A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  I stared at the map on my computer screen, with the route snaking across it in blue. I turned off my computer and lay on my bed with How to Survive in the Woods, but the route stayed pinned to the back of my eyes.

  I had never been that far from home before.

  38

  THE MORNING BEFORE I WAS SUPPOSED to leave, I threw up in the garbage can next to my bed. I stared at the throw-up numbly, my body filling up with a terrible foreknowledge.

  Not possible, I thought. So not possible.

  But my body clenched and rumbled and I threw up again.

  I sat on my bed, my body curiously rigid, curiously light.

  No, I thought to myself, no, no, no, no.

  I listed all the reasons it couldn’t be true: I was taking exactly half my pills, and Noe had said that was enough. The condom we’d used had mostly stayed on. I was underweight—the nutritionist had said so. Skinny girls couldn’t get pregnant.

  I tried to remember when I’d had my last period, but before the Pill I got it only every three or four months, and I wasn’t sure when it was supposed to happen now that I was taking it.

  Mom had left for work half an hour ago. I went downstairs, threw on my coat, and fired up the Honda, which I’d barely driven since my last shift at the ice-cream shop. The familiar houses jerked by, and the dented newspaper boxes that had melted snow pooled inside them, and the convenience store with wet bundles of firewood stacked beside the door. It seemed disloyal of the world to change like that, to be cold and dismal where it had been bright and scented and thrumming three months before. Change back, I wanted to scream. Change back. As if the winter was a cruel withholding by a universe that could just as easily churn out spring.

  The drugstore was practically empty at that time of day, just a scattering of old men looking at vitamins and tired moms trying to resist their children’s efforts at grabbing Christmas candy. There’s no reason to panic, I told myself. Any sane person wouldn’t even bother with a test. I’m being paranoid.

  I found the tests in aisle 7 and put one in my basket, then covered it with a box of tampons and a pack of hair elastics and a chocolate Santa. The checkout clerk probably wouldn’t even notice what I was buying, I told myself. They scanned so many barcodes it had to become automatic. Still, I was sweating under my snow coat. I didn’t trust myself not to fumble the PIN on the debit card reader, so I thrust a twenty-dollar bill at the cashier and did not meet her eyes while she counted the change into my hand.

  At home, in the bathroom, a plus sign appeared. I wrapped the test up calmly, neatly, as one would in case of fire, and slid it to the bottom of the trash. I walked back to my bedroom and sat on my bed.

  Outside, the last of the leaves on the birch tree were detaching themselves and spiraling down, detaching and spiraling down, landing on the snow-covered lawn. I watched them fall one by one, observing where they landed, as if I would be called to give an account of them later. When it got too windy to watch the leaves anymore, I put on The Velvet Undergound and listened to the entire album three times.

  Finally, there was nothing to do but leave the house, so that is what I did.

  39

  IN THE “UNEXPECTED PREGNANCY” EPISODE of the TV series, the girl in trouble always Considers Her Options and Struggles with the Decision. She changes her mind a bunch and later, always wonders if she Did the Right Thing.

  I was not a girl in a TV show. I’d made my decision in the seconds it took me to throw up in a garbage can. There was no going back and forth. No waiting for the decision to appear like a package in the mail. It just landed there, thud.

  It was strange to be so certain.

  You were supposed to agonize.

  What did it mean that I wasn’t agonizing?

  In the TV show, the girl in trouble cried on her bed.

  I listened to The Velvet Underground and walked in the forest.

  I was more visibly upset the time I was eight and found a tick on my arm when I pulled off my sweater after one of our hikes—Get it off me, get it off me!—while Mom calmly went for the matches and tweezers.

  Maybe it was her example that made me so certain, and so calm. Tick in jar. Tweezers in drawer. Then back to cooking the soup and chopping the wood, one cord for our fireplace and one for Nan’s.

  Isn’t this what you secretly wanted? said a mean voice in my head. An excuse to stay at home forever and never leave?

  Noe would want to be its auntie, I knew. She would coo and fuss and make lists of names in her day planner. In tenth grade, when Amanda Robinson got pregnant with Billy Shearer, Noe went nuts. She’d never even liked Amanda, but suddenly it was Amanda and Billy this, Amanda and Billy that, as if they were TV celebrities instead of Red Bull–swilling fifteen-year-olds who’d been dating for only three months. I’d seen Amanda and Billy around town, arguing in the Burger King parking lot while their baby wailed in its enormous plastic carrier. It didn’t seem romantic to me. It seemed like the end of the world.

  The woods were quiet. In my head, I was taking a magic pill that would make it go away. I was shaving my moustache. I was anywhere but here.

  40

  AFTER THE FOREST I DROVE DOWNTOWN. It looked smaller in the snow, and drearier. Raccoons rummaged in the ditches where garbage cans had overflowed. Buses sloshed up and down the street.

  I saw on a bench in front of a gift shop.

  A family with four kids wandered past me. The kids had those huge lollipops they sell to tourists, the kind you only ever see in cartoons. They had just unwrapped their lollipops and were trying to figure out the best strategy for consuming them. The thing is, though, it’s impossible to get your mouth around them, and if you just lick the surface you can’t get the full flavor. I watched the kids bringing the lollipops to their faces at different angles, realizing the dimensions were all wrong to get a good lick, looking confused but still determined, as if they couldn’t believe that these enormous pink and blue things that looked so tantalizing were basically impossible to enjoy. You have to smash them into pieces to be able to suck on them at all, but kids are never willing to do that. Besides, once you do break off a piece, you realize how bad and headachey it tastes, and you don’t want to eat it anymore.

  When I got too cold from sitting, I went to the Unbelievable! Museum.

  The museum is in a white house, with a white painted sign out front, and a replica of a barrel that someone had used to go over the waterfall in the 1920s. You can climb into the barrel and have your picture taken with your head sticking out the top. I have six or seven pictures of myself in this barrel at different ages, always grinning, my face bright with schemes to build a barrel of my own. The barrel is made of thick planks of wood encased in rings of steel. It swallows you up. It feels unbreakable. You can imagine cozying up inside it with a blanket and a book, and never noticing the roaring, rushing tumble over the waterfall.

  Inside the museum, there’s a goat with two heads and a wax figure of a woman with six fingers on both hands, as well as her delicate pink six-fingered gloves with pearl buttons up the side. There’s a rat king, which is when a nest of rats gets their tails tangled up in a knot and can’t get untangled again. They die like that, a writhing mass of rats, and eventually get discovered and stuck in curiosity museums. But the strangest thing in the collection is the lithopedion.

  At first it looks like a fossil or rock; not a big deal compared to a two-headed goat. But if you read the typed yellow card, you discover that it is actually a rock-baby retrieved from the stomach of a seventy-year-old woman. Lithopedions are exceptionally rare. They happen when a baby starts to grow in the wrong place, and the body builds a shield of calcium around it. Medieval records of lithopedions tell stories of women who knew they were pregnant but “the baby never came out,” and eventually they forgot about it and went on with their lives.

  Maybe, I thought to myself, if I was lucky, the same thing would happen to me. My body would quietly digest the bundle of cells inside it, or it wou
ld fossilize them and turn them to stone. In fifty years, I would feel a pain in my stomach, and doctors would extract a pebble the size of aquarium gravel.

  Do you know what this is, ma’am? they would say, holding it up with tweezers, and I would shake my head in bewilderment. No, I have no idea.

  “The museum is closing,” said the girl at the counter.

  I took my winter jacket from the coat hook and walked out.

  41

  I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE GOING HOME.

  I drove past the Java Bean where kids from my school were eating maple donuts, and the No Frills where Mom was working. The McDonald’s PlayPlace looked like a strange tumor growing out of the side of the building. It snaked around bulbously while little kids clambered around inside it.

  I drove past the go-kart track where my cousin Max works in the summer, and the K-Mart with the French fry truck outside.

  Finally I went to the Botanical Gardens and parked in the empty lot.

  The Botanical Gardens stay open year-round, although there are no flowers in winter. You can walk around the frozen grounds, gazing at the red berries on the winter trees and the topiary unicorn glittering with frost. The ice-cream shop is closed but Jeanette Fielding is still in her office, filling out order forms for next year’s Dixie cups and waffle cones.

  The orchid house was empty. Not a single purple face to peep at, no nodding pink things on stems.

  I remembered the first time Mom took me to the Gardens. How we spent all afternoon singing to the ducks in the pond and talking to flowers. How dizzy sweet the cosmos, how giggling and jesterly the jacaranda. How the whole garden became a many-tendriled friend I swam through under the sunshine.

  Cold air was blowing through the broken pane of greenhouse glass.

  I sat on the ground and took out my phone.

  I supposed I had better tell Oliver.

  42

  I CALLED OLIVER’S NUMBER. THE GIRL who answered sang, “This is Loreen, Alaskan booty queen.”

  If it wasn’t my life, I would have laughed.

  43

  LOREEN, ALASKAN BOOTY QUEEN, SOUNDED drunk.

  “I need to talk to Oliver,” I said.

  “Who’s this?” she drawled suspiciously.

  I paused, but couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with my name. “This is Annabeth, ice cream girl from hell. I need to speak to Oliver now.”

  Loreen didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Why?” she said. “What’s your business?”

  “Pregnancy.”

  She said she’d get him straightaway.

  44

  WHEN OLIVER CAME ON THE PHONE he was drunk too. It was noisy in the background: thrashing rock music and a sports game on TV. I wondered where he was. It was too early in the day for a bar, and Oliver was underage. Maybe Alaska was just loud.

  “Annabeth,” he shouted into the phone. “Hey-hey.”

  “Hey-hey,” I echoed back.

  “Whuss going on?”

  Was there a snowstorm over there? Sound of howling winds and rattling flagpoles. Maybe he was on the crab boat, although I didn’t see how that was possible cell service–wise, or how Loreen, Alaskan Booty Queen, fit into the picture. Maybe she was the skipper.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  “No you’re not.”

  “Is she pregnant?” A screech from Loreen.

  And Oliver: “It’s just some chick from home starting drama.”

  Loreen: “Are you lying to me?”

  Oliver: “Loreen!”

  Slamming door. A roar from the TV. Someone must have scored a touchdown.

  A few seconds later, Oliver came back on the phone.

  “That was real uncool, Annabeth,” he said. “We barely hung out and I’ve been gone for two months. You can’t call me up and get all pissed that I’m with another girl. Now she thinks I knocked you up.”

  “You did.”

  “We used protection.”

  “Not the whole time.”

  Horrified silence. Terrifying possibilities invoked.

  “Oliver?” I said. “Oliver.”

  On TV, the cheering continued. They must be passing out free burritos in the stadium, dropping them out of a plane. Oliver stayed quiet for so long I thought he had passed out. I was about to hang up when he spoke suddenly.

  “You can do whatever you want,” Oliver said, “but I’m not coming back.”

  I kicked an empty flowerpot with my snow boot. “I’m not asking you to come back.”

  “Then why’d you call?”

  It was my turn to go silent. The words dropped out of my grasp like an armful of library books. Why had I called? Why had I gone to the forest and the curiosity museum? Why had I done any of the things I had done that strange, cold day?

  “I just thought you would want to know,” I stammered, and hung up the phone.

  45

  THE ORCHID HOUSE WAS A KNOT of silence in the middle of a silent garden. It glittered like a broken Christmas ornament in the snow.

  I walked across the frozen grass toward the rose garden, not really sure what I was doing. It was getting dark; time to go home. Time to figure out the next thing to do. I pulled my coat around me tight and stuffed my hands deep in the pockets to warm them up. I wished I hadn’t told Oliver. I didn’t even know why I had. I guess I thought you were supposed to, but maybe that was an idea from a TV show.

  As I walked around the garden, I pretended I was an explorer on an alien planet. The rosebushes were black and frostbitten, spiky, thorny things in cold beds of dirt. The wedding gazebo was a docking pad for a flying saucer. I came to the duck pond and threw a rock at the ice. It didn’t shatter; it didn’t even make a dent.

  I was acting all wrong. Like a mental patient, or a little kid. Maybe I lacked some kind of basic human instinct. Maybe I’d inherited that from him.

  I stuffed some snow in my mouth to numb the thought.

  “Annabeth,” called a voice from across the pond.

  I looked up and saw a fat man with a dog. The dog was snuffling at the snow, digging up a long-lost waffle cone someone had dropped there at the end of summer. The man waved a mittened hand and came lumbering toward me, the dog tugging at its leash behind him. Close up, I recognized him as the nutritionist.

  “Hey, Bob,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just walking String Bean. What about you?”

  “Just thinking about stuff,” I said.

  He had earbuds dangling out the collar of his coat. In the quiet of the garden, I could hear the tinny voice talking out of them. Kingdom of Stones.

  “My grandmother used to say if you eat snow, you’ll freeze your insides,” said the nutritionist. He looked jolly in the snow, with his dog at his feet. Fresher and happier. Maybe “jolly” is an insulting way of putting it, but I mean it in the best possible way.

  “My grandma thinks the chemicals in snow give you cancer,” I said.

  “I certainly hope not,” said Bob. String Bean tugged at his leash. I reached down and petted him. “So, how are things going?” said Bob.

  “Good.”

  “Enjoying gymnastics?”

  “Sort of. I mostly signed up for my friend.”

  “I talked to the cafeteria manager about serving more vegetarian food.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’m supposed to give them a list of meal requests. If you want to drop by sometime and help me come up with some ideas, it would be a big help. Otherwise it’s going to be rice and beans. And snow for dessert.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  String Bean barked at a bird. The narrator of Kingdom of Stones was talking about a pond in which Rae the Stone Maiden had been frozen by a wizard.

  “You probably don’t want to miss this part,” I said, gesturing at Bob’s earbuds. “I need to get going anyway.”

  Bob nodded and wrapped String Bean’s leash around his hand. “Nice to run into you, Annabeth.”

  “See ya later
, Bob.”

  I felt lighter walking back to my car and I didn’t know why. Maybe I just needed someone to remind me that in a few days, once this was taken care of, life was going to go on as normal. There was going to be cafeteria food and Noe’s half-annoying, half-lovable chatter during gymnastics practice. I wasn’t a freak or a monster, just a kid who wasn’t careful enough. I certainly wasn’t any worse than Oliver.

  I got into the cold car and turned the heat all the way up.

  In the TV show, the girl in trouble parks by the waterfall and calls her best friend.

  I left my phone on the seat and walked to the damp iron railing alone.

  Birds were swooping back and forth in front of the colored floodlights they shine on the waterfall at night. I watched them soar and circle, their wings stained pink and green by the light.

  I stayed until my hands were frozen and my eyelashes wet with snow. Until I could feel the waterfall inside my skull, and the rocks it crashed against, and there was nothing left to do but go back home.

  46

  IF YOU COME TO MY TOWN in the winter, you will inevitably end up at the waterfall at night. You will watch those same birds swooping. Maybe you will stare at the water that rushes over the edge and hear the roaring gushing and feel the chill of mist on your skin.

  Maybe you will feel, for the first or the thousandth time, how many things in the world are bigger than you.

  47

  WHEN MOM CAME HOME FROM WORK, she buzzed around the house, all I can’t believe my baby is going to Maple Bay for three days. You would think I was going on a mission to Mars in the morning, the way she beamed and babbled.

  We made dinner together, and Mom helped me pack sweaters, jeans, a scarf, a hat, and presents for Ava and Pauline.