Looking for Jane (50)
And although Nancy spent her morning here, she should have been at home studying. She’s behind on a couple of courses, and her grades are slipping, but part of the problem is that she doesn’t care much about school right now. She’s more interested in spending her time hearing about the ways other people managed to screw up their own lives—the secrets they kept, the painful buried truths. The lies they could never unravel.
Her grandmother’s confessions in the haze of her last days and the resultant revelation have stuck with Nancy ever since, and she’s found the same inclination among the other palliative residents she sits with. She’s found that, more often than not, the presence of another person, even a stranger, sparks an urgency to relay anything left unsaid. To ensure someone will at least hear their story and carry it into the future for them in an existential relay. The prospect of death causes a person to shine a light into the darkest corners of their history, turning over the moss-covered rocks that have lain there for years. Undisturbed, perhaps, but certainly not forgotten. And Nancy likes to be there when the spotlight is flicked on for the Big Reveal. She watches the secrets begin to take shape, first with clouded edges, then sharpening with each word. The deepest thoughts these men and women dared not speak to their loved ones. The confessions and regrets, the things they did and the things they should have done.
The departing soul holds the words out to her. Nancy takes them gently in her hands, runs her fingers along the ragged edges, bumps, and sharp corners. She turns them over in her palm, viewing them from different angles, knowing that if she isn’t careful, the cut could be deep.
But the danger is part of the appeal. They’re all in Nancy’s keeping now. She has become a collector of other people’s secrets while her own just keep piling up.
In the washroom, Nancy locks the stall door and unzips her jeans. Nothing.
“Shit. Fuck.”
Her period is now officially two weeks late.
She hikes up her pants and slips out of the bathroom, making her way to the front doors of the nursing home. Her stomach churns as she walks; it could just be the nerves that are now setting in, or it could be more of the nausea she’s been trying to ignore for the past few days. She threw up yesterday morning, but she’d chalked it up to the previous night of drinking with friends.
She’s tried her best to put off the inevitable, but knows now that she’ll have to bite the bullet and go get one of those new at-home pregnancy tests. And whatever the result is, she knows she won’t be telling Len.
Len, she thinks darkly as she dodges her fellow bustling pedestrians out on the street, her head bowed down against the freezing spring drizzle. It’s Len who got her into this damn mess in the first place. Len and his cheap candy-apple-red condoms. Len Darlington, with a name like a character from a drugstore romance novel. They’ve only been dating a few months, and on and off at that. Nothing serious. Nancy isn’t even sure she would call it dating. They’ve slept together on a handful of occasions, and she thought they had been reasonably careful. Except for the past couple of times when she was too drunk to remember much. She’s spent most of the past year drinking; too heavily, she knows. But it’s an effective numbing agent.
She met Len back in the fall. He was a friend of a friend of Nancy’s roommate Debbie, who introduced them at a cramped house party she threw on a Monday night without consulting Nancy or their other roommate, Susan. Debbie’s immature antics are the only thing that ever causes Nancy to second-guess moving out of her parents’ home, but it’s better than having her overbearing mother breathing down her neck and asking her whether she’s been seeing anyone lately. It seems to be Frances Mitchell’s greatest wish that Nancy meet “some nice fellow” and settle down at the earliest opportunity. She has the Grandma Glint in her eye and doesn’t hesitate to make this burning desire known to Nancy whenever possible. Nancy decided to bring Len home precisely because he was unlikely to pass Frances’s strict standards for her daughter’s suitors. Len served a purpose. That was all Nancy needed from him.
Despite the fact that her mother is clearly angling for grandchildren to dote upon, Nancy is pretty sure this isn’t exactly what she had in mind. She rounds a corner and pulls open the door of the pharmacy.
She figures she’ll give the home pregnancy test a try first; she can’t bear to go to her family doctor. If she’s going to get bad news, she wants to get it in the privacy of her own bathroom, where she won’t have to temper her reaction. After a mortifying checkout encounter with a male cashier at least a decade older than her own father, Nancy sweeps from the shop with her head down.
She arrives back at her apartment to discover her roommates are, thankfully, both out. In the bathroom, Nancy pees into a plastic cup she took from the kitchen and then fusses with the finicky test tubes of the Predictor kit. She waits an agonizing two hours for the result, reading her novel without taking in a word of it, checking her watch every ten minutes. She prays to God for a negative, promising all manner of improved behaviour in return, and crosses herself twice to seal the deal.
When an hour and fifty-eight minutes have passed, Nancy stumbles back to the bathroom. Fingers trembling, she picks up the test tube and sees a bright red ring around the base of it. A stone-cold, clear positive.
“Fuck.” She slides down the bubbling wallpaper to the linoleum floor. “Fuck!”