by W. Winters
My smile falls and it happens so fast and honestly that I don’t have time to correct it.
“Hey,” she says and her voice falls gently as she leans in, her hand on my thigh. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I lie and at that moment my heart sputters, like it’s scolding me for doing so. I have to clear my throat and pick up my coffee, which is the cue for her to remove her hand. “Just a lot on my mind.” It’s a lame excuse, but Bethany buys it.
“It’s Seth, isn’t it?”
“What?” The word is only a single breath. I can’t even take a sip of the coffee. Why would she think it’s Seth?
“You used to tell me everything. Literally five months ago, you described the worst date with at least decent consolation sex. You’ve been with Seth for like… weeks? And you haven’t told me anything.”
“It’s been almost a month,” I say, correcting her. “He’s not like the other guys. This isn’t a one-off to have drinks over and laugh at. He’s not a date… he’s… he’s more.”
“But you aren’t happy,” she emphasizes.
I’m happy with him. I don’t know how to tell her how wrong she is. “I’ve changed and I know that, but it’s not because of Seth. I promise you.”
“If you don’t want to be with him, don’t. He can’t force you—”
“I love him,” I say, cutting her off. I’m not angry at her; I’m shocked, though. “I’ve always loved him and even though…” I trail off because I don’t even know where to start. Our love story isn’t a straight line, it’s chaotic scribbles on a page. It’s fucked up. “I need him right now. Why would you question that?”
“You haven’t seemed right. Something’s going on,” she presses and I don’t know what to tell her. I can’t tell her the truth. I can’t tell anyone. Not yet. I can’t make it real for them like it is for me.
“Will you give me some time?” I ask her. “I just need time to figure it all out.”
Her smile is small but genuine, and I get another pat too. “Of course.” As she’s telling me, “All the time you need,” a nurse calls out my name.
“All righty,” she says then stands with me and tells me she’ll see me at work. I hate that I’m lying to her and to Seth, or at least lying by omission to hide the truth. I make a promise to myself as I watch her go before handing the papers to the nurse, that I’ll tell them. I’ll tell both of them everything the moment this appointment is done.
I can’t keep lying and pretending.
“Miss Roth?” The doctor is short like me, although her shoes add at least two inches. Cheater. “Right this way.” She’s professional but walks quickly, as if she’s in a hurry. It only makes me more anxious. She doesn’t speak the entire way to the room, which is in the farthest corner of this place, adding yet again to my anxiousness.
“I’m Doctor Tabor.”
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you.” Formalities take precedence although internally all I can think is that it is not, at all, nice to meet her.
“I see you’ve already had your blood taken?” she questions and I nod, my fingers drifting on the small bandage in the crook of my arm.
“I don’t know why it was necessary.” I didn’t ask the nurse when she told me. I was too busy talking to Bethany who looked like she wanted to pry, but didn’t.
“So, I had a look at your charts,” she begins as she’s closing the door and before I’ve even had a moment to sit.
“Yes, I know we’re getting more tests done today concerning my heart condition and I--” I try to speak confidently, remembering that I am a nurse and a grown woman. I can handle this. Before my ass even hits the exam table, she cuts me off.
“I can tell you right now that I can make a firm diagnosis with what we have. More tests will only tell me if your condition has gotten worse in the last week, and quite frankly, I don’t see how it can get much worse.”
All the blood in my body seems to go to my toes. It makes them heavy and numb while my body turns cold. As I swallow, my fingers grip the edge of the exam table and the white paper crinkles under me.
“I see.” It’s all I can say. I suppose sometimes when you get a second opinion, the doctor can be blunt if it’s the same as the first. Even as I try to embrace it and somewhere deep down I already knew, I still want to deny the truth. “So, I’ll need surgery then?”
“A transplant would be best. The walls of your heart are far too thin for a repair. I’m afraid it would tear.”
“Is there another doctor—”
“I am the best heart surgeon there is on the East Coast. I’m confident I can perform a transplant. I’m also confident that there is no other doctor who would agree to attempt to repair your heart knowing very well the damage to the walls of your heart.” She takes a moment and I can hear her swallow before she rests the chart on her lap and adds, “I’m sorry to lay this all on you. I realize it can be a shock, but I assure you, the donor list is your best option.”
“If someone dies and I happen to be a match.” The reality is brutal and it picks at me, bit by bit. The chill spreads, the pain sinks in deeper. I’m really dying.
With her lips pressed in a thin line, the doctor informs me, “Organ transplants happen every day. You are not the first and you won’t be the last. It’s scary and not a guarantee, but we can work on other ways to keep you healthy in the meantime.”
I don’t want to die. It’s all I can think as I sit there. It’s what I’ve been thinking since the first doctor told me. I’m not ready to die. I just got Seth back. And now all of this?
“One thing we need to discuss…” She pauses to clear her throat then continues, “You are high on the list due to the severity of your condition, and how likely you are to accept a donor heart given the rest of your health. However, if a viable heart is selected in the next few months, you have to know there’s a risk to your pregnancy.”
Pregnancy? My head spins at the word.
The doctor continues speaking even though I’m stuck on one word. She’s talking about term and risks and I don’t understand.
“I would know. I would know if I were pregnant.” I can’t remember my last period but I’m on the shot. I’m not at all pregnant. She has it wrong. My head is dizzy trying to process what she’s saying.
“I’m not pregnant.” My statement comes out weaker than it sounded in my head.
Pursing her lips, the doctor picks the chart back up from her lap, flipping over a page, and then she looks back up at me. “Blood was taken at your most recent visit. The hormone levels were indicative of pregnancy. You are in fact pregnant, Miss Roth.”
I can’t breathe. “No, I’m on birth control. I’m not...” My head spins. “When did I last… My gynecologist administers them. I’m on the shot.” I don’t have words.
“Looking at your history, you missed your last appointment for the shot with Dr. Gaffner. You never rescheduled.” Closing the chart, the doctor looks up at me with nothing but an expectant, professional look.
I imagine I look like I’m going to pass out to her. Because that’s exactly how I feel.
I’m pregnant? My hand slips to my stomach, smoothing over my belly. I have a little extra weight on me, but I thought that was only because of stress. I haven’t been working out in weeks and…
Oh my God, I’m pregnant. My eyes widen and all I see is a doctor who’d rather be anywhere else staring back at me.
“You didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” I tell her with my bottom lip quivering. “I’m having a baby,” I say out loud and somehow that makes it all the more real.
“There are risks,” she informs me, as if breaking the little bit of a happy bubble I’m in. “I’d like to discuss your options for the pregnancy.”
I never imagined I’d be a mother. How could I know how to be one when my own left me the first chance she got?
As the doctor rattles off statistics and possibilities, I ignore everything she has to say. I only have a year but that’s
enough time for a baby. Before I left I’d make sure that baby would know it’s because I had no choice.
I cut off the doctor, unable to focus on anything she’s saying. “I can’t decide anything right now, I’m sorry. Would you give me some time?” I’m polite and the doctor although hesitant, complies, leaving me for a moment to simply wrap my head around the fact that I’m pregnant.
Seth is going to be a father. That’s even more shocking than me being a mother.
What would he say? What will he do?
I lied. That promise I made when I walked in here is bullshit. I can’t tell Seth. I can’t tell Seth any of this.
It’s been so long since I’ve been inside a church. I sure as hell won’t be going today either. It’s not too cold in my car as I sit here with the heat on, staring at the stained glass windows. The moment that doctor left the room, so did I.
I got the hell out of there to think. All the white sterile walls and carts… I just couldn’t process it in there. Let alone have a conversation about whether or not to accept a heart when it’s available and risk endangering this baby. At the thought, my hand lifts from my lap to my belly.
“You sure do know how to fuck with someone,” I whisper as I watch a woman enter the church. I’m all the way on the far right side of the parking lot and it may only be six at night, but service is long over and the early evenings of autumn have made the sky turn dark.
My grandmother used to pray. She didn’t do it often, but if she lost something, she’d pray to Saint Anthony, I think it was. I’m pretty sure. She said Saint Anthony helped you find what you’d lost. I don’t even know if that’s a Catholic thing or Baptist. I simply wasn’t raised to be religious.
Yet, when times get hard, I always find myself at a church. Maybe it’s because the graves are in their backyards, or that a church can always be found near a hospital. I don’t know why but I drove here eight years ago when I first arrived on the East Coast and I couldn’t stop thinking about Cami and Seth. The two came together, different kinds of pain. If one left, the other appeared. So I came here, to this church.
Always at night, when it’s most empty.
Once, when I was little and had no idea just how hard life could be, I asked my grandma, “If you lose your way, do you pray to Saint Anthony too?”
She looked at me with a sad smile and crouched down in front of me. She always smelled like peppermints and at the memory, I swear I smell them again.
“When you lose your way, you pray to God.”
A mix between a deep breath and a sigh fill my lungs. I have prayed so many times, and yet here I am, with a faulty heart and now a baby I don’t know if I’ll even be able to carry to term.
Maybe it’s because I only pray at my weakest moments. I’ve only prayed when things were horrible and I had no way out. Maybe that’s why it just gets harder. God is forcing me to keep praying.
It’s a ridiculous thought and I huff a sad laugh as I sniff away the tears that prick my eyes. No more crying.
My phone buzzes again and I pick it up, thinking it’s another call from the doctor’s office but it’s only a text from Bethany asking what my schedule is at work next week. I need time to absorb all of this, so the impatient doctor will have to wait.
It takes me a moment to search through my email and copy and paste my schedule to Bethany as my thoughts travel to all of the details I looked up about pregnant women with heart failure.
Maybe those scenarios are what led me here.
I nearly call Bethany. So many times as I’ve sat here for hours I’ve thought of calling her, telling her everything and then begging her to tell me how I can tell all of this to Seth.
How do I tell him I’m pregnant, but this baby might not make it? Oh, and I may not make it either. How do I tell him I’ve known for over a week now about my heart and that I lied to him?
A light in the car a few spots over goes off and then back on catching my eye. It’s the security detail and I when I see the phone in his hand I wonder if he’s telling Seth. The clock tells me I’ve been here for three hours. I don’t know how. I’ve only been thinking. Apparently I’m slow today.
“Have you been taking all my mental energy?” I ask in a soft voice, that motherly voice every adult female seems to have around a sweet little infant. “Is that why I can’t think straight anymore?” I ask this little bump.
My security detail lowers his phone and the flash of light distracts me again.
The woman is already leaving church, the same one who entered a moment ago. I wonder what she came here for and then I wonder if she has a baby.
I want a baby. That is the only conclusion I have come to repeatedly since I’ve been here. I would love to hold my baby.
Seth
I’m a bastard. Laura can’t even look me in the eyes anymore. She doesn’t want to touch me. She avoids me all the time now. It’s been a week of her doing this and I know it’s my fault.
She’s drifting away from me even though she’s right here. She’s always here but she’s not. It’s fucking killing me. All I can do is check the messages from the security detail on her. It’s gotten to the point where Jase won’t even have a conversation with me if my phone is out.
He can be pissed all he wants. I cannot lose her.
When I get home, her flowers are in a vase on the coffee table. It’s the first sign of life I’ve seen from her.
For a week now. Ever since she went to the doctor. She said she’s feeling sick and that’s all it is, but she’s lying. She goes out, she comes home, she goes to bed.
That’s been her schedule. I’ve fucking had it. Screw Declan and his advice to give her space. It’s obviously not working.
I’m not a fucking fan of space, apparently.
With a bottle of wine in my right hand and Chinese takeout in the other, I shut the door and listen for her.
No sign of her in the house, but I know she’s here.
I call out for her as I lay everything out on the counter. I got her favorites, even the crab rangoon I think is… less than appealing. Crab and cream cheese just don’t work together in my book. The wine was damn expensive and the man at the register said she’d love it. As if he knows her. Still, I got it.
“Chinese?” she says and her small voice comes from over my shoulder. She holds me from behind, hugging me first, which is new, and rests her head on my arm as she takes a look at the options. “Sesame chicken, I call that one.” The smile is genuine and I’m floored. I don’t understand, but she’s acting normal. I’m afraid to breathe or she may go back to the sullen shell she’s been wrapped up in.
“All yours, Babygirl.” I stare down at her as I speak and her response is to lift up onto her tiptoes and kiss me.
It’s a small peck, sweet and short although she lingers a moment longer when I lean down to go in for another. I’m granted a hum of satisfaction and then she’s moving behind me to get the plates from the cabinet.
I don’t miss that when she sees the wine, that bit of happiness falls. Like it was just an act. It’s already gone; the smile, the blush in her cheeks.
A worried look replaces it all and I can see the wheels spinning as she takes her time getting out two plates. One and then the other.
She’s killing time until she has to go back to putting on a show for me. It’s so damn clear and I can’t stand it. It’s eating me up inside, gnawing away at whatever makes me a semblance of a good person.
“What’s wrong?”
“What?” she says as she turns around, her lips parting in shock. Both of her hands grip the counter behind her as she shakes her head. “I’m fine.”
“The hell you are,” I say and I don’t hide the raw pain in my voice. “You think I don’t see you? I know you, Laura Evelyn Roth and I know you’re not happy. You’re not even close to being okay.”
Her sad eyes stare back at me, but the frown on her face keeps her mouth shut.
“I’m trying everything here,” I tell her as I
open my arms, the empty plastic bags in one hand and then I ball them up, holding on to them as if they’ll ground me.
She starts to say something but then she looks past me and worries her bottom lip before catching it in her teeth.
“It’s killing me, you know that? I lost you before, but this?” I throw the bags away, which makes me turn my back to her, but only for a moment. “This is hell,” I tell her, the words scratching their way out of me. “It hurts to see you hurting and you pretending you’re not for me.”
“Would you rather I go?” The question is riddled with such loss that even her whisper mourns.
“No! No!” How can she even think that? I can’t breathe. I have to loosen the fucking tie on my neck because it’s choking me. “Don’t leave me. Please. I want to be here for you,” I say, and I am begging her. “Whatever it is that makes you cry at night; you need to tell me. I promise I won’t think less of you or… shit, I don’t know what you’re thinking will happen if you tell me because you don’t tell me anything.”
Her expression crumples but still she doesn’t say anything.
“I know I hurt you—”
“No, stop,” she says and Laura’s hand flies out in front her. Her palm faces me as if to silence me.
“I know I did.” I rush out the words, hating myself. “If I could take it back, I swear to God that I would. I don’t deserve you but it doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop wanting you. I don’t want anyone else to have you and I can’t walk away.”
Her shoulders shake with each shuddering breath. “Stop! It’s not that. Stop. Stop!”
I feel crazy and lost and reckless. Dropping down to my knees, I stare up at her. “Tell me! Please! I’m begging you,” I practically yell but I don’t mean to. Just like I don’t mean for my eyes to turn glossy. “I can’t lose you but I am. I am losing you and I hate it. You aren’t here with me and I can’t be without you. I will do anything, whatever it is. Please, just tell me.”
Breathless and in a hell that is limbo, I watch her. She’s right there, only feet away from me, but she feels so far from my grasp.
