****
I looked in on Sara again when I got home; she had moved to the center of the bed, still sleeping soundly. One hand was extended outwards across my spot, and I wondered if she had been reaching out for me in her sleep. It was a warming thought. I pulled the door, left it open just a crack, and walked into the kitchen. I scanned through the cabinets, and found one with some space where I set the tests and the plant. I tried to think about what I was going to say when Sara and I finally did sit down and have our talk. The truth was that I had no idea where to start. In the end, I just reached into the refrigerator and gathered the makings for breakfast. Setting eggs on the counter, I envisioned them cooked, and it was so real that I could smell them. My stomach growled quite loudly at me; I was starving…the last thing I had eaten was the oysters, and they didn’t last long inside of me. I found peppers, ham, and cheese, and set them on the counter. I would just let fate guide what I said.
But first, breakfast.
I had just set two plates on the table, a vegetable omelet and two pieces of buttered toast on each, when I heard the toilet flush.
“Are you cooking me breakfast again, Mister Fluke?” Sara called from down the hall.
I smiled and replied, “You bet. Ask Flukey if he wants anything.”
“Will do,” I heard her laugh. “We’ll be out as soon as I get dressed.”
I poured two cups of black coffee and two glasses of orange juice, admiring my work on the table. I felt domestic at that moment, like a male Martha Stewart. I let out a small laugh and said out loud, “Now, for the finishing touch, the piece de resistance.”
I pulled the plant out of the cabinet, the strange looking stick with one leaf hanging off of it in the pretty pink basket, and placed it in the center of the table. It wasn’t the greatest of table art items, but it looked nice enough, and I knew that it would bring a smile to Sara’s face.
Sara came into the kitchen, wearing a yellow T-shirt I had never seen before and a pair of beige capri pants. She looked fabulous, as always, and I told her so as she sat down in front of her omelet.
I watched her to see the moment when her eyes caught the plant, but she didn’t look up from her plate. She picked up her fork and started cutting off a section of omelet, slowly and quietly. I leaned forward and kissed the top of her head as I sat down in front of my plate, ravenous, ready to tear into my omelet.
“Did you notice the centerpiece?” I asked, shoveling a hunk of omelet onto a piece of toast.
“Yes, it’s very nice, Adam,” she said, slowly working on her breakfast, not looking at me.
I furrowed my brow, slightly let down by her response. I hadn’t expected fireworks from a silly looking plant, but I had figured with the current mood, it would have at least gotten me a kiss. We ate our breakfast in silence, and I wondered if Sara had slipped into another trance.
She pushed her plate with the omelet only half-eaten towards the center of the table and lit a cigarette. As she exhaled, I asked her, “Something wrong?” through a mouthful of toast.
She reached behind her, pulled something out of her back pocket, and tossed it onto the table. As soon as I recognized the thin square item, I almost choked on my toast.
It was a picture, a picture of Sara, a picture of Sara when she was a little girl. It was one of the pictures I had looked at yesterday, and I had apparently missed putting back in the shoebox.
“I found this on the floor of my closet,” she said, looking at me. “Any idea why it might be out of its box?” It wasn’t exactly an accusing tone, but it wasn’t the most pleasant of tones, either. It definitely confirmed my fear that she had discovered my venture into her private life.
I swallowed hard to get the soft hunk of toast down my throat. It was the first time she had spoken to me with any sort of anger in her voice, and it made me feel terrible. I felt like a shit, a big, nosy shit.
I thought briefly about denying it. I almost said, “Well, I have no idea why this picture is out of its box,” but I knew better. Nobody but Sara, Killer, Flukey, and I had been in the place for a while, and Sara was too neat a person, too organized, to have a picture discarded on the floor. I knew I just needed to own up to it.
“Sara, I’m sorry. I just came across your pictures, and…” I started lamely.
“You came across them?” she repeated. “Really? How did you just happen to come across shoeboxes on a shelf in the back of a closet?” She tapped her ashes and looked at me, waiting for an answer.
“Okay, okay. I didn’t come across them; I saw the boxes and opened them up. I was just curious, Sara, that’s all. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy or anything.” I explained, miserably. “I saw the pictures and couldn’t put them down.” I lit a cigarette and tapped a non-existent ash into the tray. I felt humiliated, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, his mother waving her finger at him.
She stared at me and I stared back sheepishly, the frown on her face accented by her tired-looking eyes. The look on her face showed that she didn’t really want to be angry or upset with me, but instinct had overtaken her before she had time to think. She took another drag, and her face started relaxing slightly.
“Well, Adam, if you wanted to see pictures, honey, all you had to do was ask,” she explained, the tone in her voice softening.
“I know, and I’m sorry. You were at work, and I was bored, so I just…explored a little.” I picked my fork up, speckled with egg, and turned it between my fingers. “I just wanted to learn more about you, I guess. That’s all.”
She leaned forward in her chair and put a hand on my hand, forcing me to put the fork down. “It’s all right, Adam,” she said. “I didn’t mean to overreact. I’ve just been such a private person for a long time…it’s a little hard sometimes for me to accept that I’m not alone anymore.”
The break in her anger triggered my idiot side and allowed it to surge forward. I let it out this time by picking up the last corner of a piece of buttery toast and sticking it to my forehead, where the butter held it fast.
“You’re not alone anymore, Sara. You’ve got Toastface Fluke stapled to your hip,” I said, toast stuck to my face. She eyed the toast and laughed, and the anger vanished from her face, replaced by the smiling, laughing Sara that I loved. The woman who, quite possibly, had baby Fluke in her tummy, somewhere between a vegetable omelet and a slice of buttered toast.
After Sara removed the toast from my forehead and wiped it clean with a napkin, I cleared the table and started filling the sink with water and dish soap. Sara sat in the kitchen, and we talked as I washed the greasy pan and the dishes.
“I like the plant, Adam. It’s interesting. Thank you,” she said to my back.
“I thought it would look good in our house,” I said, repeating the words “our house” in my head. I liked the way it sounded.
“What’ll we do if I am pregnant, Adam?” she asked, and I could hear a trace of apprehension in her voice.
“Well, Sara,” I started, rinsing the pulpy residue of the orange juice from a glass. “I don’t know. How do you feel about it?” I didn’t know what to say, and I thought maybe she could answer for both of us. Or at least I could hear her answer first before formulating my own.
I heard her light a cigarette and drop the lighter on the table. “I don’t know if I want to be a mother, Adam. I don’t know if I could get an abortion, though. I don’t know what I think.” She sounded confused and tired, which echoed my sentiments.
“Well, I know one thing. We need to figure out if you’re for sure pregnant or not,” I declared. She looked at me with raised eyebrows, silently telling me that she already knew for sure. I didn’t know much about women’s cycles, but if Sara had never been late before, then that didn’t bode well for us.
“I guess we’ll need to run to the drugstore,” she said. I thought of the pregnancy tests in the cabinet, and wiped the suds off of my hands with a dishrag.
“No, we don’t.” I opened the cabinet
and retrieved the two boxes, holding them in front of me, posing like a model in a home pregnancy test advertisement. “Toastface Fluke has already taken care of that.”
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing Toastface is here with me,” she said, reaching for the boxes. She turned them in her hands, looking at one box, then the other. She set them on the table and asked, “Did you think to pick up any booze for us to celebrate the results? Because you know I’ll need a drink afterwards.” She smiled at me, but I knew she wasn’t joking.
I shook my head, realizing that she was right…whatever the results of the pregnancy test was, we had reason to get drunk. I found my keys and started for the door. Sara hopped up and said she wanted to come along, so we left, off to buy booze.
In the car, headed to Barney’s Package Store, I asked Sara, “What if you are pregnant? Maybe you shouldn’t drink.”
“If I’m pregnant, I’ll drink tonight, and then I won’t drink anymore,” she answered. “At least not until we figure out what to do about it.”
I drove along, conflicting thoughts in my head. I pictured two little Adams inside my empty head, almost like in the movies, when an angel and a devil appear on someone’s shoulders.
One side said, “Having a baby would be great. You’d be a great father.”
The other side said, “You’re scared to death of babies.”
“But the responsibility would be good for you.”
“You can’t keep a goldfish alive, and goldfish don’t even need anything except a sprinkle of food every now and then.”
“A baby would change that.”
“You work in a book store. You don’t make any money.”
It became too much for me; I was glad we were getting booze. I felt like I would be happier if she wasn’t pregnant; I couldn’t imagine going through the internal arguments for the next nine months.
We picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a bottle of Hot Damn from Barney’s, and drove home.
Back at the apartment, I mixed up two Jack and Cokes, and Sara read the instructions on the box. The atmosphere was tense inside of the apartment; I got the feeling Sara didn’t want to take the tests, and I felt that way myself. I could almost believe that if we just didn’t confirm it, it didn’t exist.
Ignorance is bliss, Adam-boy.
Twice, as Sara read the boxes, I came close to telling her to not bother with the tests. I was ready to tell her that we should just wait for her period, that her being late for the first time ever was just a fluke. The period would come soon enough, I wanted to tell her.
What I really wanted to do was reassure her, to make her think I wasn’t just a sniveling gimp who couldn’t make a decision or take control of a situation. I felt helpless and witless watching her read, and I wondered if her opinion of me had been reduced at all due to the wishy-washy way I was handling the situation.
I turned the cold tumbler in my hand, preparing my speech. I would tell her, it’s okay, don’t worry. We’re going to ride it out, and your period will come, and we’ll be fine. What I ended up doing, however, was staring at the bubbly liquid in the glass, and watching Sara head to the bathroom with one of the tests in her hand. She gave me a small kiss on the forehead as she walked by and whispered, “Love you, Mister Fluke.”
I whispered “love you” back to her, and realized that she would always be the strong one.
The bathroom door clicked shut, and I stood up. I was nervous, and I decided to put some music on to break up some of the quiet that was filling the apartment. I scanned her CD rack and decided on the Doors.
The music flowed out of the speakers and I plopped back down into the easy chair, letting my head rest on the back. The thoughts of the previous day, from PJs, touched the back of my mind again, and I sat up.
Keep in mind, Adam-boy, that she has a picture of your father in her closet.
“No, no, no,” I said out loud. I sucked down the rest of the drink in my glass and went into the kitchen to make another.
Her father is probably your father, Adam-boy.
“No way of knowing that,” I spoke out loud again. I knew Sara wouldn’t be able to hear me, and if she did, she would probably think I was singing along with Jim Morrison. Even though I doubt I could be singing along to anything right now.
The thoughts gnawed at me for a few more moments until I heard the bathroom door open. I went back to the easy chair and sat down, and Sara came into the living room. I saw a cylindrical piece of white plastic extended in her hand, shaped like a digital thermometer, with a narrow end that was held in the urine stream. I felt like sliding out of the chair and crawling underneath the coffee table. I didn’t want to see it.
Her face was expressionless, though I tried hard to read it, to get the answer without looking for a plus or minus sign. She said, “Here, take a look,” and held the tester out to me.
I grabbed it with one hand, and took a long pull off of my drink with the other. I had mixed it strong, and felt the slight burning as the whiskey slid down my throat into my stomach. I relished the feeling and held the tester in front of my face.
Minus.
I suppressed a small yelp of happiness and looked at Sara with what was probably an inappropriate amount of relief, but she returned my smile and she said, “We’re fine, Adam.”
Thank you Jesus! I yelled inside. Outside, I said, “That’s great, Sara.”
“I’m going to take the other test just to make sure,” she said. I turned the one in my hand over, inspecting every centimeter of it, just to make sure there were no other, hidden indicators that would prove the test wrong somehow. There were none.
“Are you sure you want to bother?” I asked. I was slightly worried underneath my relief. I wanted to accept these results and move on.
“I might as well, Adam. We have the test already, and it doesn’t hurt to get a second opinion, you know.” She picked up the box and headed to the bathroom.
I felt okay, though, because the box for the test she had taken already promised a “98% Accuracy Rate!” It was designed to reassure me, and it was working. I felt confident that the other test, which boasted a “98.9% Accuracy Rate” (when I bought the tests, I wondered how one brand managed a 9/10 of a percentage point edge on the others, but I quickly gave up, as there was probably technology involved that I couldn’t even comprehend) would prove the first one correct.
I heard a flush, and Sara came out of the bathroom. Again, she held out a white plastic tester, this one with a more rectangular than cylindrical appearance (perhaps that’s the .9 percent difference, I briefly thought). Her face was expressionless again as she held out the tester, and, feeling confident, I joked with her, “You know, you’d be a great poker player. You’ve got a kick ass poker face.” I took the white plastic from her and remembered that on this test, the small square would turn blue if you were pregnant, and stay white if you weren’t. I glanced down at it.
The square was blue, very blue.
I sucked down half of my drink and looked at Sara, confused. “But, these things are over ninety-eight percent accurate. How could…” I trailed off, glancing back and forth from Sara to the little blue window on the tester.
“Don’t know. But, these tests apparently don’t prove a thing for us. I’ll have to see a doctor and have a blood test.” She sighed and sat down on the couch, grabbing her drink. She held her drink up in my direction and said, “A toast to ignorance,” she said, laughing. I thought I caught a hint of bitterness in the laugh.
I laughed quietly and went to the couch next to her. I felt bad for her, this beautiful woman who just had to pee on two different little sticks and didn’t learn anything. It was a lot of strategic peeing to not know anything when it was over.
“I’ll call the doctor tomorrow and make an appointment,” she said. “Tonight, though, let’s just get drunk, Adam.”
“Sure, Sara, whatever you want.” I said, though the picture in her closet continued to gnaw away at me. I wanted to ask her
about it; in fact, I felt like I might go insane if I didn’t. At the same time, though, it had been such a stressful day up to that point, I didn’t know if I wanted to open up another can of worms with the love of my life.
We sat on the couch, listening to “Riders on the Storm,” when I blurted out, “Sara, there’s something I need to ask you about.”
“Sure, honey.” She sat up, and turned sideways to face me. She looked so cute as she did it, so girly, which was a terrible word, but the best I could come up with to describe the way she moved. Her right leg was tucked under her bottom, and her other leg stretched out across my lap. She tucked her chin down and took a sip from her drink, but kept her eyes on me as she did. Her hair was in a ponytail, and the ponytail hung over her shoulder.
Now there’s a picture, I thought, or as Sean would sometimes say, “A Helen of Troy. A beautiful portrait. A vision of loveliness.”
“When I was rooting around in your pictures, invading your privacy yesterday,” I started and laughed, poking my finger gently into her belly. I didn’t want this to turn too tense, so I tried to be lighthearted. “I found a picture that I wanted to ask you about.”
She didn’t say anything, just nodded at me, her eyes not moving.
I didn’t know how to say it any other way, so I said, “You have a picture of a guy who looks almost exactly like me, Sara. Almost a carbon copy. Did you know that?”
“Adam?” she said, but that was all. I recognized the trance as it came, and reached out to take the glass from her hand. I set the glass on the table and looked at her. She was gone again, and I had a bad feeling that I may never find out who the man in the picture was.
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