And it was a slow dawning then, daylight arriving at its own sweet time, one shaft of light at a time.
For thirty-odd days I had lain in bed since my encounter in the back seat of the car, and in those thirty-odd days, my period—my ever-reliable period—hadn’t come.
And now there was the nausea, the vomiting, and though every rational thought in my mind told me it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true—after all, I was infertile; there was no way I could get pregnant of my own accord, without Dr. Landry’s menagerie of drugs and devices—I knew instinctively that it was true.
I was pregnant.
To say I was happy would be a lie.
It wasn’t that I didn’t savor the thought for a second or two, that I didn’t relish the idea of carrying a child, of birthing a child, of being a mother. There was no greater desire in the whole entire world for me. It’s all I wanted; it’s the only thing that mattered in my life.
But deep inside I knew this child would never come to fruition. A fetus it was, but a baby it would never be. It would be as it was the last time with the heartbeat that was there and then not there, the gallons of blood. I would lose this baby as I had the last, and it would be my purgatory, my punishment, being forced to endure weeks, maybe a month, of pregnancy, knowing as always that it would end with blood.
That trusty, reliable blood.
And so instead of being happy I stood there, back to the countertop, steeling myself for another miscarriage, to lose this baby like I had the last. Certainly the universe wouldn’t let me keep this child. This, truly, was my penance, a gift that was given only to be taken away.
January 15, 1998 Egg Harbor
The joke is on me it seems, for I’ve made it through the first trimester without a single drop of blood.
The baby has survived thirteen weeks in my wasteland of a womb.
Only by necessity have I left the house, taking a job at a local inn where I clean rooms once the guests leave. There’s nothing glamorous about it. Just stripping beds of sheets and washing endless mountains of laundry, scrubbing someone else’s excrement off a toilet seat. The perk of the job, however, is that I essentially speak to no one, working alone in an uninhabited guest room or the laundry room, dealing only with dust spores and mildew, as opposed to the human race.
But the work itself is backbreaking. And those first thirteen weeks of the pregnancy were anything but fun and fancy-free. The morning sickness, the lethargy nearly got the best of me until the empty hotels beds were hard to resist—I envisioned myself sprawled out across them, wrapped up in one of the hotel’s velour robes—but, for as much as I wanted to, I didn’t give in to the whim.
Only second to a baby, I needed this job more than anything.
I haven’t been to see Dr. Landry or another obstetrician, though there’s a slight outgrowth to my midsection now, a bulge that makes my pants fit tightly so that I’ve taken to wearing sweatpants when I’m not stuffed into the uniform I wear for work, the polo shirt and the khaki pants, which I now leave unbuttoned so I don’t flatten the baby.
The cottage is on the market again.
I can no longer afford to pay for it. I haven’t been able to for months so that I’m in debt to the bank and the foreclosure threats have begun to arrive. The sign went in today, stuck there—forced into the nearly frozen ground—by the very same Realtor who sold us the home.
Oh, what she must think, looking at me now. How I’ve changed.
The Realtor didn’t look the least bit different to me, but I was changed, hardly the same woman I was when we first met, less than two years ago.
After she left, I sat myself on the tree swing and swayed, moving back and forth through the nippy winter air. I did it until my fingers were numb and I could no longer feel the sturdy rope beneath my hands.
This was the closest my child would ever come to a ride on this swing.
The bay was empty now, not a boat anywhere, and snow flurries fell on the dock, collecting like powdered sugar. There were birds in the trees, winter birds, cardinals and chickadees, but everyone else was gone, sunning themselves on one of those tropical islands where I only dreamed I might one day go.
The greenhouse door was frozen shut.
The flowers in the flower bed were dead.
I was still outside when I heard the doorbell ring, and thinking it was the Realtor—that she had an offer already!—I left my post to see.
But it was not the Realtor.
Aaron stood before me, his chestnut hair getting peppered with soft powdery snow. His eyes had a forlorn look about them, sad. He wore a coat, his hands set in the pockets of it, and as I pulled the door to, he offered a simple smile.
“Aaron,” I said.
“Eden.”
I couldn’t bring myself to invite him inside, for the cottage was truly a mess, in a state of bedlam; I couldn’t bring myself to show him what had become of our home. And so I stepped outside, onto the porch, my hair also getting peppered with snow. I pulled the door closed behind me. My feet were bare, covered only in socks, and against the concrete, they grew cold. Aaron, ever-obliging Aaron, ever-unselfish Aaron, ever-benevolent Aaron, shimmied at once out of his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders, saying to me, “You’ll catch your death out here,” and beneath the weight of his hands—which lingered there on my shoulders, gently liberating strands of hair that were trapped under the heavy coat, warm hands tucking them behind my ear, pausing there—I softened like a stick of butter left on the table too long.
We said nothing.
But I could see in his eyes that I had been wrong. That Aaron wasn’t healed as I’d believed him to be the day I saw him through the chophouse windows. That he was only taped back together that day, a skimpy job at best, for the tape had come undone, it had lost its stick, and Aaron was once again broken, standing before me now, mere fragments of himself.
Oh, what have I done?
He hunched to my height, bending his knees ever so. He cupped his hands around my face—softly, delicately—as if those hands cradled an heirloom crystal vase, and I could see in Aaron’s eyes that what he held was, to him, something fragile, something magical, something irreplaceable and beyond compare.
That, to him, I was irreplaceable and beyond compare as I’d always been.
That, in all these months apart, that hadn’t changed for him.
His lips felt warm as he pressed them to mine, and there was nothing rushed about it, nothing presumptuous or brusque. “I want you back,” he whispered into my ear.
“I need you back.
“I miss you, Eden.
“I am nothing,” he said, “without you.”
I am nothing.
Was it just my imagination, or did the baby inside me kick?
I stepped back from Aaron, tugging on the ends of my sweater to make sure that tiny bulge was concealed. Inside me the baby—not Aaron’s baby, but the baby of some man I would never know—knew how to squint its eyes and to suck its thumb. Each day it grew bigger, arms and legs lengthening, organs and cells unfolding in my womb. It would come to be a person one day, a person perhaps with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, but never would I resent this child for the choices that I made.
Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes, but never would I harbor a grudge for all that I lost to have this baby. All that I will lose.
It might just come true.
I would have done anything for a baby. This I know without a shred of doubt.
The lump in my throat was nearly impossible to speak past. Something inside my larynx had swollen to two times its size and my eyes burned with tears. As they began to fall, Aaron wiped them from my cheeks with the pad of a thumb and again pressed his lips to mine, saying that everything was okay, that everything would be fine. He held me close, stroking my hair, pressing my hands between his to keep them warm.
“Can I come home?” he asked.