The Forgotten Hours(72)
We do have a lot to talk about
No, this was a bad idea. She would have to find the right way to tell him, face-to-face. Then she thought, At least I can write that I love him. But it seemed wrong to send those fragile words on that kind of journey—to an SMTP server where they would wait in an outgoing mail queue, clunky and manifestly inhuman. Instead, she would whisper them into his neck, the heat of her words giving life to possibility. They would stumble toward each other as best they could when he was back.
I’m really missing you and can’t wait till you get back, she wrote instead, and she pressed send and headed out to the office.
What was different when she woke up the next morning, after going to bed far too early and sleeping badly? Nothing and everything. Spinning her feet from bed to floor, she rose, stretched her neck a bit, and headed straight to the kitchen area to get the pregnancy test. It was a basic version: pee here; watch the plus or minus sign emerge. She sat and peed, urged on by the sudden desire for certainty.
Her head was still lost among the night shadows; she stared at the pale-pink tiles, the missing grout. While waiting, she made herself coffee and picked her outfit for work. There was no rush—it was done, the damp plastic indicator lay on the windowsill in her bathroom, and all she had to do was look. Rushing would make no difference. The coffee was strong and gave her a sour kick. Her head began to clear. She checked her email again, but there was still nothing from Zev, even though it was daytime in Spain and he must have finished his speeches already. What a relief that she hadn’t written him an overblown email in a moment of weakness telling him she loved him. In a few days he’d be back, and they would talk this all through sensibly. There was an email from her mother telling her that Grumpy had briefly been in the ICU again but was improving. Katie and David had tickets to London for the following weekend: an eleven-hour flight including two layovers, but she was happy she’d get to see him again.
In the bathroom, the plastic wand waited for her. The seconds before getting the answer were crystalline, perfectly empty. It was strange to know that reality had already happened, that it was a fact—she was or was not with child—but before she entered the bathroom, this reality did not yet exist for her.
She crossed the threshold, picked up the test, saw the sign. Now she knew: she was pregnant.
At work, the ringing of the phones and the susurrant voices formed a soundtrack to the whirling sandstorm in her mind. At this point, she would have paid to be given some real work to do rather than sit there twiddling her thumbs. There was some accounting she was helping a colleague with and a little research to do for Jonas, but other than that she was trapped in her cubicle with only her thoughts. As she pondered the reality that she was indeed carrying the tiny seed of a baby in her body—a child over whom she had the godlike power of life—she kept circling back again and again to her own mother.
Charlie had once told them she’d wanted babies since she understood that she could just cook one up in her belly like one of her own mother’s rhubarb pies (this was before she understood the role men played in the culinary process of baby making). Talking with her kids about her childhood in England, she seemed charged with an almost melancholic energy, as though those days had been magical and real life hadn’t lived up to the dreams she’d concocted for herself. It struck Katie as odd, then, that Charlie seemed to get so little joy from being an actual mother herself. So odd that she’d begun to think motherhood had been disappointing in some way Charlie hadn’t anticipated. It scared her.
Perhaps it was in fact the miscarriages, the steady loss. With each one, Charlie withdrew further. When Charlie finally gave birth to David, Katie had become so accustomed to her mother’s frostiness, how she seemed to close herself off, that she wasn’t sure if she should even show her happiness at having a baby brother.
It was two in the afternoon already, and there were no messages yet from her father. The phone at the cabin rang and rang into the emptiness, and there was no answering machine. She had no earthly idea where he could be. It occurred to her that he might have decided to drive up to Montreal and find her mother, but that was too crazy to be true.
Thank God Zev would be back soon. That night they’d had cocktails, when he’d tried to talk with her about moving in together, seemed as far away as the speck of a freighter on a watery horizon. She had been pregnant then, and she’d run away from him. How much of that was avoidance, and how much was simply because she’d felt sick? If he hadn’t gone to Spain, would things have been different? She could have asked him to go to Eagle Lake with her; they would have had time to talk. Now she feared it might be too late: she’d withheld too much from him for too long. The lack of emails from him had her spinning.
That cold swim in the lake seemed so distant. The courthouse, those transcripts. Could it really have been only a few days ago that she had kissed Jack? Since Zev had been gone, she’d lived an entire life—and he had missed it all.
33
The other freshmen see only the person Katie chooses to present to them. It’s been a few hours since her mother dropped her off on campus, and her roommate hasn’t arrived yet. In the mirror of the communal bathroom, Katie is met with a surprise: the person staring back at her feels no relief. Violent furrows tug at her mouth. It’s been a couple of months since her father went to prison. Over 254 more weeks to go! The house will be gone soon, sold. Charlie and David are moving into a small sublet in the city. Her life is a pocked moonscape. A rush of anger comes over her. She grabs the scissors from her toiletry bag, the razor she uses on her legs.