“You don’t get to be the judge of that,” I said. “Don’t I get to choose at all?” I was swamped by a sudden tide of sympathy for him. Vincent really believed he was just adequate. He had a past in which he’d needed to choose to fight almost every day.
He reminded me of me.
“But who are you to judge men? Especially men a generation older than you? You have your father the hero and your ex-boyfriend the shit-head loser, so I would look pretty good.”
Let’s rewind
, I thought.
I want a chance to tell you things
. But I said, “Why is this so freaking different from anybody else? People have to figure this out all the time in their lives, and sometimes they don’t even know each other. And usually that’s a disaster. If you think I’m asking you to have a baby with me, Vincent, I’m not.” Certainly, at least in that moment, that was a big fat lie. I was asking just that and he knew it.
I sat down hard on the bed and deliberately pulled my hair over my face. Vincent cupped the back of my neck in one of his hands. I felt myself merge into his touch. Just biology. It was cold in the room except at the intersection of Vincent’s hand and the nape of my neck. I bit my lip hard, and it hurt; I realized that I’d never bitten my lip. Effectively, it stanched the tears that would have come crowding into my eyes if I let myself think that I would never forget the precise way that his hand felt there. So I pushed out the words: “I’m not saying I want you to be my partner. I’m saying I don’t know if I want to end this pregnancy, because …”
“Because why?”
“Because I might want to share my life with someone I love.”
“That’s what I said, Sicily. How could we know, either of us? The reason I didn’t call you was because it was easier to let you hate me and think I was a jerk from California who used you to get over my girlfriend. After you left, I got back with Emily. Did you know that? Then I broke up with Emily again. I couldn’t stand being around her. This was after we were together for, like, five years. And I don’t think of Emily anymore. If I ever loved anyone, it was Emily Sydney, and I don’t think of her anymore. How could you love anyone like that?”
“Do you think of me?”
“What I love is my work. I love my grandfather and my sister and my mother and my brother and my dad. That’s family to me.”
“Do you? Do you think of me? I don’t care about Emily Sydney.”
“Why does it matter so much? If I say yes, does that mean you’re going to have the baby? Sicily, why are you prolonging this? It’s … perverse. You could be hurting yourself right now and you don’t even know it. Don’t do that.”
“I’m just talking, Vincent. I have to … have the abortion. I think I have to. But do you blame me for wanting a little of what other women can have if they want?”
He stood up, and I realized with alarm that I was about to puke. This certainly would not have happened in the TV version. I ran into the bathroom and held my hair back, paralyzed with shame, then pulled myself up onto the sink, brushed my teeth with my finger, and sluiced my face with cold water. Vincent came into the bathroom with a wet washcloth and pressed it to the back of my neck.
“Settle down, Sicily,” he said. “Come on now. Settle down. That’s a girl. That’s my girl.” The sudden crimp in the lines around his eyes and the way the color in them deepened, got too bright, the way Beth’s did—it gave him away. He meant what he’d just said. And he also didn’t mean it. The melody in the minor key was lovely, until the flat note. “Sicily, I thought of you all the time. I thought of you when I got in bed with Emily and said I was tired and pretended I had to go to sleep right away. Are you happy now? Because I’m not. I will not ever be a father. I don’t know how I could. The kid would never see me.” Vincent took my hand and led me back into the bedroom, where we sat in the darkness, side by side on the couch. “That’s not true. It’s not because I’m busy. It’s because I don’t know how to do things … Ben knows how to do them naturally.”
And at that moment, I realized that I had been playing a kid’s game myself. I had no idea how to be a mother. I’d been raised by two good mothers, but they had never called upon me to take care of any living thing. I had no idea how to raise myself. Now I believed at last that Vincent wasn’t trying to do a slow and easy fade. He meant it. He meant that he couldn’t love me.
I said softly, “You’re doing this whole riff, Vincent, about how this is all about you, and you didn’t hear what I said.”
“What?”
“What I said about sharing my life with someone I love, I didn’t mean sharing my life with you.”
Vincent blinked.
“I meant with … the child. Someone I would love. That’s what I wanted. I’m selfish. And I am confused.”
“That’s what pregnant teenagers think—a live doll of their own.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to have the baby so he or she would love me. I’m not a pregnant teenager. My life is behind me.…” I recognized the truth in what I was saying as it unfurled word by word from my lips. All the life I knew was behind me, a literally burned bridge. There was no direct connection between the Sicily I was then and the Sicily I was now, except perhaps this maybe-baby, which was the child of my inmost being, my substantial self. The raw substance of this caught me in mid-sentence, forcing me up against a metaphysical mirror.
Was I considering this baby a human bridge back to normal, to a previous self? How dare I do that? But was it wrong if I wanted to build the bridge, not just walk on it? Did it have anything at all to do with Vincent? If it didn’t, which one of us was not such a really terrific person? Did I want to feel that I’d wound the clock for someone, just to prove I could? Even with the best of intentions, what kind of selfish person would use her own … well, flesh and blood to try to prove her life was entire? I had never felt so absolutely alone.
It seemed plain then. I could see past the thick walls. I needed to be alone to make this decision. Vincent couldn’t hold my arm, nor could Beth or Marie. For nearly twenty-six years I had been a child, cared for, shielded, disabled in the realest sense. Vincent said he wasn’t sure he knew how to love someone who needed him. I was sure that I didn’t. I knew how to be loved. I wanted my own way. Children want their own way. It was possible that I wasn’t woman enough to admit that, just once, having my own way was not only wrong but wrongheaded. I could burn my future down as surely as my past had fallen away, consumed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I am being foolish. We played house in California. I guess some small part of me thought we were meant to play Mommy and Daddy. I’m sorry for putting you through this. I guess I made a wish and there you were. At the luggage carousel. The perfect imaginary boyfriend.”
“So you’re not … you don’t think you’re in love with me.”
“No. Really, how could I be? It would be almost easier to say goodbye if I thought I was. I’ve always had good luck with being angry. I’m not angry. I want to be your friend. And I mean that. I guess what it comes down to is that I was scared to be on my own. But that’s just one more fear to face. Being this woman I keep claiming to be.”
Vincent got up fast. “Where is my coat?”
“I’ll drive you,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll take a cab,” he said. “I’m rich. I’m in show business. Right? Didn’t you say that? Mr. Hollywood? Your, in quotes, friend? Your buddy? Plus, in that little confession there, you just treated me like … there was no one else here but you.” There were two spots of dark red on his cheeks, the rest of his face an absence of color, even of pallor, like one of my aunt Marie’s “neutral” outfits.
“You don’t have to leave either. Stay here, Vincent. Please, Vincent. It’s late, and who knows how long it will be before we see each other again? I don’t want to forget that—”
“Take care, Sicily.” He kissed my forehead.
“Don’t go like this.”
“What other way is there for me to go? I was … It was tearing me up to have to say I didn’t want a kid. Then you say, hey, no offense, but it’s not going on with you. I need to get to know myself. You’re the one who should live in California.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why you’re angry.”
“I don’t either. I’m not angry. I’m … just … I got what I came for. And I don’t mean in the bed.”
I should have told Vincent then that, had I been with fifty men, it wouldn’t have erased the strong intuition I’d had about him, the first time I saw him, standing there at the airport. There would be no way to prove that, ever. But I had no doubt of it back then. In fact, I still don’t. Everything was happening too fast, as though timed by a stopwatch. It was possible that Vincent was playing a role too, because he was used to it, because he’d never seen himself any other way, and trying to do that felt like a dangerous swerve from the known path.
“Here’s my card,” he said, thrusting it at me. “A machine will pick up. But I check my messages.”
“Your card? You’re giving me your business card?” I flicked it through the air at his chest. It drifted to the floor between us. “I didn’t do one thing to deserve that. Why don’t you leave a fifty on the pillow?”
“Let me know what happens, huh? Or tell my mother, so she can send me a text if it’s door number one? Or a sonogram, if it’s door number two? Or some goddamned thing?”
“That’s what they are called. Sonograms,” I said. “Ultrasound pictures.”
“Sicily, I know that. I do have friends who have children.”
“You do have friends, then. Despite not being a nice person. Come on, Vincent. Please. Stay here with me. It’s cold and I don’t want you to go. I really don’t want you to go.”
“I’m halfway out the door. Don’t say anything else,” Vincent told me.
“I had one—my second ultrasound. For them to make sure how to proceed.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Only a dot. You couldn’t tell anything. It’s too soon.” It had not been too soon. I had seen a strong, fast fetal pulse and the faint tracing of a spine. Just what you would expect, if you were expecting. It looked alarmingly like something I would draw for a textbook on gestation. The pulse was the worst. It was such evident proof of potential life. The nonstarter had a forming heart. I had to wrestle down the impulses of my own heart.
“Well, that’s good. Isn’t it? Everything that should be bad news is good news. Take care, Sicily.”
“You too.”
After Vincent left, there was nothing I wanted to do more than to go downstairs and start my car and lie in the backseat. The upholstery was soft cushy pale-tan leather and reminded me of my father’s old Crown Vic. My father had been near-psychotic about safety, but somehow neither he nor my mother ever thought I was in danger lying down on the backseat of the car, with or without a belt, as they drove home through the purple summer night. And I had never felt safer anywhere as a kid, every muscle languid, in that delicious interval between consciousness and sleep, my father’s scanner chattering away on the dashboard. I knew I couldn’t do that, though. Talk about nuttier than nuts. If my aunt had come home from this glitzy restaurant opening she was at, parked her car next to mine, and found me in the backseat of my car, she would have thought I was trying to commit suicide, even though I could have let my car run for two weeks in the three-story cathedral that was our parking garage and have absorbed so little carbon monoxide that I’d still enjoy perfect health.
The last thing I wanted was to worry anyone.
Anyone else.
Instead, I slid out of my clothes and into the stupid T-shirt Vincent had left on my bedroom floor when he did his reverse strip. I put on my scanner and took out the framed photo of Vincent and me.
When that photo was taken, I already was pregnant
, I thought. Already, the only going back was strewn with broken glass. Exhausted from too much sex and emotion, I fell asleep with a pillow held tight against me.
I don’t know when I pulled the picture off the shelf. I woke up and it was beneath me. I rolled over and somehow, although I lunged to grab it, the glass smashed against the corner of my bookshelf. Carefully, I picked up the pieces and then inspected the photo. The glass had cut a crease right through Vincent, so that his face was no longer pressed against my neck but scratched half away.
Holy symbolism, Batman.
Gently, I tried to smooth the image and massage that silly, sidelong gesture of confidence back into place. In my playhouse of life, it was a family picture of all of us, maybe the only one there would ever be, because Vincent and I would not last, and the baby would not last. I would last.
I would ask Beth to make another copy for me, but I decided I would not set it up again, framed among my relics. It had been too big anyway, bigger than the others, putting out of balance the family that had been real—a mother, a father, and a child. Missing was a picture of Marie and me. One did not exist, because through all those years with Marie I had been faceless. Beth might take one for me, and there it would go, one more among the others, with plenty of room left for time to bring what it genuinely could.
I kissed Vincent’s messed-up forehead and put it under my dad’s helmet, tucking all the corners in carefully so nothing showed. I got up and stripped the bed and put on clean sheets and resolved to be like Kit, starting my twenty-one-day diet of losing Vincent.
I decided to forget that picture was there.
And I did.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
T
hose who think that callous women can have abortions on demand have never demanded one. I was a special case. Not only was I a transplant recipient, for whom urgency was key, I also would be in a real operating room, medicated with IV Versed so that I remembered nothing. Still, it took two weeks to get an appointment. Perhaps it was the Christmas rush, the time college freshmen bite the bullet before they go home for break. Perhaps it was the fact that I’d made and canceled four appointments, including the one I’d scheduled for just after Vincent left Chicago. That was juvenile and rude to the staff. And masochistic to me. Still, I waited. There were whole parts of days I willfully shunted the decision out of my conscious mind. Weeks passed like playing cards flicked into a hat by a restless child.