What We Lose(26)

I somehow manage to go to work, to come home at night and fix my dinner, and, regardless of how little I’ve slept, wake myself the next morning, dress, and get to work on time. In the beginning, I tell Aminah nothing, but then, when we are speaking on the phone one day, she asks why I haven’t said Peter’s name in weeks. I tell her about his last weekend in Brooklyn, how cold and distant he suddenly became, how he couldn’t wait to get on that plane. It doesn’t make sense to her, how the change could have happened so suddenly—from being in love to no longer speaking. I tell her that he is different, that he cares for me, that he won’t be one of those who just disappears. I wield excuse after excuse and none of them work. I have to admit to her the truth—about the baby still growing inside me that is Peter’s.

My father is less and less available. When I call him, he answers the phone in a low voice and hurries me off the line. As he is hanging up the phone, I swear I hear a woman’s voice on the other end. Sometimes I call his number and just cry into his voicemail. I ask if he can visit me in New York, but he says that he is busy, always busy. You never had so many plans before, I tell him. You’re being very emotional, he says, stressing the last word as if it is an uncomfortable sweater he is being forced to wear. I envy the flatness in his voice, the feeling that he has steadily moved uphill away from our tragedy while I have managed to slide myself back down into a pit.

Why, why, why? Aminah prods me with this word over and over, and I have no answer. I have done only what I could manage. I have had no strength to terminate the baby, or to handle an adoption; I have only persisted, and it has landed me at this point. When I tell her how far along I am, she sighs heavily. She knows what I have been hiding from myself the past few weeks. The baby is a baby now. There’s no way to deal with this easily. I can still give it up for adoption, she tells me hopefully, but this option seems the least likely. I can’t imagine carrying the baby to term only to give it away. The shame of having to admit to the world that I can’t care for the baby seems unbearable.



I feel like I am walking on land again, like my effort is getting me somewhere.





I call on a Sunday and he again tries to hurry me off the phone.

I have no time for formalities. “What’s her name?” I demand of him, and he tells me.

The woman’s name is Elma. They have been seeing each other for the past three months, he says. It’s nothing serious yet, he is careful to mention. She is a secretary in the admissions office at the college. After he tells me this, I am silent for a while on the phone, letting myself marinate in bitterness.

“I didn’t know how to tell you, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to do. Thandi, are you there?”

“I am.”

“I want to be happy again,” he says, his voice breaking. “Don’t you think I deserve happiness?”

“Of course,” I say. “You deserve much more than that. I only wish I could be okay with what form of happiness you’ve chosen.”

“Well, you know, these things choose us.”

“Hmmph,” I grunt. “Well, I don’t want to meet her. I don’t want to know her. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, honey, that’s fine. I understand.”

I can’t stop repeating it in my head: Elma. Elma. Elma. I have the sudden urge to stab something.

“Dad, I’m pregnant.”





The spare room in Aminah and Frank’s townhouse is outfitted in antique floral prints, medals and trophies from Frank’s high school days, and pictures of Aminah’s father. The effect is a strange mash-up of WASP-Afrocentric style that I am forced to take in every night.

Aminah has accosted me into staying with her and Frank for a week. On the phone one day, she suggests gently, then more forcefully, that I could use some time to rest.

“I can rest well enough in my own apartment.”

“It will be good for you to be around friends.”

I run out of excuses with Aminah, so I call in at work, lying to my boss that I have the flu. My boss is satisfied with this explanation for my recent erratic behavior. I pack my bag and take a train to Philadelphia.

For dinner, Aminah cooks me meals composed mostly of vegetables from the farmer’s market—no risky foods like seafood or rare meat. At the dinner table, she and Frank have wine from the wine fridge that glows like a spaceship under their new countertops. She’s bought me nonalcoholic wine, but I refuse that.

“I can have up to a glass a day. They say it’s even good for you.”

But Aminah just dips her head. She is doing her standard steel gaze—she pretends she hasn’t heard me.

“Asparagus?” she holds a gold-rimmed platter out to me.

Later that night, Aminah buries me under stacks of blankets.

“I feel like a real pregnant woman,” I say. “You got me all laid up here. I’m not on bed rest, you know.”

She does her steel gaze again and leaves the room. After she’s gone I try to decide exactly what I’ve done to offend her—is it the pregnancy itself, or the fact that I don’t seem to be taking it as seriously as she thinks I should?

Frank works from home the third day. In the morning he cooks me scrambled eggs; he peels and sections my orange, slices my apples into eighths with the cores cut out.