*
A year passes before she catches pregnant. She’s exhausted during those first few months, so she spends most of her days on the couch with the TV on, watching Erica Kane prance through life in Pine Valley, her feet propped up on a pillow and her hands roaming over her belly. It’s not changed much, still flat and taut, but she can feel the tiniest push, a little extra something nestled under her belly button. She sees pregnant women every day, at the grocery store, out walking through the park, and she wants to be one of them, to have a round belly and wear those ridiculous smock tops that balloon out at the waist. And then there’ll be a baby, a boy who looks like Jacky, and later they can have a girl. One of each flavor. She’s already started buying clothes, tiny socks and bottles of tearless shampoo, and the checkout girl doesn’t ask but she has to know, she looks at those things and then at Gloria’s belly, beaming, and it’s like they understand each other without saying a word.
And then, as quickly as it happened, it’s over. She wakes up one morning thinking that she must’ve had an accident because there’s a wet spot in the bed, she hasn’t done that since she was very small and her father had hung all the bedding outside so the entire neighborhood could see she was a bed-wetter. But when she throws back the covers all she sees is red. It seems to her in that moment that the entire bed is filled with blood, an ocean of it; it’s actually not that much but it’s enough, and the baby is gone. The doctor tells her to rest, that they can try again soon, that these things happen all the time. Jacky is sympathetic at first, but he’s confused by how upset she is, how sad, and says that he doesn’t understand why she’s acting like this, over something she never even had.
She bleeds for a week, and every time she goes to the bathroom she searches the toilet bowl before flushing, although she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. There’s nothing but urine and clotted blood and other bits she doesn’t have a name for, but she keeps looking anyway, expecting something more.
*
Marriage, she thinks, is a careful balancing act. If you put too much weight on one side, lose your focus, everything falls.
“Don’t touch me,” she tells Jacky. It’s been nearly six months since the miscarriage, but she doesn’t want to try again. She’s careful—sleeps fully clothed, always goes to bed before Jacky, quickly moves out of the way when she feels him getting close.
“I need you,” he says. She found a magazine under his side of the bed not long before, where it had dropped after he fell asleep. On the cover was a photo of a woman, naked and tied, a black rubber ball jammed into her mouth. The woman—and every other woman in the magazine, all tied up and being whipped or pinched or hurt in some way—looked terrified.
“I’m not feeling well right now.” She didn’t say anything to Jacky about the magazine—she’d been finding things like that for a while now, surprises he’d left behind. It was like finding a big green booger wiped on the bottom of a chair, she’d thought the first time. A nasty, crusty thing that had been left behind, and it was worse because it was Jacky doing it, it was her husband doing those disgusting things. “I need to go to sleep.”
She turns over in the bed, tucking her hand under her cheek, but Jacky isn’t letting her off this time. He grabs her shoulder, pins her back on the mattress. A hank of her hair gets caught in his watchband and rips right out of her scalp, making her shriek in surprise.
“What are you doing?” she says, but he’s busy, working on the drawstring of his pajama bottoms with one hand and holding her down with the other. “Let me go.”
She pushes at him, tries to fight him off, but Jacky’s stronger than she is, and his arms are longer. When she manages to sink her nails into the meat of his cheek he slaps her, hard, and she puts her hands over her face and cries, sucking in air so hard she can hear it wheezing through the cracks in her fingers.
“Let me see your face,” Jacky says, grabbing at her wrists and trying to pull her hands away, his hips not slowing down, and she realizes that this is turning him on, that she’s like one of those girls in the magazine, she’s scared and crying and trying to get away, and Jacky doesn’t just like it, he loves it. She doesn’t let him pull her hands away, even when he pinches her, taking flesh in between his fingers and squeezing until the skin squirts out of his grip and she screams, but she doesn’t lower her hands. “I want to see your face.”