Damien’s excitement is palpable. “She’s pregnant!” he announces, and I’m so happy for Damien and Anna because they’ve been trying to get pregnant for years. It wasn’t happening. It was one failed attempt after another. They went through fertility drugs, and then artificial insemination. Damien and Anna were always very candid with Jake and me about the process and the struggle, mainly, I think, because Jake is a doctor and because we’re their only friends without kids. It was easier to talk to us about it than with other friends. Jake and I are at that point in our lives where almost everyone we know has or is having kids, except us.
The last I heard, Damien and Anna were trying in vitro, which is obscenely expensive. They don’t have the income for it. The cost alone was almost enough to make them give up. They had agreed they would try one time, but that they didn’t have the savings to go for it more than once.
“That’s amazing!” I say. “I’m so happy for you both.” I am happy for them, so happy, though I have to force the enthusiasm into my voice because I’m not in a happy place myself.
“You want to hear the best news?”
“What could be better than that?” I ask.
“Twins. It’s twins, Nina.”
I feel so happy for them. Anna is amazing, the kind of woman who radiates kindness and warmth. “Anna will make the best mom,” I tell him. “She was born to be a mother. How far along is she?”
“Thirteen weeks. It was mum’s the word until after her first trimester, but now I’m stopping strangers on the street to tell them.”
I smile. I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Listen,” he says. “Is everything okay with Jake?”
I have to catch my breath. “Why?” I ask.
“I’ve been trying to get a hold of him since Monday morning, but he hasn’t returned my texts. It’s not like him.” Damien waits as if I should say something, but I’m at a loss for words. “Anyway,” he says in response to my silence, “I’m just wondering if he’s there and, if so, if you could put him on for me? It will only take a second.”
“Jake isn’t here,” I say, slightly stunned that Jake wouldn’t answer Damien’s texts either.
“No?” he asks.
“No. He’s not. He’s at work,” I say because I don’t know what else to say. It’s not a lie. It’s seven now. It’s a surgery day. Jake is at work. It’s crossed my mind to go to the hospital and make him talk to me, but I worried that would make things worse. When Jake is ready to talk, he’ll come to me.
“Of course he is. Could you tell him I called? Could you ask him to call me back?” Damien says that he wants to tell Jake the good news, about his and Anna’s babies. Damien and Jake are incredibly close. They went to college together. They were in the same fraternity. They’ve been friends for two decades. Damien was Jake’s best man at our wedding, and Jake was the best man at theirs. He gave the the most hilarious speech. He had people doubled over, laughing. I still remember it, though sometimes that feels like a lifetime ago, like an entirely different Jake, one who was more happy and carefree. Still, I can’t understand why Jake wouldn’t answer Damien’s calls or texts when it’s me he’s mad at.
“Yes, of course I will,” I say, short of breath because of how fast my heart is beating. “He’s just been so busy at work,” I say, feeling like I need to make excuses for Jake’s behavior. I reach for my glass and take another long sip, and then reach for the bottle and top off the glass.
Damien and I say our goodbyes. I promise again to tell Jake to call him. Easier said than done.
I can’t tell Jake anything when he won’t speak to me.
CHRISTIAN
In the middle of the night, I shake Lily awake.
“Hmm?” she asks, half-conscious.
“What’d you do with the rock?”
I’ve spent the night lying awake, wondering where it is and if it has blood on it like Lily’s sleeve, and if so, if it has Lily’s fingerprints on it too.
She rolls over onto her back. My question forces her eyes open. I see the whites of them in the darkness. She sleeps in my old shirts at night, ones she took out of a Goodwill bag and laid claim to. This one is flannel. It’s soft beneath my hand. The shirts are long because I’m that much taller than Lily, who is five foot three, relatively petite. They hang down to her upper thigh, meaning her legs are bare. I press my leg against hers, feeling her skin next to mine. Under the weight of the quilt, she gives off heat.
“I dropped it, I think,” she says, her voice slow with sleep.
“Would you remember where?”
“I don’t know.”
I say okay. I wait until Lily’s breath slows and evens out as she falls back to sleep. I slip quietly from bed, careful not to wake her. I sort through the hamper in the closet for the clothes Lily wore yesterday: the white shirt mostly, but also the pants, her underpants, a pair of socks. I carry the clothes downstairs, and leave them in a plastic bag, knotted tightly, by the garage door.
I’ll have to get rid of them.
Early in the morning, I convince Lily to take the day off work. I’ve already called my own boss and told her I wouldn’t be there. A sub can give Lily’s math test. The kids can live without her for a day. I listen as she calls in sick, saying that she must have eaten something that didn’t sit well; her stomach is bothering her. Lily rarely, if ever, misses work. Whoever is on the other end of the line is understanding, sympathetic even. She can’t use the pregnancy as an excuse because no one knows we’re pregnant.
Lily says that she slept better last night. I hardly slept. Still, she wears a bemused expression on her face, as if lost in thought, and I can only imagine what she’s thinking about and if she’s reliving the moment Jake Hayes pushed her to the ground.
I pour myself a cup of coffee. I sit and watch from over my mug as Lily forces down a piece of dry toast. The key to staving off morning sickness, she’s told me before, is to eat. Hunger is what makes it worse. I watch Lily from across the kitchen table. Even in this state, she’s a sight for sore eyes. She has a round face and full cheeks, with features that are soft, nothing overly angular or sharp though her eyes are large. Her skin is like satin; I imagine it staying that way even when she’s sixty or seventy and we’re growing old and gray together.
“What?” she asks, looking up from her toast as she catches me staring at her.
I lower my mug to the table. “If you did anything to him, it was only to protect yourself.”
I say it to soothe her, to quiet the voices in her head.
I make it worse. I shouldn’t have said anything.
“Do you think I killed him?” she asks, her eyes widening, and I think of the blood on her shirtsleeve, the shirt in the bag by the door, trying to quantify it, to work out how much blood it really was, and if it only looked worse than it was. I minimize it, telling myself if Lily broke his nose when she hit him, that would explain the large amount of blood. Broken noses have a tendency to bleed a lot. And they’re not fatal.
“I’m just saying you shouldn’t feel guilty for anything you did or didn’t do. He put you in a difficult situation. He left you no choice but to fight back. You know that, don’t you?”