I should have known my father would notice how round my belly had grown. I hadn’t expected him to come at me the way he did, though, fists swinging. A month earlier, when I was just three months pregnant, still fairly flat-stomached and hiding my morning sickness well, my art teacher had cornered my father in the grocery store and told him my last assignment in her class had won me a trip to the New York Institute of Art as a potential scholarship student. He hadn’t been able to tell her he wasn’t going to let me go, since the trip was all expenses paid. Callan had just been accepted into Columbia to study photo-journalism, so we were both daydreaming about a life we might conceivably have together outside of Port Royal.
The time came for me to go away—I was waiting at the front of the house for the cab that was going to take me to the airport, and I hadn’t noticed Malcolm creeping up on me down the hallway. He’d screamed like a banshee, grabbing me from behind, clamping his hand over my mouth, preventing me from letting out a scream of my own.
‘You’re fucking disgusting, you know that?’ he’d spat into my ear. “A dirty, lying little slut. You can’t hide things from me, Coralie. You sure as hell weren’t going to be able to hide this.’ He’d dug his clenched fist into my belly, snarling furiously. Through the open front door, I’d seen the yellow taxi pull up along the curbside, ready to take me away, but I wasn’t going to New York anymore. I was going down into the basement, and my father was going to beat me within an inch of my life.
Now, it’s dark. I don’t know if that’s because I’m still in the basement, or if it’s because my eyes have swollen shut. Malcolm was pacing for hours earlier, back and forth, back and forth, while I lay out on the bare dirt, barely conscious. Eventually, thankfully, I did pass out. Now that I’ve woken up and I can’t see anything, I can’t tell whether he’s still there or not, just sitting silently, biding his time. I ache everywhere.
Less than fifty feet away, Callan’s probably helping his mother cook dinner. Or he’s up in his room, his thick black curtains drawn at the window, a towel stuffed up against the door while he develops some of his pictures. He’s probably thinking about when I get back from my trip, when we’re planning on telling Jo about the baby.
Overhead a floorboard creaks, and I almost jump out of my skin. The low hum of the television crackles to life, and relief takes hold of me. He’s not down here with me. He’s upstairs in the family room, no doubt sitting himself down with a beer in his chair like nothing took place earlier. I strain to open my eyes. They are swollen, almost to the point where I can’t crack them at all, but I manage to part my eyelids wide enough to make out the shape of my father’s workbench in the near pitch darkness. It takes me a while to get myself upright, and then even longer to get to my feet. Sharp, shooting pains fire across my belly, making me double over every time a new cramp arrives. The agony is breathtaking. I count the steps I take before I finally reach the bottom of the stairs up toward the ground floor of the house. There’s a light switch there, which I find easily enough. I’m panicked for a second, assuming my father would have simply removed the light bulb from the fixture in order to punish me further, but when the small room floods with light I’m relieved instead.
That is, until I look down at myself and see all of the blood.
It’s everywhere, almost black, soaking through my jeans between my legs. On the ground a few feet away, presumably where I was lying a moment ago, a dark crimson patch of it has pooled in the dirt, half dried, half wet still….there’s so much of it. I go to hold my hands up to my face, to cover my mouth so I don’t cry out in horror, but my hands are covered in blood too, my skin mottled bright red and sticky, and that is the final straw. I collapse to the ground, folding over and pressing my forehead against the cool ground as I sob, ropes of saliva and snot running down my face. I clasp my arms around my stomach, knowing now why I’m in so much pain.
The baby. The baby is gone.
I don’t know how long I lay there. After a while, the pain in my stomach becomes so great that I think it will kill me. I’m happy about it; I want to die more than anything else in the world. I fall asleep. When I wake up, god knows how much later, the pain has gotten even worse but my body has started to feel numb, like my nerve endings are exhausted, unable to register the vast depths and widths of the hurt I’m experiencing.