And with each negative pregnancy test, the space between us grew wider. He was adamant about not wanting to adopt. The children needed to be his. One of the times we fought about it was when I printed a bunch of information about international adoption off the Internet. He ripped it to shreds. I fell to the floor, picking up the pieces of paper, shutting my eyes and trying to conjure the man I’d fallen in love with. The one who used to bring me two pints of my favorite ice cream on his way home from work every Friday night because he knew one wouldn’t be enough. The man who’d written me a poem and recited it to me on our second anniversary. The husband who’d once told me when we were playing one of those what-if games that he’d still love me even if I lost all my hair in a freak accident.
On the last morning I saw him, our recurring argument happened again. It came up every 28 days or 280 days, depending on when he chose to wield it like a weapon in his arsenal. And that particular morning he’d found the test in the trash can. I thought I’d buried it deep enough down under tissues. But I’d been in a daze when I tossed it. Because I’d been so sure that I finally might be pregnant. I’d been in this fertility yoga class for a few months. And I felt different, so different that I actually bought a test instead of waiting for my period to show up as it always did. But then, after I’d peed, there it was, that single pink line.
And I’d been so mad at myself for telling him. For letting him hope with me. I’d shared the changes I’d felt in my body—the tender breasts, the cramps in my lower abdomen. And I had felt all those things. But they’d been phantom pregnancy symptoms. A surprisingly common occurrence in women who are waiting to take a test, I’d learned when I looked it up. After I’d stared at the white plastic in my hand, my hopes crushed when that single pink line appeared. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. To confess that my body had failed us once more. But I’d planned to—when the time was right.
He came flying into the bedroom with his white knuckles around that stick.
“Goddamn it, Jacks! I thought you were sure this time! When were you going to tell me it was negative?”
I sat up tall in the bed and tried to collect the right words. That I hadn’t told him because I couldn’t bear to disappoint him again. That when that lonely pink line appeared, I had lain on the bathroom floor and given up. On myself. On the notion that we could create a baby together. On us. And I was terrified that he would see it all on my face. So I had said nothing.
“James, I was going to tell you . . .”
“Enough with the fucking lies!”
Like an allergic reaction to his roaring voice, tears spilled from my eyes.
“How could you do this to me? You were so sure. I even told my mom there might be a chance.”
I flung the sheets back from my body and got up on my knees on the mattress, absorbing his words. His pain.
Looking back, I wish that I’d thrown my arms around his neck and told him I was just as disappointed. That I had felt a swishing in my abdomen when my period hadn’t shown on the twenty-eighth day, and that I told myself that flutter could be the child that would bring us salvation—from my deceit, from his anger. But instead of comforting him with my own intense sadness, I attacked.
“To you?” I waved my arms across my abdomen. “I’m in this too, in case you’ve forgotten. You will never understand how much I suffer every single time it doesn’t happen. And I’m sorry. So very sorry I didn’t tell you before we got married that there is so much scar tissue around my ovaries that this whole area is most likely shot.” I pointed at my stomach again, my cheeks burning from a mix of anger and embarrassment.
“No. I told you. I got over the initial lie. I’m still pissed at you because you fucking sold it. You sold me that twenty percent like you were a goddamn used-car salesman. You made me think it was a real, actual possibility.”
His words sliced through me. Every syllable, another sharp cut.
I wanted to believe it was a possibility.
“The doctor didn’t say it was impossible.”
“But she also didn’t say it was very likely.”
“Twenty . . . percent—it’s still something.” I was crying so hard, I could barely get the words out.
“Enough with statistics, Jacks. Enough! If someone told you that you had an eighty percent chance of dying, would you feel good about those odds?”
I glared at him. Searched his dark pupils for the man I’d thought I’d married. But his eyes were cold, his jaw set, his stance like that of a bear about to pounce. And in that moment, I was convinced he might actually hate me.
“Are we ever going to get past this?” I asked him, my voice soft and measured. This argument had become an endless circle, a wicked carousel that neither of us knew how to escape. It was true—I’d let my emotions cloud my judgment when I met James. His love for me had made me feel invincible. And that 20 percent had felt conquerable. But I had been so wrong. About myself. About him. About us. And I was so, so sorry about that. But I didn’t know how to explain that to him. How to say it without sounding hollow. “You’re going to have to choose to stop resenting me if we’re ever going to make it. Because we can’t go on like this.”
James looked at me, his eyes flickering, and I held his gaze—I had to see what was really behind those beautiful eyes, the ones that had instantly engaged me so long ago. We stared at each other without saying anything until, finally, he broke away and looked down.
“It’s very possible that I may never get over it.” He forced on a pair of pants, then a shirt, not bothering to tuck it in, then grabbed his roller bag and flew down the hallway as I tried to holler after him, his words having cut me so close that I could barely breathe.
I’ve played back that morning so many times, wishing I could change things—that I could wrap my arms around him instead of hurling insults, that I could have chosen differently so he didn’t walk out the door that day with resentment burning in his heart.
But learning about Dylan has made me face the reality that I’d lost James long before that argument. He had slipped away from me once and for all on that New Year’s Eve. He may not have cheated on me until several years later, but the fuse had been sitting there, waiting to be lit.
Nick doesn’t speak right away when I finish my story. He may not understand why Dylan would stray, but now he knows why James did.
“It’s still not your fault,” he says after several beats.
“How can you say that?”
“He could have left, Jacks. If he was that upset about your lie—which, by the way, I think is a pretty understandable one to tell—he could have divorced you. He didn’t need to have an affair, to get another woman pregnant.”
“Maybe it was his fuck you to me,” I say.
“From what you’ve told me, he wasn’t an evil genius. He was a guy who didn’t appreciate what he had but was also too much of a coward to let you go. If he really loved you, you guys could have adopted children.”
I thought of his family’s zealous pride in their Costa Rican heritage. How whenever we were with his mother, grandchildren—or the lack of them—was always a topic of conversation. She’d mention how many kids James’s uncles had between them. Eighteen! How out of place she felt at family gatherings as she listened to all the other grandmothers brag about their star soccer player grandsons or their granddaughters who were learning to cook paella. James would simply glare at me as his mom rambled on. I once overheard her asking James if he planned to divorce me if I couldn’t conceive. “It’s not too late for you. You’re still young; you could meet a nice young childbearing woman,” she said, and I walked away before I could hear his answer.
I shake my head. “That’s not how they do it in his family.”
Nick sighs. “Then that was on him. You guys had options. James was just too much of a prick to consider them.”
“And now he’s dead.”
Nick pauses before responding. “I’m sorry that he hurt you. But if we leave this island with one thing, it’s that I want you to know that Dylan and James were adults who made their own choices. We could beat ourselves up about the things we did that may have pushed them away, but they chose to betray us. That’s on them, not us.”
Intellectually I know he’s right. But my heart will always believe my lie pushed James away.
“Fuck them,” Nick whispers. He’s huddled close, his face almost touching mine.
His proximity feels right. After all, I just shared my deepest regret. It seems fitting he’s as close to my heart as he can be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE