Twenty Four Weeks - Episode 18 - "Twenty Nine" (PG)

by James David Denisson

a whole lot of them. I feel like we’re in trouble of something, we’re being cross examined. The man directly in front of us I know: Malcolm Wheeler. He’s a little older than us. A little grey. He’s got green, clear eyes that seem to look right through you like their lasers. He got us on with Jerry Jones last week. Clearly we impressed him.

  “Wade Beaufort,” he says.

  “Present,” Wade says back with an easy grin.

  “So, what do you think about our idea?”

  “I’m here, right? You see me here? I must be just a little interested.”

  “And you’ve brought your manager?”

  Wade turns slightly. “I brought my producer.”

  Wheeler nods. He’s regarding me, like I’m an insect that he’s about to dissect, like he’s examining all my thoughts, cataloguing them. He says nothing, he turns back to Wade. “Any thoughts on the format?” he asks.

  “It sounds good. I’d want to keep the same vibe as the radio show, though. People could call in. I’d have guests, this time in person.”

  “That’s what we want: keep the same feel that you have already. Why change something that works.”

  “Exactly,” I say. I wonder why we need to change at all, but I also know that it’s going to happen eventually, and we have to embrace it or we’ll be replaced by someone who will.

  The suits go over the finer points and it looks like this thing is going to happen. They’ll have a contract to Wade by next week.

  On the way back to the station he’s talking to me excitedly, telling me what we’re going to do, who we’re going to interview, what waves we’re going to make. He’s talking about us a lot, but I didn’t hear my name in the discussions at all. I don’t think there is going to be an ‘us’. They’ll be a ‘him’ and there’ll be a ‘me’. I just don’t think that ‘him’ and ‘me’ will be together.

  “All the way,” he says, his final word, as he pulls into the parking spot under the station that bares his name. I smile and accept that he believes that, even if I don’t.

  Thursday

  Quinn’s obstetrician sits across his desk from us. He’s examined her from head to toe. He’s taken her blood pressure, felt her pulse, listened to her heart and lungs. He’s checked her legs, her breasts, poked her belly. Now he’s reading over his notes with his glasses down on the end of his nose.

  “So,” he says. “Everything looks to be fine, except for your blood pressure.”

  He looks down his nose at us and smiles.

  “You don’t look worried,” Quinn observes.

  “I’m not. Yet. But it is heading on the way up, and that worries me a little.”

  “So, what does this mean?” I ask.

  “Well, we don’t want it any higher. Is there any stress in your life right now?”

  I look at Quinn. She looks at me. We both laugh.

  “I see,” he says. “What about work?”

  “I’m still working full time,” Quinn answers.

  “We might have to re-think that.”

  “Give up work early?”

  “I think it’s the wisest course. If your blood pressure gets any higher you might just find yourself in hospital on bed rest.”

  I turn to Quinn. She looks at me again. We both know what all of this means. We don’t want a repeat of our last pregnancy.

  Quinn nods. “Whatever you think best,” she says.

  I’ve been here before. This is a familiar scene to me. It was years ago, when Quinn was carrying our first child. We were so full of hope then, full of love, full of joy. This was just another stage in our journey and we attended to it with all the enthusiasm we could muster. We’re overjoyed to be here again, but it’s tinged with a little fear and a little sadness. Last time it came to nothing. We’re hoping that this time things will be different.

  We’re sitting in a circle. There are eight couples, sixteen of us in total, with another sitting somewhere in the middle. You can’t really tell where she’s sitting, at the start, at the end, in the middle. It’s a circle and things don’t work that way. I guess, because she’s the odd one out, she defines the start and the end.

  We’re all connected in some way, even before we walked in half an hour ago, even before we met. We have something in common. There are bankers and stockbrokers, there are teachers and nurses, there are plumbers and electricians. People from all walks of life, from all positions and stations, sitting there, smiling at each other, joining together, becoming friends when it would have been near impossible in any other circumstance.

  Because we are all pregnant.

  Quinn and I talked about hiding my identity before we came here, in this little community meeting room, but we decided against it. I’ve been on the television. People have seen my face. And they know my name. Judd is uncommon, uncommon enough to stick in the memory just a little. And my wife is pregnant. That’s the triple threat. That makes me recognisable.

  We’ve already been around the room, introduced ourselves. I think some of my fellow passengers on this journey have recognised me, I can see the slight flicker of recognition, but they’re not making an issue of it. I think I know why. There seems to be an unspoken agreement between us all. We’re like a family now. We won’t judge each other, we won’t disparage each other. We accept each other, because we know what each of the rest of us is feeling. And I guess that fear is in every one of us, because life is precious and precarious.

  And I think about how precarious life can truly be. How it can change in an instant, how you can be pregnant and full of joy and then suddenly not and full of grief. I think of how I could have easily missed out on being with Quinn right now. I think of how it could have been Wade here with her, supporting her through her pregnancy and her labour. He’d have been the first to hold our baby and not me. But that’s not how it turned out. I’m here, he’s not. And this is how it was always supposed to be.

  Our facilitator is talking about late pregnancy and what we can expect. We’ve already seen some of those things and others are still ahead of us. Quinn holds my hand, squeezes it gently as the woman talks and I feel more connected to her now than I have ever been. We’ve been here before but I guess I wasn’t fully present with her then, even though she didn’t know it. I’m here now. I’m present. I’m with her. I know what is at stake.

  The leader is a woman in her forties. She’s had three children and she’s a midwife, so she’s eminently qualified to guide us. She’s quiet and kind and there is a calm beauty about her. I wonder what Quinn will be like in ten years time. She’ll still be beautiful, she’ll still capture my heart. Rachel will be in school. They’ll be another, boy or girl, a year or so younger. Maybe another? I don’t know.

  I’m massaging Quinn’s lower back, like I’m being shown, helping to relieve the tension that builds up there from carrying extra weight that shifts her center of gravity forward. She groans quietly under my touch, like I’m pleasuring her. We make love often, slow and deep, looking into each other’s eyes. I guess we’re making up for the time in the near future when there’ll be no sex for a while. I always seem to come back to sex when I think of her, which is a good thing, because of what we’ve been through and the stumbling blocks between us.

  We have coffee after and we mingle with the others. No one mentions my notoriety, which I glad for. They seem more interested in us as a couple and our baby, getting bigger by the day. They’ll all normal people, having normal lives, getting through normal struggles. They don’t know where we’ve been, how we’ve clawed our way back to normal, and we don’t tell them. They think we’re normal like them. But we’re not. We’re complicated, flawed and broken people, slowly mending. But then, Quinn and I don’t really know about these others, not deeply, not yet. I sometimes think that we’re all complicated, we’re all flawed, were all broken. That’s what makes a human.

  “I’m thinking of asking Jen to be my standby person,” Quinn says in the car in the way home.

  “That’s a good choice. I�
�ve always liked Jen.”

  “That’s not strictly true.”

  “No, I guess not. But she’s been a good friend to both of us when we’ve really needed one. So, I guess I love her for that.”

  “Love her?”

  “Why not. Love has many different faces.”

  She shakes her head. “You’re getting far too smart for my liking.”

  I grin. “You wouldn’t have me any other way.”

  “Speaking of having you...”

  “Yes?”

  Friday

  Quinn and I are sitting at a table at one of our old haunts. We’re reliving some of our good memories, before everything started to sour. Things haven’t changed all that much here, but we have. And that’s a little sad to me, to think that we couldn’t have just kept going on that happy trajectory indefinitely. But that’s not how life works. That wasn’t in our future.

  She’s smiling at me in her wicked way from across the table.

  “What?” I ask her.

  “I’d like to take you out back right now, but I don’t think we’d get away with it this time.”

  “It is quite busy tonight.” Wait staff move to and fro frantically, carrying loaded plates, unloaded plates, orders, drinks.

  She laughs a little. “And I don’t think I’d fit into the stall any more.”

  “You’d fit fine.”

  “Imagine me and my belly trying to squeeze in there.”

  “I am.” I grin at the thought of it.

  She hits my arm playfully. “Not like that. I’m saying that there