Chapter 45
After a few days, it’s all gone. The tissue, the blood, the nausea. The fatigue is fading. The final vestiges of the life that is no longer a life, of a seemingly auspicious beginning, hopeful yet unwanted, inordinately complicated, are slipping away.
I’m desperate to tell Zoe, but all I can think about is what I saw in your search history. Tracking another person’s iPhone activity.
I couldn’t find anything on my phone, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there: an app that shares everything—my communications, my web browsing, my location—with you.
My body still feels excessively tired, excessively fleshy, the unfamiliar softness around my middle, the folds at the waistband of my shorts as I step into the room that was to be the baby’s nursery.
I insisted, after two eggshell days in the house with you, that you return to work. I need normalcy, I pleaded. Your hovering is making me feel weaker, like an invalid.
You went. You aren’t here. You took your laptop, your phone with you. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing I can do with my time alone.
You’d been insisting to me lately that we order furniture for this room. A crib, a dresser, a rocking chair. Order whatever you want, you’d say. Pay to have it assembled.
Okay, I told you. I will. I’ll look.
But I never did.
So there’s nothing in the room but an area rug. It used to be in the living room in my condo, but you didn’t like it. How about upstairs, in your office? you’d suggested when the van brought my things to the new house and we surveyed them, instructed the movers where to put everything.
But I already had an area rug that matched my turquoise desk. So, with nowhere else to put it, I unrolled it in the room we’d agreed would be the baby’s nursery. At the time, you said nothing. You watched me do it, didn’t help, walked away, off to see what the movers were unloading next.
But I see now, at some point and with no discussion, you rolled it back up. It stretches across the room like a fallen tree.
It’s been weeks since I’ve been in this room. No reason to be here, or perhaps I’ve been avoiding it.
I bend, considering whether I should unroll the rug again, when I realize suddenly that the rug is no longer the only thing here.
There are two boxes pushed against the wall beneath the windows. They’d be clearly visible to someone walking by, glancing in, but I so rarely do that. They’re open, flaps standing at attention.
I move closer, crawling toward them, disquiet rising, then use a finger to pull back one of the flaps.
Folds of pink and softness. A tiny pink onesie, newborn size.
Footie pajamas, cream, with pink stripes or pink stars or tiny and inexplicable pink bumblebees.
A pink dress, lace at the hem, matching leggings to go underneath.
The next box has a little more variation, purples and yellows, but unmistakably, all of it, clothes meant for a baby girl.
Clothes, if I did have a baby girl, I would never buy.
They are aggressively gendered, these clothes, purchased by someone trying to make a point. Someone trying to communicate to his wife in such a quietly sinister way the very thing she didn’t want to know.
But you did want to know. And you have access to my phone. To everything in it.
I am nearly always here, and I don’t recall these boxes being delivered. I tilt a flap, check the shipping label.
Troy Weston, but beneath your name isn’t our address—rather, that of your firm. You brought them in when I wasn’t paying attention and put them here, waiting for me to find them.
I open my medical records app, log in. I tap breathlessly, locating the blood-test results my doctor told me not to review if I didn’t want to know the sex of the baby.
And there it is. Female.
So you did know. You didn’t just buy these clothes hopefully.
Although perhaps that’s what you’d claim if I confronted you.
Just manifesting, because a girl is what you wanted.
Perhaps if we hadn’t lost the baby, finding these clothes would have prompted me to check, as I have just done.
Anything to get what you want. I see that now, the way you got me.
The grief courses, slices a fresh wound through my gut. A baby, a girl. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I felt her, I saw her, I buried her.
The cruelty of it. I didn’t want to know, and you couldn’t give me that.
Your apologies always come quickly, profusely, but for deeply calculated cuts you inflicted on purpose. I feel those cuts now, the sting of them. I feel your grip, strong, as relentless as it is malignant, and I know that you will never release me.
Every move plotted in your beautiful head, behind your smiling lips, the crinkles beside your eyes. I catch you, confront you, and your excuses are impenetrable; you spit your pleas for my forgiveness, you highlight my lacking gratitude, you make me seem crazy. You make me feel crazy.
You’ll push for another baby. Trying again. You’ll make me feel broken and wrong for denying you, such a devoted husband, such a thoughtful provider.
I could leave. I could put my clothes in a suitcase, only what I really need.
I could pack up the only possessions that mean anything to me—my laptop, my collection of books, my small box of mementos, nothing in there having to do with you.
I could drive to Zoe’s house. But I’m a lawyer, and so I know better than anyone how protracted the legal untangling of our lives could be.
I’d have to wait for the requisite separation period.
Then there’d be legal papers, with which you’d have to be served.
Settlement discussions and court dates and delays.
You wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t make any of it easy for me.
My physical departure would only be the beginning.
And what I need is an ending.
I shove the baby clothes back into the boxes, fold the flaps over.
I’ve been lying in wait long enough.
Look through the house. That was my plan. I thought I needed to find proof of what you’ve done and some hint as to what you’ll do next. I’d started with your laptop. Only the first step.
But I realize now, already, that’s a futile exercise. Proof isn’t going to help me. Your next steps don’t matter. What matters are mine.
My hand dips into the side pocket of my leggings, and I remove my phone.