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It takes Sally longer than it should to actually take the pregnancy test. Barry hands her the CVS bag with nothing in it but a mile-long receipt and a small cardboard box that assures her it’s up to 99% accurate, and she almost throws up all over his shoes right there; to be fair, that’s more the fault of the nausea she’s been experiencing—the nausea that made her need to take the test in the first place—than her world-shaking fear and rage.
“I’ll be right outside,” he tells her. Barry has been alarmingly calm about all of this. It makes Sally want to be even fucking crazier.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Sally warns him. “Stay right outside.”
The door shuts, and then it’s just her in the tiny, dingy motel bathroom. She should be used to them by now, having spent almost a year bouncing between them, but God they can be gross. There’s a ring around what can only be the world’s smallest bathtub. There’s something like mold growing at the edge of the sink. Overwhelmed, Sally sits down on the toilet to read the back of the box, and the toilet is so old and so shitty it wobbles beneath her.
“Barry!” she shouts.
So they cram together in the bathroom. Barry takes up way too much space with all his awkward angles, but she feels somewhat better with him in here.
“It’s straightforward,” Sally mutters, mostly to herself. “Pee on the stick, wait until the result comes up on the screen. Easy.”
“Easy,” Barry echoes encouragingly.
Sally unbuttons her pants, and she doesn’t even have to ask Barry to turn around to look at the wall—he just does it. She’s spent the past day or so switching between profound gratitude and overwhelming hatred for him, and right now, she’s so glad he’s here with her in this awful bathroom that she could cry.
She reads the instructions one last time. She pulls her pants and underwear down and contorts her body to hold the stick in the exact right place as she pees.
“Okay.” Sally flushes the toilet. She sets the test down on the edge of the sink like it’s going to lash out and bite her. “Okay, so now we wait.”
Barry crowds up behind her. They look down at the pregnancy test, and the digital display at the bottom has a little ticking progress bar. They don’t even have to set a timer.
“Oh, wow. These things are really advanced now,” Barry says.
“The box said it could take up to three minutes, but as little as one.” Sally takes a long breath. “So now we just have to wait.”
She can feel Barry nod by the shift in the air, that’s how close they’re standing. He doesn’t try to touch her, though, which is a good call on his part. She’s pretty sure she’d elbow him right in the balls if he did.
The progress bar is moving quickly. Sally is thinking to herself that this is moving way too quickly, and then, all of a sudden, the little screen blinks and says the word Pregnant .
“That was fast,” Barry says.
“Oh fuck.” Sally picks up the test and stares at it, like she could’ve misread it somehow. “Oh Jesus motherfucking Christ.”
Barry’s hand rests on her shoulder. “Sally—”
She shrugs him off, and her breath starts to come in sharp little fits and starts. “Oh fuck. Fuck. I’m pregnant. What the—what the fuck? I’m pregnant? ”
“Sally, it’s going to be okay.”
Something in her snaps the wrong way, like a bone breaking. She whips around to look at him, furious, terrified tears in her eyes.
“Get the fuck out of here. Get away from me!” She screams.
Barry raises both hands in surrender. He doesn’t look scared of her, or angry at her, even. He seems totally calm. It makes Sally even more enraged. Her hands shake with it. “Okay. Okay, I’ll be right outside.”
But as she’s shoving him out of the bathroom, as she’s slamming and locking the door behind him, some small part of her brain thinks, he’s letting you move him. He’s stronger than you, and he’s letting you push him around and scream at him and all he’s done is let it happen. And then, like she always does when it comes to Barry, she thinks, Sam wouldn’t have let you do that.
First, Sally has a panic attack so bad she briefly worries she won’t ever catch her breath again. And then she cries. And then she thinks about her parents.
She hasn’t seen them or spoken to them since she visited right after the horrible thing happened. And really, she doesn’t miss them. Mom has probably spent the last eight months so embarrassed that her daughter is on the run with her fugitive boyfriend that she can’t bring herself to show her face at church; that’s how she was right after Sally ran off to LA. When Sally just broke poor Sam’s heart, he had no idea she wanted to leave, and really, Sally, he never meant to hurt you, anyway. And God knows if Dad has noticed that his daughter is in the news. Unless one of the sports radio shows he loves has started covering prison escapes, he probably doesn’t.
Jesus. What would they say if they knew she was having a baby with a murderer? That she volunteered to run away with him? Sally knows people assume she was kidnapped, and that’s what she and Barry agreed they’d say if they ever get caught. But she decided to come along with him. She came up with the fucking idea.
Sally looks at herself in the streaked mirror. She imagines a tiny thing in her stomach, a little Barry-and-Sally, and the thought makes her gag. She hangs over the toilet for a minute, but nothing comes up.
Eventually, she gets off the floor and splashes tepid water on her face. When she opens the bathroom door, Barry is sitting on the edge of the bed with the television on, but he’s not watching it. Outside, the sun is setting. They’re in Boca Raton this week, and the sky has gone an orangey pink that feels particularly Floridian. She doesn’t have much of an opinion on Boca Raton, because she hasn’t gone anywhere since they got here two days ago, but one thing she can say for sure—you can’t beat the sunsets.
“Hey,” Barry says. He turns to her, and the intensity of his attention falling on her is like a beam of blinding light. In a strange way, it’s steadying. He’s always been that way, so obsessed with her that it’s almost frightening, so obsessed with her that it’s comforting. It’s something to cling to. “You feeling okay?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He half-smiles. “Come sit?”
“No, I—I think I need—” Sally looks around the room. It’s so small. “I don’t know.”
“Wanna go to the beach?” Barry says. “We can take a walk, get some air. You might feel better.”
“I don’t—What if someone sees us?”
Barry shrugs. “I don’t think anyone knows where we are. And it’ll be dark out soon.”
“Uh… yeah. Yeah, okay.”
So they go to the beach. Their motel, cheap and seedy as it is, is only a ten-minute walk. Barry holds her hand and walks on the outside of the sidewalk so he’s the one closest to the road. He’s always done that. He did that on one of their first real dates, and Sally had remembered being sixteen and dating douchebags with bad haircuts, and how her dad had told her she’d know she had a gentleman when he made sure he was nearest to the road and walked her to her door without expecting a kiss.
The beach isn’t too busy when they get there. Barry keeps his hat pulled down over his eyes, and Sally doesn’t take off her sunglasses.
“I should probably get an abortion,” Sally says after a while. Ahead of them, a dog is racing around its owner as she laughs and feigns throwing a tennis ball.
Barry doesn’t say anything. His face is blank.
“I mean, I can’t have a baby right now. We can’t have a baby right now,” Sally says. In a juvenile sort of way, she feels defiant in the face of his calm. “The cops are looking for us. You’re a fucking murderer, Barry, and we don’t have a house, and I’m—I’m—We don’t have the time for a baby! And I’m not ready to be a fucking mom .”
“Sally, you’re being kind of loud.”
“Oh, I am?” She screams. “I’m being loud?”
The woman with the dog glances over at them.
“Okay, it’s not—You’re not—” Barry frowns. “I don’t know. I just think you’d be a good mom. We’d be good parents.”
She laughs, a tinkling and hysterical sound. “You’re insane.”
“I mean it,” Barry says. He stops where he is, and Sally stops too, so they’re just standing there in the sand, the Florida night that is somehow sweltering even as the sun gets lower and lower in the sky. “We could do it. We’d love that kid, I know we would. And that’s what matters. That’s what’s important.”
“Barry…”
“Just think about it.” He’s so serious. No trace of irony, no hint of doubt. He’s serious about this.
“Okay. Okay, I will.”
The dog chases after its ball into the water. The owner shrieks with laughter.
When they get back to the motel, they both eat cereal for dinner, and Barry watches a rerun of Laws of Humanity. Sally hates that show, but doesn’t bother to ask him to turn it off.
“Hey, I’m going to go outside for a few minutes,” she says. “I’m still feeling sick. Just wanna get some air.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, that’s okay,” Sally says. “I’ll just be in the parking lot.”
Barry looks concerned, but doesn’t push it.
She heads for the car they’ve been driving for the last few weeks—a generic blue sedan Barry hotwired in a Kroger parking lot in Alabama—and sits on the hood. She thinks. She thinks about her parents, her father’s disengagement and her mother’s never-ending disdain. She thinks about growing up in Joplin. She thinks about Sam, who wanted kids, and how she got an IUD without telling him so that she wouldn’t be held back by a baby if she ever got the guts to leave. She thinks about Barry, who she knows is keeping an eye on her through the curtains. Barry, who murdered Janice Moss and dozens of other people. Barry, who escaped from prison and took shelter in the apartment they used to share. Barry, who loves her so much. Barry, who wants her baby.
She takes her phone out of her sweatshirt pocket for something to do. It’s a cheap flip phone they got from a Walmart a few months ago, and there’s only one person programmed into it: Barry. Sally looks at his singular name. There’s no one to call. None of her friends or former roommates or old coworkers, no acquaintances from Joplin, no family. Her world has shrunk, she thinks. It’s shrunk down to one man, and his world has shrunk down to one woman, and it’s just them. There’s no one else. Sally can’t remember the last time she had a conversation with someone who wasn’t Barry that lasted more than two minutes.
The realization is strangely calming. She gets up and walks slowly to the motel room. She knocks, and Barry opens the door almost immediately.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.” Sally goes inside. He locks the door behind her.
“Are you okay?” Barry looks at her with his wide eyes. Sally thinks maybe she could strangle him. Sally wants him to hold her.
“Um, not really.” The whole world feels dull, distant. The gray light from the streetlamps in the parking lot spills over the unmade bed and its ugly floral bedspread. “I—there’s no one I can call. So.”
Barry reaches out like he wants to take her hand, but he stops short. “You can do this. We can do this.”
Sally looks at him. The past year has aged him so much—he already looks like somebody’s dad. His beard is flecked with gray, and his stomach has a permanent paunch. There are wrinkles on his forehead that never seem to go away. And he’s looking back at her with so much wide-eyed hope.
“You really want this.”
“I do.” Barry reached out and tucked her hair back behind her ear. Sally leaned into his touch, the absolute familiarity of his hand on her. “Sally, I want this so bad. I’ve wanted it for a while.”
“Really?
“Really.” Barry smiles, just a bit, and Sally can’t help it. She slips her hands around his shoulders so that they’re pressed together. Like if music started up somewhere, they’d already be slow-dancing. “I, uh. I thought about it not long after we met.”
Sally laughs. “What? Really?”
“Yeah,” Barry says. “I liked you a lot. And I was… I was really depressed. It was just a nice fantasy, I guess.”
Absently, she wonders if it was something he thought about in the aftermath of a murder They don’t talk about it, but she’s performed Macbeth enough to know how guilt eats at people. She wonders if he ever stood over a body and had that horrible, stomach-rolling feeling, and if in that moment he thought about Sally from his acting class, thought about a pretty girl who was the best actress he’d ever seen, and if they ever had a kid, what that would be like. She wonders if it helped him.
“Let’s go to bed,” Barry says quietly. “And, uh. We can talk about it in the morning?”
They end up cuddling in bed together. It’s so hot they’re just in their underwear. Barry does an impression of a commercial mascot, and it makes her laugh.
Sally falls asleep halfway through an episode of Dateline. When she wakes up again, the room is dark, lit only by the twisting shapes and colors of the muted television playing late-night commercials. She shifts uncomfortably under the sheets. Barry is asleep next to her. His hands are pulled up under his chin, because that’s how he sleeps, like a little kid.
“Barry,” she whispers. He doesn’t stir. “Barry.” Still nothing.
Sally flicks the side of his face, and he jerks out of sleep. “Sally?” he mumbles. “What is…?”
“Will you be a good dad?”
Barry blinks his eyes open. He looks clueless. He looks like the awkward midwesterner who stumbled into acting class and Sally took pity on. He doesn’t look like someone who could dump a body in the woods. He doesn’t look like a liar.
“What?” he says. “Are you okay?
“I… I’m asking you,” Sally says, “if we do this… then I need you to promise me you’ll be a good dad. That this kid is… That it’ll be able to trust you. And be safe with you.”
“It will. I promise,” Barry says. He burrows closer to her; it’s hot under the blankets, the shitty air conditioner working overtime against the muggy Florida heat and losing, but Sally lets Barry get as close as he can. “Sally, I promise. You and the baby, that’s—that’s all I care about. Okay? That’s all that matters.”
“You promise?” Sally says. Her voice wavers. “You promise?”
“I promise.” Barry kisses her forehead, the bridge of her nose, her cheek, her ear. “Baby, I promise.”
Sally squeezes her eyes shut. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” Sally would’ve guessed that saying it would feel like a death sentence. Like a hand’s iron grip around her wrist. But it doesn’t. It just feels like the next choice in a long line of them, and it feels like something Barry wants so badly that she wants to give it to him, and it feels like a reason to stop running. “Let’s… God, okay, fuck it. Let’s keep it. We should keep it.”
Barry’s eyes fill with tears. That wild emotion, just always bubbling under the surface—it was the only thing that ever made him a decent actor.
“Oh my God,” he says breathlessly. “Wow. Okay, we’ll have to—we can find a place to settle. Somewhere isolated. Somewhere quiet. But we’ve got enough time. By the time the baby comes, things will have blown over enough. We can do this. We can.” He looks at Sally, and he’s smiling like someone just told him he won the lottery. “Sally, this is going to be great. I promise. This is—we’re going to be so happy. I promise. This is going to make us so happy.”
“Okay,” Sally says again.
She turns on her side so that Barry can spoon up behind her. He slips his arms around her waist, and one hand lingers over her stomach. Like he just can’t wait to meet whatever it is that’s in there.
“I love you,” Barry says. His beard rasps at her bare shoulder. “Sally, I love you so much.”
“I love you, too.” And the kicker is, Sally means it. She really does love him.
Barry falls asleep again pretty quickly. His heavy breathing isn’t quite snoring, but so close to her ear, it might as well be someone trying to chainsaw their way through the door. Maybe it is. Maybe the cops finally caught up with them, and they’re all out of time. That thought hasn’t ever scared her before—mostly, she felt ambivalent about it. Now, though. Now, she guesses she has to think about the baby.
Sally places her own hand over her belly. She has only ever imagined being pregnant in the ways it would fit into the rest of her goals; Sally always figured she’d have a baby after her first couple great movies released, dial back to just guest roles on prestige television shows until the kid got to middle school, then make an incredible comeback where she’d get at least halfway to an EGOT. But all those dreams are long since dead and buried.
Sally’s never thought about the actual, physical reality of being pregnant. If she had to guess, she probably would’ve assumed there’d be some sense of a presence within her. A fullness, maybe, a feeling of life . But there on the shitty mattress, sweat trickling down the backs of her thighs in the Florida heat, she doesn’t feel the baby growing inside of her. She doesn’t feel anything. She feels hollowed out. Like she’s not even here. Like she’s empty of something she used to have.
This can’t be your life, a small voice says. How did this become your life?
Behind her, Barry murmurs in his sleep. Sally closes her eyes. Pictures her body as an empty thing the wind is whistling through.