“Then tell me this,” she argues. “How is it that Max knew, and I didn’t?”
“You’re jealous? You’re actually jealous that I told Max about something horrible in my past!”
“Yeah, I am,” Vanessa admits. “Okay? I’m a selfish bitch who wishes that my wife opened herself up to me as much as she opened herself up to the guy she used to be married to.”
“And maybe I’d likemywife to show a little compassion,” I say. “Considering I was just raked over the coals by Wade Preston and that I’m now Public Enemy Number One for the entire religious right.”
“There’s more than just auinus,” Vanessa says. “Not that you seem to realize it.”
“Great!” I yell, tears springing to my eyes. “You want to know about my abortion? It was the worst day of my life. I cried the whole way there and the whole way home. I had to eat ramen noodles for two months because I didn’t want to ask my mother for money; and I didn’t tell her I’d done it until I was back home for the summer. I didn’t take the medicine they gave me for the cramps afterward because I felt like I deserved the pain. And the guy I was dating—the guy who decided with me that this was the right thing to do—broke up with me a month later. And in spite of the fact that every doctor I’ve ever seen tells me that my infertility has nothing to do with that procedure, I’ve never really been able to believe it. So how’s that? Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to know?”
By the time I finish, I am crying so hard I can barely understand my own words. My nose is running and my hair is in my face and I want her to touch me, to take me in her arms and tell me it’s all right, but instead she steps back. “What else don’t I know about you?” she asks, and she leaves me standing alone in the entryway of a house that no longer feels like home.
The actual procedure took only six minutes.
I know, I counted.
They had talked to me about all my options. They had given me lab tests and a physical. They had given me a sedative. They had opened my cervix with dilators. They had given me forms to sign.
This took a few hours.
I remember the nurse fitting my feet into the stirrups, telling me to scoot down. I remember the shine of the speculum as the doctor lifted it from its sterile napkin. I remember the wet-vac sound of the suction device.
The doctor never called it a baby. She never even called it a fetus. She referred to it astissue.I remember closing my eyes and thinking of a Kleenex, balled up and tossed in the trash.
On the way back to campus, I put my hand on the stick shift of my boyfriend’s old Dodge Dart. I just wanted his palm to cover mine. Instead, he untangled my fingers. “Zoe,” he said. “Just let me drive.”
Although it was only two in the afternoon when I got back to my dorm room, I put on my pajamas. I watchedGeneral Hospital,honing my focus on the characters of Frisco and Felicia, as if I would have to pass a test on them later on. I ate an entire jar of Jif peanut butter.
I still felt empty.
I had nightmares for weeks, that I could hear the fetus crying. That I followed the sound to the courtyard outside my dorm window and crouched down in my pajama bottoms and torn tank to dig with my bare hands in the ragged ground. I pulled up hunks of sod, chipped my fingernails on stones, and finally uncovered it:
Sweet Cindy, the baby doll I’d buried the day my father died.
I can’t unwind that night. I hear Vanessa moving around above me, in the bedroom, and then when it gets quiet I assume she’s fallen asleep. So instead, I sit down at my digital keyboard and I start playing. I let the music bind me like a bandage. I sew myself together note by note.
I play for so long that my wrists begin to cramp. I sing until my voice frays, until I feel like I’m breathing through a straw. When I stop, I lean my forehead so that it rests on the keys. The silence in the room becomes a thick cotton batting.
Then I hear clapping.
I turn around to find Vanessa standing in the doorway. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough.” She sits down beside me on the piano bench. “This is what he wants, you know.”
“Who?”
“Wade Preston. To break us apart.”
“I don’t want that,” I admit.
“Me neither.” She hesitates. “I’ve been upstairs doing math.”
“No wonder you’ve been gone so long,” I murmur. “You suck at math.”
“The way I figure it, you were with Max for nine years. I plan to be with you for the next forty-nine years.”
“Just forty-nine?”
