I didn’t have that with Langs Valley. When Heather and I moved to New York, neither of us looked back.
On the front stoop I pause, listening to the rain drum against the roof of the portico. I shift from one foot to the other. I imagine Skye back on West Eleventh Street. I picture her sitting on one end of the couch with her knees tucked. I imagine the apple smell of her hair. I miss her so badly I feel split open with a kind of homesickness, and maybe this is what I do, maybe this is what I have always done. I make my home in the women that I love and remain lost inside my own self.
Dusk is descending and lights pop on from within, the first-story windows glowing yellow. I don’t ring the doorbell. I locate the spare key underneath the garden-gnome statue to the right of the stoop—the usual hiding place—and let myself in. I let the door slam.
She rushes from the kitchen, her eyes glassy and wide. Heather’s giant green eyes always used to stun me, but in the past few years they’ve started to appear buggy, too big for her face. I used to feel guilty for having that thought.
“You scared me!” She catches her breath, and fear is in her face. Several long seconds pass before her lips spread into a smile that sends a chill down my spine. “Welcome home, Husband.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Heather
Dear Dr. K,
The fall of my junior year at Fordham, I got sick. Really, wrenchingly sick. At first I thought it was a bad bout of the flu, but when I was still puking multiple times a day after three weeks passed, Burke insisted I see a doctor.
I’d never liked going to doctors. Something about the stuffy, chemical smell of hospitals and medical buildings always made me feel nauseated, and it had gotten worse since Gus died.
I asked Burke to come with me, but he was swamped prepping for a test, and I was too proud of him that fall to make a fuss. He’d recently started classes at NYU; in his first two years at CUNY Medgar Evers he’d received perfect grades, and with a 4.0 GPA and glowing references from his professors, he’d been accepted to NYU as a transfer student.
It was a crisp Saturday morning in October when I headed to the doctor’s office in the Bronx, just a short walk from the campus library where I’d been tackling some work. I felt faint with nausea, but my Cultural Theory midterm paper was due the following week, and I’d barely made a dent in the outline.
A cheerful man with a salt-and-pepper beard introduced himself as Dr. Wayne. He asked me a number of questions, checked my vitals and blood pressure, and poked around in my ears and mouth with his instruments. He said everything looked fine, that it was probably just a prolonged stomach bug, but that a nurse would take some blood tests to be sure. I’d always loathed needles, but looked the other way and let the nurse prick my pointer finger. She said the doctor would be back in several minutes.
I was starting to get antsy; I’d made only pathetic progress on my paper, and I’d failed the pop quiz the week before because I’d felt too ill to do the reading. It was too early in the semester to be sure that my grades were dropping, but I’d never failed a quiz before.
Nearly twenty minutes later Dr. Wayne reappeared with the nurse at his side. They both wore smiles that stretched their faces like cartoon characters.
“You don’t have a stomach bug.” Dr. Wayne beamed.
“That’s good, I guess.” I tried to smile back, but suddenly wanted to hurl again.
“You’re ten weeks pregnant.”
That must’ve been enough to send me over the edge because the bile came rushing up my throat and I vomited all over the floor, partly on Dr. Wayne’s patent-leather loafers.
Like most sexually active college-aged women, I subconsciously knew that despite my daily birth control pills—pills that made my period almost nonexistent—I was not fully immune to pregnancy. During that stage in my life I’d always assumed that on the off chance Burke and I ever did get pregnant by accident, I’d get it taken care of. I’d never had an abortion, but they hadn’t been uncommon in Langs Valley. I’d taken Kyla to Planned Parenthood twice in high school, held her hand while the doctor did his thing.
So that day in Dr. Wayne’s office, after I apologized for puking on his shoes, I opened my mouth to explain that I’d need an abortion. But instead of the words, tears filled my eyes and the back of my throat felt full, and I couldn’t speak. I knew then that I was going to have the baby.
I’d expected it to be a choice, but it wasn’t. Perhaps losing Gus had instilled in me the fragility and preciousness of life, or maybe it was the knowledge that inside me was a cluster of cells that was a mix of Burke and me, the product of our love. Our baby. I couldn’t simply turn my back on this miracle, not even if I’d wanted to.
That night I waited up for Burke. He crawled into bed beside me, and I sat straight up and told him the news. Burke cried—underneath his masculine exterior he’d always been a sensitive soul—and agreed that we had to keep it. He pressed his face against my stomach and whispered a promise to our baby that he would be the best dad in the world.
I continued to have awful morning sickness for another month. By the second trimester my nausea had mostly subsided, but I was utterly exhausted. I knew my grades were slipping, but for the first time in years I didn’t care. After all, I was pregnant. Besides, Burke was getting straight A’s at NYU. Since the news of the pregnancy he’d been working even harder in school and had already lined up a summer internship at Credit Suisse. If he did well there, he’d likely be offered a place in their two-year analyst program after graduation. With the baby coming, Burke and I decided it would be ideal for him to work for a couple of years before applying to business school. Analyst salaries at banks such as Credit Suisse started in the low six figures; if Burke could get that kind of position, we’d be more than fine financially.
As I grew visibly pregnant, I noticed the way my classmates and professors looked at me, and I learned to ignore their judgmental stares. To them I was a tragedy, a poster child for what not to do—another dumb girl who’d gone and ruined her future by getting knocked up. But I didn’t care; I saw the future that Burke’s work ethic promised us, and I began to let myself relish in the feeling of being taken care of for the first time in my life.
I wasn’t concerned with what the students at Fordham thought of me. Since I spent most of my free time holed up in the library or at home with Burke, I hadn’t bothered to make many friends, but the few girls I had gotten to know began to distance themselves, which came as no surprise. A college campus isn’t exactly an ideal setting for a pregnant woman, and I was no longer invited to the bar for cold pints after a tough exam.
Burke sat me down one day in late March, when I was seven months pregnant. He’d been circling me like a hawk for days, and I could tell something was up. On this Sunday afternoon we were eating noodles at our favorite cheap ramen joint in the Village.
“I think we should get married,” Burke said after I demanded he spit out whatever was bothering him. He nodded in the wake of his confession, as though agreeing with himself.
I sometimes forgot that Burke’s grandmother had raised him Catholic, that lodged into the pit of him was a hearty dose of unsettled Catholic guilt.