“I’m sure my father felt the same way about my mother.” That shut him up for a minute. Had her father always been cold and distant, or only after his wife died? Only after she’d died trying to give birth to Wednesday, the child he’d never seemed able to love?
He brushed her hair back from her tearful eyes. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Believe me. Everything will be fine.”
Daniel didn’t believe for a second that she was going to die, or he would have ripped their baby from her womb himself. When praying fervently to lose the baby naturally didn’t work for her, she made an appointment to have an abortion, which got rather involved since they were in Australia. In this, for once, he did not feel he had the authority to control her, so he held his silence and waited for the day. As he’d suspected, she was unable to go through with it and came home from the appointment a mess. She cried for hours in his arms, wretched and scared.
But from that emotional afternoon, it was a reality. They were having a baby. Wednesday and he had created a life together, however accidentally, and they would soon be a family. Shortly after they returned to LA, he made Wednesday his wife. She only fought him a little. A few good, strict spankings and a marvelous ring did the trick.
And yes, it galled him that he was doing exactly as Vincent had directed, doing
exactly
, to the letter, what Vincent had prescribed. “
I want you to love her and baby her and discipline her and marry her and get her pregnant with little Daniels and Wednesdays
.”
Vincent had been excited to hear about the baby, but he hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Not a chance. Their shotgun wedding was a private affair between them and a justice of the peace. Afterward Daniel took her home and fucked her in the middle of the living room with her wedding dress over her head and then tied her to the tree and spanked her. She wouldn’t have had it any other way.
After that they kept as well as they could to their usual routines, even as she grew and changed before his eyes. Her breasts—wow. Pregnancy and breasts. God’s apology to men for those pregnancy hormones that made life a living hell. He still found ways to discipline her, although inventiveness was the order of the day. No nipple clamps, because nipple stimulation could cause preterm labor. They had both almost cried over that. No hard spankings, no rough stuff, and no marks or welts when she had an appointment coming up. In the eighth month, she had to start going to the doctor weekly, and at that point they mostly gave up on the kinky play.
But he still fucked her, still lusted for her. He still bedeviled her even when she pushed him away, complaining she was a house, a blimp, crying that he couldn’t possibly be attracted to her. He was attracted to her more than ever, although he could never convince her of that.
Unfortunately she was also convinced her chances of survival were slim. She regularly fell into fits of deep despair and fearfulness. They attempted a childbirth class together. He hoped it might help her manage her anxiety, but all it did was make her more anxious, and she pulled him out of the classroom in the first hour. So finally he left her to her writing and her nervousness and did all the things that had to be done to prepare. She wouldn’t shop for clothes or pick out anything for the baby, ambivalent as she was, so he did everything down to painting and fixing up the nursery down the hall from their room.
It was the smallest bedroom and the darkest, good for baby napping. He painted the walls—all of them. The rest of the house was as white as ever, but the baby got all the colors of the world, rainbows and trees and happy bears and a smiling sun. And pink bows and flowers, because they discovered in an awe-inspiring ultrasound that they were having a girl.
That was the closest he’d come to losing it with her during the pregnancy, that day when she wouldn’t look at the screen. But he looked, and he saw, and he described it to her later in bed over her soft sobs and tears.
“
Ten fingers, ten toes, two arms, two legs
,” he’d whispered, trying to infuse his voice with all the enthusiasm he couldn’t draw from her. He wished he could pour it into her ears like his words—that enthusiasm and excitement she refused to feel. “It was all right there on the screen. You should have seen it. She was beautiful. I looked right into her face.”
“
Who did she look like
?” she’d asked, curiosity overcoming her stubborn attempt not to care.
“
Well. Skeletor, but she has some more time to grow and develop
.” She’d laughed then, relaxing against him. “
You could see her eyes and her nose and her mouth, Wed. It was just amazing, seeing her there
.” After that they’d called their poor baby girl Skeletor for months. They were unable to decide on a name.
“Let’s just decide when we see her,” Wednesday suggested. “You can pick out the name when you see her.”
You
can. Of course.
Because, Daniel, I’ll be dead.
The baby was going to kill her. Wednesday knew it. That was, if she didn’t kick her to death first or kill her from lack of sleep and lack of sex. Daniel tried, he really tried, to fuck her, and he did manage somehow, but it was hard for her to enjoy it when she looked and felt like a whale.
From time to time, to torture herself, she went to the armoire in the corner of the bedroom to cry over the lingerie sets she used to be able to wear. She couldn’t even fit one of her boobs in those skimpy bras, and it would have taken three or four of the garter belts to span her distended, grotesque waist. The baby must have weighed fifteen pounds by then. She’d never get her out. That was how the baby would kill her. Wednesday had killed her mother the exact same way, by being too big.
But no one took her concerns seriously. Not the doctor, not the nurses, Daniel least of all. She finally just stopped talking about it and resigned herself to the fact that she would die. He would see. He would be sorry later that he’d mocked her. He would understand and admit she was right when he was grieving over her body, and she’d be up in heaven, or more likely down in hell, saying,
I told you so.
In the meantime she busied herself writing, trying to put down her life before it was gone. If her daughter survived her, she wanted her to know the story of her mother, the good and the bad. She wrote about her childhood, her time with Vincent, her time with Daniel—sanitized a bit. She specified on the title page in bold and italicized caps,
DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU ARE AT LEAST 18.
Daniel loved to see her writing, even though she wouldn’t let him read it. It was too personal for her to show it to him, at least while she was alive. When she was gone, he could read it, and hopefully it would sustain him until he was strong enough to get on with his life. She put it all in there, all the depth of her feelings for him. All the hope and happiness he’d given her, all the love and emotion she felt. He begged constantly to see what she was working on, especially as she typed through tears.
“It’s too personal,” Wednesday said, to get him off her back.
“Personal?” he scoffed. “You’re nine months pregnant with my child. Let me see.”
“No, but I love you. Maybe someday. When it’s finished and perfect.”
When I’m dead.
“Speaking of finished,” he said, “the nursery’s almost painted. I should finish it up. We don’t have much time left, do we?” He leaned down to kiss her huge belly.
No, we don’t have much time left.
She stood by a window in the soothing autumn afternoon sun while he painted upstairs. She let the unseasonable warmth seep into her sore bones. Her uterus felt tight and achy. She was at the printer, collating pages as well as she could over her massive belly. She was finished with her story. She hadn’t been sure exactly how to wrap up everything, how to sum up all the amazing moments they’d had. It had kind of trailed off at the end.
No matter what happens, no matter how miserable I am right now…
She wished she could have finished it, but she had a feeling her time was almost up. She wanted to print a hard copy before it was too late. She was just secreting the pages of the document in the armoire upstairs when the phone rang. She lumbered down the stairs with a groan, holding her belly.
“Hello, Laurent household,” she answered.
There was a momentary pause on the other end of the line, then, “Is Daniel there?”
She knew that voice as well as her own, had listened to it for five years. Had obeyed it and cowered under it and ached for it for half a decade of her life.
She took a deep breath. “Yes, he is.”
Another pause. “Well then, Wednesday, put him on the line.”
Not
Wednesday, how are you? What are you doing there
? Not
Wednesday, I hope you’re okay
. No, just matter-of-fact orders to hand the phone over to Daniel. The sick part of it was, his voice made her instantly, unthinkingly obey. She might have asked,
Why are you calling here
? But no, she was already heading across the room.
“Just a minute.”
Woodenly, she struggled back up the stairs. She’d thought she was over Vincent after a year and a half, but she was hurt that he’d ignored her and asked to speak to Daniel instead.
She opened the door to the nursery. God, so many colors.
“Don’t come in here, baby. The fumes—” He looked at her face and fell silent. “What is it?”
She held out the phone to him like it was a snake.
“Vincent. For you.”
She wasn’t sure about the look he gave her then. It was frustration, anger, annoyance, guilt, but it wasn’t surprise, and not seeing any surprise on his face…she wondered at that. He shepherded her out the door quickly. “Go. These fumes aren’t good for the baby.”
When she was out in the hall again, he slammed the door.
She stood there and listened, desperately trying to hear what was being said. She only heard a short, terse conversation, Daniel saying good-bye, then nothing. Back to the walls.
She drifted downstairs and collapsed on the couch, staring into space. She’d forgotten what it felt like—that worthlessness—and it scared her how easily that feeling came back.
She waited for Daniel to come down, to explain why Vincent had called, but he didn’t, and she started imagining all kinds of things. Maybe Vincent was sick or dying. Maybe he was moving away. Maybe he wanted Daniel to share her with him as Vincent had shared her once upon a time.
It wasn’t until dinner that she accepted Daniel wasn’t going to tell her on his own, so she asked him point-blank. “Why did Vincent call you today?”
Daniel frowned and avoided her eyes. At first she thought he would ignore her question completely, but then he said, “It’s none of your business.”
Blame the pregnant hormones or the heartburn or the lack of sleep or the annoyance of feeling like a whale, but she saw red at that moment. “Why the fuck did he call?”
“Calm down, Wednesday.”
“No, I won’t calm down!”
“You shouldn’t be getting all excited in your condition.”
“Fuck my condition. Why did he call?”
“To talk to me. That’s all. Just to chat, okay?”
“Why? What on earth could you possibly chat about with him?”
He made a face.
“What do you have to discuss with Vincent?”
He sighed heavily. “You. Okay? You. He calls to talk about you.”
“He
calls
? He’s called before?”
“He calls me a lot actually.”
“You never told me. You never once told me he called.”
“The reason for that, Wednesday, is that I didn’t want you to know.”
“You didn’t think I had a right to know?”
“No, I didn’t and I don’t! And I can decide not to tell you whatever I fucking please.”
“Oh, that’s right.” She picked angrily at the food on her plate. “I’m only your fucking possession, your sex toy who’s not even good for that now.”
He threw down his fork. “Why do you care so much? Are you still in love with him? Do you want to go back to him?”
“No, I’m just wondering why—”
“Why? Why I didn’t tell you? Because I hate him. I think he’s an ass. You’re mine now, not his. I don’t want you to care if he calls or not. It’s not important. Let it go.”