* * *
I sat down across from Martine without saying “hello” first. I repeated never apologize over and over again in my head.
Martine looked up, smiled, closed her book without even marking the page. She tucked the book into her purse before I could see the title.
“Evelyn, I’m so glad you had time for me. I know you’re terribly busy.”
I clenched a fist under the table. “Terribly busy” felt like code for “too involved in work to save your marriage.” That wasn’t what she meant. Of course I was overreacting. But then, it was Martine. Wasn’t I entitled to overreact? I bit back everything I wanted to say. “Of course,” I replied. “It’s the least I could do.”
Martine rested her wrists on the edge of the table to hold her mug. Not her elbows. Elbows would be rude, but wrists, those were fine. I recognized the posture, and I sat up a little straighter, felt my lips purse with distaste. She didn’t seem to notice, smiling up at the server as he delivered my drink. She thanked him for me. He looked between the two of us for a moment before leaving.
I took a sip of my drink. It was too hot. I took another sip, letting it scald my throat.
“I wanted to ask you some things,” Martine said, then looked down into her mug. “But first, I hope you’ll forgive me if I step away for a moment? I got here a bit early and my tea has just run right through me.”
I was about to say that I didn’t mind. I was thinking that of course I didn’t mind, that Martine could get up and leave whenever she wanted, that Martine could take a running leap off a high bridge for all I cared. But before I had the chance to say anything, Martine pushed away from the table and stood, and the sight of her standing up stole my breath from my throat.
Martine gave me a small smile, then walked off to the restroom, one hand smoothing her blouse over her slightly rounded belly.
I finally managed a soft “Oh.”
So that’s what she wanted to talk about.
CHAPTER
SIX
Martine was not the cause of my worst fight with Nathan.
That fight, the worst one we ever had, happened years before she existed. Before Nathan and I were married, even. We had been working together, then, for two years, and had been dating for three. We already shared a home, a research lab, and—I thought—a dream.
Then I got pregnant, and I found out how wrong I’d been.
He didn’t go with me to the clinic, not because he didn’t want to, but because I didn’t tell him I was going. I can own that mistake: I should have told him that I wasn’t going to keep the baby, should have made it explicit. We had been working together for long enough that I knew Nathan struggled to grasp obvious concepts, and I should have applied that knowledge to myself the same way I applied it to pipette distribution and sensible glove disposal.
I suppose, on some level, I hoped that I wouldn’t have to tell him every little thing all the time—I suppose I hoped that there would be something, anything, that he would understand without me spelling it out.
But somehow, Nathan didn’t understand that a baby would destroy our dreams, would ruin the career that we had been building. Even though he’d known me for three years, even though he’d seen my endless hours of work, even though he knew how close I was to making a name for myself in the field—in spite of all that, he failed to see that I would never keep that baby. He failed to see that my career was all the legacy I would ever need.
I got home from the clinic, unsteady on my feet and nauseated, to find him waiting with a bottle of sparkling cider. He told me his good news: He’d accepted a job as an assistant professor on an accelerated tenure track. He told me he would be able to support our family, that I could put work on hold for a couple of years.
The fight was endless, cruel on both sides. He blamed me for his decision to throw away his own ambition in favor of “stability.” I told him that he was a coward, seeking refuge in the comfort of a child who would admire him without question, and colleagues who would never know how sloppy and useless his labwork was, how limited his dreams were. He yelled at me, knocked over a chair, clenched his fists and looked at me like he was going to put them to use.
I vomited a thin stream of yellow bile onto the kitchen table, my head swimming, my vision spotted with white sparks.
He threw a roll of paper towels into my lap, called me selfish. I threw them back at his head, calling him naïve.
It was awful.
The fight itself was bad enough, but the timing was catastrophic. I could barely hold my own after the day I’d had. Part of me wanted him to hit me, wanted him to make it the worst it could be—but instead he stormed outside for a cigarette. I waited for half an hour before I realized he wasn’t coming back.
By the time he came home, I’d cleaned off the kitchen table, taken a scalding shower, and gone to bed. He woke me by turning on the lamp on my nightstand and saying my name.
“Evelyn, wake up,” he said, his voice soft and calm, his hand gentle on my back. I remember the way my skull throbbed, his scotch-and-cigarette stink seeming to pulse in time with the pain in my temples.
Nathan told me that he was sorry.
If I had been in better condition, or maybe if I hadn’t been so recently asleep, that apology would have started our fight afresh. Nathan always apologized to try to make me feel guilty for having been angry with him, or to make me back down from a point.
It was cowardly, his apology, and if I’d been myself I would have told him so.
But I didn’t tell him so, and in that silent space where my hornet’s sting should have gone, he told me that he loved me. He set a ring down on the nightstand—no box, just the ring, pinched between his thumb and middle finger. He put it down with a tiny click of metal on wood, then walked out of the room without saying a word about it.
I heard the squeal of the bathroom tap, the hiss of the shower running. I tried the ring on as I listened to the water rushing through the old pipes in the walls of our tiny apartment. The narrow band was yellow gold, set with two emeralds, and it was not so tight that I could say it didn’t fit.
I fell asleep with the ring on. In the morning, I startled at the way it caught the light.
The worst fight we ever had, and it ended with our engagement.
After that, Nathan and I never really argued over whether or not to have children. We stopped arguing all together; arguing would have required me to engage in conversation beyond the word “no.”
He started agitating anew for a baby shortly before he got tenure, and I told him that I didn’t intend to put my career aside just because he was bored by his, and that was the end of that. It never came up again.
We had agreed.
Or at least, that’s what I thought, until that day in the tea shop.
* * *
I waited until Martine was out of sight before allowing myself to collapse into a parenthesis. But I only gave myself a few seconds to slump in my chair before straightening; it wouldn’t do to have Martine see me in a posture of defeat.
It wasn’t possible.
Martine was pregnant. Not very pregnant, but definitely, absolutely pregnant. Impossible, completely impossible, there was simply no way—but it was right there in the soft swell of her belly.