Waiting for a Star to Fall

by Kerry Clare

  Mostly, though, Brooke was trying to ignore it, when she wasn’t sleeping among the Post-it notes. They were busy at work, and her schedule was crazy, so it was easy to be distracted and think of other things. And being distracted meant that she was succeeding here, in not having her life overtaken by melodrama and manufactured crises. “Life is not a made-for-TV movie” is the thing she kept reminding herself, also in Derek’s voice. They had more important things to worry about, all of them. Her period would come eventually. Except it never did.

  She couldn’t say anything to Derek. He was still settling into his new role as party leader and his life was upside down. She wasn’t so much coming second to his career, because second would be generous. Maybe there was a place for her in the twenty-fifth percentile? And maybe he wouldn’t even believe her if she told him what was going on, because it seemed like ages since they’d slept together. There hadn’t been any time to.

  So Brooke did what women do in these situations, no matter how old they are: she called her best friend. Carly could have given Brooke a hard time about things, for her distance and the silences and how she’d acted like she hadn’t needed her until there was no doubt that she really did. But Carly did not do this, because that’s how friendships go, forgiveness being paramount. Brooke knew this now in a way she hadn’t before, like how she also hadn’t realized how wrong she could be, so convinced of the solidity of her perspective. Who needed friends, she’d asked, rhetorically, imagining that female friendships were just a hangover from adolescence, giggly girls in bathrooms, something that must necessarily be cast off on the road to maturity.

  But they weren’t giggling now, Carly and Brooke, as Brooke hovered over the toilet and tried to pee on a plastic stick, and Carly leaned against the door to keep any of Brooke’s roommates from busting in, because the lock was broken, along with everything else in her crumbling life.

  For the one hundredth time, Brooke said, “I don’t even know why I’m bothering with this. It’s a waste of money. I mean, it’s barely possible. I don’t know how. There’s got to be some kind of explanation.”

  “But it’s a possibility,” said Carly. “I don’t know why you waited so long.”

  Brooke finished peeing. Glamorously, she’d peed on her hands, and so she put the stick on the counter and washed her hands in the sink. They had to wait five minutes, the package said. Except the results were immediately apparent: the test was positive.

  “Do we still have to wait?” she asked Carly. They were staring at the test, two pink lines side by side.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Brooke said, “Better be safe,” and they kept watching, as though the results might change. As though they were watching something fascinating, and it was, in a way. Those two pink lines that had emerged in that white space like a scream, threatening to derail Brooke’s entire life now—her job, her relationship, all she’d planned for herself and her future. This was a disaster, and such a confirmation of everything she’d suspected Derek really thought of her—that she wasn’t mature enough to conduct a grown-up relationship—and her inability to handle all this would soon be apparent to everyone.

  She started to cry. “I think this is it,” she said, because they were thirty seconds away from five minutes, and the result was still the same. She’d gotten knocked up. She was an idiot. They could sit here for five minutes longer, and another five minutes after that, and this would still be what had happened.

  Somebody tried to open the door. “It’s occupied!” said Carly.

  It was Brooke’s roommate Bryce who called back, “Are there two of you in there? What are you doing?”

  “We’re fucking,” said Carly. “Leave us alone.” To Brooke, she said, “You really should get this door fixed.”

  “I think I really should just move out of here.” And then it became overwhelming again. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do now.” Her plan, not that she’d ever admitted to it, had been that she’d end up moving into Derek’s place. She spent so much of her time there anyway, which was why living with shitty roommates in a crappy house hadn’t mattered to her so much. But now there was nowhere else to go, and they were stuck in the bathroom. And the test was still positive.

  Carly said, “But let’s not freak out. One way or another, we’re going to sort this out.” Brooke loved the way Carly said “we,” as though Brooke wasn’t alone in this, even though she’d never felt so all alone in her life, so lost and humiliated, and entirely steeped in shame. She was sitting on the toilet seat now, her pants back up. “Let’s get out of here,” said Carly.

  Brooke gestured toward the test on the counter. “But what do we do with this?”

  Carly grabbed the toilet paper roll and started wrapping the test around and around until it was unrecognizable, then she stuffed the bundle in her bag. It occurred to Brooke as she was watching her do this that it was the kindest thing, the grossest thing, that anyone had ever done for her. Then Carly took her hand and pulled her out into the sunshine.

  As they walked down the street, Carly’s arm around Brooke’s shoulders, Brooke sputtered, “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?”

  “The only way out is through,” said Carly. “What do you want to do?”

  “What do I want to do?” Brooke repeated. “I want to not even have this problem, is what I want. So, like, what I want is kind of beside the point here.”

  Carly stopped, and pulled Brooke around so she was facing her. She said, “But it’s everything. What you want. You’re steering the ship here.”

  Brooke said, “The ship has hit an iceberg.”

  “The damage is not irreparable,” Carly said. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Brooke said, “I don’t even know.” She sat down on the curb, and Carly sat down beside her.

  “You don’t have to figure it all out now. And you definitely don’t have to figure it out alone,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Brooke told her, but grudgingly.

  Carly said, “I’m not talking about me. I mean, you didn’t get yourself pregnant.”

  “Oh my god,” said Brooke. Her head, her hands. “Do I have to tell him?”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” said Carly. “But why wouldn’t you?”

  “Because of everything?” she said. “He’s going to be furious.”

  “With who? With you?” Carly looked horrified, all her worst ideas about Derek about to be confirmed.

  Brooke said, “Not like that. It’s not him. It’s just, he’s so busy right now, and there’s so much going on. He doesn’t need this.”

  “Nobody needs this,” said Carly. “But that’s life. It’s called taking responsibility for your actions. If the tables were turned—”

  “But they wouldn’t be,” said Brooke. “With Derek, it’s different.”

  “It’s not,” said Carly. “At least it shouldn’t be.”

  “He wouldn’t have let something like this happen,” she told her.

  “But guess what,” said Carly. “He did. This is on him too.”

  “I’m so embarrassed,” Brooke said. She started crying again, and it felt like she was turning circles, beginning the spiral down a drain. The ground underneath them was damp, and her jeans were getting wet. “This is such a disaster.”

  “Let’s get up,” Carly said. She pulled Brooke to her feet. “It’s a start, I guess.”

  “Where are we going?” Brooke asked.

  “We’re walking,” said Carly. “That’s the point. Just keep on doing it. One foot in front of the other. Don’t stop.”

  “Maybe I don’t have to tell him,” said Brooke. It would make things so much easier.

  Carly said, “I think you should. You’re not alone in this. You can’t be—you need support. And he’ll want to know. Wouldn’t you?”

  Brooke told her, “Honest
ly? Twenty minutes ago, I was completely in denial, and that was fantastic.”

  * * *

  —

  She went in to work that afternoon—Carly had urged her to take a full day off, but she’d only be sitting at home marinating in despair, and at work, at least, she could think of other things beyond her terrible fate. Plus, she’d texted Derek and asked him if they could get together that night, which wouldn’t make any sense if she’d been out sick all day. He’d texted back right away, cheerfully enough, it seemed. He was in a good mood, which was fortunate, though she’d be putting an end to that soon enough. If, that is, she was really going to go through with telling him—the prospect seemed far-fetched still. How could such a thing occur? Any of it? And could she really get away with not telling him? Was that possible? Or even ethical? But then, how could he be angry at her for deciding not to ruin his day, his life? To throw a grenade right into the middle of their relationship. Who would ever object to missing out on that?

  “Their relationship” made it difficult too, because it wasn’t solid, this thing they had. It was still like walking on eggshells, or walking on sand, and maybe quicksand at that—all of those walks that weren’t a saunter, a stroll. If Brooke had had a grasp on what they were together, it would have been that much easier to decide what was going to happen next, but the promises Derek made to her seemed different every day, subject to his various whims and fancies. She never knew what she was going to get.

  “You okay?” asked Marijke, Derek’s new chief of staff. Marijke had had her eye on Brooke, whom she’d usurped as highest-ranking woman in the office with her arrival, and Marijke liked to keep tabs on her as much as she liked to remind Brooke of her seniority. Sometimes Brooke convinced herself she was only imagining the tension between them, but other times it was undeniable. Marijke had caught her napping in the closet once, and now here was Brooke arriving at work midway through the day. The look on Marijke’s face was disapproving, and for the first time it occurred to Brooke that her job may not be as secure as she’d taken it for granted to be. She had to get her act together.

  She told Marijke, “I’m feeling okay.” As far as everybody knew, she’d been under the weather for weeks, and while Marijke had urged her to take some time off to properly recover, she kept coming in. Late. She was a workaholic, was what she hoped they were all thinking, but it didn’t seem like Marijke was buying it.

  Derek was concerned for her too, she could see it, and she appreciated his attention when he came over to her desk. His hand on her shoulder—“Everything all right?” he asked. Her absence, the text—he was looking for her reassurance. She didn’t usually ask for his time, because that was always a more difficult demand than it might seem, considering his schedule and how everybody wanted a piece of him. “You’re coming back to my place tonight? We’ll order pizza,” he said. They had a standing order, extra-large Hawaiian with a side of wings. Anything that was theirs was especially precious to her.

  He tiptoed around her for the rest of the day. She had made him nervous, she knew. He held her hand that evening when they left the office, never mind who was looking. Letting it go once they were out on the street, but their strides matched as they made their way to his building. He tried to act like nothing was up, talking about the day, someone’s meltdown on Twitter. He’d be holed up in committee meetings all day tomorrow, but today had been a reprieve from the usual pressures.

  He nudged her shoulder, “And now I get to go home with you.”

  She was quiet. They kept on walking.

  He said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” she told him. “Let’s just get back to your place.” And because she hadn’t assuaged his worries, what else could he do except walk faster?

  “So we’ll order the pizza?” he asked, once they were inside his unit. They’d been quiet in the elevator. It was crowded, and they’d stood on opposite sides, their usual routine, an attempt at being clandestine. He got off first when they arrived at his floor, and had started down the hall by the time she’d made her way through the doors.

  “I guess,” she told him, in response to the pizza.

  He said, “You have to tell me what’s going on.”

  She said, “Order the pizza.” She was hungry. Lately she was always hungry, when she wasn’t feeling sick. Could she drag this out and eat the pizza and delay delivering the news forever?

  But no. She had to get it out there. She’d waited long enough, and Carly was right—he needed to know. Even more important—she needed him to know, even though she was afraid he’d be angry. But he’d be angry now if she didn’t tell him. She was stressing him out, she knew.

  “So there’s this thing,” she said, once the pizza was ordered. It would be at least forty minutes before the buzzer would ring and the delivery guy would arrive. Where would they be by then, she wondered? Would they even want the pizza after all?

  There Derek was, expecting something, so she had to get the words out now, no turning back. Like a runaway train, just go. “And I’m totally going to deal with it. I mean, not ‘deal with it’ deal with it, or maybe. I don’t know. It’s all really messed up, and it’s totally not your problem, but I needed to tell you. Or at least I think I do.” Maybe she didn’t? What if she held him here forever?

  His eyes were locked on her, and never had he been so much in her thrall, she was thinking, as he kept waiting. But she could see it was fear, total panic in his eyes.

  He was jumping ahead. “Has somebody been talking?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  He said, “Who knows?”

  “Who knows what?”

  He said, “What did you tell them?”

  “No,” she told him. “Just listen to me.”

  He stopped. “Okay.” He still looked scared.

  “I think,” she said. “I’m pregnant.” Those words. And they weren’t supposed to be tentative, but if they were tentative, she considered as she was delivering them, it would soften the blow. But the words I think only made her sound stupid, she realized. Like someone who was dumb enough to get pregnant, like she didn’t even know if she was or not. Simpering, teenaged, and she waited for his reaction, for the expression on his face to move from panic to terrified, but it didn’t do that.

  Instead, it was relief. “Oh,” he said, the word drawn out long like a sigh. And then he reached for her and brought her into his arms, wrapping them tight around her, and it felt like she could breathe for the first time all day. Like someone had caught her now, and she was no longer in free fall. Every muscle had been clenched, but now the tension drained, and she just let herself fall into him, as though she’d been meant to land here all along.

  They stayed like that for a long time, not saying a word. When she finally pulled away and looked back at his face, she could see from his expression that his thoughts were far away from there. He was calculating, all the wheels turning, columns lining up. He was going to deal with this. He was going to fix it. And she thought it might be possible that everything would be okay.

  She asked him, “What did you think I was going to say?”

  He said, “I don’t know. Sorry, I’m jumpy. I’m paranoid. I was thinking this was something big.”

  She pulled away and looked up at him. “This is big.”

  “But this is us, you know? You had me thinking it was something menacing. Something outside that’s beyond our control.” There had been quiet rumors of dirty tricks, conspiracies to take him down since he’d won the leadership. Derek insisted he never listened to any of it, but Brooke knew it was getting to him.

  She settled her head back against his chest, where she could listen to his heart’s steady beat. She said, “I was afraid that you’d be angry at me.”

  He kissed her head. “No way,” he said. “But yeah, it’s a lot.”

  “I don’t want to have a baby,” she said, ar
ticulating this very solid fact for the first time, and it was a relief to say the words, to know she had a choice in the matter. She said it again, but with a caveat. “I don’t want to have a baby right now.”

  Derek said, “No. Now is really not a good time.” And she was imagining years down the line, after the next election. Maybe when his career in politics was done and he’d gone into something with a smaller scale. She still wanted to go back to school. She didn’t want to have a baby until she was in her thirties, at least. There was all the time in the world—but still.

  “I mean, if there was a way,” she said. Entertaining the possibility, a sweet romantic fantasy. She had dreams about a future with Derek, about having a child together, but not like this. It would not be right now. There was no question. She leaned in close, and breathed him in. But suddenly he was sitting so stiffly beside her, differently, that it was hard to succumb.

  She pulled away again. “What are you thinking?” She needed to know where this news had taken them, just where they were standing. Instead of answering, he pulled her back against him, kissing her hair, which didn’t tell her either way.

  When he finally answered, she was utterly unprepared for his words. “I’m thinking about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Like, this is big. I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t. Just taking a bit to process, you know. I mean, are you okay? How long—how long have you known?”