The Good Girl

She’s only gone a few steps when she starts to fall.

 

“Owen,” she manages to whisper. She reaches a hand out to the wall, misses and tumbles toward the ground.

 

I don’t think I’ve ever moved so fast in my life. I didn’t catch her, but I did stop her head from hitting the hardwood floors.

 

She isn’t out long, only a couple seconds at best. When she comes to she calls me Jason. She thinks that I am him. And I could get pissed, but instead I help her to her feet and together we go into the bathroom and I pull down her pants and help her pee. And then I carry her to the couch and tuck her in.

 

She asked once if I had a girlfriend. I told her no, that I tried it once and it wasn’t for me.

 

I asked her about this boyfriend of hers. I met him in the bathroom stall and hated the guy the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s the kind of bastard that acts tough. He thinks he’s better than everyone else but inside he’s a coward. He’s the kind of Thomas Ferguson that would let a man hold a gun to her head.

 

I watch her sleep. I hear the cough rattle from her lungs. I listen to the shallow breathing and watch as her chest rises and falls irregularly with each breath.

 

“What do you want to know?” she’d said when I asked her about the boyfriend.

 

Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it.

 

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

 

“Because,” she said, “I believe what you said.”

 

“What?”

 

“About paying him off. I believe you.”

 

“You do?”

 

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

 

“Why do you say that?”

 

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t.”

 

I know that I can’t let this go on. I know that every day she gets worse. I know that she needs an antibiotic, that without it she could die. I just don’t know what to do.

 

 

 

 

 

Eve

 

After

 

She certainly can’t be alone. I leave the house as soon as James arrives home without Mia in tow. There’s nothing more important than Mia. I am positive she’s standing alone on a street corner, deserted by her own father, and certainly lacking the resources to get back home.

 

I’m screaming at him. How could he do this to our child?

 

He let her walk out of that doctor’s office alone, into the cold January day, knowing full well she isn’t able to make herself breakfast, much less find her way home.

 

And he told me that she’s the one who’s being stubborn. That Mia is the one being unreasonable about this damn baby. He said that she refused the abortion, that she walked out of the obstetrician’s office just as the nurse called her name.

 

James stomps into his office and slams the door, unaware of the suitcase I pack and quietly walk down the stairs before I leave.

 

I don’t give her enough credit. By the time I pry my car keys out of James’s hands and circle the doctor’s office many, many times, she’s tucked safely in her apartment with a can of soup warming on the stove for lunch.

 

She opens the door and I fall into her and hold her as tight as I possibly can. She’s standing in the small apartment she used to call home. It’s been a long time since she was here. Her houseplants hold on to life by a thread, and there’s dust everywhere. It smells like a new home, that scent that says no one’s been here for quite some time. The calendar on the kitchen refrigerator is stuck on October, the image ablaze with red-and-orange leaves. The answering machine beeps; there must be a thousand messages waiting for her.

 

She’s cold, frozen from all that time walking and waiting for a cab. She says that she didn’t have a dime on her for the fare. It’s freezing cold in the apartment. She’s slipped her favorite hooded sweatshirt over a thin blouse.

 

“I’m so, so sorry,” I say over and over again. But she has it all together. She holds me at an arm’s length and asks what happened and I tell her about James. It’s me who’s losing it, who’s falling apart. She takes the suitcase from my hands and brings it into the bedroom.

 

“Then you’ll stay here,” she says. She sits me down on the couch and covers me up with a blanket, and then walks into the kitchen to finish the soup—chicken noodle, she says, because it reminds her of home.

 

We eat our soup, and then she tells me what happened at the obstetrician’s office. She runs a hand across her abdomen and curls into a ball on a chair.

 

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