I was angry—still, always—and I was as confused as a bull in a field of rocks. If she loved me, she’d be with me. She seemed to be trying to teach me a lesson, but if she was, I wasn’t learning it. She wanted me to love her less, to need her less? She said she loved me, but she’d left me when I most needed her?
Of course she left you, the evil voice whispered. The voice I heard at two and three and four o’clock and was hearing again now, because there was no work and no exercise and no music that could drown it out. They always leave you. You’re too hard to love.
“Whoa,” Eugene said after I’d pummeled the living hell out of the punching bag and was standing, head down, arms dropping, breathing hard and my sweat dripping onto the floor. “It ain’t the bag’s fault. That ex causing trouble between the two of you? That why Hope’s not here? That sounds like a big ol’ mess.”
“Oh,” I said, accepting his help in stripping off the gloves, hoping he wouldn’t notice that my arm muscles were trembling with fatigue and knowing he did. “You heard about that.”
“If you’re going to be a big shot, everybody’s going to pay attention. Guess that’s the downside. But you think Hope’s believing you did something wrong, or worried about the money? ‘Cause I got to tell you, man…”
“No. Of course not.” I didn’t ask what Eugene believed. I didn’t want to know. Instead, I reached for the towel and rubbed my head down. “I’m ready.”
“Well, don’t start thinking it,” Eugene said. “Got to be obvious by now that she ain’t in it for the money. And I notice you didn’t ask me if I believed it, which shows me you ain’t quite as dumb as you sometimes act. So I got to ask myself—where is she, and what’s got you so twisted up?”
I just stared at him, and he said, “No? Give me twenty pushups, then, to finish off. Twenty regular, that is. And then ten one hand, ten the other. You need to work it out? Work it out.”
He was pushing me, but I wanted to be pushed. By the last two reps on my weaker left side, my entire arm was shaking, and when I got to my feet, Eugene shook his head.
“Adrenaline running the show again,” he said. “Get on the bike and take one more shot at letting it go, and we’re done.”
When I climbed on, he pulled out his stopwatch, pressed it, and kept his eye on it. Finally, I said, “She left.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, still not looking up. “How come?”
I shrugged and kept pedaling, and he waited without speaking until I said, “Because she doesn’t want to work at the company, doesn’t want my help. Says I’m…”
I stopped, but Eugene had no trouble filling in the sentence. “Taking away her air. Holding her so tight she can’t breathe.”
I glared at him. “If you know, why are you asking?”
“Man, I’m not the one brought this up.”
“Ha.” He was exactly the one.
He looked at the watch some more. “You ever think she might be pregnant?”
My feet stopped pedaling, and then I did the math and started up again. “No. That’s not it. She had a period, what, a few weeks ago. Three, four, somewhere like that, so she couldn’t be having any…what? Effects yet.”
He snorted. “Got a lot of experience with pregnant women, do you? She ain’t been progressing in here one bit the way she ought to’ve been. She’s trying, but her heart rate shoots up there right away, and then it stays up there like it shouldn’t. Gets tired too fast, too, ever since we started, and it’s not getting better like it ought to do.”
“But I told you,” I said. “Even if she were…” I had to work to get the word out, “pregnant, it’d be, what? A week? Two weeks? Barely a…an egg. And this started before then.”
“Uh-huh. It’s like I thought. You don’t know nothing. A woman gets pregnant, she’s got all this extra work going on right away. She’s making extra blood, heart’s pumping harder to move it around, lungs got to work more, too. And them hormones…I got three kids, two of ‘em daughters. Got two grandkids, too. You know how a guy takes ‘roids and gets all ragey? That’s male hormones, what they do to you. So what do you think happens when a woman’s got all them female hormones going wild in there, not giving her a moment’s peace? She ain’t never felt that way before, thinks she’s losing her mind, that’s what. Laughing one minute, crying the next, so tired she can’t hardly get out of bed, and trying to go on like normal. You think she’s bad when she’s having her period? That ain’t nothin’ compared to pregnancy. A pregnant woman—you got to cut her some slack. Anything hard you think you’ve done in your life, you better believe she’s working harder than that making your baby for you, and it starts way, way before she’s showing.”
Making your baby for you.
I’d long since stopped pedaling, because what he’d described—it sounded exactly like Hope. “She’s had a dodgy stomach,” I said slowly. “Ever since we came back from En Zed. Tired. Crying some, too, and that’s not usual. That’s not ever. But that’s not…that can’t…it’s what I said. The timing’s wrong. And anyway, she’d have told me.”
I tried to suppress the disappointment, just as I’d tamped down a surge of excitement at Eugene’s description that had shocked me into breathlessness. Hope might not have been the only one who’d had some trouble with moods lately.
“Maybe not, then,” Eugene said, “but if it ain’t that? Then it’s something going on. I told her to go get checked out. She ever do that?”
“No.” I was pedaling again, because I couldn’t sit still. “Told me she was fine, that it was nothing serious.”
“Hmm,” Eugene said. “Now, Karen got real sick like that, and their mama died, right? Least that’s what Debra said.”
“Yeh. Cancer, when she was…dunno. Late thirties, I’m guessing.” My scalp was prickling, and everything had changed again. Now, it was the creeping fear that I couldn’t pedal away.
“Which means if Hope did have something wrong with her,” Eugene said, “maybe she wouldn’t want to find out. Maybe it would scare her too bad to even think about, leaving Karen like that, the same way she got left. Or maybe she did find out, and she didn’t want to tell you. Whatever it is, don’t you think you better ask?”
“I tried asking.”
Hope didn’t have anything wrong with her, I told myself. She couldn’t have. Not like that. Nothing but an upset stomach, a little fatigue. She’d had a new job and a new living situation, and neither of them had been easy for her. That had to be all it was. The cold dread in the pit of my stomach tried to tell me something else, and I shoved it away.
“You sure you asked?” Eugene said. “Or did it get caught up in everything else, and all you said was what she ought to do? What’d you do, tell her to stop being so stupid?” When I stopped pedaling again, he sighed and shook his head. “Don’t tell me. What was the word?”
“What word?”
He gave me a stare that compelled the truth from me. “The word you used.”
“Childish,” I admitted. “I may have said ‘irrational,’ too. Maybe a couple other things. Because she was.”
“Now, how did I know? Bet that went over real good. Here’s the cold, hard truth, and I’m telling it to you, even though you’re not one bit ready to listen. The point with a woman ain’t winning. The point is keeping. If she ain’t in your bed anymore, you ain’t winning.”
He didn’t have to explain that. I got it. “Which doesn’t help,” I informed him, “not if I don’t know what I’m meant to do to get her to come home.” And to the doctor, too. Just to check. Just in case.
“Could start with an apology. That’s generally a pretty good spot, ‘cause it’s the hardest, and women do like it when you try your hardest.” He picked up his bag from the corner. “Or you could try something else, of course, since you probably think you got a better idea, or if you can’t apologize ‘cause you know you were right. Only thing I know for sure is, ain’t no motto in the world that goes, ‘I Give Up.’”
Hope
Let’s just pass over the days between Friday and Tuesday, shall we? Suffice it to say that I’d found out what it was like to be alone, and I hated it.
I know it’s weird that I hadn’t had the experience before, but I hadn’t. Other than the occasional night when Karen had slept over at a friend’s, I’d never been alone in bed, let alone in a whole apartment. And it was lonesome. As hot as it was, I still missed the warmth of another body.
I missed Karen, even though I called her every night. And, oh, how I missed Hemi. How I questioned my decision, even though I knew it had been the only one possible.
I missed his touch. I missed his voice. I missed his smell. But a woman who lost her breath and nearly had a panic attack from climbing the stairs and walking into an empty apartment, who burst into tears at the sight of her single toothbrush in the rack and wept through a Katherine Hepburn movie because Spencer Tracy would never love her for her wit and her brains and her success, and neither would Hemi—that woman had no business getting married to a man that powerful and complex. A woman like that had damn well better start getting a backbone.
And, yes, I do realize that I was declaring my independence by living in an apartment on which my boyfriend had paid the rent, and that my very electric bill was being covered by said boyfriend. Which was why I needed a job, and I needed it fast. I had a few thousand dollars in my personal account from before Hemi had opened the joint one, and that was my spending limit. And as soon as I had a job…rent.
Did I get that the money wouldn’t exactly make a big dent in his wallet, and that it would infuriate him to start getting rent checks from me? Sure I did. But all I had to navigate by was my own intuition, my own judgment. Otherwise, with no job, no sister, and no Hemi, I was rudderless.
Oh, and sick, too, my lightheaded episodes exacerbated by the heat. On Sunday, I had to stop on the way home from the store to lean against the wall before I could go on. On Monday afternoon, I walked upstairs with my laundry basket and had to put my head between my knees again. On Tuesday, I gave in and called the doctor.
“It’s probably nothing,” I told Dr. Galbraith that afternoon, after I’d braved the subway to Manhattan and nearly passed out again from being in the crowd. “Probably anxiety or low iron or something. Those can cause this kind of thing, right? I hardly ever get sick.”
I didn’t say what I feared, the thought that had me waking in the middle of the night. That this was how my mother had been, before she’d gotten even sicker. Before she’d died.
I wasn’t a hypochondriac, though. I’d never been one to imagine that every headache was a brain tumor. It would be something simple and easily fixed. It had to be. I was Karen’s guardian.
Then where is she? the nagging voice in my head whispered, even as I tried to shake it loose. Who’s looking out for her? Who’s left her?
“Hmm,” Dr. Galbraith said, a word they must teach in medical school. She’d listened to my heart and had apparently found that it was still beating. “Well, when we hear hoofbeats, we look for horses, not for zebras. When was your last period?”
“Uh…four weeks ago. Due any day. You think it’s PMS? That’s how I feel. Probably it.” I’d been stupid to come, and stupider to imagine I was sick. I was just looking for excuses to lie in bed and sleep, that was the truth.
“Mm,” she said. Another doctor noise. “Why don’t you lie down here and let me take a look?”
When she started poking and pressing under my attractive paper gown, though, I tensed. “I’m not pregnant,” I said. “I’m on the Pill, remember?”
“Uh-huh.” She was focusing on the eye chart on one wall, her fingers still moving, and very uncomfortable they were. And then she rolled away, snapped off the gloves, tossed them in the trash, and said, “But you’re pregnant anyway.”
Talk about not being able to breathe. “What? I can’t be.”
“About eight weeks, I’d say, but you’ll be able to get a more exact due date once you see an OB/GYN. Not my specialty.”
“I had a period,” I reminded her. No. Not possible. “There’s got to be something else.”
Oh, God. A tumor. I had a tumor on my ovary, or in my uterus, more likely. And if it was already affecting my overall health—that wasn’t good at all. My mom had gone so fast. So very fast.
Karen.
Dr. Galbraith pulled back the edge of the gown and checked out my breasts. “Tender here?” she asked when I winced. “Sore? Swollen? Got some tingles?”
“Well, yes, but…PMS.”
She slipped the gown back into place and gave me a pat on the arm. “Nope. Those are pregnant breasts, kiddo. We’ll do a blood test, or if you need the proof right now, you can go pee on a stick. Or you can save yourself twenty bucks, because there’s not going to be any different answer to this one.”
“But my period,” I insisted again, even as my heart started to do a tango. If I hadn’t already been lying down, I’d have fallen down.
“Uh-huh. Let me guess. It wasn’t heavy.”
“Well, no. But…the Pill.”
“Implantation spotting. Good news is that you’re halfway through your first trimester already, and you’re probably not going to get any sicker. At least, that’s good news if you want to keep it. If you don’t, you probably want to get moving. I can give you a referral for an abortion, but sooner would be much better there.”
“But how?” I asked again, as if it would make a difference.
She seemed to agree, because she said, “Doesn’t really matter, does it? Pregnant is pregnant.”
Eventually, we figured it out. I’d had some dental work done before we’d gone to New Zealand, and I’d taken antibiotics. “One guess,” she said. “The dentist didn’t mention that they’d interfere with the Pill. Middle-aged guy?”
“Yes.” I barely knew what I was saying. My head kept trying to float away from my body.
“For future reference?” she said. “Backup contraception with antibiotics, please.”
“That’s great to know. Now.”
“What about the baby’s father?” She glanced at my ring. “Is it your fiancé?”
I almost laughed. What, like Hemi’s sperm wouldn’t have duked it out with anybody else’s, and won? “Yes.”
“Remember, your choice is your own. If you’re feeling pressured, if you’re feeling unsafe, talk to me. Meanwhile,” she added before I could tell her that, no, I’d never be unsafe, and that she didn’t know the meaning of ‘pressured,’ “take this.”
You’re Pregnant, the double-sided flyer read. Now What?
Now what indeed.
I took the subway home again at the height of rush hour, and this time, when I had to swallow back nausea for the four stops when I was pressed up against a strapholding guy in a tank top, his armpit practically in my face, at least I knew the reason for it.
I longed, suddenly, for New Zealand. For cool green grass and the impossibly exotic creations that were fern trees. For endless green vegetation and clear air. For a wide ocean and a wild wind and an empty beach. For a life that wasn’t mine.
When I got home, I checked my emails. No responses to my applications, except a chipper note from Nathan that he’d asked his dad, and there might be something for me. In banking.
Tomorrow, I thought, and went into the kitchen to microwave a potato, which had turned out to be one of the few things I could manage. Let’s hope a baby could grow on yogurt and baked potatoes.
I was going to have a baby. Hemi’s baby. Hemi’s son, or his daughter.
I sat at the table with my potato chopped into tiny pieces and ate it one slow bite at a time as my throat threatened to close. And when I got up to wash my plate, my shaking hand hit my mother’s vase and knocked it into the sink.
It was as if it happened in slow motion. The tall white vase wobbled, tipped, and fell. My hand followed after it, grabbed for it, and found only air. And then my last reminder, my best thing—it hit the hard white ceramic sink and split in
two.
I set down the plate I still held, lifted out the sharp-edged pieces with a trembling hand, set them on the counter, and tried to breathe.
I wanted to rewind. I wanted a do-over. I wanted…I wanted none of it to be true. My hands were gripping the edge of the counter, and I looked at what I’d done and cried.
My mother’s vase was fractured, broken right down the middle, and so was my life. I was pregnant, and I was alone. I’d left Karen behind, and I’d lost Hemi. It was all my fault, and I couldn’t fix it.
I cried because Hemi had left me alone, and knew I was the one who had left. I cried because he hadn’t called me, and remembered that I was the one who’d asked him not to. And I cried because he hadn’t taken me for a walk, and he hadn’t sent me flowers. Not once. Not ever, since I’d moved in with him.
And, yes, the other part of me knew that was all completely unfair and insisted on reminding me of how busy and stressed he was, and of everything he’d done for Karen and me. But still. He’d said he wanted me, but only on his terms. Only if I stayed right there and did exactly what he wanted and was in his bed every night when he finally showed up.
I was going to have his baby, and I was a hot mess who wasn’t even ready to be a good partner, let alone anybody’s mother. And I’d broken my mother’s vase.
Finally, I stopped crying. I had no tears left, and they wouldn’t have helped anyway. I blew my nose, washed my face, picked up my phone, and made a call. And after that? I packed my suitcase.
Hemi
It was after eight by the time I was standing outside Hope’s building. I pressed the buzzer, and then I pressed it again, and then I leaned into it. And when nothing happened again, I did the thing I hadn’t done all along. I used the key.
I hadn’t used it so far, had I? I’d respected her wishes, but I wasn’t respecting this. If she was ill…
Suddenly, I knew she was ill. All those weeks last autumn, when Karen had grown ever weaker and sicker, what had Hope done? She’d kept working, had cared for her sister, had sat up with her, had dealt with everything life had thrown at her. She’d grown paler, and she’d grown thinner, but she’d kept going. Now, she couldn’t stay awake past nine. It had happened so gradually, I hadn’t noticed it. Or maybe I’d stopped noticing her at all.
Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) Page 31