8. Margot
Margot
She's in my kitchen again on Monday.
Anders is at a site until five. She's here at four with Milo, Anders told her she could use the highchair while he was out, because it's easier than the portable one. I come home early on purpose, knowing she will have let herself in with the key Anders gave her “for emergencies”.
I don't raise my voice, I’m proud of how contained I am when I speak. I set my bag on the counter and I say, "Becca, I need to ask you about something."
"Sure." She's spooning yogurt into Milo. My yoghurt. The full-fat organic kind I buy for the last trimester.
“So the thing is I seem to be missing six hundred dollars and my gold bracelet. You know the one, you mentioned it the other day… have you seen anything laying around?”
She keeps spooning yoghurt, seemingly ignoring me but the tension in her shoulders indicates that she heard exactly what I said.
"I'm not accusing you, but I’m letting you know what’s come up missing. If you know anything about either of them, please tell me now before Anders comes home. He doesn’t need to be involved.”
She sets the spoon down. She wipes Milo's chin. Then she turns around and leans on my island, and the crying face I expected isn’t there. Something else completely has replaced it. Cold calculation.
"You've wanted me gone since the first time we met.”
“All I asked for was a DNA test. You acted like that was an instant rejection but it wasn’t.”
"You looked at my son like he was dirt on your floor."
"I welcomed him with open arms, I told Anders he was welcome into our home.”
"You don't know what it's like." She's talking fast now, low, in a hushed tone.
"You've got all of this, a gigantic house.
You've got him and he loves you so much.
You've got a baby coming that everybody's going to celebrate.
I had a baby by myself in a two-bedroom over a laundromat and I did it alone because I didn't want to ruin Anders's life, and now I'm finally letting him be a father and you're counting every god damned penny he’s giving me. Us. His son.”
"I'm counting the pennies because they're mine."
"They're his."
"No," I say, "they're not."
She blinks.
"And you're not answering my question."
"Because it's insulting. Because I would never steal from you.
Because you'd love it if I had, wouldn't you?
Then you'd have your reason." Her voice climbs.
Milo looks up from the yogurt. "You want to know what I'm scared of?
I'm scared he's going to wake up one day and realize he should be with the mother of his first kid.
That's what I lie awake about. Not your fucking bracelet. "
"He's not going to wake up. He's married."
"To someone who treats him like an employee."
"Get out of my house."
"He invited me."
"He doesn't own it."
She laughs. It's ugly. "Maybe if you weren't such a cold bitch," she says, "your husband wouldn't keep choosing me."
The garage door goes up. We both hear it. The kitchen door opens and Anders is there with his keys in his hand and dust on his jeans, and he takes one look and says, "What's going on."
"She's leaving," I say.
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Get out."
"Anders." She turns to him. "She's accusing me of stealing. In front of Milo, too!”
"I asked her a question, that’s all,” I reply, trying hard to calm the rapid thudding in my chest.
“Please, both of you, calm down," Anders says and his eyes dart from me to Becca and back again.
"Get your son and get out of my house,” I tell Becca, I’m so sick of her smug face and the destruction she’s bringing into my life and marriage.
She comes off the island fast. Two steps. I see her hand come up and I don't move, because I'm eight months pregnant and my center of gravity is somewhere near the floor, and because some part of me doesn't believe it until it happens.
She slaps me.
Hard. Open handed. It knocks my head to the side. There's a noise like a large book slamming shut.
For a second nobody moves. My cheek is ringing. My arms have gone around my stomach on their own, both of them, wrapped over Nora, and I'm backed against the counter.
Anders moves.
I see him come. I see him cross the kitchen in three strides with his face white, and I think, here he is, my husband is coming to rescue me and his baby. I feel my body start to loosen toward him as I relax.
He goes right past me without even making eye contact.
And then the world opens up again and sound rushes in.
Becca is screaming. She's screaming she made me and she's got her hands in her own hair and she's swinging at the air.
Milo is wailing in the highchair, and Anders gets his arms around Becca and pins her elbows to her sides. She twists and kicks and then folds. She collapses. She goes down against his chest like she's been shot, sobbing, and he holds her up.
"I've got you," he says, into the top of her head. "I've got you. Calm down. Calm down."
I stand at my counter, clutching the ridge with a shaking hand.
The handprint on my face is hot. I can feel it coming up. My hand is still resting on my stomach, protecting my daughter.
Anders looks at me over Becca's hair. His face is stretched in a grimace. He's holding her, and he's looking at me, and I wait for him to let go of her and come. I will him to come, to rescue me, to think about me.
"Margot," he says. "Just give me a minute."
I hear it.
Give me a minute.
But it’s more than a minute, it’s a weeklong fling that resulted in maybe this baby. It’s a mistake that brought this fucking horrible woman into our lives and it’s her manipulation driving a wedge into my marriage and pushing it onto the quicksand.
Something in my chest clenches. It just stops. Like a clock you don't notice until it's quiet.
I take my hand off my stomach. I pick up my bag from the counter. I wipe the back of my hand against my cheek where I feel wetness. Tears, I think, until I see red. My nose is bleeding and Anders still chooses her.
I stride past them. Becca is still crying. Anders is still saying okay, okay. Milo's face is red and streaming.
I go upstairs.
I get the small suitcase from the closet, the one I use for overnight site trips. I put in two changes of clothes. My prenatal vitamins. The folder with my birth plan and the hospital pre-registration. My charger. The wedge pillow, which doesn't fit, so I carry it under my arm.
I stand at the dresser. I take a tissue and clean the blood off my face, drop it in the trash and take a deep, quivering breath in as I make my decision final.
I take off my ring. It's a plain band. He wanted to buy something bigger and I said no. I set it down on the dresser next to the wedding photograph that I never hung, the one where I look surprised.
I look at it for a second. Then I pick up the suitcase and the pillow and go down the back stairs, through the mudroom, out to the car.
I can still hear them in the kitchen. Her crying has gone soft. His voice is steady. Nobody's saying my name.
I back out of the driveway with a stinging handprint still hot on my face and I drive to my mother's.
She opens the door and looks at my cheek and doesn't ask a single question. She takes the suitcase. She takes the pillow. She puts me in my old room and brings me ice in a dish towel and sits on the edge of the bed with her hand on my knee.
The room hasn't changed. She's never redone it. The bedspread's the one from college, blue with the white stitching worn down on the edge I used to pick at. The desk still has the burn mark from the lamp that fell over when I was out of the house and melted part of the varnish.
I'm thirty-six years old and eight months pregnant and I'm lying on my back on a bedspread I picked out at nineteen with a dish towel of ice on my face, and my mother is sitting where she sat when I had chicken pox. And I feel miserable, more unhappy than I ever have.
"Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asks.
"No."
"Okay."
"She slapped me."
"I can see that."
"He held her instead of me. He went to her and not me. He left me standing there while he comforted her,” I say at last, my breath hitching.
My mother's hand doesn't move on my knee. She's very still. She's been still like that twice in my life, once at my father's bedside and once when the school board tried to cut the music program, and both times somebody ended up regretting it.
"Is the baby moving?"
I put my hand under the ice. I wait. Nora rolls over, slow, a knee or an elbow dragging across the inside of me like a hand on the outside of a tent.
"Yes."
"Then we're fine." She stands up. "You're going to sleep. I'm going to make soup. Tomorrow we'll figure out the rest."
"Mom?”
She stops at the door.
"I left my wedding ring.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
"Good, you need to send a message,” she says, and goes to make soup.
My phone is in my bag. I don't look at it.
It's fifty minutes before it rings.
Fifty minutes. I know because I'm watching the clock on the nightstand, the same clock I watched at fifteen when I was waiting for a boy to call.
He didn't notice I was gone for fifty minutes.
I turn the phone off and fall asleep.