My Last Continent: A Novel(70)
I looked away from the image of Pam’s face and, trying to distract myself, leaned over the sink as Chad agitated a new piece of photo paper. I watched the image of a bird emerge, a wood duck he must’ve seen at Eagle Bluffs while he was shooting the portrait.
“Wow,” I murmured. “She’s beautiful.” The image was black and white but captured the gray scale of the female of the species perfectly: her smooth-feathered face, her white-shadowed black eyes, her salt-speckled breast.
And then I noticed that the image was a little blurry, that Chad was agitating the photo more vigorously than he needed to, as if to hurry up the process—and that his lens hadn’t been focused on the wood duck in the foreground but on a woman, long-haired and smiling, stretched out seductively on a blanket.
I released my prints from their clothespins and stuffed them into my folder. I mumbled that I had to go, and Chad, still busy with his photo, paused and looked at me.
“It’s just a photo,” he said, in a weary, halfhearted way, as if we’d had this discussion a hundred times before and he couldn’t decide whether to try to convince me to stay.
I flung the door open as I left, flipping on the overhead light, exposing his print. I heard his muffled curses as I walked down the long hallway.
Breaking up, such as it was, happened as naturally and unceremoniously as getting together had, as if it was meant to be all along. He never knew about the pregnancy.
BEFORE I LEAVE the clinic, they give me a brochure on birth control, as if I hadn’t known better, as if this had been a mistake of ignorance rather than impulsiveness.
The weeks leading to my appointment had been excruciating. I felt that everyone who looked at me must’ve been able to tell; I worried that Chad would find out somehow, even though there was no way he could possibly know. And my choice seemed inevitable no matter how I looked at it, no matter how many ways I tried to imagine another outcome.
As I walk slowly back to campus, I think of Chad’s photograph, the wood duck, how lovely it was. It feels hypocritical that I wouldn’t dream of eating an animal but that I hadn’t thought twice about ending a pregnancy. Maybe I’ve begun to live too closely by the rules of the animal kingdom, where sacrifice makes sense, where it’s necessary and just and often more humane.
THIS YEAR I’M dreading my visit home more than usual. Alec’s family has just moved to Kansas City, so he’s spending the holidays there. My cat, Ginger, is gone—she’d disappeared after I left for college. The first time I came home to find her missing, I put up signs and checked the shelter, to no avail. I feel her absence most acutely at night, alone in my childhood bed, and I can only hope that she’s found a new family, one that welcomes her more than mine did.
My father’s empty seat at the table is filled by Mark’s new son, Christopher, the first grandchild. I’m watching the baby examine a soft plush rattle, holding it up to his face, when my mother suddenly says to me, “Deborah, are you all right?”
I swing my head toward her, not realizing until that moment how intensely I’d been staring at Christopher. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look well,” she says. “You look like death warmed over.”
“I’m fine,” I repeat, and a few moments later I get up and lock myself in the bathroom. A glance in the mirror tells me she’s right—my face is pale, eyes sinking into dark hollows—and I prepare myself to tell them, if they ask again, that it’s because of work, because of finals. But it isn’t.
I turn my back on my reflection and lean against the sink, taking deep breaths. I always feel most alone when I’m here at home, but this year the feeling is sharper than ever, and I can’t help but think it’s because I’ve made a dreadful mistake.
The next night is a repeat of every other—it’s all about the baby—and for a moment I wonder what it might’ve been like to have come home pregnant. Though my mother hopes I will one day have a big family, at this stage of my life it would’ve been scandalous—but it also would’ve made me less invisible.
When I run this notion by Alec over the phone, he convinces me otherwise. “You don’t want that sort of attention, believe me,” he says. “You did the right thing.”
Still, the emptiness I feel goes beyond the solitude I’m used to and often enjoy. It’s that something was there, a chance at something, and then it wasn’t—I’d had it and given it up, destroyed it, and would never get it back. I’m on the bus heading back to Columbia when I finally figure out what I’ve lost: the chance to have another person in the world I could relate to, someone who might turn out to be a little bit like me, someone I could love, who would love me back.
The Gullet
(67°10'S, 67°38'W)
The code Mayday, always repeated three times, signals that a ship is in urgent, life-threatening danger. There are no degrees of Mayday—just the one word—and because we -haven’t received any further information from the bridge, for me, right now, this leaves room for interpretation, for doubt and hope.
Both these emotions mingle in my mind as I gingerly move across the ice. After stepping on board the Cormorant long enough to change into a dry sweater, find a dry parka, and tell Kate to keep her idiot husband on board, I rushed back out—only to find that my Zodiac had been appropriated by another crew member, leaving me to find my way to the wreck of the Australis on foot, over the ice.