Then she was gone: in the bathroom, with the shower running. I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and waited for her to come back, which she eventually did, wearing a fluffy bathrobe and looking more closed off than I’d ever seen her.
“Mer,” I began, intending to explain that there had been no premeditation on my part, that it had happened in the heat of the moment, that I didn’t even want kids, but she was looking around the room, frowning slightly, as if trying to remember where she’d put her keys. When her eyes finally settled on me, her expression didn’t change.
“I think,” she said. “I need to be alone.”
I nodded, letting her know that I found her request perfectly reasonable. “Okay. I’ll make a bed on the couch.”
“No, I mean alone in the house.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I’ll call you a cab,” she said. “You should get dressed.” She left the room with that same distracted look, like a person confronted by some unpleasant fact that they’ve always denied, but secretly feared to be true.
It took three days for Meredith to find me at the Super 8. A knock came at the door and I looked out the spyhole to find her standing in the hallway with a pizza box. I opened the door and her anxious features smoothed out.
“Hey,” she said. “Have you had supper yet?”
We ate together in silence, her in a cheap office chair, me on the edge of the bed. On the muted television, a satellite image of a hurricane swirled towards a fragile archipelago. “I’m sorry I sent you away,” she said when we’d finished eating. “I thought you’d get in touch.”
“I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said, deliberately, the way a parent speaks to a child they’ve made the mistake of expecting too much from. “I should have been more careful. I should have asked you to use protection.”
“Because I can’t be trusted,” I said, my eyes going from the hurricane to the half-empty pizza box on the bed.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s true. You don’t know the kinds of crazy things I’ve—”
“Of course I do,” she said with a laugh. “Do you think I’d have invited just any patient home without digging into their history? All those terrible things you thought you did… None of them happened.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But they could have.”
She laughed again and shook her head in exasperation. “Are you still on your meds?”
“Yes,” I said, truthfully.
“Good. That’s good, Felix.”
After talking it over, we agreed to give the relationship another try, but a subtle shift had occurred in our three days apart, a polite distance settling between us. We still slept in the same bed, but neither one of us seemed to have any interest in sex. We treated each other with studied kindness, the way one treats a dying loved one. On my birthday, she gave me a new laptop. The extravagance of the gift took me off guard, and I thanked her in a hollow voice, thinking I had no use for it; I hadn’t written a thing since I’d gotten out of the hospital. When she was at work, I connected the machine to the internet and browsed the local classifieds for affordable one-bedroom apartments, not knowing just how or when the end would come, but sensing the moment drawing near.
Then, three days before Easter Sunday, the miracle occurred. Meredith came out of the bathroom, holding a little pink wand with a blue cross on its face.
“No,” I said.
She nodded, looking dazed.
“Could it be a mistake?”
She held up a second wand, with a second blue cross.
“Maybe they’re defective,” I said.
“They’re not defective.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Felix, I’m a nurse.”
I sat down on the couch and lowered my face to my hands.
“What do you want to do?” Meredith asked after a moment.
“Me?” I looked up at her. “Isn’t it supposed to be your decision?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Felix. I’m having the baby. What I’m asking is… do you want to be a part of this?”
Pain stabbed at my right temple. “I can’t,” I moaned, shaking my head. “I just can’t.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I understand.”
“I never meant for—”
“I know.”
I looked up at her uncomplicated face; the way she was standing with her shoulders defiantly square, taking it all on herself.
“I think…” I said slowly, wanting to be sure of the words this time, “that I love you, Mer.”
She smiled sadly. “I’m not sure that helps us.”
“What would help us?”
She thought for a moment. “In the bathroom,” she said, “looking at the results, I started to cry.” She raised her hands when I began to apologize. “I wasn’t upset. I was happy. I’m not a young woman, you know, and I’ve always wanted children. I think I must have been waiting for something like this to happen. I suppose that’s why I was so careless. You’re a good person, Felix, whether you realize it or not, and you could make a good father. But you’d have to want it.” She paused to emphasize the point. “You’d have to really want it. And if you don’t, well…”
The pain in my head had begun to subside. “I don’t know what I want,” I admitted. “To be honest, I don’t even know if this is really happening. I mean, how can I even be sure this is real?”
Still holding the positive test, Meredith gave me a weak smile. “I was just asking myself that same question.”
The room was fittingly womblike—dark and quiet, the technician moving one hand over a glowing console, the other over Meredith, who lay on the examination table, her stomach glistening with jelly under the ultrasound probe. From the angle of my chair, I had a good view of everything that was happening: pale ghosts swirling on the technician’s screen, as if she were communing with souls in different realm.
“There’s the heart,” she said, tilting her screen so we could both see the tiny fluttering organ. Meredith gave me a broad smile and I tried to smile back as the technician applied more jelly to her abdomen and shifted the probe around. “There’s an arm. A hand. The spine.” A camera was integrated with the machine and I could hear her printing occasional pictures of what we were seeing. She came to the head and worked to get a decent angle. In profile, the skull looked malformed and much too large, but the technician didn’t seem concerned. She fidgeted with the probe and a distinct face appeared.
“Hi there,” Meredith said softly.
Horror crawled up my neck. It was obvious to me that there was something wrong with the baby, the seeds of my sickness germinating inside its tiny skull.
“So,” the technician said, “would you like to know the gender?”
Meredith laughed. “Well, I would. But my…” She hesitated at the designation. “Felix,” she said, “would rather not.”
“Well, that’s fine,” the technician said. “He can step outside for a minute if he’d like.”
“Would you mind?” Meredith asked me.
“Um… sure.”
I slunk from the room, sensing that both Meredith and the technician were glad to have me go. Out in the hall, I sat on a folding chair, fidgeting, as people in lab coats walked briskly past. Eventually, Meredith came back out, carrying a strip of captured stills from the ultrasound, not unlike the ones you get from a photo booth at the mall.
I stood up. “What happened? I thought she was going to come back and get me.”
“There wasn’t much left to do. Do you want to see the photos?”
“Later. I need to get out of here.”
“Okay.” She took my hand and led me down the hall and back out to the waiting room, past a half-dozen pregnant women accompanied by capable, confident-looking partners. The receptionist gave me an approving look, as if I were the one supporting Meredith. I followed her through the windy parking lot to the car. She got behind the wheel and I sat on the passenger side, my head against the window.