The Kindest Lie(12)
It hurt until it didn’t anymore. Sex was like salve on old wounds. When he entered her, he filled the aching, empty places left by a dead grandfather and parents she never knew. They didn’t talk about protection because he was her protection.
The day the doctor confirmed Ruth’s pregnancy, Mama didn’t say a word. There was no surprise on her face. No shock. It was as if she had been awaiting official confirmation of what she already knew. People said there was something about the way a girl walked from the very beginning when she was carrying a baby—a spread to her hips, the parting of her legs—that you could just tell.
Mama took her anger out on a frying pan, scrubbing it so hard the nonstick coating peeled off like an onion skin. That night, Ruth saw her kneeling in the closet, her face wet with perspiration, trembling, a moan rising from her throat, petitioning Jesus to intervene.
Ruth couldn’t even look her grandmother in her eyes in those early months of pregnancy. She had messed up big time, carrying her shame in front of her, that shame walking into rooms first, pressing against the kitchen table where they said grace as a family.
Keeping the baby a secret from Ronald had never been the plan, but he barely looked at her during that first trimester. When he got sidelined from football in a late-season game with an anterior cruciate ligament tear and his college scholarship dreams began slipping away, he withdrew into himself. That’s the only way to put it. As soon as he stopped touching that ball, he stopped touching her, too.
Still, Ruth kept making plans for them and the baby on the way, hoping he’d eventually stop tripping. On an Excel spreadsheet she kept private, she mapped out her strategy, which included Ronald attending community college to start and then joining her at a four-year university where she’d study part-time and raise their baby, and he’d play football.
The college prep books had advised making two lists: one for “safety” schools and another for “I’ll die happy if this ever happens” schools. Yale, with its reputation for fostering big ideas and curiosity, had been her reach-beyond-the-cornfields-of-Ganton, her reach-for-more. She had watched Angela Bassett in the movie Waiting to Exhale dozens of times, and the Yale graduate inspired her. There was something about the way she moved—her back stick straight, head high—and every time she spoke, brilliance dripped from her lips. A Yale-made woman.
After college graduation, Ronald would be drafted to the NFL and she would find an engineering job in whatever city he landed in, and by then, they would consider having a second child.
In those early months of her pregnancy, before she began to show, she told herself that if Ronald knew the truth, maybe his eyes wouldn’t be so cold and distant. But every time she tried talking to him about anything, he either snapped at her or stayed quiet.
She tried to explain how the Pythagorean theorem related to football interceptions, but he wasn’t interested. She offered to ice his knee, but he didn’t want her to touch him. Could she make him a sandwich? No.
One night, they were sitting on the couch at Ronald’s place watching an old Martin rerun and she suggested they go together to a party that Friday night, something to take his mind off his knee injury. And if she were honest, anything to get out of his mother’s basement.
Without looking at her, Ronald pulled hard on the Velcro strap of his knee brace. “You can do what you want on Friday nights, just not with me,” he said.
How could she tell him about the baby after that? What if he blamed her and thought she had trapped him somehow? People labeled certain girls in school who zeroed in on potential husbands like a laser, some going as far as to poke holes in condoms. Ruth wasn’t one of those girls, yet she desperately wanted him to know they’d created a life together. Keeping the baby a secret almost destroyed her, but every time she opened her mouth, no sound emerged. She couldn’t do it.
Her long talks were instead with the baby. Do you think he still loves us? Her tongue would itch, and she’d crave something sweet, like caramel apples or Tootsie Rolls. That would be a sign from their baby that everything would be okay.
Then she’d say, If Ronald really loves us and wants us to be a family, kick once for yes, twice for no. Sometimes, she wouldn’t feel anything for a long stretch of time, and then if there were two kicks, she told herself the baby had misheard the question. She’d ask it again until she felt a single kick.
Now, the silence between Ruth and her husband coated the air, thick and pungent, the discontent almost choking them. When there was no more good TV to watch, only infomercials for blenders and thigh thinners, Xavier finally came to bed. He wasn’t a man to pout or lick his wounds. But they’d never fought over anything this consequential before, either, and as well as she knew her husband, it was impossible to read his mind. And honestly, this hadn’t even been a fight. A fight would have been easier. He moved around their bedroom, careful to avoid any physical contact with her.
Ruth turned out the lights and lay beneath the sheets with her eyes closed and hands clasped over her chest, pretending she hadn’t moments earlier been pressed against the door trying to anticipate his mood. Her head burrowed in the thousand-thread-count pillowcase, made of Egyptian cotton designed to softly caress her cheek. But on this night, it just chafed, and she couldn’t get comfortable with Xavier so close, yet so far away.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes before stretching out on top of the covers, then rolling onto his side. Curling into a ball, she tucked her legs beneath her, facing one wall while he faced the other. He had always been a generous bed partner, never hogging the covers or manspreading. In the infancy of their marriage, she had stayed awake through the night watching his chest rise and fall as a mother would do with her baby, admiring the bridge of his nose and the length of his eyelashes. She had been afraid to go to sleep. Afraid he might not be there in the morning.