8. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Three minutes.
The box said three minutes, and I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bathtub for two of them, staring at the little plastic stick on the counter like it might stand up and make an announcement.
I already know. I think I’ve known for days, the knowledge sitting quietly underneath everything else, waiting for me to be ready to look at it. The nausea. The exhaustion. The math I did in the car outside the pharmacy.
The timer on my phone goes off. I silence it and stand up, and my legs are shaking, and I make myself look.
Two pink lines. Clear as day. I’m pregnant.
The bathroom tilts, rights itself. I grip the edge of the counter and stare at those two lines while my heart does its best to beat straight out of my chest.
I’m pregnant. I’m going to be someone’s mother. There is a person the size of a grain of rice inside me right now, a person Corey and I made, and suddenly I’m laughing and crying at the same time, both hands pressed over my mouth to keep the sound from carrying.
A baby. After everything, after all the distance and the loneliness and the slow quiet unraveling of us, there’s going to be a baby.
And here’s the thing I can’t stop thinking, the thought that keeps rising through all the fear: this could save us.
Not fix everything, I’m not naive enough to believe that.
But this could be the reason we finally fight for each other.
A family. The thing we used to whisper about in that freezing apartment, back when it was just a someday dream.
I’ll tell him tonight. I’ll wrap the news up like a gift and hand it to him, and I’ll watch his face change, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll find our way back to each other on the other side of it.
I wash my face. I fix my hair. I practice saying it in the mirror, feeling ridiculous and giddy and terrified all at once. Corey, I’m pregnant. Corey, we’re having a baby. Corey, you’re going to be a dad.
I float down the hallway with the test in my hand and my heart in my throat, and that’s when I hear it. Glass on glass. The sound of pouring, uneven and sloppy.
I find him in his study, drunk.
Corey doesn’t drink. Not like this, not alone in the dark, not on a weeknight with his tie half off and his eyes like something behind them has gone out. The smell of whiskey rolls off him in waves, and the sight of him stops me cold in the doorway, the happy speech dissolving on my tongue.
“Corey? What’s wrong?”
He looks at me, and I don’t recognize what looks back. Flat and cold and furious about a thing I can’t see.
“What are you smiling about?”
The question comes out wrong, hostile, and I hide the test behind my back on pure instinct, some animal part of me understanding before the rest of me catches up that this is not the moment. That the gift I’m carrying can’t be opened here, not with him like this.
“Are you drunk? You never get drunk. Did something happen?”
“What the fuck is it to you? It’s not like you’d care.”
The words hit me like cold water. I reach for him, because twelve years of relationship tells me to, and he jerks away so hard his glass goes flying. It shatters against the floor, whiskey and glass everywhere, and the sound is so violent in the quiet house that I flinch backward.
“Don’t touch me,” he says.
“Corey…”
“I said don’t fucking touch me.”
He shoves past me, down the hall, and the guest room door slams hard enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. The lock clicks.
I stand in the hallway holding a positive pregnancy test behind my back, listening to my husband lock himself away from me, and I have no idea what just happened.
I knock. I plead with the door. I tell him I love him through two inches of wood, and the door says nothing back, and eventually I stop.
In our bedroom, I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the test again. The two lines haven’t changed. The joy is still in there somewhere, buried now under confusion and hurt, but real.
Work. It has to be work. A deal collapsed, the servers went down, one of a hundred work disasters that eat him alive because he’s never learned how to let anything fail.
He didn’t mean it. He’s drunk. He’s not himself.
The Corey I know has never once told me not to touch him, not in twelve years, and drunk men say things they’d die before saying sober.
I hide the test in my nightstand drawer, under the book I’ve been pretending to read for three months.
Tomorrow, I tell myself. When he’s sober, when the poison has worked its way out of his system, I’ll tell him. The news can survive one night. It has to.
I don’t sleep. I lie in our bed alone, staring at the ceiling, listening for the sound of the guest room door opening, of his footsteps coming back to me.
They don’t come. The house stays silent, and somewhere down the hall my husband sleeps behind a locked door, and inside me a heart the size of a poppy seed is beating out a rhythm neither of us can hear yet.
At six I give up on sleep. I shower, dress, go down to the kitchen and make coffee I won’t drink. My whole body is buzzing with exhaustion and nerves and the terrible fragile hope that daylight will fix what the night broke.
At seven-thirty I hear the guest room door open. His footsteps on the stairs, slow and heavy. He appears in the kitchen doorway, and he looks wrecked. Still in yesterday’s clothes, eyes bloodshot, jaw shadowed with stubble he never allows.
Whatever happened last night is still happening in his face.
But I have news that can’t wait any longer, news that might be the exact thing to pull him back from whatever edge he’s standing on. He’s standing at the counter with a cup of coffee, and I square my shoulders, and I open my mouth.