by Noelle Adams
But this was hardly the time to get into an argument.
“I’m not sick,” she said instead, taking a breath and steeling her will again. “But I will need to see a doctor.”
She handed him the plastic stick with a slightly trembling hand.
Thomas took the stick and stared down at it. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just appeared frozen for a long time. For far too long.
Abigail gulped over the lump in her throat. “The little plus means yes.”
“Wha—?” Finally breaking out of his stupor, Thomas cut off the word and shook his head hard. “I don’t—”
“I’ve been good about the birth control,” she said in a rush, with a surge of fear that he’d assume she’d done it on purpose. “I must just be in that small percentage that gets pregnant anyway.”
Thomas opened his mouth but no sound came out. His gaze shifted from the stick to Abigail’s face.
“I know we didn’t plan this,” Abigail said, her voice breaking a few times. She put a hand on her belly. “But...our baby. Are you...are you okay?”
He walked into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed abruptly. “Yes. Yes, of course, I’m okay. I’m just surprised.”
Abigail hugged her arms to her middle, following him and shaking even more now than before. “Are you sure?” she whispered. “I know we were going to wait until you were done your residency and everything, but I want you to be happy.”
“Of course, I’m happy,” Thomas said, his voice soothing now and natural. He held out his arms. “Come here, baby. Of course, I’m happy.”
She went to him, let him gather her into his lap, hold her in a tight embrace, and murmur out reassurances.
After a few minutes, her shaking stopped. And soon they were able to talk about it, make plans for the future.
Abigail didn’t leave the security of Thomas’s arms for a long time, but she also didn’t look too deeply into his eyes.
She was too afraid of what she might see there.
***
Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.
Like before, she heard the voice through the darkness until it morphed into words she was saying herself as she once again knocked on the door to Thomas’s study in Durham. This time, four years had gone by, but she was once again muttering under her breath, “Please be okay, please be okay with it.”
She didn’t hear a response, but she didn’t wait for one. She just opened the door. It was a room in her house. She was allowed to enter without permission.
Thomas blinked up at her from the book he’d been pouring over. He still spent most of his downtime from the hospital studying. “What?”
“I wanted to talk to you, if that’s allowed.” Her tone might have been a little snippy, but she was so, so tired of waiting for spare moments to talk to her own husband. Over the years, it had just gotten worse.
“About what?”
“I was looking around at jobs,” she began, going into her prepared speech.
“For me?” he interrupted.
She stiffened in annoyance. “For me.”
This seemed to get his attention. He put down his book and straightened his shoulders. “Why are you looking for a job?”
“Why shouldn’t I look for a job? I’ve got two Master’s degrees now, and I’ve done exactly nothing with them. Why shouldn’t I look around and see if there’s something I’d be good at, work that could make me happy.”
Something went cold on his face. She saw it happen the way she’d seen it happen dozens of times before—whenever she tried to talk to him about how she’d changed, matured, grown out of the insecure girl he had married. “We don’t know where we’ll be next year.”
“I know that, but it can’t hurt to look around. There aren’t that many jobs I can do that use my degrees.” She cleared her throat, her heart dropping heavily as she saw nothing of kindness or understanding in his expression. “It’s not like I have to work, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t look around, just in case it works out. Anyway, I found this. It looks perfect for us.”
She handed him the job ad she’d printed off and had been praying over for a week now.
He accepted the wrinkled page on the open position at Milbourne House in the mountains of North Carolina and stared down at it for far longer than it would take him to read.
Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer. “That’s near Willow Park,” she said.
“I see that.” He still hadn’t looked up from the page.
“We always talked about moving back to that area, since your family is there and everything, so I noticed it right away. You could easily get a job at a hospital nearby, so I thought it might be worth…worth looking into. Just to consider.”
He wasn’t happy. She could tell he wasn’t happy from the lines of his face, the posture of his shoulders, the tension in the air.
He wasn’t happy at all.
“What about Mia?” he asked, finally looking up to meet her eyes.
“What about Mia?”
“You’re planning to take this job and just leave her—”
“I’m thinking of getting a job—not abandoning our child on the street. Why shouldn’t I considering getting a job I’d be good at, one I’d enjoy?” She felt sick and put a hand on her belly. She was angry and terrified and hurt and betrayed and uncertain, the conflicting feelings all tightening into a hard knot.
“Of course, you can consider getting a job,” Thomas said at last, the tension on his face relaxing but not into anything like peace or acceptance. It was that cool, superior irony she disliked more than any of his other expressions. “You know perfectly well I’m okay with that. But it seems like the priority should be our family—and not some fantasy job to fulfill your own personal dreams. So maybe you should just hold off and see where we end up, and then start looking for a job that works out with our whole situation.”
She stared at him, experiencing a hot and familiar wave of shame. He thought she was being selfish—thinking of herself at the expense of their family. And maybe he was right.
She’d spent most of her life assuming she wouldn’t work outside of the home. It was the lifestyle she’d been raised to believe was the only one appropriate for women. She’d started changing after she’d first joined that Bible study, and she no longer believed what she used to. But maybe she’d taken it too far. Maybe she had somehow become selfish. She knew so many women who prayed for the day they could stay at home with their children. And here she was…
“Okay?” Thomas prompted, with a lift of his eyebrows.
She nodded, swallowing hard, feeling the way she always had as a child when her father gave her a sermon, telling her how God expected her to be a better girl. She picked up the paper and crumpled it with her hand. She murmured, “Okay. That makes sense.”
***
Abigail, wake up. Abigail, baby, wake up.
The voice was coming out of the darkness again, and this time it was paired with a soft shake of her shoulder. “Abigail, wake up.”
Four months had passed since that conversation in the study about the job, and Thomas was now trying to wake her up.
Abigail groaned reluctantly, attempting to turn away from the intrusive presence.
“I’m sorry, Abigail, but you need to wake up.” The grip on her shoulder tightened slightly and the shaking grew more forceful.
“Too early,” she mumbled, trying to keep her eyes closed.
“I know it’s early, but I have to leave.”
And that jarred away the last remnants of sleep. Her eyes popped open, and she was confronted with a vision of Thomas—fully dressed in a suit and tie—sitting on the edge of their bed and looking down at her. “What? What?”
“My plane leaves in a couple of hours.”
“But,” she croaked, forcing her foggy mind to work. “I thought you weren’t going.”
“I said I’d think about it. But it’s too good an opportunity not to consider
. I’m not saying I’ll take it, but I have to at least give it a chance. It would make my entire career.”
Of course, it would. Thomas was brilliant, and he had almost completed his residency program at Duke. Hospitals and medical groups were falling all over themselves to get him. But this particular opportunity meant moving halfway across the country and taking a high-stress job that guaranteed she and Mia would hardly ever see him.
“But we were going to stay in North Carolina.” Abigail was becoming more and more aware of what was happening now, and a heavy weight of dread started sinking in her gut. “It was all working out. Being close to our families, a low-stress position for you so you could be around more, the job for me...”
She’d applied for the job at Milbourne House after all, a few weeks after she’d agreed to wait and see, since the position was closing and she would have lost her chance completely. She’d talked to Thomas about it, and he hadn’t looked happy but he hadn’t objected.
Last week, she’d gotten the job offer.
“I know that,” Thomas said coolly, looking slightly annoyed by the reproach. “I’m not saying that won’t work out. But my job is more important than…” He trailed off before he finished the thought, but she knew exactly what he’d been going to say. “I just need to give this a chance before I make a decision.”
“But—”
“I have to go, Abigail.”
Anger spiraled up, momentarily overwhelming the doomed burden of acknowledgment underlying it. “So you’re going to decide on your own? What’s best for our family? You’re just going to decide on your own?”
“Abigail, please,” he said curtly, standing up, the release of his weight causing the mattress to shift. “Don’t be unreasonable. You know I hate when you’re emotional like this.”
Her first response was to hold her tongue, rein in her angry and crushing disappointment. And then she was furious with herself for that instinctive response, as if she’d been trained to always cave without question to a man’s will. “Unreasonable? Emotional? I’m so sorry my feelings bother you so much.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“I will be sarcastic if you’re going to be so—”
He didn’t give her the chance to even finish the sentence. “I have to leave. I’ll give you a call when the plane lands. Give Mia a kiss for me.”
And then he just turned around and walked for the door.
“Don’t leave, Thomas,” she called after him, her voice almost a plea. “Please don’t leave me.”
Thomas closed the door quietly behind him, and the sound seemed to signal his final answer, the nature of their marriage, their entire future.
Don’t leave me. Baby, please don’t leave me.
***
I can’t do this without you. I really can’t do this without you.
The words were still coming from outside her and then turning into something she said. This time, it was during the last of the marriage counseling sessions they’d done before Christmas.
Since they’d both quickly fallen into angry accusations today, Lorraine, the counselor, asked them to start using “I” statements.
“I understand what you’re saying,” Abigail said, slowly, working hard to keep her emotions under control. “But I can’t do this without you. I know I was always too jealous and insecure, and I know it wasn’t fair of me to blame you for it. But it’s one part of the whole picture of our relationship, so it’s not something I can work through on my own. I can’t fix this without you.”
“Am I asking you to fix it on your own?” Thomas’s shoulders were stiff, and his face was unrevealing—sure signs that he was upset and defensive.
Lorraine lifted her eyebrows, but before she could say anything, Thomas rephrased, “I don’t understand why you think I’ve expected you to fix it on your own. I’m here twice a week to work through this with you.”
Abigail thought for a minute so she could say what came next in the clearest way possible, her hands twisting in her lap. “I know you’re here. I really appreciate it. I know you want to work through this as much as I do. But every time I try to explain how I feel or what wasn’t working for me, I don’t feel like you’ve really heard me.”
“Of course, I’ve heard you.” Thomas’s voice was soft and rough, and his expression twisted slightly with impatience. “I’ve heard it over and over again for more than a year now. How many times do we have to go over it?”
The words—his clear frustration with her and the implication that she was the only one with the real problem—hurt so much she froze, focused down on her clenched hands.
Lorraine said gently, “Okay. Maybe you can explain to Abigail what it is you’ve heard from her about your marriage.”
Thomas took a ragged breath and shifted in the upholstered chair. “You left me because…” When Lorraine cleared her throat, he stopped and began again. “I understand that you left because you wanted more than you had.”
This was so unexpected—and so completely wrong—that Abigail stared at her husband. “I wanted more than I had?”
He’d been meeting her eyes, but now he looked away. “You wanted to work. You wanted this job. You wanted me to spend more time with Mia. You wanted more independence. I understand that. And I keep telling you that I’m okay with it.” His voice thickened with the last words, matching the tightly repressed feeling in his face.
“But you’re angry,” she began. Then remembered the “I” statements. “I feel like you’re angry about it—even now. Like you’re just going to put up with me so you can have a wife back, but it’s not really me you want.”
Thomas released a brief sound of frustration and rubbed his face. “I don’t care if you work. You never wanted to before we got married, but I don’t care. I’m not your father, and I’m really tired of you assuming I’m just as narrow-minded as he is.”
Abigail was again consumed with the reality that he wasn’t hearing her at all, he didn’t understand her at all. He thought all of this was just about her job and the time he spent with Mia.
He really believed that was their whole problem.
A tight shuddering had begun inside her, slowly spreading out through her body.
“Abigail?” Lorraine prompted. “Did you want to respond?”
She took several breaths before she spoke. “I know you’re not my father. The main issue isn’t even my job. That’s just a symptom of something deeper. And I still feel like you have no idea what the deeper thing is, no matter how many times I’ve tried to tell you.”
Thomas held her eyes, looking tense and overly controlled—almost stoic. “Then tell me again.”
Abigail made herself say it. “I feel like you see me only as a wife and not as a whole person, so you’re never happy when I’m not the wife you always wanted.”
“What the hell—” Thomas cut off his initial reaction, controlling himself even before Lorraine broke in. He visibly calmed down before he continued, “I don’t see how you can possibly say that, after everything I’ve done for you.”
Abigail just stared at him, her heart aching in her chest.
When she didn’t respond, Thomas went on, “I don’t see how you can possibly believe that. I moved here because of you. I gave up my career because of you. I sacrificed everything because you wanted me to—because you didn’t think you had enough. What else do you want me to give up for you? Exactly how much do you want me to suffer until you think I’ve suffered enough?”
He’d slowly lost his grip on his emotions as he was speaking, and she knew the words pouring out now were the absolute expression of his heart.
He believed it. He believed that she had no genuine reason to be discontent—that their marriage had been mostly fine and that she was blowing little things out of proportion.
The truth of it hit her so hard she was blinded, choked by it. She hugged her arms to her chest to try to hold the emotion in.
He thought she was making him jump through a s
eries of hoops and he should now be rewarded for accomplishing them.
“You...” She cleared her throat as the word strangled in her throat. “You really think that about me?”
“We both know very well that it’s true.”
His voice was hard and cold, but her vision was blurred so she couldn’t see his face.
“Okay,” she managed to say, staring down at her hands. “Okay. That’s really what you believe. I’m the problem. You’ve done nothing wrong, and the problem really is that I’m not good enough. I’m selfish, irrational, and demanding.”
“I’m not saying that. I know I made mistakes before, but I’ve fixed them. I’ve fixed them. And now there’s nothing else I can do.”
She lifted her head to see him, and they might as well have been strangers.
He didn’t know her at all—he didn’t understand any of what she’d gone through over the last six years, all the ways she’d grown to understand herself more, to understand God’s love more, to understand that life was more than constantly striving to clean herself up.
He didn’t believe he could do anything better than he was doing right now. He didn’t know how much she was hurting. He thought she was just making a fuss over nothing.
Even as she heard Lorraine breaking in, telling Thomas that he should try to listen to what he’d just said, how it implied a marriage was nothing more than a series of tasks to perform, Abigail was suddenly so exhausted that she wasn’t sure how she could take the next breath.
They’d been in counseling for what felt like ages, and they clearly weren’t any farther along than they’d been at the beginning.
It was never going to be over, never going to get better, never going to get to a place where they didn’t have to desperately struggle for every step forward they took.
He was never going to really hear her, and she was never going to be able to be who he wanted.
Thomas sat just a few feet away from her, but it felt like there were vast endless miles between them.
Then there were more words out of the darkness, coming from even farther away. Words she’d never heard before.
