting pregnant, I'm sure she..." Charlinder paused to think, "beat them up."

"It is unfair that she felt that way," Gentiola went on, "you know, about how her friend Marissa died. Probably blamed herself inappropriately for it, too. No one can really say why the young lady had as many babies as she did. That she was simply fertile is as likely a reason as any other."

"Unless someone else in the community actually said out loud to Eileen that Marissa was compensating for her," Charlinder suggested.

"People can be tactless, true," Gentiola admitted, "especially in times of stress. But it sounds more like Eileen got that idea on her own."

"She probably did," he agreed. "It was unfair either way. And I hate how she had to say that Laura was right. She really did have to think that nothing she did for her community meant anything unless she had a child."

Perhaps there was something in the tone of his voice, for Gentiola next asked, "Do you think her having a child was any less worthy than her other contributions?"

"No, it's just that," he began, and faltered. He knew what she was getting at. Was his mother any less interesting a woman after she had Charlinder? That was a bad example, as her village had always been on her back to have more. Was Miriam somehow diminished by motherhood? He couldn't picture what she would have been like without those four children. "Well...did you have any kids?"

"Me? No," she answered, vigorously shaking her head. "No, I had a career that kept me awfully busy. It bothered my parents terribly until they died when I was twenty-eight, but my work became my family."

"See, you were allowed to do something else with your life. When Eileen was keeping her journals...it was just this obsession, that everyone had, with procreation," he attempted to explain with helpless gesticulations, "how all the survivors were always talking about having children, so it ended up being Eileen's obsession, too, because she couldn't escape it."

"Those people had just lost their entire families and the human race was nearly extinct," Gentiola pointed out.

"I know, so it was understandable for them, but it's no different now. Everywhere I go, what does anyone do with their lives? They work their backs off to feed their families, so their children can do what? Grow up, find new spouses and have more children, and so on. Every generation is just like the last, except maybe bigger, and every woman's life is dominated by caring for her kids. Any woman who can't have babies is in trouble, and I don't like to think about what happens to women who just don't want to be mothers."

"Yes, you've just described women's lot for much of human history," Gentiola agreed calmly. "But what's the alternative to what you're seeing? Would you rather everyone let themselves go extinct?"

"Of course not, but..."

"And what else is there for anyone to do? Eileen may have had other plans before her world ended, but what is there now?"

"The problem I'm seeing is I don't think it occurs to anyone that there could be more to life than just perpetuating yourself. Does anyone want to learn, or grow, or explore, or somehow improve their world? I can't say hardly anyone does."

"Char, I agree with you over what life 'should' be about, but you expect too much of people with so little to work with. Of course, when they make advances in medicine, and transportation, and energy, and manufacturing, and food preparation, then they'll be freed up for loftier ambitions than survival. But they don't have those advances yet, so what can anyone do right now?"

"I know," he sighed. "It'll take a long time to redevelop those innovations."

"Time, and what else?" she prompted.

"A lot more specialization of labor," he said.

"That's right. And what will you need for that?"

"I know. We need more people."

"There you are. Only when your people no longer have to 'work their backs off' just to feed their families will they find other things to worry about," she elaborated gently.

"I'm just," he breathed, "afraid, that we'll lose sight of those goals?" he said, as if asking for her approval.

"Yes, that is a challenge to keep in mind," she said. "But when an opportunity presents itself, human beings generally do turn to innovation rather than complacency. But until all those innovations add up to a certain point, I'm afraid life is all about survival."

Somehow, they got onto the topic of Charlinder's family, and it was revealed that he was an only child, and always had been.

"That's unusual," said Gentiola. Charlinder waited for the other shoe to drop, for her to indicate that this was an unfortunate state of affairs. Still, she seemed not the least bit pitying, only curious. "Did something happen to your mother when you were little?"