17. Maddie
CHAPTER 17
MADDIE
“ C an we make eggs for dinner tonight?” Charlie asked.
He was sitting at the kitchen island with a coloring book open in front of him, kicking his feet against the woodwork. Maddie thought about telling him to stop. She hadn’t been feeling well all day — she was nauseous and had a bit of a headache. But Charlie wasn’t doing anything wrong, so she forced herself to put up with the kicking sounds.
“I didn’t know you liked eggs,” she told Charlie.
“Dad likes them.”
“You know he isn’t coming home tonight, right?” They went through this every day, and Maddie hated it.
“I mean, I know he said he wasn’t,” Charlie said. “But in case he does, he likes eggs.”
“He won’t be here, Charlie. We can make eggs if that’s what you want, but he isn’t going to be here.”
Charlie made a sour face. “I know,” he insisted.
Maddie sighed. “All right, I’ll look up some egg recipes. We’ll come up with something cool.” It felt as if the best thing she could do would be to get Charlie excited about the actual meal itself. Maybe then he would forget the daily disappointment of his father not showing up to eat with him.
He wouldn’t, though, of course. This was exactly what she had worried about, and exactly what she’d warned Eli about. It was good for him to change his ways, but only if he could commit to it. As it was, he had given Charlie a glimpse at a different kind of life and then snatched it away. Of course Charlie was moody and unhappy now. He must feel as if his father had abandoned him.
And Maddie needed to swallow down the feeling she had about that — the feeling that Eli had abandoned her — because the last thing she wanted was to make Charlie feel worse about his father. They were the two that needed to be united. Even though it felt like she and Charlie were on the same side of an injustice, she couldn’t let anything come between him and his father. Someday, she would be gone, and Charlie would need whatever could be salvaged of that bond.
He had returned to his coloring, and it was clear that — even though he was disappointed about the idea of Eli not coming home in time to spend time with him tonight — he wasn’t devastated. He seemed to be doing his best to take it in stride. To Maddie, that was as sad as anything else — that he could feel that disappointment and then process it so easily. He should expect better of his father, but it was clear that he didn’t.
She opened up an egg recipe on her phone, but the pictures made her feel queasy, and she clicked away from it. She was going to have to settle her stomach before the time to start cooking arrived. She went to the fridge and got out a ginger ale. “Want to watch a movie?” she asked Charlie, thinking longingly of the plush recliners and cool, comfortable room that had the big screen TV.
“I thought we could go watch the skateboarders again,” Charlie said.
The thought of being out in the hot sun made Maddie’s head pound. “Let’s stay in today.”
Charlie frowned. “I don’t want to stay in.”
He was usually such an agreeable kid, but Maddie got it, of course — he was acting out because of what Eli was doing. “Just for today,” she told him firmly. “We can talk about going to the skate park tomorrow, maybe. It’s too hot out to fuss with that sort of thing today.”
Charlie sighed. “Fine,” he said. “But I get to pick the movie.”
“That’s fine.” Maddie didn’t care what they watched. She just wanted to be able to close her eyes and relax for a few hours.
They went into the movie room. Maddie handed Charlie the remote controls and he put on something animated with cats and dogs in it. It turned out to be a musical, and the tunes were pretty, and Maddie was able to spend the next few hours relaxing — but it didn’t seem to help the unpleasant physical symptoms she was experiencing.
“You don’t seem like you’ve been yourself lately,” Eli observed.
He had walked into the movie room late at night, hours after Charlie had gone to bed. To tell the truth, Maddie hadn’t heard him come in. She was watching an old black-and-white film with the volume on low, so she probably should have noticed, but Eli was right — she hadn’t been herself.
Still, she resented him saying so. “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t mean anything by it.”
“You don’t know what I’m like,” she said. “Not really. You haven’t known me that long.”
“I only thought… you know, usually you’d spend nights dancing. Are you unhappy with the studio? I can have a change made if it isn’t meeting your expectations.”
“The studio’s great. Do I need to dance every night to show my gratitude?”
“No, of course you don’t. I just wondered if you were all right.” Eli shook his head. “Obviously, I shouldn’t have asked. Forget I said anything.”
Maddie wanted to say something to him — to let him know that he hadn’t really done anything wrong. She didn’t know if that was a true reflection of the way she felt or not, but she was so tired of the unpleasantness between the two of them that it was tempting to brush everything under the rug and simply allow that to be the truth — force it to be the truth, if that was what had to happen.
She wanted it to be the truth.
It would have been easier, and felt so much better, to forgive him for everything. To allow herself to be empathetic instead of angry about the fact that he had returned to his old habit of pouring all of his attention into work. After all, what he’d said about all the money the company had lost did change things.
She still thought he was making a mistake. She couldn’t agree with the way he was prioritizing business over everything else in his life. But at the very least, she could understand what had happened.
The trouble was that it didn’t make it any easier to live with.
She was the one who spend every day with Charlie. She was the one watching him long for his father, a longing that was beginning to seem as though it would never be properly satisfied.
And she was left longing for Eli herself. She had truly believed for a moment there that things were about to change between the two of them for good. The night they had spent together had been magical, and the morning after, he had seemed eager to embark on — something. Even when he’d had to go into work, she had assumed it was only a postponement of the conversation they would inevitably have and the plans they would inevitably make for their future. It had to be that, surely.
But he had never come back to her.
Walking into the TV room late at night and acting as if he understood her well enough to worry about her — that was far too little and coming far too late.
She didn’t want to talk to him about herself or how she was doing. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him she had been feeling unwell. What business was that of his?
Eli had made it clear that he wanted to view her and treat her as an employee — so, fine. That was what they would do. That was what they would be to each other moving forward. And Maddie felt no urge to tell her employer that she hadn’t been feeling well for the past few days.
“It’s your house,” she told him. “I’m your nanny. You can ask me whatever you want.”
“But I shouldn’t expect an answer?”
“Not if it’s personal. We don’t have a personal relationship,” she said. “I don’t owe you the answers to any personal questions.”
“Okay, got it. I just wanted to see whether you were all right. But I suppose that was nosy of me.”
“I mean, I don’t know why you’re asking about me instead of Charlie,” she said. “If I had just gotten home and hadn’t seen my son all week, my first question would be about him. But people are different, I guess.”
He tensed. “I can get another nanny, if need be,” he said. “If you and I can’t be civil to each other, I don’t think it’s to anybody’s benefit for you to go on working here.”
Maddie lowered her head, though she was still angry and didn’t regret saying what she had. She couldn’t afford to lose this job. Not now. And even though Eli might not see the benefit to Charlie in having her here, she was sure that Charlie needed consistency. And right now, she was the only person providing him with anything like it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, though there was no real regret in it. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Is there anything I need to know about Charlie? Did anything happen today?”
“It was a normal day,” she said. Of course, a normal day consisted of Charlie missing his father terribly, but she had already pushed his limits as far as she dared for one night.
He left the room.
Maddie tried her best to settle back into watching the movie, but she found she couldn’t. The interaction weighed on her mind.
He was right that he shouldn’t have confronted her. It offended her that he would presume to think he knew anything at all about her, and it disturbed her to think that he might be right.
Because there was truth in something else he’d said — she wasn’t herself lately. She would have been dancing on an ordinary night, and the only reason she wasn’t doing that was due to the fact that she still wasn’t feeling well. Whatever illness had gotten to her and caused her headache and nausea, she still wasn’t over it. It came in waves — worse in the morning and late at night, but never fully gone. She didn’t feel like dancing because the idea of spinning made her feel sick to her stomach, and she didn’t know what could be done about that.
The fact that it didn’t seem to be going away on its own, as she had hoped it would, was starting to worry her.
It wasn’t until the following morning that the answer came to her, in a rush of shock and disbelief. It was so obvious, once she thought of it, that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before — and yet it couldn’t be the right answer because it simply couldn’t be true.
Eli was at work, so there was no choice but to take Charlie to the drugstore with her. Maddie gave him instructions to pick out a few candy bars while she nipped into the neighboring aisle to get what she needed, her heart pounding the entire time. She couldn’t quite believe that this was really happening, that it wasn’t some sort of strange dream, and she couldn’t even begin to process the implications of it. How everything would change for her — for all of them — if her suspicion was correct.
Back at home, she parked Charlie in front of the TV. He didn’t even complain or ask to do something else, and she had the feeling that he must have picked up on the tension of the moment. She excused herself to the restroom and took out the pregnancy test she had purchased.
She had chosen the one that developed most rapidly, and the plus sign had already shown up in the window by the time she finished washing her hands.
Still, she stalled there, staring at the test as if time might somehow change the answer she was being given.
I’m pregnant .
It seemed impossible — and yet it made perfect sense of everything. All the symptoms she had been experiencing. Of course this was what it was. What else could it possibly have been?
The reality of the situation was finally starting to settle over her. This pregnancy, if she chose to keep it, would tie her to Eli for the rest of her life. Eli, whose parenting she had little but criticism for, would be the father of her child.
He was not the father she would have chosen, in spite of her feelings for him.
And yet… She thought of the good moments. The way he had panicked the day she’d met him, when he’d thought he had lost Charlie. The way he had taken to Charlie’s bedtime routine in order to be a part of the process of putting his son to bed. Maddie couldn’t help but love those things about him. If only she believed those were things her child would be able to have…
Eli had made his choice clear, though. When it came to him, work came first. Before family. Before anything. It always would.
And that left Maddie with a terrible question.
What was she going to do about this baby?
And for that matter, what was she going to do about Eli?