Bonus Chapter The Two Lines
Alma
I bought the test in Bristol.
I drove to Bristol.
I drove the truck. I drove with the radio off.
I drove because I had been late by approximately twelve days, and because I had spent the previous nine of those days telling myself that lateness was just lateness, that stress did this, that I had been working sixty hours a week on the new fabrication contract for the Maverick custom build, and that the body did what the body did.
I had told myself this until the morning of the tenth day, when I had thrown up in the office bathroom for no reason I could account for, and the throwing up had landed on me like a piece of information rather than an illness, and I had stood in the office bathroom of Navarro Custom Cycles with my hand against the sink for forty-five seconds, and I had thought, very clearly, I am going to need a test.
I drove to Bristol on the eleventh day.
The pharmacy in Bristol was a CVS off the bypass with a parking lot the size of a small airfield.
I parked at the far end of the lot. I went in.
I bought two tests — different brands, different sensitivities, because I had read enough internet on the drive over to know that if I was going to make a single trip to a pharmacy in another state, I was going to buy redundancy — and I bought a pack of gum and a magazine from the rack, because the redundancy of the gum and the magazine made the purchase feel less like the purchase, and I paid the bored cashier in cash, and I went back out to the truck, and I sat in the truck in the parking lot at the far end of the CVS in Bristol, Tennessee, for forty-five seconds before I started the engine.
I drove home.
I drove home with the bag on the passenger seat under a copy of the magazine.
The magazine was Architectural Digest. I did not, in any meaningful sense, read Architectural Digest. I had bought it because it was the largest magazine on the rack.
The largest magazine on the rack was, in the moment, a tactical decision.
I got home at four-fifteen.
Beckett was at the forge. He had been there since seven.
He had a deadline on a commission for a small custom hotel in Asheville that wanted a complete set of hand-forged stair railings for their renovation — sixteen runs of railings, every spindle hand-shaped, the largest single commission of his career — and the deadline was Friday, and the day was Tuesday, and he had told me at breakfast that he would not be home before nine, and that I should not wait dinner.
I had the loft to myself for five hours.
I sat at the kitchen table with the bag in front of me.
I did not open the bag. I made coffee. I drank the coffee.
I made tea. I drank the tea. I picked up the magazine, which I had no intention of reading, and I read it, because the magazine in front of me was the only thing in the room that was not, in the broader sense, a pregnancy test.
I read about a Connecticut farmhouse renovation by an interior designer named Cybilla.
I read about a kitchen in Marin County with a sixty-thousand-dollar range that the homeowner, an opera singer, used twice a year.
I read about a teenager's bedroom in Maine with a fly-tying station along one wall.
I read about a tiled bathroom in Provence with a freestanding tub that the article called aspirational, by which I gathered the writer of the article meant expensive.
At five-thirty, I closed the magazine.
I went to the bathroom. I took the first test. The first test was a digital one — the kind that shows you, in plain English on a small screen, the word PREGNANT or the word NOT PREGNANT.
I had chosen the digital one because I had been afraid that I would not be able to read a stick with two lines correctly under the conditions of the moment.
The digital one would tell me in English.
The digital one would not allow my hands to lie.
I set the test on the bathroom counter. I closed the lid of the toilet. I sat down on the closed lid. I waited.
The instructions had said three minutes.
The three minutes were the longest three minutes of my life.
I had heard people say that. I had not, until that moment, understood it.
The three minutes did not pass in seconds.
The three minutes passed in some other unit of measurement which my body was inventing in real time.
I sat on the lid of the toilet. I looked at the floor.
I looked at the wall. I looked at the towel hanging from the hook on the back of the door — the towel Beckett had used after his shower that morning, slightly damp still, the smell of him on it — and I thought about the morning.
I thought about the previous Saturday, when we had gone to the diner and Sienna had said to me, in passing, Honey, you are glowing, I keep saying it.
I thought about the past two months, when I had been more tired in the afternoons than I had been in the previous five years combined and had attributed it, in the simple way the mind attributes things, to the fabrication contract.
I thought about the way I had felt the previous Tuesday morning, on my way down to the third bay, when I had paused on the stairs because I had been, for a single split second, dizzy, and how I had stood on the stairs with my hand on the railing and told myself it was because I had not eaten breakfast.
I thought about the body.
I thought about the slow patient way the body would, in fact, tell you the thing it knew. I thought about how I had been refusing to listen.
The three minutes ended.
I picked up the test.
The screen said PREGNANT.
I sat on the lid of the toilet and looked at the screen.
I took the second test.
The second test was the line kind. I took it because I had bought it, because I was already in the bathroom, because the redundancy was the redundancy.
I sat back down on the lid. I waited the three minutes again.
They went faster this time. They went faster because I already knew.
The mind was not asking the body to invent any new units of measurement.
The second test showed two pink lines.
The first line was bright. The second line was less bright but distinct. I held the test under the light. I held it at an angle. I looked at it three different ways. The second line did not, in any of the three ways, become less of a line. It was a line. It was a clear and distinct line.
I sat on the lid of the toilet for a long time.
I do not know how long. The sun moved enough across the bathroom that the light through the small high window changed angle.
I sat there with the two tests in my hand and the warm slow knowledge that, in the most particular sense, my body had been telling me a thing for a week and that the thing was, as it had turned out, yes.
I want to tell you what I felt.
I want to tell you because I think the moment matters and because I think the moment was not what I expected.
I had expected to feel terror. I had expected to feel the small backwards-falling sensation of a thing that had not been planned.
I had been on the pill for fourteen years.
We had been trying — and trying was a word that, between Beckett and me, had been used twice, both times in the abstract, the way you talk about a thing you are planning to do in a year that you have not, by mutual quiet agreement, yet entered — only in the sense that I had stopped the pill in January.
The stopping had not, on either of our parts, been accompanied by what people in the magazines called active trying.
We had just stopped the pill. We had agreed, at the kitchen table over coffee in early January, that we would stop the pill and see what happened, and that we would not, between us, treat the seeing as a project.
Beckett had said, Honey, we will know when we know. I had said, Yes.
Now I knew.
The feeling was not terror.
The feeling was — I am going to try to describe this carefully.
The feeling was the feeling I had had at the courthouse, on the day of our wedding, in the second when Judge Pruitt had said by the power vested in me and not yet finished the sentence.
The feeling was the feeling I had had in the truck behind the shop on our anniversary night, when Beckett had said you arrived already forged.
The feeling was the feeling of standing on the small edge of a thing you had thought was further away than it was and was, as it turned out, right under your feet.
The feeling was, in the most precise sense, the feeling of being given more than you had asked for.
I sat with the feeling.
I sat with it until the light in the bathroom had gone fully soft and the sun, outside the small high window, had set behind the foothills.
The loft had gone dim. I had not turned on a light.
The whole apartment had gone slowly to the warm orange of the streetlights coming on outside, and I sat in the bathroom of the loft above the shop with two pregnancy tests in my hand and the knowledge that I was, in the most quiet way, no longer a household of two.
I got up.
I washed my face. I put the tests in the small linen drawer of the bathroom cabinet, in a clean cloth napkin I folded around them, because I did not want to throw them out in the trash and also did not want them, in the half-hour before Beckett came home, to be sitting somewhere where I could keep looking at them.
I left the bathroom. I went to the kitchen.
I turned on the small lamp on the counter.
I made a cup of tea. I did not drink it.
I sat at the kitchen table.
I sat at the kitchen table with my hands wrapped around the mug of tea, and I looked at the Mary Oliver poem on the wall, and I thought about how I was going to tell Beckett.
I had options.