Nausea
It started at two in the morning. Again.
I made it to the bathroom. Just. Same as before — no warning, just the body deciding and the rest of me catching up.
I knelt on the tile and waited and there was more and then there was more after that and by the time it stopped, I was sitting with my back against the tub and my forehead on my knees and absolutely nothing left.
I stayed there.
The tile was cold. September cold — which in Louisiana wasn't cold at all. I could hear nothing but the ringing in my ears and taste nothing but the bile on my tongue.
Judah hadn't woken up. Or if he had he'd made the decision not to come in, which was its own kind of answer about the version of me he was willing to hold.
I put my cheek against the tub.
Thought: flu.
Thought: something I ate.
Thought: it's been two weeks.
That last one sat differently.
I lifted my head.
Two weeks of nausea that came and went without a fever. Without the ache behind the eyes that came with real illness. Without anything, actually, except the nausea and the tiredness that I'd been attributing to stress and everything else I was carrying around like stones in my pockets.
Two weeks.
Two fucking weeks.
I sat up straighter against the tub.
When was your last period, Mercy?
I didn't answer myself right away. I didn’t want that answer.
August. I thought it had been August. Early August, maybe. The week I'd moved into the manor, the boxes still stacked in the corner of the east bedroom, Judah carrying things up the stairs without being asked.
That was — I counted.
I counted again.
Seven weeks. Maybe eight.
The tile was very cold under my palms. And in truth it wasn’t cold at all.
Seven weeks. Eight. The arithmetic of a body that had been trying to tell me something I hadn't been listening to, because I'd been busy with all the lying I had to upkeep.
When did you last use protection, Mercy?
I almost laughed. It came out wrong — too sharp, too close to the other thing.
We hadn't. Not once. Not from the beginning, not from that first night in July or any of the nights after. It had never come up. He hadn't offered and I hadn't asked and I had been so far inside the gravity of him that the ordinary logistics of consequence had simply — not registered.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
We'd had sex on his desk to the Lord's Prayer.
We'd had sex in his car on a dirt road outside town at eleven on a Tuesday.
We'd had sex in the garden after dark against the south wall where the lavender was coming in, his hand over my mouth because the groundskeeper lived in the cottage at the far end and could’ve heard.
Not once had either of us said the word protection.
I sat on the damp tile in the dark and thought about a man who preached abstinence from his pulpit. Who quoted Song of Solomon in the morning. Who pressed his mouth to my temple and called me sweetheart while there was a pile of folders hinting heavily to human trafficking sitting on his desk.
Who had, apparently, been having unprotected sex with me for two months.
But I guess that's the Christian way, isn't it.
The laugh that came out wasn't funny at all.
I didn't go back to sleep.
I sat on the bathroom floor until the damp became too much and then I moved to the edge of the tub and sat there instead and watched the window go from black to gray to the pale gold of a Louisiana morning.
Judah knocked at six.
“Mercy.” His voice through the door. Even. “You've been in there a while.”
“Stomach,” I said. “Go ahead and shower in the other bathroom.”
A pause.
“I'll make coffee,” he said.
His footsteps moved away down the hall.
I looked at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. The woman looking back at me had been in St. Francisville for three — almost four months. A woman who might be pregnant with a preacher’s child out of wedlock.
I turned the tap on and splashed water on my face. Hall’s words rang in my ears.
They think of it as a system, not a crime.
I thought about what it meant to bring a child into a system.
I thought about what it meant if the child was a girl.
I turned the tap off and went downstairs.
Judah was at the stove, his back to me. He'd already poured my coffee. It was sitting at my place at the table, the exact temperature he knew I wanted it, which he'd learned without asking because that was how he learned everything about me.
I sat down.
He set the plate in front of me and sat across, opened the paper and we had breakfast in silence. I drank my coffee and looked at the man across the table and thought:
I have to find out first.
Before I did anything. Before I decided anything. Before I let the thing that was building in my chest — not panic, something colder than that — become action.
I had to know.
“I need to run to the pharmacy,” I said.
He turned a page. “I'll drive you.”
“I have my car.”
He looked up. That assessment. Those pale eyes finding the thing I was trying not to show.
“Okay,” he said.
He went back to the paper.
I finished my coffee.
“Actually,” I said, “I might drive out to Baton Rouge. I need a few things.” I realized I needed the anonymity of a city that didn’t know me.
Judah turned another page. “Take the card.”
“I have money.”
He looked up again. Held my gaze for one second too long.
“Take the card,” he said.
I took the card.
I had no intention of using the card.
The test was from a Walgreens on Government Street in Baton Rouge where nobody knew my face or his name — well, maybe they knew his name — or what Billy’s Jaguar looked like parked in front of Grace Eternal on a Sunday morning.
I bought two.
I sat in the Walgreens parking lot for ten minutes before I went back inside for a third.