A Sense of the Infinite (10 page)

I WAS GRATEFUL WHEN SCHOOL STARTED
again. Even though the break was only four days long, it felt like forever. I’d gotten a cold the day after the dance and spent Sunday on the couch watching
Fraggle Rock
. I wasn’t too sick to go back to school, but I was still a little queasy and tired.

Noe had come back from the ski lodge wearing a brand-new coat with a fake fur collar. At our lockers that morning, she chattered about Darla. “She’s like a second mom to me, you know?”

Noe’s mom was perfectly nice: generous and exhausted, always making sure you had a drink and a snack. Noe couldn’t stand her.

“Why do you need a second mom?” I said, which seemed to make Noe annoyed.

That afternoon, we had a gym meet, the first one that counted for points. Noe got three first-place ribbons. My whole body felt heavy and I was sneezing so much I almost fell off the uneven bars, so for the rest of the afternoon I sat on the bleachers reading
How to Survive in the Woods
, two warm sweaters pulled over my leotard, a small mountain of tissues piling up beside me.

“Did you make out with Bryan Drexel?” Noe asked me on the bus ride home. “Rhiannon heard you did.”

“Extenuating circumstances,” I croaked. “You had to be there.”

“You’re getting to be so scandalous,” Noe said. “You never even used to talk about boys, and suddenly you’re the one-night-stand queen.”

“I don’t think a kiss counts as a one-night stand,” I said.

“Darla thinks you’re acting out your father issues,” Noe said.

“What does Steven’s mom know about my
father issues
?”

“Just because your dad left your mom doesn’t mean that any boy you actually like is going to leave you.”

“Noe. I was bored. I made out with Bryan Drexel. You don’t have to come up with some big
interpretation
.”

The bus jolted over a pothole, and I felt a wave of fatigue. I
couldn’t wait to get home and lie down. “In other news,” I said, “Margot Dilforth has been telling people you throw up in the bathrooms.”

Noe made a gesture of contempt encompassing the bus, the scenery, and the universe at large. She put her arm around my shoulder as if to assert our solidarity against the meddling Margot Dilforths of the world. “Margot Dilforth is an idiot,” she said.

THE FIRST FRIDAY BACK FROM
Thanksgiving, they herded all the seniors into the auditorium to drill us on the rules for campus visits. No drinking. No illegal substances. No sexual escapades. Noe and Steven held hands throughout the entire presentation, making plans to video chat every night of the three-day separation.

I wasn’t quite so gung ho.

Uncle Dylan had called Ava to say I was coming and bought my Greyhound tickets online to get the early-bird price. Mom called her best friend, Pauline, who lives in the same town, to arrange for me to go over for dinner on my last night.

The town, Maple Bay, was an eight-hour bus ride away.
“We’ll see each other all the time,” Noe had reassured me when I’d expressed my dismay a second time. “You’ll still come home for Christmas and stuff. Don’t worry.”

I stared at the map on my computer screen, with the route snaking across it in blue. I turned off my computer and lay on my bed with
How to Survive in the Woods
, but the route stayed pinned to the back of my eyes.

I had never been that far from home before.

THE MORNING BEFORE I WAS SUPPOSED
to leave, I threw up in the garbage can next to my bed. I stared at the throw-up numbly, my body filling up with a terrible foreknowledge.

Not possible
, I thought.
So not possible.

But my body clenched and rumbled and I threw up again.

I sat on my bed, my body curiously rigid, curiously light.

No
, I thought to myself,
no, no, no, no.

I listed all the reasons it couldn’t be true: I was taking exactly half my pills, and Noe had said that was enough. The condom we’d used had mostly stayed on. I was underweight—the nutritionist had said so. Skinny girls couldn’t get pregnant.

I tried to remember when I’d had my last period, but before the Pill I got it only every three or four months, and I wasn’t sure when it was supposed to happen now that I was taking it.

Mom had left for work half an hour ago. I went downstairs, threw on my coat, and fired up the Honda, which I’d barely driven since my last shift at the ice-cream shop. The familiar houses jerked by, and the dented newspaper boxes that had melted snow pooled inside them, and the convenience store with wet bundles of firewood stacked beside the door. It seemed disloyal of the world to change like that, to be cold and dismal where it had been bright and scented and thrumming three months before.
Change back
, I wanted to scream.
Change back
. As if the winter was a cruel withholding by a universe that could just as easily churn out spring.

The drugstore was practically empty at that time of day, just a scattering of old men looking at vitamins and tired moms trying to resist their children’s efforts at grabbing Christmas candy.
There’s no reason to panic
, I told myself.
Any sane person wouldn’t even bother with a test. I’m being paranoid.

I found the tests in aisle 7 and put one in my basket, then covered it with a box of tampons and a pack of hair elastics and a chocolate Santa. The checkout clerk probably wouldn’t even notice what I was buying, I told myself. They scanned so many barcodes it had to become automatic. Still, I was sweating under my snow coat. I didn’t trust myself not to fumble the
PIN on the debit card reader, so I thrust a twenty-dollar bill at the cashier and did not meet her eyes while she counted the change into my hand.

At home, in the bathroom, a plus sign appeared. I wrapped the test up calmly, neatly, as one would in case of fire, and slid it to the bottom of the trash. I walked back to my bedroom and sat on my bed.

Outside, the last of the leaves on the birch tree were detaching themselves and spiraling down, detaching and spiraling down, landing on the snow-covered lawn. I watched them fall one by one, observing where they landed, as if I would be called to give an account of them later. When it got too windy to watch the leaves anymore, I put on
The Velvet Undergound
and listened to the entire album three times.

Finally, there was nothing to do but leave the house, so that is what I did.

IN THE “UNEXPECTED PREGNANCY” EPISODE
of the TV series, the girl in trouble always Considers Her Options and Struggles with the Decision. She changes her mind a bunch and later, always wonders if she Did the Right Thing.

I was not a girl in a TV show. I’d made my decision in the seconds it took me to throw up in a garbage can. There was no going back and forth. No waiting for the decision to appear like a package in the mail. It just landed there,
thud
.

It was strange to be so certain.

You were supposed to agonize.

What did it mean that I wasn’t agonizing?

In the TV show, the girl in trouble cried on her bed.

I listened to
The Velvet Underground
and walked in the forest.

I was more visibly upset the time I was eight and found a tick on my arm when I pulled off my sweater after one of our hikes—
Get it off me, get it off me!
—while Mom calmly went for the matches and tweezers.

Maybe it was her example that made me so certain, and so calm. Tick in jar. Tweezers in drawer. Then back to cooking the soup and chopping the wood, one cord for our fireplace and one for Nan’s.

Isn’t this what you secretly wanted?
said a mean voice in my head.
An excuse to stay at home forever and never leave?

Noe would want to be its auntie, I knew. She would coo and fuss and make lists of names in her day planner. In tenth grade, when Amanda Robinson got pregnant with Billy Shearer, Noe went nuts. She’d never even liked Amanda, but suddenly it was
Amanda and Billy
this,
Amanda and Billy
that, as if they were TV celebrities instead of Red Bull–swilling fifteen-year-olds who’d been dating for only three months. I’d seen Amanda and Billy around town, arguing in the Burger King parking lot while their baby wailed in its enormous plastic carrier. It didn’t seem romantic to me. It seemed like the end of the world.

The woods were quiet. In my head, I was taking a magic pill that would make it go away. I was shaving my moustache. I was anywhere but here.

AFTER THE FOREST I DROVE DOWNTOWN.
It looked smaller in the snow, and drearier. Raccoons rummaged in the ditches where garbage cans had overflowed. Buses sloshed up and down the street.

I saw on a bench in front of a gift shop.

A family with four kids wandered past me. The kids had those huge lollipops they sell to tourists, the kind you only ever see in cartoons. They had just unwrapped their lollipops and were trying to figure out the best strategy for consuming them. The thing is, though, it’s impossible to get your mouth around them, and if you just lick the surface you can’t get the full flavor. I watched the kids bringing the lollipops to their faces at different angles, realizing the dimensions were all wrong to get
a good lick, looking confused but still determined, as if they couldn’t believe that these enormous pink and blue things that looked so tantalizing were basically impossible to enjoy. You have to smash them into pieces to be able to suck on them at all, but kids are never willing to do that. Besides, once you do break off a piece, you realize how bad and headachey it tastes, and you don’t want to eat it anymore.

When I got too cold from sitting, I went to the Unbelievable! Museum.

The museum is in a white house, with a white painted sign out front, and a replica of a barrel that someone had used to go over the waterfall in the 1920s. You can climb into the barrel and have your picture taken with your head sticking out the top. I have six or seven pictures of myself in this barrel at different ages, always grinning, my face bright with schemes to build a barrel of my own. The barrel is made of thick planks of wood encased in rings of steel. It swallows you up. It feels unbreakable. You can imagine cozying up inside it with a blanket and a book, and never noticing the roaring, rushing tumble over the waterfall.

Inside the museum, there’s a goat with two heads and a wax figure of a woman with six fingers on both hands, as well as her delicate pink six-fingered gloves with pearl buttons up the side. There’s a rat king, which is when a nest of rats gets their tails tangled up in a knot and can’t get untangled again. They die
like that, a writhing mass of rats, and eventually get discovered and stuck in curiosity museums. But the strangest thing in the collection is the lithopedion.

At first it looks like a fossil or rock; not a big deal compared to a two-headed goat. But if you read the typed yellow card, you discover that it is actually a rock-baby retrieved from the stomach of a seventy-year-old woman. Lithopedions are exceptionally rare. They happen when a baby starts to grow in the wrong place, and the body builds a shield of calcium around it. Medieval records of lithopedions tell stories of women who knew they were pregnant but “the baby never came out,” and eventually they forgot about it and went on with their lives.

Maybe, I thought to myself, if I was lucky, the same thing would happen to me. My body would quietly digest the bundle of cells inside it, or it would fossilize them and turn them to stone. In fifty years, I would feel a pain in my stomach, and doctors would extract a pebble the size of aquarium gravel.

Do you know what this is, ma’am?
they would say, holding it up with tweezers, and I would shake my head in bewilderment.
No, I have no idea
.

“The museum is closing,” said the girl at the counter.

I took my winter jacket from the coat hook and walked out.

I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE GOING HOME.

I drove past the Java Bean where kids from my school were eating maple donuts, and the No Frills where Mom was working. The McDonald’s PlayPlace looked like a strange tumor growing out of the side of the building. It snaked around bulbously while little kids clambered around inside it.

I drove past the go-kart track where my cousin Max works in the summer, and the K-Mart with the French fry truck outside.

Finally I went to the Botanical Gardens and parked in the empty lot.

The Botanical Gardens stay open year-round, although
there are no flowers in winter. You can walk around the frozen grounds, gazing at the red berries on the winter trees and the topiary unicorn glittering with frost. The ice-cream shop is closed but Jeanette Fielding is still in her office, filling out order forms for next year’s Dixie cups and waffle cones.

The orchid house was empty. Not a single purple face to peep at, no nodding pink things on stems.

I remembered the first time Mom took me to the Gardens. How we spent all afternoon singing to the ducks in the pond and talking to flowers. How dizzy sweet the cosmos, how giggling and jesterly the jacaranda. How the whole garden became a many-tendriled friend I swam through under the sunshine.

Cold air was blowing through the broken pane of greenhouse glass.

I sat on the ground and took out my phone.

I supposed I had better tell Oliver.

I CALLED OLIVER’S NUMBER. THE GIRL
who answered sang, “This is Loreen, Alaskan booty queen.”

If it wasn’t my life, I would have laughed.

LOREEN, ALASKAN BOOTY QUEEN, SOUNDED
drunk.

“I need to talk to Oliver,” I said.

“Who’s this?” she drawled suspiciously.

I paused, but couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with my name. “This is Annabeth, ice cream girl from hell. I need to speak to Oliver
now
.”

Loreen didn’t like the sound of that.

“Why?” she said. “What’s your business?”

“Pregnancy.”

She said she’d get him straightaway.