Catch 26: A Novel. Carol Prisant

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СКАЧАТЬ squared her shoulders and summoned up the rest of what backbone she had.

      ‘But here’s the thing.”

      “If I’m able to get those things, this agreement is dissolved. I get to go on with my new life: my husband, if I have a husband, my child.’

      ‘So if I succeed, then you don’t get my soul.” (If it’s true I have a soul, Frannie thought once more.) She watched the milling gamblers hustling by.

      ‘Everyone hedges their bets.”

      Randi’s eyes followed hers. She shook herself a little, then turned to blind Frannie with that smile.

      “Okay, my friend. Really nice try, especially the maturity part. But here’s the way it’s going to go.”

      The girlfriend was gone.

      “You can give it all you’ve got to get that baby and that ‘soulmate’,” an ill-concealed sneer distorted her mouth –“but if you can’t manage to do that, well … you’ll get old again. You’ll get old. Though you won’t necessarily die right away. It won’t be that easy. You’ll age a lot. Get sick. Suffer considerable pain. And you’ll reach the point where you’ll consider sleep to be the best part of your day. Then you’ll die.’

      ‘And there will be no going back to anything, Frannie. No undoing anything. You certainly won’t revert to this life, my dear. You won’t return to St. Louis – as if anyone would want to return to St. Louis. You don’t pass go. And if you fail, when you do finally die, then you and Mrs. A” – Randi smiled affectionately and toyed for a moment with Frannie’s middle finger – “well, let’s just say, from that day on, you’ll absolutely remember her name.”

      Frannie shut her eyes.

      “And all right, you want a written contract? Fine. But if you want things in writing, we’re only giving you a year.”

      Her eyes popped open.

      “Wait. I didn’t say that.”

      “I did.”

      She turned it over in her mind. The Devil was in the details, but God was in the details, too. And if she wasn’t hallucinating this, then this impossible, ludicrous, crazy, nightmare thing could be a miraculous second chance.

      A baby, a soulmate and youth.

      All she had to do was beat the clock.

      (She was nothing but clichés tonight!)

      Though she could still back out.

      “Do I have to give birth within a year, or just get pregnant?”

      “Whichever you like, my friend,” Randi answered pleasantly, applying an emery board to the pinkly-new oval nail on her middle finger. “We’re easy to get along with.” She looked over at Frannie, filing all the while, “And just to sweeten the deal, within that one-year time period – because we know it isn’t long – whatever you decide to do, how you do it, and who you do it with will be completely up to you. We’re just here to make you young and beautiful and give you your fifteen minutes, so to speak. In all its variants, it’s worked for thousands of years.”

      The nail file vanished into the scarlet clutch as she slid one arm around Frannie’s shoulders and hugged her really tight. This time, it didn’t burn. They were girlfriends again. Frannie and the popular girl who could also be the mean girl.

      She peered around the corner of the booth. Except for that boy, no one in this stuffy, unwholesome room had even seemed to notice them, or in any way to validate the preposterous transaction that was – maybe? – going to happen here. She had learned the house rules now.

      “Okay,” she said.

      She was sitting so close to Randi now that she could smell her tomato juice-lipstick breath and it sickened her a little. “I just have to get pregnant within the one-year time frame. I can give birth after?”

      Her companion nodded amicably. “Good choice,” she agreed, like some solicitous waiter.

      ‘So let’s just do this, then.”

      Dumbfounded, Frannie looked up to see a piece of loosely rolled, mottled parchment unspool line after line of sepia script upon the tabletop in front of her. From someplace beside her on the bench, Randi had retrieved a miniature bottle of hair color, carefully labeled in an inky Gothic font, Flaming Bosch, and NOW, with three long fingers, she was unscrewing its jewel-encrusted cap. Opening Frannie’s pocketbook once again, she extracted an elegantly worked gold pen along with what looked like a packet of vintage Lady Gillette razor-blade refills.

      “If you’re ready then, Mrs. T …”

      Flattening the aged vellum against the table with her forearm, Randi dipped the pen’s iridescent nib into the tiny bottle and began to write.

      It took her several seconds to fill in the blanks at the top of what appeared to be a boilerplate document, and then she turned to Frannie expectantly.

      “Both, or either?”

      She needed to think, to consider the question, and yet the roulette wheel’s whicker was so distracting she had to cover her ears till it stopped.

      So … she’d much rather have her child with her soulmate, of course. But that might mean having to spend too much time finding him first. And in the real world, a person could easily wait years for the perfect man to come along. If he ever did. But then, let’s say she did find him, then she’d have to get pregnant. But what if she didn’t find Mr. Right until the last four months, say? She’d need to get pregnant right away.

      So, if she were to tell Randi she wanted both, she could miss the deadline.

      And she wouldn’t risk it. A year felt like too little time to soulmate-shop.

      The thing was, in order to conceive with no Mr. Right, she’d have to sleep with more than one man, maybe even two. Or several. A terrifying thought, although thrilling, too. And if she did it that way, even if none of the more-than-two turned out to be her soulmate, she could still have her child.

      “I think I won’t be greedy, Randi. I’ll settle for either. If the one doesn’t happen, the other will have to be enough. ”

      “Soulmate or child,” the gatekeeper wrote. “Okay. And pregnancy-only within the specified time limit? Not birth?”

      Frannie nodded. “Write that down.”

      Randi smiled.

      “And one year, then?”

      A year had been feeling like two weeks lately. She nodded once again nevertheless.

      Randi filled in the expiry blank:

      “Twelve months,” she breathed the words aloud.

      Then she blew lightly on the parchment to dry the ink and passed it to Frannie to read. Frannie smoothed it flat upon the tabletop and read it slowly through.

      It СКАЧАТЬ