Perfect Little World(8)
“You have to try harder,” she said, and Hal nodded. “More therapy. Constant medicine.”
“I will,” he said, his voice getting high and quick with the anticipation of forgiveness. “I will do everything to make us happy.”
“You can’t punch people in the face just because they’re rude.”
“Shit,” Hal said. “That was bad.”
“Well, it finally pays off that we go on dates in a different state.”
“You said it,” he said, and she knew that he was relaxing now. She was giving in to him, and she did not try to fight it as hard as she knew she should. He was a mess, nothing but imperfections, but he was still the most perfect thing she had ever touched. She did not need him, she told herself, but she wanted him, and so she would make the adjustments necessary to keep him.
“I better stop to get gas,” he said, pulling off the highway into a gas station. As he stepped out to fill up the car, Izzy walked toward the lit-up station. “I’m going to get a soda,” she said, wondering if it was better for the baby to drink regular or diet, still needing the fizz and burst of soda in her belly. “You want anything?” she asked. He shook his head and smiled. “Just come back,” he said.
When she walked back to the car, taking deep sips of the bottle of soda, she saw Hal slumped against the car, crying. She dropped the soda. “What?” she shouted, now running to Hal. “What? What?”
He looked up at her, his eyes so red that it seemed a movie special effect. He held out his hands, empty. “My wallet,” he stuttered. Izzy immediately felt a sickness start in her belly and paralyze her limbs.
“I left my wallet in that theater,” he said and then shrugged.
His wallet, his driver’s license, his credit cards, sitting untouched on the floor of the movie theater. She could see the way things would play out, were probably already playing out, the discovery of the wallet, the decision, easy enough, to press charges, the way things would get smashed apart. “God, I fucked up,” he said.
“It’s okay,” Izzy said, stroking his hair, uncaring about what anyone at the gas station might be thinking. “It’s going to be okay.”
“This is bad,” he said. “Everything is so fucking bad.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, but she found that she could not muster up the force that the statement required.
Hal gathered himself, readjusted his body so that he was now kneeling, so that he could better see her. “I can’t do this,” he finally said.
“It’ll be okay,” she said.
“I don’t want the baby,” he said, almost breaking down again when he said the last word. “I can’t do it.”
“Okay,” Izzy said quickly, just trying to get him to stop talking. “Okay, okay, okay.”
“You deserve so much better, Izzy,” he said, and she didn’t even believe him for one second. She didn’t deserve a fucking thing, she believed, but she would take what she could have. She reached for him and held him loosely in her arms.
What was the worst that would happen to him, rich and connected? Probation, probably, certainly not jail. Maybe another stint in a very expensive mental health facility, one where he got to wear his own clothes and have trips into town. How could he not hold it together for her? She could take anything if he had not mentioned the baby. Of course he was unfit; of course he didn’t want it. She wished he was able to keep those doubts to himself and soldier on. She felt her life disentangling from him, all the tendrils being tweezered apart, leaving bruises that she knew would never heal.
“I’m a mess,” he said, and she kissed him and then stood up, reached into her purse for the rest of the money from her graduation card, and walked back into the station to pay for the gas.
She would pay the man behind the counter, pump the gas, and then drive Hal back to the park, to her own truck. She would kiss him, and, as he drove away to wait for his own singular fate, she would sit on that park bench and she would play with the graduation cap and she would freak out in private, so hard and so long, until she had emptied everything inside her except the one thing that mattered, the only thing she wanted anymore. Let one person tell her she couldn’t have it and she would claw them into submission. Let one more person tell her what she could and could not have, and she would smile, nod, and, without apology, do whatever the hell she wanted.
chapter two
Izzy stood over a hog that was split nearly in two, its skin so reddish-brown that it looked like the finest leather. Wearing thick rubber gloves, she reached into the pig and pulled the meat from its bones, her hands shaking, some bits of pork somehow getting into the inside of her gloves, steaming against her skin. It took every bit of strength she had to fight the nausea, the morning sickness that swirled inside her. The smell of smoked meat, she had determined, ruined her now, and it angered her that weakness crept into her body and kept her from doing one of the few things she was so good at.
She wasn’t showing yet; she was tall, five feet nine inches, and skinny, and she hoped she could hold on to the familiar dimensions of her body for as long as possible. Still, even if nothing showed on her frame, something fierce was assembling itself inside her. The morning sickness spilled over into the afternoons most days, and she found a constant, buzzing irritation spiking her interactions with her father, not even close to recognizing her new state. She believed, in the most secret parts of her mind, that she could hide the pregnancy from everyone for the entire duration, simply appear one day holding a baby that people assumed she conjured up with a magic spell. Now, however, another wave of nausea washing over her, her gloved hands slippery with pig fat and juices, she realized how stupid she could be sometimes.