The Good Girl

The doctor asks if Mia has any questions. She has only one, but she can barely find her voice. She tries, and then, clearing her throat, tries again. It’s spineless and faint, little more than a whisper. “I’m pregnant?” she asks.

 

This is every little girl’s dream. They begin thinking about it when they’re too young to know where babies come from. They carry around their baby dolls and mother them and dream of baby names. When Mia was a girl it was always overtly flowery names that flowed off the tip of a tongue: Isabella and Samantha and Savannah. Then there was that phase where she thought everything should end in i: Jenni, Dani and Lori. It never crossed her mind that she might have a boy.

 

“You are. About five weeks.”

 

This is not the way it’s supposed to be.

 

She rubs a hand against her uterus and hopes to feel something: a heartbeat or a small kick. Of course it would be too early and yet she hopes to feel the flutter of movement inside her. But she feels nothing. I can see it in her eyes when she turns and finds me weeping. She feels empty. She feels hollow inside.

 

She confides to me, “It can’t be. I can’t be pregnant.”

 

Dr. Wakhrukov pulls up a swivel stool and sits down. She drapes the gown over Mia’s legs and then says, her voice softer now, “You don’t remember this happening?”

 

Mia shakes my head no. “Jason,” she says. But she’s shaking her head. “It’s been months since I’ve been with Jason.” She counts them on her fingers. September. October. November. December. January. “Five months,” she concludes. The math simply does not add up.

 

But of course I know Jason is not the father of that child.

 

“You have time to decide what you’d like to do. There are options.” The doctor is producing pamphlets for Mia: adoption and abortion, and the words are coming at her so fast that she can’t possibly keep up.

 

The doctor sends for James, allowing Mia a few minutes to get dressed before the nurse brings him in. While we’re waiting, I ask Mia if I can see the ultrasound. She hands it to me, her lifeless words repeating...it just can’t be. It’s then, taking that photograph in my hands and laying eyes on my grandchild, my own flesh and blood, that I begin to cry. As James enters the room, the crying turns into a moan. I try to suppress the tears but simply can’t. I yank paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and blot my eyes. It’s just as Dr. Wakhrukov returns that I can no longer hold it inside and I wail, “He raped you. That bastard raped you.”

 

But still, Mia feels nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

Colin

 

Before Winter has arrived. It was snowing when we woke and the temperature in the cabin had dropped by what felt like twenty degrees.

 

There’s no warm water. She layers on all the clothes she can find. She puts on two pairs of long johns and that gangly maroon sweatshirt. She slips on a pair of socks, complaining that she hates to wear socks, but without them her feet would freeze. She says that she’s always hated socks, even when she was a baby. She would rip them from her feet and throw them to the floor beside her crib.

 

I haven’t admitted to being cold before, but it’s fucking freezing. I started a fire the moment I woke up. I’ve already had three cups of coffee. I’m sitting with an old, torn U.S. map spread across the table. I found it in the glove compartment, along with an all but dried-up pen and I’m circling the best routes to get us the hell out of here. I’ve got my mind set on the desert, somewhere between Las Vegas and Baker, California. Somewhere warm. I’m wondering how to make a detour to Gary, Indiana, first, without highway patrol spotting the truck. I figure we’d have to ditch the truck and swipe a new one, somehow, and hope it doesn’t ever get reported. That or hop a freight train. Assuming people are looking for us there could be roadblocks in our honor, especially around Gary, just in case I have the nerve to go home. Maybe the police are using her as bait. Maybe they’ve got a surveillance team lined up around the old Gary home, waiting for me to call or make a stupid move.

 

Damn.

 

“Going somewhere?” the girl asks, looking at the map as I fold it up and push it away.

 

I don’t answer her question. “Want some coffee?” I ask instead, knowing we couldn’t stay in the desert for long. Squatting in the desert nixes any chance of a quasinormal life. It would all be about survival. We can’t go to the desert, I decide, then and there. The only chance we stand is somewhere abroad. We don’t have enough cash for a flight anymore, so the way I see it, there’s two choices: up or down. North or south. Canada or Mexico.

 

But of course to get out of the country, we need passports.

 

And that’s when it hits me: what I have to do.

 

She shakes her head no.

 

“You don’t drink coffee?”

 

“No.”

 

“You don’t like it?”

 

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