I’m not looking forward to it. I’d rather just stay here, where everyone knows me. At a new place, everyone might be like Rogers and assume the worst of me. And I might not be able to sneak out so easily to hit my OT appointments.
I need to hang in here. It will get better. In another month, I’ll have Anna back to talk it over with, and that alone will make it all tolerable again.
Chapter 47: Anna
Was my sister’s house always this big a mess?
It couldn’t have been. I cannot imagine her house could have looked this way six months ago, because I would never have set foot in here. Not that Lisa’s house is ever clean, but it has now reached a level of intolerable messiness.
There are toys everywhere. On every surface, in every corner. And where there are not toys, there are clothes. Tiny jeans, a stained T-shirt—even underwear, for the love of God. The sofa has so much junk on it, I can’t imagine anyone would ever sit on it.
The carpet is the worst though. It is stained a virtual rainbow of colors. What is that blue stain? Why is it dark red here? And I’m afraid to ask why it’s brown over there. But mostly it’s black—black stains, presumably footprints because Lisa does not require people to take off their shoes the way I do. (Not that I would take off my shoes in this home in a million years.) Of course, our floor gets dirty now from tire tracks, but I’m meticulous about cleaning them.
Not that I’ll have to worry about tire tracks soon.
No, I can’t let myself think about that.
“Why are you just standing at the door?” Lisa asks me.
Why? Because I’m afraid to walk in and breathe the air in her house. I wouldn’t, except I need to talk to my sister. I need to have one of those heart-to-heart conversations that sisters in insipid sitcoms are always having.
“I need to get some things from my car,” I tell her.
I hurry out to my car and get some of the nontoxic cleaning supplies I keep in the trunk. Five minutes later, I’ve sprayed the air in Lisa’s living room and am busy vacuuming her carpet. I think I’ve used Lisa’s vacuum more times than she has.
“You don’t have to clean my house, Anna,” Lisa says, shaking her head. “For Christ’s sake, you’re pregnant.”
I’m too pregnant to properly clean this house. I want to pick up some of the junk on the floor but I can’t because it’s too hard to bend. I’ll have to come back after the baby is born.
“Anna,” Lisa says. “Seriously. Stop cleaning.”
I look up at Lisa. She looks like she needs a good scrubbing as much as the rest of the house. She’s got stains on her baggy gray sweatshirt and the knees of her jeans look dirty. How could she walk around like that in front of her husband and family?
“Just let me do your carpet,” I say.
“Okay, but after the carpet is done, you’ll stop, right?”
Luke walks in the path of the vacuum, peering up at me with curiosity. “Whatcha doin’, Aunt Anna?”
Poor child. He doesn’t even recognize cleaning.
“I’ll just do the dishes after this and that’s it,” I say.
Lisa puts her hand on my shoulder, and I recoil so violently, I nearly trip on a yellow toy truck. She seems surprised, because I’d been less anxious recently about being touched. Being off the medications has affected me so much.
“Anna,” she says, “are you okay?”
I open my mouth to tell her I’m perfectly fine, but I don’t get that far. Instead, I dissolve into hysterical tears. I can’t remember the last time I’ve cried like this. I’m so upset, I have to stop vacuuming.
“Anna…” Lisa tries to put her arm around me, but I shrink away from her. I do allow her to take the vacuum away from me though, and lead me to the couch.
I wipe my eyes. “I… I can’t sit on this couch, Lisa. It’s too dirty.”
If I weren’t sobbing hysterically, she would certainly have made a snarky comment to me. But instead, she fetches a towel from her linen closet and lays it down on the couch so I can sit without fear of contamination.
“What’s going on?” she asks me.
I just shake my head.
“Come on, Anna. I’m your sister. You can tell me.”
I don’t want to say the words out loud. But I have to. After all, she’ll know soon enough. “Matt is having an affair,” I say.
Lisa’s mouth falls open. “No. He isn’t.”
“He is,” I insist.
She shakes her head. “No, not Matt. He’d never do that.”
“He is,” I say again.
“He’s not the type.”
“Every man is the type.” I hug my arms to my chest. “He’s thinking about leaving me.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Lisa snorts. “This is… ridiculous. You’re getting paranoid from the preggo hormones. Matt’s not leaving you. He’s crazy about you.”
“I heard him talking about it,” I say, wincing at the memory. “He said he can’t take any more of me. That he wants to leave, but he feels like he can’t with the baby coming.”
“Oh, Anna.” She starts to touch my shoulder, but then thinks better of it. “Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand? Matt is such a good guy—I can’t imagine it. I mean, he loves you so much and… he wanted a baby with you so much.”
I just shake my head. “There’s stuff you don’t know.”
“Like what?”
I lower my eyes, unable to look at her. “I won’t have sex with him anymore. Not for three months now.”
Lisa laughs, which makes me look up at her sharply.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s just…” Lisa looks at Luke, toddling around on the filthy carpet. “Jake and I could do three months standing on our heads. When Luke was an infant… God, it was the last thing on my mind.”
“Yes, but…” I know what Lisa is trying to do, but I can’t shake the feeling she just doesn’t understand. “Even when he kisses me, I… I want to push him away. And he can tell. He doesn’t even try to kiss me anymore. He never touches me.”
She frowns at me. “Is it just the pregnancy? I mean, I know you were always… weird about that stuff. But you always seemed affectionate with Matt.”
I never told her the truth, but now that I’m confiding in her, I may as well tell the whole story. “I had to go off all my medications to get pregnant.”
Lisa’s eyes widen and I can tell she’s putting it all together. Yes, I’ve always cleaned her house when I’ve come to visit, but never quite so obsessively—at least, not in a long time.
“Okay,” she says, “so you’ll start them again after you have the baby. No big deal, right?”
I feel more tears spill over and wipe my eyes. “No. It’s too late. There’s this secretary at work…”
“I just don’t believe it, Anna,” Lisa says. “Not Matt. He wouldn’t.”
But she’s wrong. I saw Nicole and Matt together. I heard what they were saying. As soon as we have this baby, he’s going to leave me. He’s just waiting for the right moment.
Chapter 48: Matt
I miss Anna.
I don’t know what’s going on with her. I don’t know if it’s the fact that she’s off her meds or pregnancy hormones going full speed, but in the last two months, she’s become an entirely different person.
Okay, I didn’t love it when she said she wouldn’t have sex with me anymore. That sucked. But I could go a few months with no sex. Hell, when my MS was getting worse, I went years with no sex and no prospects of sex. There were moments when I believed I’d be celibate the rest of my life.
So yeah, that part I could live with. But then she started jumping away from me when I even tried to touch her. Kissing her became out of the question.
Try being married to a woman who’s afraid of you touching her.
I kept telling myself it’s all just temporary. Anna will get back on her meds really soon and I’ll have back the woman I married. I just have to put up with it a little while
longer. She’s worth it. The baby is worth it.
Except now Anna won’t even talk to me.
When we sit together at dinner, she mumbles responses to me, her eyes staring down at her food. Sometimes she looks like she’s going to burst into tears. Whenever I ask her what’s wrong, she gives me this fake smile and says she’s fine.
She’s not fine. We are not fucking fine. It’s so frustrating, I want to punch a wall.
We used to have lunch together most days when I came to work, although sometimes I’d go out with Calvin. Anna always likes to eat really early, at about a quarter to eleven. No, not at about a quarter to eleven. At exactly 10:45 on the dot—Anna likes promptness. I always found it endearing. But today I got the breakroom to meet Anna, and she was nearly done with her sandwich.
She came to the breakroom early. She never does that. Why would she do that?
Is she trying to avoid me? It’s the only thing I can think of.
When I get into the room, Anna’s eyes are downcast and she’s got one hand on her belly as she chews. She looks up in surprise when I come into the room.
“Matt,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“Uh…” I frown at her. “You ate lunch without me.”
“Oh.” She shrugs. “Well, I figured you might want to eat with… someone else.”
I watch her chewing on the last bite of her sandwich, trying to read her expression. “I wanted to eat with you. Who else would I want to eat with?”
She shrugs again, not making eye contact.
I want to shake her. I want to yell at her to tell me what the fuck is going on in her head. I know she’s off her meds, but she wasn’t like this even before she started taking them. She always wanted to be with me, even when she was afraid of me touching her.
No. There’s something else.
“I made you lunch,” she says finally. “It’s in the refrigerator.”
She’s allowing me to eat food that’s been in the fridge? Wow, she must really not care about me at all anymore.
She stands up, wiping her hands carefully with a napkin. I can see from here how raw her hands are. She gives me one last look, then edges past me to leave the breakroom.
“Anna,” I say.
She stops. Turns to look at me. There’s a weary look on her face, but something else. Fear?
No, why would she be afraid?
“Yes?” she says.
“I just…” I wring my hands together. “Are you angry at me? Did I do something wrong?”
She considers my question for a moment. “No,” she says. “You did nothing wrong.”
Before I can press her further, she turns again and walks away from me. Whatever is upsetting her, she won’t talk to me about it. She’s shut me out.
Christ, I miss my wife.
Chapter 49: Anna
This is the fourth elevator that has come and gone, and I can’t make myself get inside.
I had this problem years ago. I couldn’t make myself get into the elevators at work because all I could think about was being enclosed in that coffin-like space with everyone breathing the same air. So I had to walk down all eleven flights of stairs to get down to the ground floor. My knees were killing me.
I finally ended up staying late every day to ensure I’d have the elevator to myself. But then when Matt and I started leaving together, we’d take the elevator together, and somehow, that made it better. Well, that and my medications.
Even though I’ve regressed a lot in the last year off my medications, I’ve always managed to get into the elevator without a problem. I’m not sure why. It’s a good thing because it would have been hard to go down the stairs as I got progressively bigger.
Except today… I don’t know why, but I can’t do it. I can’t make myself get in the elevator.
At first, I was waiting for an elevator to be empty. The first two were occupied, and I just wanted one to myself. But then the third one is empty, and I still can’t get inside. I keep thinking of the air the last passenger had exhaled. How I will be breathing in that air. How it will go to my baby.
I have to keep my baby safe.
I have to take the stairs.
It’s going to be difficult making it down eleven flights of stairs every day. But I only have a few weeks left. It’s better not to take any risks.
Making it down the stairs is harder than I thought it would be. My center of balance is completely off. I remember Matt telling me how rough it was to go up and down stairs when his legs first started getting weak, and now I feel a pang of sympathy for what he went through.
No. I don’t feel sympathy for him. Not when he’s cheating on me.
He’s trying to fake it—I can see that much. When he talks to Nicole at work, it’s always brief and in low voices. There are no outward signs of affection, even though anyone could see the sexual tension between them. Whenever I close my eyes, I see them talking, their heads tilted towards each other…
My heart starts to pound just as I feel my right foot slip on the stairs. Before I can stop myself, I’ve toppled down three steps and landed with a sickening thud at the base of the stairs. The wind is knocked out of me.
Oh my God, I’ve fallen.
I’ve probably killed the baby.
I put my hand on my belly, waiting to feel little Otto moving inside me. For a second, I feel nothing. In my uterus, everything is still.
Oh God. I’ve lost him. I’ve lost my baby. I’ve been so careful—I’ve done everything right. I threw out all the knives, I washed my hands dozens of times every day, I avoided cold cuts like plague—I did everything I could. It wasn’t enough to stop this from happening.
Just as my eyes are filling with tears, I feel it. That reassuring jab right into my rib cage. He’s moving. My baby is still alive. Thank God.
That was so close. My carelessness almost killed the person I love most in the whole world. I can’t take the stairs anymore. The risk is too high. I must protect Otto. After all, who else will? Certainly not Matt, who can’t wait to be rid of us.
Of course, if I can’t take the stairs and I can’t take the elevator, how am I supposed to get out of this building?
I look around me. I’m still sitting on the floor, not quite ready to heave my considerable weight off the ground. I’m between the ninth and the tenth floors, so to even get back into the hallway will require me to go up or down stairs. I really can’t imagine what I’m going to do.
I’m trapped.
I grab my purse and pull out my phone. Instinctively I start to call Matt, but then I remember. Matt will not care if I’m trapped between two floors. He wants me out of his life. I’ve become a burden to him. And really, who could blame him? Look at me! What sort of person ends up stuck in a stairwell, too terrified to move? It’s a credit to him he’s stayed with me this long.
Anyway, none of this solves the problem of how I will get out of this stairwell.
“Anna?”
I look up, craning my neck to see the man standing at the top of the staircase. I recognize Calvin Fitzgerald, Matt’s best friend at work. Years ago, Calvin and I had our differences—he never kept his distaste for me a secret and even vandalized my cubicle at one point. But now that Matt and I are married, Calvin and I have a tentative truce. And he’s matured a lot in the last several years—he even has a child of his own now.
“Hi,” I say weakly.
He sprints down the flight of stairs to where I’m still sprawled on the ground. He’s giving me that funny look he often does. “Why are you on the ground?”
“I fell,” I admit.
His eyes widen. “Shit, are you hurt?”
I shake my head no. “I’m fine.”
Calvin reaches into his pocket for his phone. “Maybe we better call Matt…”
“No,” I say quickly. “Please. Please don’t.”
That’s just what I need. For Matt to find out that his crazy wife is on the floor in the stairwell, too terrified to move. I’m c
ertain that would be the last straw.
“Um,” Calvin says. “I guess… I mean, if you’re sure you’re okay…”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
He scratches at his head. “Do you… need help standing up?”
I would love help standing up, considering I’ve got a basketball strapped to my midsection. But I have no idea when Calvin last washed his hands. So I will be standing on my own.
It takes a bit of work, but I manage to heave myself back into a standing position by grabbing onto the railing. Calvin is gawking at me the whole time. I wish he’d leave.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I ask him.
“Well, I…” He hesitates, then smiles crookedly. “I’m trying to squeeze in a little exercise. No time to get to the gym anymore and, well…” He pats his own belly. “I put on some weight. I don’t know if you’ve noticed?”
Calvin previously earned the title of most attractive man in the office, according to vast popular opinion. All he had to do was flash his patented Calvin Fitzgerald smile, and the women would swoon. In the last few years though, he’s put on weight and his hairline has started to recede. I suspect he’s lost his title. “Yes, I noticed.”
He rolls his eyes. “Gee, thanks, Anna.”
I don’t understand. Why did he ask if he didn’t want to hear my honest answer?
“So your turn,” he says, “why were you in the stairwell?”
Like him, I hesitate. But then I tell him. I tell him how I got panicked at the elevator and so decided to take the stairs. But then I fell and now I can’t get down the stairs either and am essentially trapped here.
“Holy shit,” Calvin says when I’m done.
“I know,” I murmur.
He reaches into his pocket. “Anna, I really think we better call Matt.”
“Well, what’s he going to do?” I snap. “It’s not like he can come up the stairs and get me.”
“Ouch.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “Is everything okay with you two?”
Baby Crazy (Matt & Anna Book 2) Page 17
