Page 151 of The Chain
When everyone’s ready they go out to the car, and since they’re early for school, they swing by Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 1.
Rachel looks at her daughter as she takes a bite of a bear claw. Kylie and Stuart are arguing about spoilers for season three ofStranger Things. This is nearly the old, carefree, bullshitty Kylie again. The splinter will always be there, of course. The darkness. They’ll never quite be able to get that out. It’s part of her now, part of all of them. But the bed-wetting has stopped and the bad dreams are fewer. And that’s something.
“OK, here’s one that’s a winner. How many hipsters does it take to change a light bulb?” she asks.
“Mom, don’t! Please. Don’t even!” Kylie pleads.
“How many?” Stuart asks.
“It’s a pretty obscure number, you’ve probably never heard of it,” Rachel says, and at least Pete grins.
She leaves the kids at school and she drops Pete at the commuter-rail stop in Newburyport. His new job requires him to wear a suit and he hates that. He is continually fussing with his tie.
“Leave it alone! You look fabulous,” she says and means it.
When his train comes, she walks back to the Volvo, drives into town, and goes straight to the Walgreens. She checks that Mary Anne, the cashier she knows, isn’t working, and she slinks down the aisles to the pregnancy-test-kit section.
There’s a baffling number of choices. She grabs a kit more or less at random and takes it to the counter.
The cashier is a high-school-age girl whose name tag claims that she’s Ripley. She’s readingMoby-Dick.
She doesn’t appear to be at the “devious-cruisingRachel” bit. Their eyes meet.
“What chapter are you on?” Rachel asks.
“Seventy-six.”
“A man once told me that all books should end at chapter seventy-seven.”
“God, I wish this one did. I have loads to go. Hey, um, you should probably get the Clearblue kit,” the girl says.
“The Clearblue?”
“You think you’re saving money by getting the FastResponse. But the FastResponse has a higher rate of false positives.” She lowers her voice. “I speak from experience.”
“I’ll get the Clearblue,” Rachel says.
She pays for the kit, gets another coffee from the Starbucks on State Street, and drives back to the island.
She goes to the bathroom, takes the kit out of the box, reads the instructions, urinates on the stick over the toilet bowl, and puts the stick back in the box.
It’s surprisingly warm for March, so she takes the box and goes outside and sits on the edge of the deck with her feet dangling above the sand.
The tide’s in. The smell of the sea is strong. Wisps of heat are rising above the big houses on the Atlantic side. A gawking white heron wades among the weeds as a hawk flies westward toward the mainland.
Fishing boats. Crabbers. The lazy bark of a dog down near the convenience store.
She feels the force of the metaphors—comfort, stability, safety.
Thoreau called Plum Island the “bleak Sahara of New England,” but it isn’t that today.
She looks at the box in her hand. The box that contains two possible futures. Two futures that are tumbling toward her at sixty seconds in every minute, sixty minutes in every hour.
One heartbeat at a time.
She smiles.
Either future will be OK.
