I watched other people’s lives flash in front of me. I saw my freshman-year floormate, Erika Cao, posing on a beach in Thailand on a break from running her successful eco-friendly beauty start-up, and I thought, Hey, I could go to Thailand! I’ll look up cheap flights for next winter! But then a new thought came less than a second later, metaphorically mowing down the first as my brain yelled, You’ll never run a start-up! And for the record, you’re on the verge of getting too old to ever be named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30, too.
I sighed and kept scrolling. I flipped quickly past photos of gender-reveal parties and baby photos posted by high school classmates. I would take a cute picture of a puppy over a newborn photo shoot any day.
Then I came across a picture from Michelle’s account. It showed her and Jake posing on the veranda of her parents’ house, her left hand stretched out in front of her with the engagement ring clearly in focus. She had captioned it, “Last Thanksgiving until we’re husband and wife! I’m so thankful for this man. Four-month countdown ’til #HappilyEverOster!”
If I were really ever going to move in with Mark, I wondered, should that mean I could imagine saying “so thankful for this man” without cringing?
I shook my head. Semantics aside, I needed more time. Instead of making any kind of decision, I begrudgingly liked Michelle’s photo, closed out of Instagram, and started searching for a flight back to Birmingham in three weeks’ time for Christmas.
CHAPTER 14
The week before I was scheduled to fly back to Alabama, I opened my calendar to slot in drinks with Dana. Helping Michelle stay calm through wedding dress alterations, freelancing, and working on my own writing had dominated my sparse spare time, and I hadn’t seen her since the night at the club. She promised “conversation topics that have nothing to do with law, I swear.” But as I created a calendar event in between a meeting about a book cover reveal and my Friday flight to Alabama, I noticed something missing.
The calendar date informed me that it was time to “refill BC,” meaning birth control. That meant that I should have gotten my period the week before, which I definitely did not. It’s normal to miss a period sometimes, I reasoned.
You never have before, a different voice argued back.
I shook my head as if that could physically dislodge the thought. No, I would give it another few days, remember to pick up my birth control, and push it out of my mind. Everything was fine. How many times had I watched female friends in college freak out over a period that was a day or two late? They were all false alarms. Our sophomore year, Ritchie had taken a pregnancy test in the dorm bathroom and she hadn’t even had sex in the previous month.
You have, though.
I went back to answering e-mails, and I sent a Gchat to Dana confirming that we were still on for drinks. She gave me the thumbs-up, and I dove back into the catalog copy in front of me.
* * *
• • •
We met up that night at our favorite East Village wine bar. The stools were splintered and uncomfortable, but the happy hour special ran until eight p.m., and the bartender always gave us a glass for free if we lingered long enough. I was already knee-deep in glass number two by the time Dana arrived, and it had still done nothing to quell my nerves. She walked in, took a seat next to me at the bar, and kissed me on the check without hanging up her phone.
“You’re getting billed for this, you know. And I’m more expensive than your therapist,” I heard her snap before signing off. She dropped her phone in her bag and pivoted toward me. “Jules, hi. I’m sorry. You wouldn’t believe this fucking woman. You know what? I’m not going to talk about it. How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I began, trying to sound normal. Stick to normal topics. “I’ve been trying to write some more essays, mostly about growing up in Langham. All garbage, obviously—I should stick to line edits for authors who know what they’re doing.” I took another sip of wine. “Anyway, how was your date last night? Is that the news?”
Dana lived all her life with the same intensity and borderline vicious nature with which she approached her work; dates rarely passed muster.
“Yeah. Well, I shouldn’t have gone; he wasn’t worth it,” she said, waving to the bartender to order a glass of cabernet. “Who has time to do these things anyway? I thought dating in New York would be all Sex in the fucking City, but I barely even have time to get one drink. By the way, I’m sorry, I have to go back to the office after this.” She paused. “Oh, I do have one funny story from the date. He called me Diana.”
“That’s . . . close?”
“Yeah, but when I corrected him, he could have just said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Instead, he actually tells me that he had a Tinder date with a Diana last week and that’s why he messed up. He legitimately started telling the story of the whole date, what she looked like, the whole thing. And then he noticed I looked pissed, and he tried to recover by—”
“I think I might be pregnant.” Tactful.
Dana spat her first sip of wine back into her glass. “What the fuck? You think or you know?”
“Just think,” I hissed, lowering my voice. The bartender had obviously heard. He was looking down and polishing a glass a little too intensely, flicking his eyes toward us every few seconds. “No, I’m sure I’m not. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. I’m probably just freaking out because Mark asked me to think about moving in together when my lease is up, and I still don’t want to talk about it. Maybe this is just, like, a manifestation of my fear of commitment?”
“Mark asked you to move in with him?” She set her glass down hard, the wine sloshing against the rim as I stared at her. “What? When?”
“At Thanksgiving. I don’t think it was serious.” I conjured the scene in my mind once again, remembering the roaring fire, the haze of a heavy buzz from the schnapps. Mark still hadn’t brought up the subject in the last two weeks, either, so maybe it really had been only a drunken whim, something simply said in the moment and then forgotten, as surreal to him as it was to me.
“You guys aren’t, like, move-in-together serious, right? Or are you?”
“Well, we were drinking when he said it. Are you freaking out? Don’t freak out.”
“Well, you don’t need to freak out, either. You are obviously not pregnant. You’re on birth control. Right?”
“Yes.” I didn’t tell her I had been frantically scrolling through my mental backlogs, trying to figure out if I had missed a pill. I had been taking them for seven years, and I was generally meticulous, but I thought I recalled a missed day—or was it two?—during an especially hectic week when Mark had been out of town. Was that last month? This month?
“Yeah, you’re not pregnant. Remember when Ritchie used to think she was pregnant every single month? Then she’d get her period, like, an hour later.”
“I didn’t get it this month.”
“That happens sometimes? With the pill? Anyway, take a test if you’re so nervous.”
“Yeah, I will. I’ll get one after this. It can’t hurt, right? I’ll take it soon if I’m still feeling this insane about it.”
“Right. Okay, now tell me about the rest of your life,” she said, checking her watch. “I have twenty minutes.”
* * *
• • •
After one more hasty glass of wine, we crossed the street to Duane Reade. I felt woozy, balancing on the tightrope between tipsy and drunk. Dana pulled me by the hand to the family-planning section of the store.
“These ones are only twelve ninety-nine.” She gestured to a generic-brand pregnancy test.
“I don’t know that this is really the time to economize, especially after we just spent forty dollars on wine.” I scanned the shelves from the top down, overwhelmed by both the selection and the painful fluorescent lighting. “I had no idea there were this many kinds.”
Dana wrinkled her bro
w. “Haven’t you ever taken one before?”
“No. Literally never.” I had watched friends deal with pregnancy scares, usually needlessly. As Dana had pointed out, Ritchie honestly did think she was pregnant every time she had so much as a dance-floor make-out. Still, I never thought about it happening to me. I swore a silent oath that I would finally get an IUD, if I could just not be pregnant this time.
“Here, take this one.” Dana reached for a First Response box and knocked over five others in the process. “Shit.”
“Oh my God, I’m drunk in the pregnancy test aisle,” I moaned. “This is a mess.”
Dana laughed.
“Take this seriously.” I glared at her, and she grabbed my hand as we walked to the register.
“Jules,” she whispered into my ear, suddenly solemn. “This is going to be fine. No matter what, you know?”
It didn’t really make sense, since I could think of about a million ways this could not be fine. But still, as she said it, I somehow knew that it would be.
* * *
• • •
I avoided taking the test until I was in the bathroom of the Birmingham airport.
At first, my rationale for waiting was to give my period a few more days to show up. I had been sure that it would. When I had no such luck, I decided I couldn’t bear to investigate the issue until I had stepped outside the normal sphere of my life. This didn’t make any sense, either, obviously, and yet here I was, pulling the First Response pregnancy test box out of my suitcase and opening it furtively in the airport bathroom stall, as coolly removed as if I didn’t know myself at all.
When it was over, I laid the stick carefully on the floor between my foot and my suitcase, setting my iPhone alarm to two minutes. One accurate cliché of the pregnancy test experience: It was the longest two minutes of my life. Then the alarm finally went off, and I forced myself to bend my head down to the black-and-white tile to look. This would all amount to nothing, surely.
But then there they were: two unmistakable lines. Parallel, like the path I had wanted my life to take and the road I was now on.
For some reason, in all the happy stories I’d heard of women recounting their pregnancy tests, they had always called the second line “faint.” (“It was there, but it was faint, so I didn’t want to get my hopes up that I was really pregnant! I took three more tests, can you imagine?”) That was my first thought. There was nothing faint about that line. I felt an aching sense of shock that seemed to permeate my bones, yes, but no disbelief. This was real and definite. I placed my hand on my stomach absentmindedly.
My second thought was, Oh shit.
I tried to draw in a deep breath, but suddenly I couldn’t inhale properly. It felt like getting the wind knocked out of me, but without the blunt-force trauma. I had no idea what to do. Not about the pregnancy, specifically. I knew my options, and they’d been lingering quietly in the back of my mind since the moment I realized I’d missed my period. It was more that I didn’t know what to do right that moment. Throw the damn test away, get out of the airport, and call my ob-gyn later? Or should I call someone I really knew? Did I want to tell anyone at all? Calling Mark when he was at home with his family seemed impossible, but I would have to tell him at some point. Wouldn’t I? Of course I would. What was wrong with me? My ears buzzed, and the pocket of silence around me in the airport bathroom seemed oppressive. I bent my head down between my knees, trying again in vain to breathe.
I had only ever imagined getting pregnant in one context: as a stupid seventeen-year-old back when I first had sex and had yet to go on the pill. After that, I foolishly thought I was safe. And now here I was, after all those years of birth control taken, and somehow it still had happened. How?
At last, a point of clarity emerged. I had to get out of the bathroom. I wrapped the test in a paper towel before I threw it away, as if I had to hide it from someone, and then I walked out to the curb to grab a cab to my mom’s house. I finally opted to call my ob-gyn discreetly from the back seat as the cab bounced and lurched down I-20, and I managed to secure an appointment in a canceled slot for a week later. I could handle this.
I watched as the backdrop to my youth flashed by out the window, feeling a first wave of nausea rising as I caught sight of an old trump/pence 2020 sign still on display near the exit ramp. The city of Birmingham itself was politically and racially diverse—I belabored this point to the New Yorkers who made only stereotyped comments—but I knew the deep divide that ran through the city, the beliefs and prejudices that snaked through the surrounding rural communities like tributaries. There was a reason that politics had become an unspoken matter between me and the women I had grown up with.
I remembered Michelle making a comment a few years back, around the time of the controversy over the transgender bathroom bill in North Carolina. She said that she was “all for equality,” but that still didn’t mean she wanted to see a penis in the bathroom. At the time, I shrugged the comment off.
Now I felt ashamed for that, for my inability to ask questions, for my fear of interrogating our beliefs and finding out how different they really were. Now it seemed all too late. I forced myself to drop the thought, and, hands shaking, I texted Michelle simply that I had landed and that I could “of course” make it to her annual cookie-decorating party on Christmas Eve. I had no idea how I would act once I got there, but trying to maintain a sense of normalcy seemed like the only way I would keep myself from falling apart.
My mom wasn’t home when the cab deposited me in her driveway, which meant that I might get at least one small moment of the respite I sorely needed. I found the key hidden in its typical spot and hauled my suitcase inside, hands still trembling. As promised, the Christmas tree was up in the cramped living room, decked with colored lights and crooked tinsel. My mom insisted on buying a real tree every year, a tradition I had always liked more than I let on, even though she almost always forgot to water it. I deposited my suitcase on the side of the futon that wasn’t edged up against the branches, and I went to the kitchen to grab a pitcher of water for the dry fir. Still breathing shallowly, I poured a glass for myself, too, and chugged it down.
I found a note on the faux-marble countertop next to the sink. “Julie: Welcome back! Date tonight—Jeff! Probably out late. See you tomorrow?” I set the note down and leaned against the counter, closing my eyes. ‘See you tomorrow.’ Of course. I wanted to see her immediately and to never see her again, in equal measure.
I looked at the note one more time. “Love you,” she had signed it. Maybe she did—I knew she did—but the childish part inside me wondered what it all amounted to. I already knew I wouldn’t tell her what I was going through. And anyway, what kind of love did I really have to offer her in return?
It was funny. I remembered that, growing up, Marcia used to tell Michelle and me that loving someone without the hope or prospect that they would ever change was the only way to truly love someone. If you didn’t love their flaws and shortcomings, then you only loved the person you wanted them to someday become, which was just a way of saying you only loved things and people that served you. Marcia had no patience for that kind of behavior, which she perceived as more selfish than the thoughtless offenses our loved ones often perpetrated. Loving someone without the hope or promise of change is the only way to love someone. It was proving harder than ever to love shortcomings, I thought, both in others and in myself.
I lay down on the futon and stretched out, my legs nestled under the branches of the Christmas tree that overlapped the edge. Then again, I thought, Marcia had also always told me that motherhood was the highest calling in life for a woman—the “greatest love in the world,” she had said—so maybe she wasn’t my best resource right now after all.
I knew it right then, in that moment that saw me as completely exhausted and spent as I had ever been: There was no way I could stay pregnant. There was no way that I could
have a baby. Not right now, and not in nine months. I said it out loud to myself, and in hearing my own voice, I knew it was true. It was the climax of what I had begun to realize back in the drugstore with Dana. Even better, I knew that when I told Dana what I had decided, she would comfort me, would assure me that my decision made perfect sense. She would say that, in my place, she would do the exact same thing.
Sometime after that, curled up in the fetal position under an afghan from my childhood and next to the sweet smell of pine, I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 15
The Davis house at the holidays was a sight to behold. Rich decked the trellis with hundreds of petite icicle lights, and inside, Marcia wrapped the banister in a garland from top to bottom, hanging ornaments from the boughs to render it essentially an aesthetic extension of the nearby fourteen-foot tree that presided over the living room. A sprawling nativity scene covered the mantel.
“Sugar,” Marcia greeted me first in the foyer, as per tradition. “Merry Christmas. Michelle is in the kitchen.”
“I knew she would be.” Michelle had been hosting her Christmas Eve cookie-decorating party at her parents’ house for nearly two decades, and it always started in the kitchen and then progressed to the glass-enclosed sunroom for drinks and stargazing. I found her hovering over a tray of gingerbread men, with a chef’s tube of icing in her hand and Jake standing next to her with a proprietary hand on her back.
“Jake,” I said, surprised, as I approached them. “I didn’t think you’d be here until tomorrow.”
He bent down to give me a dry kiss on the cheek, keeping his hand on Michelle. “Well, my lovely fiancée told me I had avoided this tradition for too many years. I promised to try it out at least once.”
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