The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 12
She told him in January, at dinner, between one thing and another.
“I am pregnant.”
Carlos, who had a fork in his hand, put the fork down.
“Say that again.”
“I have said it once. You heard it.” She kept eating. “I have known for four days. I wanted to be sure before I said it out loud, because if I had said it and been wrong I would have had to watch your face do the other thing.”
“How sure.”
“Sure.”
He sat back. She kept eating, or gave a convincing impression of it, and after about twenty seconds she put her own fork down because she had stopped being able to hold it steady, which annoyed her intensely.
“Say something.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work faster.”
“Avîn.” His voice had gone somewhere odd. “I need a minute.”
“You always need a minute. It has been two years of minutes.” But she reached across and took his wrist, and held it, and looked at the table, and neither of them said anything for a while and it did not matter at all.
She went to the range on the Monday and taught a full day and said nothing to anybody.
She kept teaching through February and into March, and she was, by every account I have from that base, insufferable about how well she felt, right up until the morning in the third week of February when she was sick twice before nine and had to sit down on an ammunition crate in the cage with her head between her knees.
Boyd found her there.
“Ma’am.”
“I am fine.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It is the smell of the solvent. It has never bothered me before in my life.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Do not — “ She stopped, and pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth for a second, and then said, with enormous dignity, “Sergeant, if you tell anyone I was sick in the cage I will make the rest of your career very difficult.”
“Wasn’t planning on it, ma’am.”
“Good.”
“My wife had it with all three,” Boyd said, to the shelving. “Crackers. Keep ‘em in your pocket. Eat one before your feet hit the floor in the morning, before you’re even up. Sounds stupid. It works.”
There was a silence of perhaps four seconds.
“Thank you,” said Avîn.
“Yes, ma’am.” And he went away and did not tell anyone, and she carried crackers in the pocket of her jacket for the next two months and never once explained it to anybody who asked.
The Army was, in the end, less trouble about it than she expected, which she found suspicious for about a week and then decided to accept.
She would teach until she could not, then take what she was owed, then come back. It was written down and signed and filed, and she read the whole document twice with a pen in her hand looking for the trap, and did not find one.
“They are being reasonable.”
“They can be.”
“Nobody has ever been reasonable to me on paper before.” She set it down. “In my whole life, every piece of paper about me has been a problem. Papers were the thing that could kill you at a checkpoint.” She smoothed the top page flat with her palm. “This one says I may have a child and come back to my job. It is a strange thing to hold.”
What she did not say, and what he did not say either, was the arithmetic they had both done and neither would speak: that if she had stayed she would be four years dead by then, and that the paper in her hand was the far end of a chain that started with a man deciding to burn his career in a schoolhouse in Mosul.
She taught a full course at six months along, in the heat, and the class that summer was the best-behaved class she ever had, which she attributed to her instruction and which every man on that range knew was terror.
They did not know what to do with her. She was visibly pregnant and she was also the woman who had told them on day one that the number was not the trade, and the two facts sat in their heads without touching. Nobody offered her a chair. Nobody dared. A specialist named Whitby got down on the deck to help her up off the firing line on the second week and she looked at him for a moment that he described afterwards as the longest of his life, and then said, “Thank you, Whitby,” and took his arm, and after that they all did it and none of them made anything of it.
It was Boyd who solved the last of it, in his way, by walking into the bay one morning and putting a folding camp stool down beside her without a word and walking out again. She used it for the rest of the course and never mentioned it and neither did he.
“They are frightened of me,” she reported at home, delighted.
“They’re frightened of you anyway.”
“Yes, but now they are also frightened of the other thing, and they do not know which one they are frightened of, and it has improved their groups by a great deal.”
She was not sentimental about the pregnancy and she would not let anybody else be either.
She was, however, extremely irritated by it.
“I cannot get up from the floor.”
“You could last week.”
“Last week I was a different shape. Do not laugh at me, Carlos, I will remember it.”
She hated being tired. She hated being told to sit down by people who had never done a hard day in their lives. She hated that her body, which had done exactly what she told it for thirty years, had begun negotiating.
“It is not mine anymore,” she said one evening, not unhappily, looking down at herself with a kind of professional detachment. “It has been requisitioned.”
But there was one thing she did that she never explained and never apologized for. Somewhere in the spring she took her father’s brass button out of the drawer — the flat one, worn smooth, the only thing of his she had carried out of that country — and she stopped putting it back. It lived on the kitchen windowsill after that, where the light got it in the mornings, and she did not say a word about why, and Carlos had the sense never to ask.
It happened in the yard, in May, on a Saturday afternoon with nothing whatever going on.
She had gone out to sit down, because the house was warm and the chair by the back door was in the shade, and she was doing nothing at all — which by then she had grudgingly learned to do — and looking at a fence a child could step over and a patch of grass where nothing had ever happened.
And then something moved that was not her.
She told me about it years later, in that kitchen, and it is the only time in twenty years of knowing her that I saw her have to stop in the middle of a sentence and start it again.
She said it was not like being kicked. She said that is a stupid word for it and whoever chose it had never felt it. She said it was more like the flutter of something turning over in deep water, a long way down — the smallest possible signal, arriving from inside her own body, from a place she had no authority over and could not reach.
She said she sat completely still for a long time to see if it would come again.
It came again.
And Avîn, who had lain motionless behind a rifle for four days on a widow’s roof and never once let her hands shake, sat in a plastic chair in a small American yard with her palm flat against herself and cried so hard she could not get up, and did not care, and did not try to stop, and stayed out there alone with it for the better part of an hour because it was hers and she was not ready to share it yet.
She told him that evening.
“It moved.”
“Today?”
“This afternoon. Twice. Then a third time when I was inside.” She was at the sink with her back to him, which is where she went for the ones that mattered. “It is very small. You would not feel it from outside. It is only for me at this stage.”
“Okay.”
“I wanted you to know that I did not tell you at once. I sat with it by myself for an hour first.” She turned around. “I am telling you that because I do not want to have a secret from you, even a small good one.”
Carlos came over and did not touch her, because he had learned that too.
“How was it?”
And she thought about it — actually thought, the way she thought about wind, taking her time.