Chapter 13 Tessa
I decided on a Thursday. It did not feel like deciding. It felt like noticing.
I had been running the numbers for days. What a person costs in the first year. What an eight-week leave does to a single-doctor practice. How many overnights I could give up before the fosters started dying on me.
And then at four in the morning I was in the treatment room with a bottle in one hand and a three-week-old in the other.
I reached past the coffee I was not drinking and took a prenatal vitamin out of a bottle Violet left on the shelf.
I got it into my mouth before I understood that I had been doing it every morning for days.
So that was the decision. It had been made by somebody who works here. She hadn't filed the paperwork.
"Okay," I said, to a kitten.
Here is what I decided along with it.
That this was mine. Not the choice. The whole thing after the choice, the appointments and the money and the two in the morning of it.
I've done the hard part alone since I was twenty-two.
The reason I'm good at it is not virtue.
It is that if I never hand anybody a piece of my life, nobody ever gets to put it down.
And that I was going to tell him anyway. Because it was his to know. And because a man once decided on his own what I was allowed to know about my own life, in a gravel lot when I was twenty-one.
I texted him Tuesday.
Can you bring Bear Thursday at eight? Nothing's wrong.
He wrote back inside a minute. Okay. Is anything wrong?
I said: No.
Violet parked in my lot at seven-forty with a coffee she was not drinking either.
"I'm going to sit right here," she said through the window. "Full tank. Snacks. If he says one wrong thing you flash the lobby lights twice and I will come through that door like weather."
"He's not going to say a wrong thing."
"Then flash them once so I know, and I'll go home and lie on my floor."
He came at 8:00. Bear came in first and put his nose in my hand. He went straight to the mat like a man taking his usual chair.
Beckett stood in the doorway.
"He's fine," I said. "This isn't about him. Sit down."
He sat down on the bench. Bear sighed and lay across his feet. The whole thing was so ordinary that for about two seconds I lost my nerve completely.
"You've got your coat on," he said. "Are we going somewhere?"
"No."
"Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"Tessa."
"I'm going to say it fast," I said. "I'm not capable of saying it any other way. If I go slowly, I'll start managing your face."
He put his hands flat on his knees. That was what that man did instead of bracing.
"I'm pregnant," I said. "It's yours. It's eleven weeks. I'm keeping it."
Nothing in that room moved.
I've counted a hundred and eighty heartbeats a minute with two fingers on a femoral artery at three in the morning. My hands do it now whether I ask them to or not, so I counted.
One. His face did not change at all. Two. Something went out of it. Not shock the way people play it. It was more like watching a building lose power floor by floor. Three. He looked at the floor between his boots. Four. He was back.
I knew exactly what I was braced for. I've been braced for it since I was twenty-one. The flinch toward the door. The hand going to the back of the neck. The sentence that starts with okay, so, and ends with a plan for me to be somewhere else.
What he said was, "Who's your doctor?"
I did not have anything ready for that.
"What?"
"Your doctor," Beckett said. "Do you have one, or do we get one?"
"I have one. Mateo took over the practice on Wadsworth. I've known him nine years. He did Marisol's second."
"Okay." He was looking at me now and not at the floor. "When's the next appointment?"
"Beckett."
"When is it?"
"The nineteenth."
"What time?"
"Two-fifteen."
He took his phone out of his jacket and put it in.
I watched the starting goaltender of the Denver Peaks put my obstetrics appointment into his calendar with his thumb. I could not get a full breath into the top of my lungs.
"Can I come?" he said.
"That's not…"
"I'm asking. That's a question, it isn't a plan." He put the phone away. "If it's a no, it's a no, and I'll ask again in three weeks."
"Why would you ask again in three weeks?"
"Because it might be a different answer," he said, "and I'd rather ask than assume."
"Okay, stop. Stop being like this."
"Like what?"
"Like this," I said. My voice did something I did not authorize. I turned around and straightened a jar of cotton balls that did not need it.
Behind me there was the sound of a very large man not getting up.
"Tessa."
"Give me a second."
"Take it."
I took about four. Then I turned around and did the thing I came in there to do.
"Here's the part you need to hear, and I need you to let me get all the way to the end of it.
This changes the logistics. It does not change the terms. What I said in that doorway in October is still the whole of it.
I'm not asking you for anything. Not money, not time, not a place in the rotation, not a conversation about what we are, because we are not anything.
I'm not going to be a situation that a man handles. "
"Understood."
"I'm telling you because it's yours to know. If you want in, there's a way to do that and we will work it out like adults with a calendar. If you don't, you say so tonight and I will never once bring it up again. I mean that, and I'm good at it."
He let about three seconds go by.
"Are you finished?"
"Yes."
"I want in," he said.
"You've had ninety seconds."
"I've had ninety seconds and I'm not going to need more."
"Beckett, you don't get to decide something like that in ninety seconds."
"I decided it in four," he said.
And then he did not say anything else, which was his weapon. He sat there on a bench with an old dog across his feet and let it be in the room with us.
"You should be scared," I said.
"I am."
"You don't look it."
"No," he said. "That's the whole problem with me. Ask anybody."
I laughed. It came out wrong, like something with a hole in it. I put my hand over my mouth for a second and then took it away and got hold of myself.
I had armor for the other version. I had ten years of it. I did not have one single thing for a man who wanted in.
"There's a rule," I said. "Nobody knows. Not the room, not your agent, not one guy in that building. Violet knows and that's it. My brother doesn't know, and he is not going to know until I say so."
"Eli."
"He'll build his whole life around it inside a week. He'll drop shifts. He'll be here every night. He was twelve when our mother died. I've spent nine years keeping that boy from being a support beam under me. He gets to be twenty-one a while longer."
"And your side is worse," I said. "One person in a locker room knows and this city knows by Sunday.
You're in a contract year with a national desk that has your name in its mouth twice a week.
I've watched what happens to a woman who gets attached to a goaltender.
I've watched it happen to women I've never met.
They put your face next to his and they decide what you are inside of a day. "
"Yeah," he said.
"So that's the rule."
"It's a good rule." He turned his hands over on his knees and looked at them. "Saying nothing is the one thing I've never once been bad at."
"I know," I said. "That's not the compliment you think it is."
There was one thing left and I could not get to it out loud.
It had been in my coat pocket for six days. I had gone to the dating scan on my own on a Wednesday morning and sat in a parking garage afterward. Then I had gone and done a splenectomy.
I could not make my mouth do it. So I did the other thing. I took it out and I put it face down on the exam table and slid it across the stainless steel. It made the noise a piece of cheap paper makes on steel, which is almost nothing.
He picked it up.
It was grey. It was the size of a stamp. There was a shape in the middle of it that was not shaped like anything yet. The clinic printer they used was worse than mine. There was a date in the corner and a number and my last name spelled right.
He did not say a word for a long time.
Then he turned it a little, toward the light.
"That's the head," I said, in a voice I did not recognize. "That's the, that's all spine. It's eleven weeks, it doesn't…"
"I see it," he said.
He did not give it back.
He did not ask if he could keep it. He did not perform not asking. He held it a while longer and then folded it once, along a line that was already there. He put it inside his jacket and looked up to see whether I was going to take it off him.
I did not ask for it back.
My phone went off against my hip.
Violet: well. the not knowing is doing something to my body
I typed: He knows.
Violet: he knows! okay. I am calm. I am composing something and I want you to know it will have a border on it. is he still in the building? don’t answer that I can see the truck
"That's Violet," I said.
"She's in the lot."
"She's been in the lot for an hour."
"I know," Beckett said. "She had her headlights on me the whole way in."
We stood there. Bear got up off his feet and stretched his back end in stages. He went and leaned on me, because he had no discretion at all.
"I'll go," Beckett said.
He got as far as the door and stopped. I braced.
"The nineteenth," he said. "Two-fifteen. You don't have to answer tonight."
"I know."
"That's all," he said, and went.
Violet made me go and eat. Then she admitted she was too emotionally compromised to drive. So I drove her car. That is how I came to be at Federal and Alameda with a bag of food in the footwell and a friend narrating destiny in the passenger seat.
I ran the list on the way back. I was very good at the list.
There is a deadline and nothing in his contract that stops it.
He has already left once, and he had a good reason.
A man with one good reason will find another.
His father describes his son's failures for money.
There is a lease renewing in August. I've inventoried the room personally, at three in the morning, and there is none.
And at the light at Twenty-Sixth, for as long as it stayed red, I let myself see it.
A dim room and a screen. A very large man in a chair that is too small for him, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, not saying anything.
Then it went green, and I said, "No," out loud.
"No what?" Violet said.
"Nothing."
"Tessa Anne."
"I'm driving," I said.