The Forgotten Hours(68)
Thirsty but unwilling to break in on Ursula’s exchange at the bar, Katie leaned with one elbow on the sticky wood and surveyed the crowd. She had ordered a beer but already finished it and was reluctant to drink any more. Things were just getting started on the dance floor. The DJ spun a curious mixture of old-style disco and electronic music, which had people gyrating with jerky hesitancy.
She felt a jumpy tension in her limbs, the need to move. She’d hoped the noise and sweat and energy would take her away from herself. It had crossed her mind to confide her pregnancy fears to Radha, but saying those words aloud again—I’m worried I might be pregnant—would give even more heft to that possible reality. On the floor, Radha was motioning her over with big circular gestures. Someone tapped her on the back; it was a young man with a pale shaved head and a bushy black beard, carefully tended, as soft looking as mink. He raised a beer and his eyebrows at the same time, making her crack a smile. What would it be like to run her fingers over his smooth head, the egglike roundness of it? She marveled at the way humans tried to connect with one another, everywhere, all the time. In each person she encountered, she detected a whiff of sad-eyed need, the perpetual desire to be noticed and understood.
But she wasn’t interested in meeting men. Scrunching her face, she shook her head and mimed, Not for me.
Radha waved again, and Katie joined her to be sure the bearded boy didn’t think she might change her mind about the drink. At first she was stiff, but when the music changed to something slower, a deeper, more drawn-out beat overlaid with staccato drums and a repetitive chorus, her body started to respond. She imagined herself moving, serpentine, along the jungle floor like a snake. The tightness inside her resisted release, making her fingers twitch, distracting her so that she caught herself looking toward the bar again and again—as though she were in fact interested in the guy—until finally the tension surged over the wall of her discomfort and released her.
31
Trudging to work, she tried to distract herself by counting the hours and minutes until her father’s release, until Zev returned from Barcelona. Until her hastily planned trip to London to see her grandfather with David the following week. The incessant loops her mind was making were exhausting but effective; she managed to go for minutes at a time without telling herself, Take the goddamn pregnancy test. But she wasn’t sure she could do it on her own. Last night she had talked with Zev for a while, but it seemed wrong to bring it up over the phone. He was in the thick of his presentations, and it wouldn’t be fair to distract him, but also, she wanted to see his face, to know for sure what he was thinking. Besides, she needed to know if she was pregnant or not before it made sense to broach the topic of parenthood with him.
When she imagined taking the test, she couldn’t picture Radha there with her, or any of the other women she knew, for that matter. And while she loved her brother, he was not the person she would choose for this particular mission.
Of course, it was Lulu she wanted by her side. Even though she knew, especially after what had happened with Jack, that the idea of her friendship with Lulu was simply that—an idea, long ago extinguished—it was still what she yearned for. So often it had been Lulu who’d comforted her, persuaded her things would be okay. When Katie gouged her leg on a nail and the wound was thick with grit, Lulu kept a cool head even though the grown-ups were all gone. When Katie drank too much whiskey after they’d sneaked out one night, Lulu had given her a piggyback through the darkened woods, not even stopping once. She had a herculean strength, it seemed, the ability to withstand almost anything with a wry smile or a dismissive shrug. Never hysterical, never flippant. Katie thought she’d put all that longing for what she could no longer have behind her, but no. It was hard to accept that this hurdle—finding out if she had a child growing inside her—was one she’d have to figure out on her own.
From the outside, her life looked pretty ordinary, but the revelations of the past few weeks had shifted her self-perception. She wanted agency over herself, the freedom to make her own mistakes and to be her own person—the irony was that this was the life she thought she’d already been living. Now she was realizing that she had been in thrall to the past, allowing it to define her every move. Keeping new friends at arm’s length, minimizing her relationship with Zev, awaiting her father’s release like a child eager for the comfort of being tucked in at night. She even felt differently about her mother, who had revealed a tender side on that call that she’d previously kept hidden—or that, perhaps, Katie hadn’t been able to see.
Upon waking each day she slipped a finger between her legs and searched her bedsheets for a drop of blood. Every time she got up from her cubicle to go to the ladies’ room at HCG, she prayed to see a splash of red on her underpants. Knowing whether she was actually pregnant was complicated by Zev being away all this time: as long as he was physically absent, she could trick herself into staying in this false limbo. Last night after they’d spoken, she had almost cried with relief at having heard his mellifluous voice again. But at the very same time, she dreaded his return and all that it would mean for them.
If she were actually pregnant, how would he react? She really had no idea. What did he even think about children? The only clue she had to go on was watching how he reacted as they walked around the city together—watching out for a child amid the crowd jostling to board a subway carriage, grinning at a baby peeking out from a blanket-stuffed stroller as they waited in line at the supermarket. But it wasn’t clear what any of that might mean in terms of how he felt about becoming a father himself. And what did she think? Could she consider becoming a mother at such a young age—could she do it?