A Bad Case of You

by Taylor Holloway

  I laughed a little bit. “I can?”

  “Sure, you can. If I can survive this and relearn how to use my left arm—something totally unnatural and bizarre, then I know that you can handle this pregnancy.” Her expression was sincere.

  I paused. Vanessa had a point. She’d been through hell already. She was going through another hell right now. Learning to use a reattached limb was an exercise in patience. She’d already been through an exercise in loss. But Vanessa hadn’t given up.

  If she wasn’t giving up, what right did I have to? There had to be a path forward for me somewhere in all of this. I just had to find it.

  40

  Eric

  Faith disappeared off the face of the earth. Rationally, I knew she was still coming to work and doing her job, but for all intents and purposes, she’d become a ghost. She wouldn’t return my texts, answer my calls, or let me catch her at the hospital. Like a switch had flipped with her, Faith had cut me out of her life with surgical precision. I didn’t know what I’d done, but it must have been awful. For four endless days, I had no contact with her.

  “Have you seen Faith today?” I asked Lucy five days into Faith’s disappearing act. I figured if anyone had seen her or knew what was going on, it would be busy-body Lucy.

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Is she scheduled to work today?” I pressed.

  Lucy looked at me sidelong. I knew she was thinking it was strange that I didn’t know my own wife’s work schedule, but I wasn’t about to explain myself. She looked down at her roster a moment later. “She’s not on the schedule for today.”

  I bit back my frustration. I’d gone so far as finding the nursing duty schedule for the next few days and making sure my shifts overlapped with Faith, but I supposed that since she now set the schedules, she was able to work around me. Either that or she was calling in sick or something. I really had no idea.

  “She might have told Caroline what her schedule is,” Lucy suggested. “They’re friends. You might check with her or Vanessa.”

  I nodded, thinking she was right. Caroline was Faith’s best friend. Caroline Riley, I’d learned from Faith, was training as a physical therapist. Similar to doctors, they had to undergo long rotations in hospitals and rehabilitation places to get licensed. It took some doing, but I tracked Caroline down on the third floor. She saw me coming and turned pale as a ghost. She clearly knew exactly who I was.

  “Caroline Riley?” I asked, advancing on the petite woman in a hallway.

  She nodded warily, looking around. There was nowhere for her to go and her short legs definitely couldn’t carry her away quickly enough. “Dr. Carter.”

  “Do you know where Faith is?” I asked.

  “Please leave me out of this,” she begged.

  My heart beat sped up in an instant. She knew what was going on! My focus narrowed on the little woman in front of me, although I tried not to loom over her in too-menacing of a way. “Why is Faith avoiding me?” My voice was louder than I intended, and sterner.

  She turned an even whiter shade of pale. Her voice became a whisper. “You need to leave me out of this, ok?”

  I was fighting my frustration but yelling at Caroline wouldn’t get me any closer to my goal. “Please,” I begged her instead. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  She shook her head at me. “I really can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

  “At least tell me where I can find her.” She hadn’t been to her apartment in at least a week. I knew. I’d been practically stalking her outside it.

  Caroline shook her head. “No. I can’t do that.”

  “What can you do?”I challenged.

  “Nothing.” The expression on her face was firm. “I’m not going to betray her trust to you or anybody. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  Something in her tone, and the look on her face made me convinced that she was being truthful. Faith must have sworn her to secrecy, and Caroline was loyal to her friend. Although it also made me respect Caroline, it made me feel doubly helpless.

  “Where’s Vanessa then, can I ask her?”

  Caroline’s face turned into a frown. “Listen to me, you aren’t going near Vanessa. She doesn’t need to be interrogated by you or anyone. The woman had her arm ripped off last month.” Caroline wasn’t messing around. She now sounded like she might attack me if I argued.

  I swallowed. She was right. Trying to talk to Vanessa, a woman I’d never actually met who was going through her own shit right now, was probably not a good idea. I’d just come off as a crazy person who went around scaring patients.

  “Ok, I won’t talk to Vanessa… Caroline, I know you don’t know me at all, but I don’t understand what’s going on.” At this point, I was not above begging. I considered getting down on my hands and knees to do it, but thought better of it when Caroline’s expression stayed hostile.

  She shook her head at me again. “Look, I wish I could help you, but I really can’t.”

  “Did I do something to make her angry? Was it something my sister said to her? Is Faith ok?”

  I hadn’t spoken to Mary since February. I was still boiling mad at her. If she’d reached out to Faith and scared her off, I was going to go nuclear on her.

  Caroline merely blinked at me. “I’ve said everything I can say.” She looked around at the empty hallway as if fearing that someone would catch our argument. “I need to get back to work.”

  “Just tell me where I can find her, and I’ll leave you alone,” I promised.

  She frowned at me. “Um, no. You’re going to leave me alone now anyway.” Her expression had gone from frightened to fierce and now to dismissive. “I’ve told you everything I can, and if you don’t like it, that’s not my problem.”

  I bit back a snide reply. She was right, of course. There was nothing I could do to make her talk. I’d played all my cards with her and none of them had worked. I was completely out of options.

  My bravado cracked. Deep in my heart, the hope I’d been holding onto that Faith would forgive me, or start answering my texts, or answer one of my calls, started to erode. I hung my head. “Just tell me if it was something I did.”

  Unexpectedly, Caroline reached out and touched my arm. I jumped and stared at her. “You have to wait for her to be ready to talk with you. Just wait. It’ll all work out.” Her voice was soft and understanding. My lips parted in surprise, but before I could ask her anything else, she darted out of my grasp and down the hallway. “That’s all I can say. Please don’t ask me anything more.”

  Caroline was gone before I recovered enough to even ask a follow up question. She was either extremely quick, or I was extremely slow. At the moment, I suspected the latter, but it could have been both. I didn’t know what to make of what she’d said. I stood in the hallway for a long time, not sure what to make of our interaction or what I’d learned about Faith.

  I needed to wait? It seemed to me like I didn’t have much of a choice.

  41

  Faith

  I called in sick to work and went to visit my mom and grandparents in New York just before Easter. I didn’t have the money to take a vacation, but it didn’t really matter. The credit card company had the money and they already owned my ass anyway. What was another few thousand dollars that they had over me? It was a drop in the bucket.

  I went to the doctor the day after I took the at-home pregnancy tests. As I suspected, I was quite definitely pregnant. The doctor said I was right on schedule for an October baby. Leave it to me to get pregnant practically the first time I ever had sex. Part of me wondered if it was a divine punishment for having unmarried sex. Or perhaps it was just an extremely unfunny cosmic joke.

  “I’m so glad you were able to come visit,” my mom told me over breakfast on my last day. We’d been spending the last few days hanging out with the family, getting current on the latest gossip at the old folk’s home and playing lots of checkers with my grandmother.

  “Thanks mom. Me too
.” It was nice to see my grandparents and spend time with my everyone, even if the world’s biggest albatross was circling overhead.

  “But Faith… is something going on with you?” she’d been prodding me for details about me and Eric since I’d told her we’d broken up. The truth was much worse than she imagined. I’d come up here to tell her the truth, but the right moment had never presented itself. Apparently, the right moment was now, however, because I was all out of excuses.

  I took a deep breath and looked her square in the eye. “Mom, I’m pregnant.”

  We were sitting in a little café a few blocks from the assisted living center where my grandparents lived. The morning breakfast crowd had departed, and lunch rush hadn’t arrived yet, so we had relative privacy in our little booth. Still, I had underestimated the volume of my mom’s response.

  “You’re what?” she all but screamed. Her eyes filled up with tears a moment later. People craned their necks to look at us.

  I hung my head in shame. What was I supposed to say?

  “This wasn’t how I raised you,” she said through her tears. Other diners were looking at us, peering around their cups of coffee curiously and then pretending not to pay attention when I tried to meet their eyes. I was glad this diner was full of strangers.

  “I know, mom.”

  My mom was raised to believe that church dogma was exactly what God wanted. She was a very eccentric person in general, and one of the ways that manifested itself was in her especially serious approach to religion. She truly believed with all her heart that God, Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit were all extremely disappointed in my current life choices.

  “Who’s the father?” she asked after a moment. The tears were crawling down her face and each one caused me physical pain. The look on her face was so disappointed that it hurt my heart. This was going exactly how it had been in my nightmares. Exactly.

  “Eric.” Of course. Who else would it be? Perhaps now that my mom knew I was capable of getting pregnant outside of marriage, she thought I had tons of lovers, too.

  She nodded knowingly. “I never liked him. I suppose he wants nothing to do with you now?”

  That wasn’t true. She did like him. “I don’t know. I haven’t told him yet.”

  She blinked through her tears. “Why not?”

  All the fear and indecision of the last few weeks broke free from the barrier I’d erected in my mind and heart. The ensuing flood had me crying too. I lost my composure at last. After days pretending everything was normal, I was completely out of normal. “Everything is so messed up mom. Everything with Eric was weird from the start. I never meant to get married to him on New Year’s, I never meant to get pregnant. It’s just completely out of control.”

  She went very still. “Wait. You’re married to him?”

  I nodded miserably. I might as well tell her the whole, shameful story. “We got married on New Year’s Eve. I’m not exactly sure what happened but we got very drunk, and then the next morning, I found out we’d gotten married. And not just married, either. Catholic married. The Bishop himself performed our ceremony. And then all of a sudden, Dr. Koels decided he wanted to promote us, and we decided to stay married for a little while because we wanted to keep our promotions, and Eric and I realized that we liked each other, and we started dating… and now I’m pregnant.”

  God, it really sounded pathetic when I laid it all out like that. I cringed.

  My mom’s face had become very, very still. Eerily still. She looked like a painting entitled ‘parental shock’. “You’ve been married since New Year’s? You were married when you got pregnant?” She asked.

  I nodded miserably. “Yes.”

  Her tears dried. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well then I don’t see what the problem is.”

  I froze and stared at her. “What?”

  “You need to go home and tell Eric that you’re pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “Faith, don’t you see? He’s in love with you.”

  I shook my head. She didn’t understand. “He doesn’t want a baby. He doesn’t even want a wife. The only reason we didn’t get an annulment immediately was because we wanted to keep our promotions.”

  My mother looked skeptical. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, I’m sure.” Eric had been very clear about his desire to eventually seek an annulment, and it’s not like either one of us was dumb enough to think that we should stay married when we barely knew one another. “I’m one hundred percent sure.”

  “Well now that you’re one hundred percent pregnant with his child, he might have a different opinion on the matter.” My mom’s demeanor had shifted entirely. She was now looking at me with excitement. “This isn’t the disaster that I thought it was.”

  “Mom, this is an even bigger disaster than you thought it was.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to hear another word about it until you tell him that you’re pregnant.” Her expression was smug. “I know you’ll feel differently after you discuss it with him.”

  My lips parted in shock. All she cared about was that I was married when the baby was conceived. “It’s not a real marriage, mom.”

  “I’m sure the Bishop would disagree, especially now that there’s a child involved.” She was so sure. In her mind, the fact that I was married to the father when the conception occurred made everything right with the world. The details, at least in her mind, were irrelevant. Her beliefs told her that everything would work itself out. It made my headache worse. My life wasn’t a fairy tale.

  I blanched at her words when they sunk in a moment later. The Bishop… I hadn’t thought of that. It was going to be a hundred times harder to get the annulment now that I was pregnant. In fact, it was now imperative that we obtain the annulment immediately. Before I started to show.

  “Mom, I really think you’ve got this all backwards.”

  “I don’t think so, Faith. I think I’ve finally got a handle on the situation. I knew you were keeping secrets from me, but I thought it was just how much you liked Eric. But I don’t think I’ve got anything backwards anymore. Eric is in love with you. Once he learns about this baby, he’s going to be in love with him or her, too.”

  I stared at her, dumbfounded. “So… you aren’t mad?”

  She shook her head and smiled at me. She smiled! Like everything was going to be ok. “Of course not, Faith. You didn’t do anything wrong. You got married and now you’re pregnant. That’s the normal, proper course of events.”

  I couldn’t seem to shake her loose of her excitement. “But Eric doesn’t want this baby. He doesn’t want me.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “That’s not true. At the moment, he’s probably just extremely confused. How long have you been avoiding him?”

  “What?” I hadn’t told her that I’d been avoiding him.

  “You said you two broke up. I assume that means you just left him hanging, confused about what was going on?”

  I bit my lip. “Maybe.”

  My mom frowned at me. “Faith, you need to go back to Austin and talk to that man. Eric has a right to know what’s going on. You can’t keep this from him forever.”

  Caroline had said almost the same thing to me. I’d been living with her. Since Vanessa was now at a rehabilitation facility, she had the room. I thought that perhaps she’d been right, but the fact that my mom agreed with her, meant I was right to be suspicious. I loved my mom, but she thought people lived happily ever after like in the movies. She thought Eric was going to rise to the occasion and be the husband I needed now that I was pregnant. The truth couldn’t be more different.

  “You’ll help me, won’t you mom? No matter what happens?”

  She reached out and grabbed my hand. “Of course, I’ll help you. No matter what happens. It wouldn’t matter how this baby came into the world, this is my grandbaby. And you’re my baby. Nothing could ever change that.”

  My
spirits lifted just a little bit. Even though I thought my mom was batty, and that she’d totally lost touch with reality if she thought that Eric was going to be excited to learn that I was pregnant, at least I knew that I had her. That meant a lot to me.

  “You really think I should tell him?” I asked my mom, shaking my head. “What if he hates me?”

  She frowned at me over her chamomile tea. “Then he still deserves to know the truth, Faith. No good will ever come from lying.”

  42

  Eric

  Two days before Easter, Faith showed up at my apartment at nine p.m. She had a beat-up suitcase draped over her shoulder, and her dark eyes were wide and almost panicked. When I opened the door expecting the Thai food I’d ordered, we stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Faith.” After two weeks of trying to get a moment in her presence, now that she was here I could hardly believe it.

  “I’ve got something really important to tell you,” she said, looking more terrified than I’d ever seen her. Her lower lip was trembling. “Can I come in?”

  I stood aside to let her in. I wanted to sweep her up in my arms. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to scream at her that I hated the way she’d disappeared. “I’ve been trying to call you,” I told her instead, wondering what had prompted her to finally show up at my door. “I’ve been trying to call you. Where have you been?”

  “New York.” Once inside my kitchen, she stared around herself like she was expecting large predators to dart out from behind the cabinets. She sat down on one of the kitchen stools and gestured for me to do the same. “You need to sit down.”

  I did? I followed her instructions anyway. The look on her face was seriously worrying me. Had her mother suddenly died? Her grandparents? What could prompt her bizarre reactions? “Faith, what’s going on? I tried to get Caroline to talk to me, but she wouldn’t and I’m worried about--”