by Julia Kent
“We need to get to a twenty-four hour pharmacy and buy Plan B. Or get me back to my apartment, and fast. The sooner we—”
“Plan B?”
“Liam, don’t play dumb.”
“No, seriously—what is it?”
“You have the nickname ‘The Kegger’ for tapping everything with a vertical taco, and you don’t know what Plan B is?”
I just stared her down.
“Emergency birth control,” she sputtered. “You take it in cases like this! Except I never thought I’d ever have to take all the advice I hand out at work and apply it to me!” Her voice went high and hysterical and she started to laugh with a wheezing, giggly sound. She was losing it. Totally losing it.
I stood and went over to her, grabbing her gently by the wrists, forcing her to look at me. “Charlotte. Charlotte.” I got nice and firm, lowering my voice, like talking to a scared animal. “You’ll be fine. The chances of pregnancy are….”
None.
I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t put those words out there. We still hadn’t talked about what happened years ago. It was like a third partner in bed, except one that was a voyeur, watching but never participating. Just observing and collecting data, as if ready to use the information in the future for purposes not yet revealed.
The lack of talking was creeping me out, but the intimacy (and, ahem, the sex) was worth the trade-off.
Until now. God damned shredded condom. Same brand I’d been using for years. I guess the odds finally caught up with me. Long shot.
Of all the people. A broken condom would have been so much better with some chick on the pill, or someone I didn’t—
What was I thinking? A broken condom sucks no matter what. Now it opened up a whole layer to this barely reconnecting thing with Charlotte.
“You don’t need to rush. We can just get dressed and I’ll take you back to your apartment and you can get the pills you need.”
“No. The sooner the better. I can’t get pregnant, Liam. I can’t. I just—I can’t.”
“Why are you so hysterical?”
Wrong words.
“Why am I?” she roared. “You think I want to go through what I went through five years ago all over again? You think I want—” Her chest heaved convulsively, a keening sob ripping through my apartment. She looked like she was about to have a seizure and my mind raced, instinct telling me that calming her down was more important than any talk we needed to have.
“It’s okay, Charlotte. It’s fine. We don’t need to get into this right now. You’re not going to get pregnant. You’re not. You’re totally fine.”
“What the fuck is the matter with you, Liam? We just had sex! I’m in my ovulation cycle! We used a condom and spermicide, but we beat the odds once before!” Her voice crackled with anger. “We’re so lucky that way, aren’t we? And if you think I’m going to let you knock me up again and dump me like you did, then fuck you!”
“Fuck you!” The words roared out of me and I was barreling down on her. She knew I wouldn’t hurt her—couldn’t hurt her—but five years of everything rolled through me, and we were face to face, screaming at each other, the words a bloodbath.
And then, when she paused to take a deep breath, I said:
“You can’t get pregnant because I’m sterile.”
Charlotte
Oh, his face as those words poured out of that twisted, cruel mouth.
Because I’m sterile.
I actually laughed, howled, really, because What the Fuck? That was one sick joke. Sick, sick, sick.
Like me, right now, at the thought of being pregnant. Not Liam’s baby. Not again.
“I have slightly more self-control now,” I hissed as the laughter died in my throat, which throbbed as if recovering from being sucker-punched, “so I won’t slap you, but you’re an asshole for making a joke like that.”
All the blood drained out of his face. “It’s not a joke.”
All the blood drained out of my heart. “What?”
“Charlotte, I can’t get you, or anyone else pregnant. I’m sterile.”
“Since when?”
“Since I was sixteen.”
No. No no no.
“You’re lying,” I whispered, but I could tell from his face he was telling the truth.
“No, I’m not.”
A whirling buzz of everything flew through my mind all at once, like a tornado above only me. Sterile. Sterile, how could he—
“How?”
“Remember how I had mumps my sophomore year?”
“That can make you sterile?”
He just nodded. “I had…a complication. Testicular swelling. It’s rare, but it can make men sterile if everything lines up just right.” He snorted. “And it was a long shot, but…”
“You’re sure?”
“Mom and Dad made me go to two specialists in Boston. Sperm tests were definitive. I can’t father children, Charlotte,” he said with a deliberate slowness that sucked all the oxygen out of the room. There was a kind of wild pity in his eyes that made me want to tear my own eyes out so I could never, ever see that look on his face as the dawning realization poured through me.
“Then, then,” I gasped, my breathing harder to maintain, “then five years ago, when I told you I was pregnant, you—oh my God!” The room began to spin, hard and fast, like someone turned a roulette wheel and I was the ball.
Whirrrrrrrr.
I sat down on the floor and pulled my chin to my knees, completely exposed and utterly ill. “You, oh my God, Liam, you threw me away, threw the baby away because you assumed it wasn’t yours?”
Silence.
“You thought I…I’m going to be sick.” I stood and clawed my way down the little hall to his bathroom and threw up, the dinner, the glass of wine, all of it coming back up, as if my body were trying to purge itself of five years of poison to make this all make sense.
And still, from Liam—silence.
I vomited until all that was left was bile, then the tears poured down me, sliding through the valley between my breasts, peppering my shoulder as I pressed my cheek against the cold porcelain toilet, my ass on his cracked tile floor, grief rippling through me. I cried without logic or purpose, just emptying myself until—some part of me hoped—I was hollow enough and cleansed enough to go back out into the living room and face a scenario that had never—not once—crossed my mind.
That Liam had broken up with me because he thought I was trying to pass another man’s baby off as his.
I’d dump my ass too if I thought that.
But that meant Liam would have to assume I’d cheated on him, and that was the part that slammed into me, over and over like a malfunctioning steamroller.
Motherfucker actually thought I cheated on him? Never told me he was sterile? Put two and two together and got four on the outside, but relied on medical certainty to explain what his emotions couldn’t?
And I spent a long, cold night bleeding out, then in an ER having our baby scraped out of me, alone and desperate—abandoned because Liam was sterile and didn’t tell me, and made assumptions about me that weren’t true.
Were never true.
Couldn’t be true.
It was worse than I thought, then. This explanation made sense. It was rational. Logical. All the parts fit, but they hinged on his bedrock certainty that the only way I could be pregnant was with someone else’s baby.
And that meant Liam never really loved me the way I’d convinced myself he had.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe telling me you were sterile was a good idea back then?” I was talking to the wall now in whispers. “That maybe I would have been supportive, grieved with you, helped you through that?”
The wall was a good listener.
“You didn’t trust me enough—love me enough—to tell me one of the biggest things I can imagine anyone experiencing, and then you used that information to create a case for dumping me and—you asshole!” I cried.
I rose to my feet and stood in front of the sink, staring at the gaping, dark holes that were normally my eyes. How many countless hours had I spent in this exact position, eyes boring into my reflection, looking for some answer, some comfort, some “aha!” moment where it all would make sense and I could move on with my life and find happiness
Well, ha, here I was. The answer was a big whopper of one, and it didn’t give me any real clarity in the end. Just unleashed yet another vortex of pain.
A gentle tap on the door. Liam stood there, already dressed. Like a stab to the heart, here I was, naked and completely stripped raw while he just tidied himself up, shut down, and walked away.
Who knew life could have a repeat in it like this?
“Um, I don’t know what to do here, Charlotte. Can we go out and get some coffee or just go for a walk?”
Panic fluttered inside me. “You want to leave?”
“I don’t want to leave you.” He kept his eyes centered entirely on my face. The passion from just moments ago was long gone, the dissonance so strong it was like someone had died, and the body was on the floor between us, blood pooling and bones poking out. But we were ignoring it, because acknowledging it meant we had to do something. Act. Change.
I just…I snapped.
“Please give me privacy,” I said in a shockingly controlled voice. He stepped back and shut the door slowly as I turned on the sink and rinsed my acrid mouth out a few times. Then a tap at the door.
“Yes?”
The door opened a sliver and his hand came through with some of my discarded clothes. “I thought you might want these.”
Click.
That was the Liam I remembered. Thinking about my feelings, worrying about how my internal emotional state was, cleaving with me and joining in creating our own little haven of good feelings. As I slid my leg into my panties I felt so vulnerable, sobs making my chest shake. Putting on jeans, then a bra, then a shirt, and finally I was covered. Walled off. Contained.
But it felt like I was still naked and so new. Like someone had peeled off my skin and left me in the bright sunshine to bake.
I could hear him in the living room, little shuffling sounds a constant reminder that he hadn’t left. Would he just take off again? Shut me out? Shut me down? The cruelty of that, of piercing my five-year-thick wall and then dumping me again was so malevolent that it made me think that evil might damn well exist.
My own mind was my worst enemy right now, though. Not Liam. Sterile? He was sterile, and he assumed our baby hadn’t been our baby. All these years.
“Okay, then. Coffee,” I said as I walked out to face him.
Without a word he reached for me and slid his arms around my waist. I stiffened. He persisted. I didn’t melt, but a jumble of words got caught around my heart. Keep holding me, I wanted to say. I need more time.
He pulled back and I smiled a sad, tight smile. “I can handle coffee,” I said. “Let’s start there.” He looked like he’d been up for three straight days and had a shell-shocked sense about him.
We walked outside, and along the way, we saw a yellow school bus stop. Tiny little kids, no taller than my hip, climbed on board, wearing backpacks bigger than them.
Kindergarteners. Five years. Actually—I realized in that unfortunately timed moment, that cataclysmically ruinous second—if I hadn’t lost the baby we’d have a child headed toward kindergarten in less than a year.
I stared at a little girl with a pink princess backpack, long, shining blond curls cascading down her back, her little face grinning at her mom and waving as the bus swallowed her.
Liam watched me watching her, and the world went cold.
“I can’t,” I said. “I just…can’t.” I had my purse, and I could walk to the train station from here, take the train to Worcester and call Maggie to come get me.
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t do this.” And with that, I walked away from Liam.
He didn’t follow me.
Chapter Seventeen
Charlotte
I stared at the stack of disciplinary forms sitting on the table in front of me, then looked up at the other members of the judicial committee for residence life. This was a closed session, and three resident directors, including me, two RAs, the associate director for student services, and—of course—a university lawyer were all present.
“She tried to kill herself in a residence hall,” the lawyer, Marci Robbett, recounted. “That alone is enough for termination from on-campus living privileges.” But there was an uncertainty in her voice, and I found myself turning toward her in gratitude. Petty bureaucrats who made decisions based solely on the rules, without giving any breathing room for humanity and judgment, made me red with rage.
“And yet we’ve allowed some students who’ve attempted suicide to stay on campus,” I said evenly. While I wasn’t the student’s official advocate, all of the professionals on the committee knew damn well I’d fight for her. She had tried to kill herself after filing rape charges against her ex-boyfriend, and the DA had decided not to pursue the charges. Then Campus Life had determined that there wasn’t enough evidence to ban the ex-boyfriend (who was not a student) from campus.
Which meant he got away with it, scot-free.
Maggie had recused herself from sitting in on this hearing. We all understood.
“Is she a danger to anyone other than herself? She doesn’t have a roommate, right?” Marci asked. She was a kindly, older, plump woman with grey, curly hair and sharp brown eyes behind rectangle glasses. Her daughter had been one of my residents last year. Pre-law major. Like mother like daughter…
That made me think about the phone call I owed my own mom.
“She is in a double, but the roommate moved out. The roommate’s boyfriend is best friends with the perp,” I elaborated.
“Alleged perp,” Marci insisted. But she did it with an expression of distaste that was not aimed at me.
The two RAs paid avid attention to the proceedings. My fellow resident directors stared at their phones, typing occasionally. Nice.
“We need a final ruling on this one. The student wants to stay through the end of fall semester, and has already applied for a transfer. She says she just needs to get through the semester.”
“Double room, huh?” The associate director looked at me. “Can we get her to pay for a single room and have her stay there? Or do we need that spot for a waiting-list student?”
Ah. A ray of hope. “No,” I lied. “We can keep her there if she pays the single rate.” We did have some freshmen living five to a quad right now, but…
“If she agrees to that, and to being monitored by psych services, and we have a smaller meeting with Charlotte, her psychologist, and me,” the associate dean explained, “then I think we can make this work.”
Thank you thank you thank you. A wave of nausea rolled over me, making my skin heat up. Thank God the system could bend to serve the people it managed and not always the other way around.
“I’ll agree, with caution: the alleged perpetrator should also be monitored, quietly, and the alleged victim should be very carefully trained in how to legally handle any breach that should be documented,” Marci declared.
“You mean,” said one of the RAs, a very righteously angry young man named Josh from across my quad, “we need to officiate his ass off campus. If he sneezes wrong, it’s written up.”
Marci gave him a stern look, though I could see she was suppressing an appreciative sly grin. “I mean what I said, Mr. Collins. She needs to have someone mentor her through the exact channels for reporting misbehavior so that at every possible turn any actions he takes that can be construed as violating her privacy or personal boundaries will be taken seriously.”
“Could you translate that to English, please?” the RA asked.
Marci sighed. “The more we document what he does, the better the chance of getting him banned from campus.”
“Paper trail,” Josh said.
“You got it.”
As the meeting broke up, I couldn’t break the pervasive nausea. Sexual violence had such a domino effect, creating wave after wave of fallen pieces of so many lives. While this was one tiny victory, there were so many battles. Thank God I’d never had to deal with being raped, or stalked, or intimidated like so many women I’d known in college and, now, in my line of work.
It wore on me, though. There was a reason people in this job got “Res Life Burnout.” When you lived with hundreds of people experiencing identity formation and the shift from dependence to independence as new adults, you saw the gritty underbelly of humanity far more than you could ever imagine.
“You okay?” Marci asked me, appearing suddenly at my side as I put my papers in my brief bag.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You seem a bit green.”
“Having a student almost booted out of the dorms because she had an emotional reaction to a shitstorm of a legal and administrative result can do that to me.”
“Off the record?” she asked.
I nodded and leaned in.
“The guy may have done something similar to a young woman at one of the other local colleges. I did some digging. No paper trail, no proof, the woman transferred out. The college won’t give details. Just rumors, but…”
“Fucker.”
“That about sums it up.”
“Any thoughts on how we can keep him away?”
“Document, document, document.”
I nodded. “Will do.”
“And Charlotte?”
“Yeah?”
“Get something to eat. You don’t look so good.”
Liam
“So it’s over before it really began?” Darla asked. Here we went again. If Oprah and Dr. Phil ever joined forces with Jeff Foxworthy, they’d create a character like Darla.
“Pretty much.” It had been a month since I’d seen Charlotte.
“No hope?”
“She’s not really that interested in talking about it.” Ignoring my texts was a clue.
“I can see why not. You accuse a woman of cheating on you and trying to pass off a baby as yours and that can kind of make a woman a bit unaroused.”