I sat there until the streetlights clicked off at dawn.
26
— • —
Andrea
Mary found me on the bathroom floor.
I’d given her a spare key months ago for emergencies, and apparently five days of one-word texts qualified. I heard the front door open, her voice calling my name, footsteps down the hall. Then she was standing in the bathroom doorway with her jacket still on, purse over her shoulder, her face doing the thing it did when she was trying not to cry.
“Oh, honey.”
“I’m fine,” I said from the floor. My back was against the tub, my knees drawn up, the tile cold through my sweatpants. I’d thrown up twice already this morning and I didn’t have the energy to stand.
“You’re on the bathroom floor.”
“It’s a lifestyle choice.”
She crouched beside me, pushed my hair back from my face, pressed the back of her hand against my forehead. “You don’t have a fever.” She looked at the toilet, at my face, at the dark circles I could feel under my eyes without needing a mirror. “How long have you been throwing up?”
“A few days. A week maybe. I don’t know.”
“A week?”
“It’s stress. The whole... everything. I’m not sleeping, I’m barely eating, my body is just reacting.”
She sat down on the tile beside me, back against the tub, shoulder to shoulder. She didn’t say anything for a minute. Just sat with me, her arm warm against mine, the bathroom quiet around us except for the drip from the faucet I kept meaning to fix.
“Andrea,” she said carefully. “When was your last period?”
My brain stopped.
I stared at the bathroom wall. Counted backward in my head, past the rejection, past the hospital, past the birthday dinner, past the weeks of good. Past the office, the elevator, the couch, the first time. I counted and I kept counting and the number I arrived at made my stomach drop through the floor.
“I’m on the pill,” I said. “I’ve never missed a dose.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Mary.”
“When?”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t... I can’t remember exactly. Before. Before all of this. Weeks.”
She looked at me, and I knew she came to the same conclusion as I did. She squeezed my hand, got up, brushed off her jeans. “I’m going to the pharmacy. Stay here.”
“Where else would I go?”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
She came back with a plastic bag and pulled out two boxes because she was thorough like that. I took them into the bathroom and closed the door and my hands were shaking so badly I could barely open the packaging.
I sat on the edge of the tub afterward, waiting. I could hear her in the other room, pacing, the soft creak of the floorboards going back and forth. The minutes stretched. I stared at the shower curtain, at the grout between the tiles, at the crack in the ceiling I’d never noticed before. Anywhere except the counter where the test was sitting.
I couldn’t look at it. If I looked and it was positive then everything changed again, everything that already changed was going to change more, and I’d just been rejected by a man who told me none of it was real, sitting in my bathroom in sweatpants I’d worn for three days, hair unwashed, eyes so swollen fromcrying they barely opened in the morning. I was not equipped for this. I was barely equipped to brush my teeth.
