– Diary entry –
I have never felt more alive in my life. It is a bright blue sky day, the birds are lunatic with the warmth, the river outside is gushing past, and I am utterly alive. Scared, thrilled, but alive.
This morning when I woke up, Nick was gone. I sat in bed staring at the ceiling, watching the sun golden it a foot at a time, the bluebirds singing right outside our window, and I wanted to vomit. My throat was clenching and unclenching like a heart. I told myself I would not throw up, then I ran to the bathroom and threw up: bile and warm water and one small bobbing pea. As my stomach was seizing and my eyes were tearing and I was gasping for breath, I started doing the only kind of math a woman does, huddled over a toilet. I’m on the pill, but I’d also forgotten a day or two – what does it matter, I’m thirty-eight, I’ve been on the pill for almost two decades. I’m not going to accidentally get pregnant.
I found the tests behind a locked sheet of glass. I had to track down a harried, mustached woman to unlock the case, and point out one I wanted while she waited impatiently. She handed it to me with a clinical stare and said, ‘Good luck.’
I didn’t know what would be good luck: plus sign or minus sign. I drove home and read the directions three times, and I held the stick at the right angle for the right number of seconds, and then I set it on the edge of the sink and ran away like it was a bomb. Three minutes, so I turned on the radio and of course it was a Tom Petty song – is there ever a time you turn on the radio and don’t hear a Tom Petty song? – so I sang every word to ‘American Girl’ and then I crept back into the bathroom like the test was something I had to sneak up on, my heart beating more frantically than it should, and I was pregnant.
I was suddenly running across the summer lawn and down the street, banging on Noelle’s door, and when she opened it, I burst into tears and showed her the stick and yelled, ‘I’m pregnant!’
And then someone else besides me knew, and so I was scared.
Once I got back home, I had two thoughts.
One: Our anniversary is coming next week. I will use the clues as love letters, a beautiful antique wooden cradle waiting at the end. I will convince him we belong together. As a family.
Two: I wish I’d been able to get that gun.
I get frightened now, sometimes, when my husband gets home. A few weeks ago, Nick asked me to go out on the raft with him, float along in the current under a blue sky. I actually wrapped my hands around our newel post when he asked me this, I clung to it. Because I had an image of him wobbling the raft – teasing at first, laughing at my panic, and then his face going tight, determined, and me falling into the water, that muddy brown water, scratchy with sticks and sand, and him on top of me, holding me under with one strong arm, until I stopped struggling.
I can’t help it. Nick married me when I was a young, rich, beautiful woman, and now I am poor, jobless, closer to forty than thirty; I’m not just pretty anymore, I am pretty for my age. It is the truth: My value has decreased. I can tell by the way Nick looks at me. But it’s not the look of a guy who took a tumble on an honest bet. It’s the look of a man who feels swindled. Soon it may be the look of a man who is trapped. He might have been able to divorce me before the baby. But he would never do that now, not Good Guy Nick. He couldn’t bear to have everyone in this family-values town believe he’s the kind of guy who’d abandon his wife and child. He’d rather stay and suffer with me. Suffer and resent and rage.
I won’t have an abortion. The baby is six weeks in my belly today, the size of a lentil, and is growing eyes and lungs and ears. A few hours ago, I went into the kitchen and found a snap-top container of dried beans Maureen had given me for Nick’s favorite soup, and I pulled out a lentil and laid it on the counter. It was smaller than my pinkie nail, tiny. I couldn’t bear to leave it on the cold countertop, so I picked it up and held it in my palm and petted it with the tip-tip-tip of a finger. Now it’s in the pocket of my T-shirt, so I can keep it close.
I won’t get an abortion and I won’t divorce Nick, not yet, because I can still remember how he’d dive into the ocean on a summer day and stand on his hands, his legs flailing out of the water, and leap back up with the best seashell just for me, and I’d let my eyes get dazzled by the sun, and I’d shut them and see the colors blinking like raindrops on the inside of my eyelids as Nick kissed me with salty lips and I’d think, I am so lucky, this is my husband, this man will be the father of my children. We’ll all be so happy.
But I may be wrong, I may be very wrong. Because sometimes, the way he looks at me? That sweet boy from the beach, man of my dreams, father of my child? I catch him looking at me with those watchful eyes, the eyes of an insect, pure calculation, and I think: This man might kill me.
So if you find this and I’m dead, well …
Sorry, that’s not funny.