Chapter 26
Suddenly, I’m your wife.
The day of our wedding is gorgeous. It’s a Friday and brilliantly sunny, in the weeks preceding the stifling and unrelenting humidity that will bathe the area in a soup-like damp heat. It’s a day that calls for an outdoor party, bare feet in the grass and sangria full of ripe seasonal fruit.
We say our vows, secular and brief. We sign our names. A courthouse employee looks on. She congratulates us—not curious, only distracted, already looking to the next couple in line.
Afterward, you are giddy. We go to lunch at an expensive steakhouse downtown.
French fries are one of the only foods that don’t make me feel sick.
You laugh while you watch me eat and joke that if I’m not careful, I’ll give birth to a fry in eight months.
I think secretly, darkly, that I might prefer that to a baby.
I try not to look at the blood pooling on your plate as you slice through your steak. Your hand on mine while we share a wedge of cheesecake—on the house, after you told the server exuberantly that we’d just gotten married. I only eat a bite, and you don’t seem to notice.
Early the next morning, we fly to Grand Cayman. You take the middle seat and give me the window. We think that might help with my sickness.
The flight is turbulent, and I vomit into a paper bag, curled toward the window. You rub my back and curl around me, shielding me from our seatmate.
“We’ll get you some fries as soon as we get to the hotel,” you whisper conspiratorially. “My pregnant wife.” There’s a smile in your voice, like I am something you own, something you take pride in, something you had orchestrated.
Now the diamonds in my wedding band glitter beneath the high Caribbean sun. My hands have darkened, a deep golden brown, and the stones in my rings look even brighter and more brilliant. It looks like the hand of a stranger.
The sea is still and clear and warm, like nothing I’ve ever felt. We’re reclining on padded lounge chairs together, beneath an umbrella whose shade has shifted, the light touching my legs, forearms, the gentle swell of my belly beneath the black Lycra of my swimsuit.
“Paradise,” you say, your face obscured by sunglasses I’ve never seen you wear before.
“Yes,” I agree. “It will be difficult to leave.”
I mean it. We took a last-minute vacation from work, rearranging schedules.
When we get back we’ll have doctor’s appointments and arrangements to make.
Parental leave and finding a nanny or day care.
Selecting a pediatrician and buying baby books.
For now, reality feels suspended, life on hold, the bundle of cells in my uterus forever no bigger than a blueberry.
“Not too difficult,” you say, your hand finding mine without looking. “We have so much to look forward to when we get home. So much will change.”
And it’s true. You’re right. So I’m not sure why your words feel like a threat.