She allowed herself a dry cackle.
“I thought, Oh God, how silly, she’s just a chubby student with a crush.”
Of all the things Deenie Harrington said that night, this is the line that I have come back to the most. On my worst days, on my bad dates, on the job interviews that didn’t quite work out the way they should.
Just a chubby student with a crush.
Big blotches broke out on Deenie’s neck and arms. There was no pearly glow left on her. She was rumpled, sweating, reddened. For once, her petite frame didn’t seem feminine to me. It seemed childlike.
“Then suddenly…he knows all these things about you. Things I haven’t told him. Things you don’t know, if it’s just…just a regular student. I know. It was me first, remember?”
I wanted so badly to leave, but I could still hear people filing out the front door, and I couldn’t bear to face them. They had all put it together by now. I was afraid they would stone me to death.
Dr. Byrne was so still, like a painting of himself. He seemed to think if he just took the waves of abuse, it would eventually be over, and he would have his wife at the end of it. He had helped me with so much in the short time I had known him, but he would never help me again.
“I looked through his emails, after I dropped you off that day.” Deenie scratched her arms, and the red marks grew redder. “He got you out of essays? He wrote letters to the department, and got you extensions? But you know this already.”
She was scratching her fingers now. Her left hand working at the right, raking at the space between the knuckles and the joints.
“You know, there’s a world where your degree isn’t even valid, Rachel. I could call them up tomorrow and get him thrown out, and your grades are cancelled because you literally fucked your way into an extension. Did you even write your own essays? Or did he do those, too?”
The evidence was compelling. It seemed like every moment since Dr. Byrne walked into O’Connor’s in January was leading up to this one. Fated from the instant I lied about the pre-orders of The Kensington Diet.
“Please don’t do that,” was all I said. “Please don’t cancel my degree.”
“She’s not going to cancel your degree,” Dr. Byrne said quietly. Turning me in would mean turning him in, and that would mean divorce, as well as him being fired. It appeared, on that night at least, that they had plans to stay married.
“The same night,” Deenie went on, “the same night he emailed me about you. I remember. We were sitting on the couch, and he said, ‘I have a student who needs an internship, that nice tall girl you met, I just emailed you about her.’ Laptop open. Cool as a fucking cucumber.”
She had spent days trying to metabolise this information, and it still wasn’t going down. The facts, or what she believed to be the facts, kept coming up like bile.
In a way, I understood why Fred would prefer his wife to think that he was sleeping with a younger woman, rather than a younger man. He had been in the closet for a long time. I expect he is planning to die there.
But he would rather be an abusive and corrupt professor than be bisexual. He would prefer Deenie to think that he was a sociopath, acquiring jobs for his girlfriend with his wife, rather than be correctly identified as queer.
“I just wanted Rachel to have an opportunity,” he said. “I didn’t think…”
There was nowhere for the sentence to go. He looked at me with an expression that probably read as a lover’s sorrow to Deenie, but whose real meaning I saw immediately. Please, Rachel. Please don’t say anything. I’m begging you.
There was only one thing left for me to do.
“I’m pregnant.”
It was one of those situations where the only way out was through.
The Harrington-Byrnes were silent.
“I’m pregnant,” I said again.
“Rachel,” Dr. Byrne said. “No, you aren’t.”
“I have an email from Marie Stopes.”
Deenie looked as though she had been smacked across the face. “No,” she echoed her husband. “No, no, you aren’t.”
“I am. Ten weeks.”
I made a pact with myself that I would not lie to Deenie. Even now, I’m impressed with myself that I made it through this entire incident without really lying.
“There is a box for a pregnancy test in your bathroom,” I said. “And it’s empty. That’s because I stole the test the last time I was here.”
The house was empty now. I could feel the silence of the other rooms bearing down on this one, pushing at the walls.
Deenie got up from her bed, and took out her laptop. The rage had flown out the door with the remaining guests. She was now like a scientist in a film, one who has just discovered an asteroid is about to hit the earth.
“Show me,” she said. “Show me the email.”
It was crazy to be sitting with her on her bed, like being her assistant again. I logged in to my email account and showed her the appointment confirmation for the twenty-sixth.
“Well,” Deenie said. “There it is.”
I closed the laptop lid. “Two thousand,” I said.
“What?” Deenie said.
Fred finally had the grace to appear shocked. “Rachel, what?”
“Two thousand euro.” I clenched my fists so tight that I felt my fingernails embedding on my palms. “Two thousand euro, and you’ll never see me, or hear about this, ever again.”
“Two thousand?”
“For the abortion,” I said. “For the flights, the procedure, the hotel. And I want a friend to come with me. I’m not doing it alone.”
I cleared my throat. “My friend James.”
They looked at each other, and I wondered if Dr. Byrne was grateful to be on the same team as his wife again. I was doing them a favour. Before, they were a struggling couple. Now they were going through something together, and that thing was extortion.
“I’m going to wait in the hallway,” I said, my voice clear. “And you can discuss what you want to do.”
I said, “I didn’t want to do this. It wasn’t my plan.”
And I left them there.
I understand the instinct to judge me. Extorting Deenie Harrington for the termination of a baby that was not her husband’s is the worst thing I have done, and I sincerely hope it is the worst thing I will do.
But while the gift of hindsight has changed much about this story, in my own head at least, it is still difficult to see what else I could have done.
I sat in a wooden chair in the hallway next to the post table and waited. After ten minutes, they came out of the bedroom. Deenie had a chequebook in her hands.
“How will we know that you haven’t just kept the baby?” she said. Her hands were quivering.
I thought about this. “You won’t.”
By this point, Deenie Harrington had been glaring at me for almost an hour, but this was the first time she met my eyes. Her lips bitten, her nostrils tipped pink.
“Rachel,” she whispered. “You weren’t…you couldn’t have been this person all along, could you?”
I examined each one of my teeth with my tongue. “I’m not evil,” I said to her, and to myself. “I just…I don’t have any money, Deenie.”