Thirty November 4, 2023
SATURDAY MORNING, Elsie wakes in the workshop with her arm asleep, numb under Zander’s body.
There’s also a strange contraction in the muscles of her face.
It takes a moment for her brain to figure out what it is: She woke up smiling.
She feels amazing this morning. The world is amazing!
Her nose is pressed into Zander’s armpit and his sweat smells musky, but she can’t get enough of the stuff.
The pattering of rain on the tin roof of the workshop seems orchestral.
As she slides her arm out from under Zander, the raw, pinprick tingles feel not painful but invigorating!
Even the strain of her full bladder urging her to pee is oddly satisfying.
Oh, the miraculous workings of the human body, the world!
She feels exuberant and light-headed, stoned.
Zander’s eyes open and they grin at each other, flush with the memory of last night’s lovemaking. “Hello,” Zander says, his tongue thick with sleep.
“Hello.”
Elsie stretches her arm back to life and surveys the workshop, her new home.
She feels buoyed by the possibilities before her.
She’ll paint the walls a robin’s egg blue, and sand the floors, put on a coat of varnish.
She’ll get Zander’s help to build a partition to hide her bed so she can entertain clients in this open area.
For the first time she can remember, she’s walking in the right direction.
She throws off the blankets and strides naked and confident to the tiny bathroom.
And then, as she closes the bathroom door behind her, it occurs to her: her period still hasn’t started.
More, everything is, in fact, happening as it did in her trips to the future.
She’s falling into a relationship with Zander, and not Marcus; moving into Crystal’s workshop, where she saw herself giving birth in roughly nine months.
And Zander was at the home birth, hovering by her bed, like he wasn’t sure he should be there.
Why would he be there, if they weren’t involved?
Zander and Marcus aren’t two possible futures. They’re one.
Oh my god. If she is pregnant, she’s pregnant with Marcus’s baby. Marcus’s, not Zander’s.
Elsie opens the plywood cupboard, rips open one of the five remaining early detection pregnancy tests and pees on the stick. She pees on all the sticks, lining them up one by one on the rim of the sink, then washes up and watches as the answer to each test rises like the fortune in a Magic 8 Ball.
She closes the toilet lid and sits. Staring at the bathroom door, she thinks of Ziz hiding within the toilet stall in Joe’s Café as Elsie tried to talk her into chasing after Marcus.
Strange how she now remembers the scene from both perspectives.
What would an older Elsie on the other side of this door say to her now?
Would she encourage her to chase after this future, or run away?
Elsie puts her head in her hands and cries.
There’s the pad of bare feet on the old wood floor outside the bathroom. Zander knocks. “Elsie? You okay?”
Elsie reaches out to lock the ancient barrel bolt but isn’t quick enough. The door inches open and Zander’s gaze lands on the pregnancy tests. “Oh,” he says, before she closes the door in his face.
She stands, naked, with her back against the bathroom door, staring at the sheen of light coming through the privacy film on the small bathroom window. There’s a sticky fly ribbon dangling there, covered in corpses. One insect, recently trapped, buzzes, flapping a wing impotently.
And then there’s the pad of bare feet again. “Elsie?” Another knock on the door. “Would you like your bathrobe?”
Elsie opens the door a crack, snatches the robe from his hand.
She closes the door again, slips on the robe.
Stares at herself in the mirror. Already her face appears fuller, more mature, the heat of pregnancy in her cheeks.
There’s a metallic taste, like a coin, on her tongue, and a heaviness and tingle in her breasts.
Real or imagined, she can feel a hormone cocktail coursing through her veins.
She collects all the pregnancy tests and dumps them into the garbage can, then wipes the sink clean, washes her hands, and sits on the toilet.
She thinks of Crystal and her husband, John.
The child that brought them together. She wanted that kind of love for herself, a comfy forever love, and had started to dream of it with Zander.
Now, with her pregnancy, it seems impossible.
Zander knocks on the door again. “I made you tea. Just the way you like it.” When Elsie doesn’t answer, he says, “We should talk. Don’t you think we should talk?
” He inches open the door. Elsie doesn’t stop him.
She can use a cup of tea. He hands her a mug and leans against the door frame with his own.
He’s dressed in yesterday’s clothes. His face is solemn. There’s stubble on his chin.
“The tests. Are they positive?” he asks.
She nods.
“Marcus is the father?”
Elsie feels a sudden empathy for the trapped fly. “Yes.”
“Will you keep the baby?” As if it’s a gift basket she might return to the sender.
“I don’t know.”
Zander doesn’t reply to that. They contemplate in silence for a while. The fly buzzes. Her mug grows tepid.
She finally finds the courage to look Zander in the eye. “If I do—” She pauses. “Will you still want to be with me?”
And then he says the thing she fears most. “It’s a lot to process. This is all happening so fast. I mean, we’ve sort of been friends for a while, but we’ve only started dating. And now—” And now, she’s asking him to consider raising another man’s child.
“You want to end things,” she says, fidgeting with her mug.
“I didn’t say that.”
She stands, dumps her cold tea, leaves the mug in the sink. But confined in this small space and with Zander blocking the door, she can’t move. She needs to move. “Can you go now?” she asks. She feels short of breath. She needs to get out of this room. “Please, just go.”
But after he goes, Elsie finds she can’t leave the bathroom.
The world out there seems too big, too threatening, too unpredictable; full of surprises, confusion and unfulfilled expectations.
Happy one moment, desperate the next. She drops to the toilet seat.
Within her, there’s a child she can either will in or out of existence.
If she keeps the baby, she’ll likely ruin her new plans for her life and Marcus’s too.
And she’ll lose Zander, if she hasn’t already.
But the soothing weight of the child in her arms. The intoxicating smell of her. A baby. Someone who would love her unconditionally. Someone who wouldn’t leave.