Page 61 of Soft Erasure

Here was the hand at the top of the ladder, half an inch off, and the body came up to meet it before I had leave to want it, and this time I wanted it, cleanly, in front of Willson and Pembroke and Noah, asleep in the carrier.

I wanted the half-inch gone. I wanted the hand to land.

The wanting stood up ahead of me, and I let it stand the one second I had learned to let it stand, and I didn’t kill it. I used it.

I said the word.

I said it so the lens and the recorder and the clipboard panel and the dome and the three phones took the syllables clean, no glitch, no soft edge a man could cut.

“Postpartum.”

The hand stopped.

It didn’t go back. It didn’t come in.

It hung half an inch off my throat with the platinum ring catching the overhead light. The seam threw a thin green line onto the pale of his own sweater, for the first time in a public room.

He could see the green on the sweater. He had never been able to see it on the ring.

He looked down and found it on his chest, his own green, put there by his own hand. The beat that crossed his face was the beat I had come for.

Pembroke’s lens saw it. Later, in Willson’s chain, the clip would be slowed until the seam showed. The hand came down to his knee.

He gave me the elevator smile, the one that had never been for the room.

“That word doesn’t apply to you, Amber.”

“It applies to my body, and it applies in this room, and I am the one saying it. The band has logged it.”

It was Jess’s word. She had put it under my door weeks ago and told me not to spend it cheaply. This was not cheap.

“You have not had a child.”

Nothing in the room moved. Jess kept her eyes down and her hand on Noah’s back.

She didn’t look at me.

She wasn’t going to let her face be a second camera, not for him, not in that room, and whatever she was holding off it she held off it.

“I have a body,” I said. “No one has told my body what it has and has not had. My body is using the word that guards what it knows. The session ends.”

He held. “Charles. Confirm policy.” He didn’t turn his head. He said it to the door.

Voss cleared his throat from a chair I hadn’t marked him in. “Confirmed. The patient has invoked the postpartum protocol. The room logs the invocation. The session is closed.”

Caldren stood. He didn’t look at Voss. He looked at me, and the bowl of three pills sat between us with not one of them touched, and he saw that I saw it.

“Next Wednesday, Amber.”

“On my terms.”

“Of course.”

He left.

The chairs scraped. Penelope gave the nod that let the room empty. The gallery filed out around me.

I stayed in the chair until it stopped being a chair and became a position I was holding, because the body had not decided whether it was a place I had won or a place I had lost.