I take off my jeans and my underwear, gripped by the sudden and undeniable need to push. I cry out. I scream and I shout. I beg for my father to call for a doctor. Above me the house is silent. I fall asleep again, exhausted.
The next time I wake, one of Dad’s dinner trays has been placed on the ground next to me, and on it is half a glass of water and a cheese sandwich. Nothing else. No pain medication. No clean clothes. No nothing. I throw the glass of water at the wall, sobbing as the water spills and the glass shatters. I feel too nauseous to eat the sandwich so that gets thrown, too. I somehow manage to drag myself up onto my feet but by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs, I have no energy to walk up them. I crawl.
At the top, I find the door is locked and no matter how hard I rattle it or scream underneath the narrow gap beneath it, no one comes to open it.
I think about Callan next door, going about his daily life. It must be days now since I was meant to leave for the Institute of Fine Arts. He must be wondering why I haven’t called him yet. He won’t be worried, though. He’ll be thinking that I’m just enjoying myself, learning, focusing all of my attention on the opportunity before me, just like he told me to. I cry for hours because I know no one is coming to get me.
The pain seems to abate for a while, but then it returns with a vengeance a few hours later. I’m overcome with the need to push again, so I do, crying, feeling like my soul is being ripped out of my body as I give birth to my baby.
At first I can’t look. It hurts too much. When I do pluck up the courage, my heart breaks at the tiny, half formed being that should have been allowed to grow inside me. For a while I don’t know what to do. I feel much better, weirdly, though incredibly weak. I find some of my old paintings stacked one on top of another in a dark corner of the room. I pick the most beautiful painting—a bluebird, full of vibrant color and life—and I tear the calico from the frame. I use the material to make a tiny shroud and then I bury my baby in the dirt where I lost him. I have no way of knowing that he was a boy, but for some reason I’m filled with the certainty that this is true. I lie on top of the spot where I buried him and I sob until I fall asleep.
I pray that I don’t wake up. When I do, I find that I’m in clean pajamas in my bed, and sunlight is pouring through my bedroom window. My father sits in my reading chair on the other side of the room, reading a book. When he sees that I’m awake, he stands up and walks over to the bed. Sitting on the edge of the mattress beside me, he holds the back of his hand up to my forehead. I notice that his knuckles are red and scabbed over.
“You had a fever,” he tells me. “You slept for three days. You seem to be getting better now, though.”
I want to recoil away from his touch, but my body feels like a lead weight in the bed. “What day is it?” I croak.
“Friday.” My father’s voice is strangely warm. “Don’t worry. You have another week before you’re meant to be back from New York. Your bruises will have faded by then. You’ll be feeling much better.” He beams at me, like everything is working out just perfectly and he couldn’t be happier. “Of course, there’ll probably be a couple of dark shadows on your face. You’ll have to cover it with makeup. You can do that for me, can’t you, Coralie?”
I nod dumbly. I don’t want to do anything to make this crazy mood of his slip. My skin is crawling, though, my insides seething at his close proximity.
“You must be very hungry,” he says, scratching at his stubble. “You lost a lot of blood. And you didn’t eat the food I brought for you, silly girl. I’m gonna have to watch over you, make sure you’re keeping your strength up.”
And he will, too. The next week is going to be pure hell. He’s not going to let me out of his sight. Even if I were capable of getting up out of this bed and heading next door—which I most definitely am not—he will be hovering over me like a hawk. I’m stuck here until he deems it necessary or appropriate that I leave.
“Now, I know you’re probably still not feeling all that great, child, but you and I need to have a little talk, don’t you think?” He says this ruefully, smiling, like he just busted me kissing a boy for the first time and he’s planning on telling me about the birds and the bees. I flinch at the prospect of what’s about to come. “You lied to me, Coralie. You told me you wanted to wait until you were married before you got intimate with a boy, but clearly that wasn’t the case. You’ve been sneaking around behind my back. Do you have any idea how much that hurts me?”
I have to be so careful. If I don’t handle this situation in the right way, he’s going to lose his fucking mind. It won’t matter that I’m already laid up in bed, unable to even sit up. He’ll lay into me again, and this time I won’t be losing my baby. I’ll be losing my own life, for all that it’s worth.