Chapter 20
20
KATE
I wake up sick as I’ve ever been. I had half a glass of wine last night at the restaurant. I’m not hungover but it feels worse than that. I’m clammy and sick to my stomach. As soon as I reach for my phone to check the time, I know I’m going to puke. I stagger to the bathroom in time to vomit hard into the toilet. I think wistfully of the days when Mom would have been here, told me to rinse out my mouth and handed me a washcloth for my forehead before she tucked me in bed and fetched me a glass of ginger ale.
I stumble back to bed, messaging HR to report I’m sick and can’t make it to work today. I roll over in bed and berate myself for giving in to anxiety. It has to be that. I’m lightheaded and freaked out about last night and I puked. It’s worse but not too far off from the anxiety attacks I had before I left LA when I realized I couldn’t make rent anymore and I had to admit failure.
I squeeze my eyes shut and tried counting backward from one thousand by sixes which is just annoying enough to distract from the anxiety sometimes. Unfortunately, just when I’m getting to the seven hundreds, I feel another wave of nausea. I make it to the toilet where I grab a towel to cover up as I lay on the floor, teeth chattering, head swimming. I wake up a short bit later and manage to rinse out my mouth and crawl into bed. It’s two in the afternoon and I just pull the covers up and lay there, miserable.
I’m sick off and on all day. I doze, I cry, I throw up some more, and mostly I feel like crap. Weak and dizzy and I gag every time I even think about last night’s dinner. I take a bath very slowly and carefully. I sip some water and eat a cracker. When that stays down, I eat a few more and eventually manage to make a grilled cheese and eat it.
I go through my work emails on my phone but I don’t have my laptop or tablet—they’re in the crow’s nest still. If I hadn’t insisted on going back for them, we wouldn’t have been in danger and I could’ve gone home with Mickey and spent the night in his arms.
Mistakes were made, that was for sure. I spend the rest of the evening starting my next prep course and taking abundant notes. My heart isn’t in it but it’s a decent distraction. Around ten, I get a call from Mickey.
“Hello?”
“Are you okay?” He asks gruffly.
“Yeah,” I answer weakly.
“I heard you were sick. I got your tablet and all, thought I’d bring it by or I can have one of the guys deliver it.”
“No, that’s fine. That’s nice of you. Go on and bring it by,” I say.
“Okay. I’ll be there in like five minutes.”
I scramble out of bed and drag a brush through my hair. It doesn’t help much. I look like a pasty gray ghost or a dying Victorian child with big dark circles and clammy pale skin. I grab a robe to cover my pajamas and run down to the door. He’s about to ring the bell when I open it.
He’s so big that he fills the doorway and towers over me. It’s a physical sensation, how large he is, and my stomach swoops in response. He holds out my laptop and table alongside my notebook and file folders.
“I don’t really care if you do any work while you’re sick. I just wanted an excuse to drop by and check on you,” he says.
“I know,” I tell him, my voice too high and thready.
“You think it was the duck fat thing that made you sick?” He asks.
I’m about to answer when the mere thought of the duck fat makes me recoil, stomach heaving. I clap a hand over my mouth and dash for the kitchen sink where I throw up. I cough and choke, rinse my mouth right from the faucet. His hand on the small of my back startles me.
“I thought you left,” I stammer.
“Why would I leave with you this sick?” He asks.
“I’m sorry, this is embarrassing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I thought maybe you were upset after last night, but I can see you’re actually really sick.”
“Check to see I’m not playing hooky?” I ask.
“Not unless I can stay and play hooky with you,” he says in a low voice that’s nearly a growl.
“You don’t have to,” I start.
“Would you feel better if I stayed a while?”
“Of course, I would but then we’d be right back where we started from. There’s no way for us to be together. There’s too many moving parts. Too many complications. The least of which being I’m Rory’s baby sister.”
“Let’s get one thing straight right now, Mary Kathryn Donahue,” he says and his face is angry all of a sudden. Not the dialed-up charm anger but the kind he lets me see.
I like it when he says my full name, I admit it. It gives me the shivers in a good way.
“You’re more than just Rory’s little sister. You are a strong, beautiful, fierce, independent woman who deserves the world.”
“Thank you,” I say, and I don’t qualify whether I’m thanking him for the compliment, thanking him for bringing my laptop, or for being the single brightest spot in my entire life. I’m afraid if I try to explain, I’ll just start crying. So I walk him to the door. I feel about a hundred years old, my steps heavy and plodding.
“Goodbye, Katie,” he says. “This was—something special.” I nod, blink furiously.
“It really was. I’ll see you at work but only at work,” I tell him and shut the door.
I go back to my room and cry myself to sleep, hoping tomorrow will be a better day.
Except again, I wake up right at dawn, sick as can be. Maybe it’s a virus, I think, and I google what is going around near me. Apart from a respiratory virus, there isn’t much in the way of contagion currently. I give it another day to make sure I have no fever.
By the third day I drag myself to the walk-in clinic. I’m lightheaded, still puking multiple times a day and tired beyond description.
After what seems like ages I get called back, weighed, wondering how I gained three pounds while throwing up for the past few days and my vitals checked. I describe my symptoms and gloss over the contents of the tasting menu that doesn’t bear thinking of.
Another hour after that I’ve been swabbed for strep throat and flu, had my blood and pee tested, and filled out a depression questionnaire that I’m pretty sure I flunked. By the time a doctor comes in I just want to leave.
“Date of your last period?” the doctor asks after introducing himself.
“Uh—” I try to think but my brain is foggy. I take out my phone and check the calendar. It can’t be right. I didn’t have one last month? I scroll back to the previous month and give the date.
“So about eight weeks ago? Right. How long have you had these symptoms?”
“Three days like I told the nurse,” I say.
“Best guess is that you’re around six weeks,” he pronounces.
“Six weeks till what?” I ask.
“You conceived around six weeks ago. Does that sound right?”
I stare at him like he started speaking Japanese to me. “You think I’m pregnant?”
“No, Miss Donahue, I know you’re pregnant. The results are in your digital chart. No strep, no flu, white count is fine, pregnancy test positive. Right here.” He sounds so pleased with himself.
I shake my head as if to clear it. He starts talking about vitamins, drinking plenty of water and setting up an appointment with my gynecologist.
“She’s in LA,” I say. “I’m just here for a short while”
“Getting back sooner is better than later in your condition. Obviously, you can travel into the sixth month, but you’ll be more comfortable if you don’t wait that long. And you’ll need monthly checkups with your OB.”
“Right,” I say flatly. “So can I leave?”
“Of course. Do you have any questions?”
“None that you can answer,” I say and I leave with pamphlets and samples of prenatal vitamins that I’m to start ASAP.
The ride home is icy numbness. I want my mom. I always miss her but this is the moment when losing her hurts all over again. At home I turn on the shower and stand under it until the water goes cold. I don’t know how to handle this.
The practical steps are obvious: make a new patient appointment with a gyno, take prenatal vitamins, get exercise and rest, drink lots of water. Make plans. It’s that last part I get stuck on. I have plans. Pass three more sections of the CPA exam, then apply for jobs in and around LA. Return to California where the weather’s nice and no one has ever pulled a gun on me in a parking lot or anywhere else. It’s a no brainer. Or it would be if I wasn’t in this situation. How did growing a child inside me fit in with all these plans?
I dry off and yank open the drawer with my birth control pills in it. I take them out, count them, and realize I missed a couple last month. I start googling whether taking birth control pills before I knew I was pregnant could have hurt the baby and if the half glass of wine I drank at that fancy restaurant is going to cause developmental problems. Reassured that as long as I don’t ingest any more alcohol or birth control it should be okay, I start down the rabbit hole of what to do when you find out your pregnant by your ‘ex-boyfriend’.
I find a Facebook group for single moms who had kids after a breakup. Most of them ‘co-parent’ and have some kind of schedule they follow where the baby is with mom part of the time and dad part of the time. My stomach drops at that thought. My baby, who is approximately the size of a lima bean right now and who I’ve only known about for a few hours, would be away from me for days at a time. That is if Mickey wants anything to do with this child. Tears spring to my eyes and I dash them away impatiently.
A new terror seizes me and I almost double over with the force of it. My baby will be in danger because of who their father is. Rory and I grew up on the outskirts of the Mob. Our dad was a fence, and he was midlevel, not big enough to be a target. Mickey on the other hand is the boss. There’s no one more powerful. And while the scope of his network can protect him, it wasn’t enough to stop a disgruntled janitor from finding him alone on a parking lot.
His reach, all his men and no one was there but him to protect himself and me. If Oscar had been faster, less talkative, sober, or if Mickey had hesitated then it could have ended up a lot worse. I can’t count on luck to keep my baby out of harm’s way.
Going to the clinic was supposed to put me on the road to recovery, not ruin. I feel worse than I did when I went. Overwhelmed doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Telling Mickey the truth is the right thing to do. I know it in my bones. But I’m scared, and the fear screams at me to flee. Go to LA and don’t look back. Ever.