Annette hadn’t planned on telling Eli when she’d gotten pregnant. She was going to take care of it herself. They’d been in the States, which was lucky, subletting a studio in Brooklyn. Annette had been waitressing, per usual, at an Italian restaurant in Williamsburg, and Eli had found work with a master carpenter. He would come home fragrant from wood shavings, telling her about the Brazilian mahogany floor he’d installed at a gut renovation on Court Street, or the tiger maple escritoire he and Pete were refinishing. Eli’s parents would take them out to dinner, which meant free food and nonstop interrogation. Stan and Judy would start out with subtle hints during the appetizer （“Haven’t you gotten all this wanderlust out of your blood?”） and move on to direct questions with the main course （“You’re not going to do construction for the rest of your life, are you?” “If you apply to dental school now, you could start in September!”）。 By the time dessert and coffee arrived Eli’s mom would practically be in tears （“This is not what I wanted for my sons. First Ari, now you!”）， and his dad would be tight-lipped and glaring. After those meals, Eli would be quiet and moody, and in the days that followed, Annette would catch him staring at some kid’s braces, or hear him sighing longingly at the sight of an overbite.
Annette knew that a pregnancy would tip the precariously balanced scales. If Eli found out, she’d lose the life she wanted and end up stuck with the life that everyone wanted her to have. He’d notice if she took the necessary funds out of their joint checking account, but she had her tips, and she had friends, and they could loan her the money. Eli would never have to know.
Except it turned out that Eli was paying attention to her cycles. He’d known that she’d missed her period; he’d dug the pregnancy test out of the kitchen trash can. On a Friday night, Annette came home from work to find him waving the urine-soaked wand at her, his attitude somewhere between exultant and furious.
“When were you going to tell me?” he asked.
“I wasn’t,” she answered.
“You can’t have an abortion,” he said.
“I can,” she said. “It’s already scheduled.”
Eli had looked shocked. Then he’d begged her not to do it. He’d yelled that it was his baby, too. Then he’d cried. Over the weekend, he’d painted her a picture of a life they could have, the two of them plus a baby, which, in his descriptions, sounded no different from an adorable doll, easily transported, no impediment to their travel, no trouble at all. They could buy a sailboat and travel around the world, dropping anchor anyplace Annette had ever dreamed of. They could raise chickens on a farm upstate or build birdhouses in Montecito or lead bike trips around azure-blue Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, only please, please, don’t kill our baby.
“It’s not a baby,” she’d said, irritated and nauseated and exhausted after an eight-hour shift on her feet.
“Don’t tell me she’s just a clump of cells, because she isn’t. She has her own DNA. Her own fingerprints.” Eli had started referring to the embryo as “she,” just to be extra aggravating.
“It’s a parasite,” Annette said. “It’s alive, yes. It’s its own thing, fine. But it can’t live without me.”
“She has her own heart.”
“Which is pumping my blood, and which can’t beat without me.”
They’d gone round and round, Eli insisting that what was inside her was a child, their child; Annette just as certain that what was inside of her was more like a possibility; a set of circumstances that might, or might not, come to pass. And who was he to even voice an opinion? None of this was happening inside his body. “If you really believe that what’s inside of me is an actual person, you should sit shiva every time I get my period, because maybe there’s a fertilized egg in there that didn’t implant, or didn’t survive, and, according to you, that’s a person, too,” she said.
For hours they’d fought, with Annette saying it was her body and her choice and Eli saying that the baby was half his. Annette had shouted; Eli had pleaded. Finally, Annette had locked herself in the bedroom while Eli stood in the hallway, still making his case. “I swear I’m not trying to trap you or tie you down. We’ll get married, and I’ll go back to school, just so we’ll have health insurance, and my parents will help us out. You have the baby. And if you aren’t happy—” She could picture him, drawing himself upright; could picture the look of stoic, long-suffering nobility on his face. It made Annette want to puke. Or maybe that was the quote-unquote baby. “If you aren’t happy, you can go.”