“I’ll tell you what’s wrong, buddy. Everything is fucking wrong. The shit is about to hit the fucking fan, my little furry friend, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m going to fucking do about it.” Ernie doesn’t understand my need to swear in continued succession; he opens his mouth and begins to pant. It looks like he’s laughing. “This is not funny,” I tell him.
I should eat something. I haven’t had anything in my stomach for hours and I’m feeling a little light headed, but I know as soon as I get something down it’ll be coming right back up again. I’ve seen so many pregnant women in my time at St. Peter’s. Most of them suffer from morning sickness, and there are a lucky few who don’t. The women who do suffer from the constant need to throw up seem to bear it with rueful pride. Look at me. I’m so pregnant, I just can’t seem to stop voiding the contents of my stomach everywhere. It doesn’t seem as though any of them have ever been this sick, though. I can’t get up out of a chair without wanting to run for the bathroom. And don’t get me started on bacon. The faintest whiff of greasy, salty, usually delicious bacon, and I can feel the bile rising like a tidal wave up my esophagus. It’s getting harder and harder to disguise the fact that I’m not sick with the flu, and that I am, in fact, very knocked up.
Oh my god. What the hell am I going to tell my parents? I was supposed to be married and settled down with a nice neurosurgeon when I started a family. I wasn’t supposed to be living in sin with an ex-hit man. It doesn’t really matter what Mom and Dad think at this point, though. It only matters what one person thinks about it, and I’m almost one hundred percent sure I know how he’s going to react when he finds out.
He’s going to lose his goddamn mind. I can’t imagine him as a father. I can’t picture it at all. I’ve tried not to picture how it’s going to go when I tell him, because I’m too damn scared to even think about it, but when the scenario has pushed its way into my head despite my best efforts to keep it at bay, things have not gone well. Furniture has been smashed. Angry words have been thrown. Tears have been shed. I’ve imagined him saying the very worst things to me, his anger spiked, his eyes filled with misery. I haven’t, on the other hand, been able to imagine what I’m doing while Zeth is losing his shit. Am I happy that he’s horrified by the idea of a child? Am I glad that he doesn’t want it? Am I relieved that I don’t need to go through with becoming a mother? Or…
I’m too scared to consider the or.
If I’m not happy or relieved, then it means that I’m heartbroken, and that possibility doesn’t even bear thinking about. I can’t have a baby. I can’t be pregnant and carry a child to term. I’m not ready. I’ve never even thought about a family with Zeth, not even in an abstract, whimsical way, because such a thing is an impossibility. This life that we live together, it’s not safe for us, let alone another vulnerable, innocent human being. It wouldn’t be fair. It would be cruel.
And yet, a shade of doubt…
A what if...
Sloane Romera: Doctor.
Sloane Romera: Accomplice.
Sloane Romera: Lover.
Sloane Romera: Mother?
The idea sits heavy on my shoulders, either a weighty responsibility, or a weighty blessing. I just—I just don’t fucking know!
“Stop looking at me like that, Ernie.” His eyes are shining bright, his face lit up with the simple joy of attention being paid to him, but to me it looks like he’s happy that these sneaky thoughts are infiltrating my brain. “You’re supposed to be on my side,” I tell him. He gets up and comes to me, raising his head so he can rest his chin against my kneecap, looking up at me with those deep, soulful brown eyes of his. Sometimes it seems as though he’s wiser than most people I meet in the street. He manages to communicate so much in that even, steady gaze of his.
“I’m not telling him,” I say. “There’s no way I can tell him.”
Ernie blinks.
“I can’t. You don’t understand. How could you?”
The tip of the dog’s tongue uncurls from his mouth, poking through his teeth, and then disappearing again. “It’s not that simple. Pregnancies fail sometimes, you know. It would be stupid to say something this early. Who knows? It might not take, and then the arguing, the fighting, it will all have been for nothing.”
Ernie makes a disapproving grumble at the back of his throat.
“I’m waiting at least a month,” I say, imbuing my voice with a certainty that I’m definitely not feeling. “A month is fair. A month isn’t long.”