Three missed periods later, after Angel could no longer ignore it—and after confirming it with both a drugstore-brand and a name-brand pregnancy test, wrapping the packaging in a black garbage bag and pushing it deep into the trash can outside, not even recycling the paperboard—Angel confessed to her mother. It was late on a school night, just the two of them home, and they were washing their faces at the sinks in the bathroom. After Angel uttered the words, she nearly cried with the relief of handing her burden to her mother.
Her mother looked up at Angel in the mirror, her face streaming, hairline wet. “Wait. You think you’re pregnant?” She looked very young and frightened, which wasn’t the reaction Angel had hoped for.
Angel’s mouth went dry. With shaking hands she spread toothpaste on her brush, and tried to steady her voice. “I guess I don’t just think it.”
“Oh, shit. Oh shit.” Marissa’s face dripped into the neckline of her pink pajama shirt. “Mike’s not going to be happy about this.”
Angel put down her toothbrush and stepped back. “Mike’s not the one who’s going to have to go into labor.”
Marissa snatched the towel and rubbed her face vigorously. Then she folded it with great precision and hung it on the rack. “Let’s not pretend this isn’t going to affect Mike. And me, too. Who’s the father?”
Angel was still too stunned to speak, but Marissa must have interpreted her hesitation as not knowing, because she let out a long keening whimper.
“Oh god, how stupid could you be? Messing up all of our lives!”
“What about me?”
“Your life, too! Especially your life! Oh god.”
She seemed about to go on, but Angel left the bathroom without brushing her teeth, and shut herself in her bedroom. She curled on her bed, waiting for her mother to come in and make things right, waited and waited.
“SHE’S GOT TO GET an abortion,” Mike said when, a full three weeks later, Marissa finally told him. Angel overheard the conversation from her bedroom.
She might have gotten one, too, would have gotten one, except that her mother never suggested it and Angel was somehow afraid to bring it up, because her mother must have thought it was a sin. Why else wouldn’t she mention it? And it was a sin, wasn’t it? Except that she can’t believe that God would be so unfair, letting guy after guy get off scot-free, while saddling girls with either lifelong responsibilities or mortal sins.
At the same time, Angel had a sense that she should suffer for her mistakes, see them through. Now she wonders at the inertia that somehow allowed her to ignore what was happening inside her week after week and the self-loathing that insisted she be punished.
Mike was already looking up clinics. “Call them,” he ordered Marissa, waving the phone in her face. “Now.” Angel was flooded with relief, because even if he was a jerk, Mike was an adult, taking charge, and Angel was about to get a second chance at a normal life.
“It’s too late,” Marissa said in a small voice. The disappointment was like a sack of sand in the gut. Angel hadn’t actually known it was too late until now.
She could hear Mike’s long exhalation. “What the hell do you mean, it’s too late.” It was a statement. “How long have you been keeping this from me?”
“Maybe if you’d been around. You were staying in Santa Fe! Anyway, it’s Angel’s business and she’s my daughter. And besides, you know we’re Catholic. We don’t believe in abortion. I didn’t give up my baby, did I?”
He gave a short mean laugh. Angel could picture him exactly: tipping his round head, smiling wryly. “Do you really not believe in it, Marissa, or do you just think you don’t, because then you’d have to admit you made the wrong choice?”
“Gee thanks, Mike,” Marissa said bitterly, lamely.