2. Olly
TWO
OLLY
Cedar had insisted on ordering a company car to drive me home after seeing how unsteady I was on my feet.
It wasn’t pregnancy vomit time again. I think it was more like shock that I was pregnant to begin with.
I couldn’t be pregnant. I mean, apparently biologically I could, considering I had a pregnancy as a teenager, and I did think about having a child of my own someday.
But that was supposed to be at least five or six years from now, when I was comfortably well into my thirties, not when I was twenty-nine!
Not when I just got the biggest bump my career had ever taken, and I was going to move out of Shepard’s and my place and…
a horrifying thought came over me. How on earth was I going to tell Shepard?
About the baby, and about the move? This would be a missile blowing up right in the centre of both of our lives, and I had no idea how to handle it, except with straight-up honesty.
Shep and I weren't partners. We were best friends with benefits. The point was, we were not in a romantic relationship, and the thought of us making a go of one for the sake of this unwanted baby made me feel ill. And there was another thing that I didn't quite understand, as demonstrated by my inner turmoil earlier. Intellectually, I knew this… invader…was something that I could “deal with” relatively simply. But when I thought of seeking termination, something in me recoiled. It couldn’t be motherly instinct because I was sure that, at the present, I didn't have an iota of that in my body. Yet there it was. Horrors from the past haunted me as I saw Joey’s immature face, practically giddy about what a gas it would be to be a Dad, and could we name him Jeremiah for the Degrassi laughs if it was a boy? That was how our daughter, Maya, got her name—I refused to spell it Miah—but no one was laughing at her birth. Or should I say, death. She had died inside me, and I knew from that whole nightmare experience that going forward, I couldn’t terminate.
I also couldn’t raise a baby. I’d be terrible at it. How would Shepard feel about that?
Shepard Smythe, formerly of London, had been raised by a well-meaning but misguided English couple who adopted him on a whim in Mumbai.
Shepard had been living in a children’s facility run by Christian missionaries.
His new parents thought he should put everything from the past behind him and start over as a three-year-old English lad who never needed to know or learn anything about the country of his birth or make any attempt to track down living relatives.
In an act of rebellion, after Shepard finished secondary school in London, he applied to Queen’s University in Canada.
He got on with Canada so well that he decided to have a go at staying.
We became acquainted as freshmen, and there had been an undeniable crackle of attraction between us.
He loved my curvaceous figure, freckles, long, curly red hair, and what he called whiskey eyes.
I loved the gorgeous medium brown of his oh, so soft skin on his lean body, the unruly wavy black hair that he now tamed down every morning for work but let fly free on the weekends like he had when we were in school, and his brown eyes that I swear had flecks of gold in them, all made radiant by his killer smile that was like a beam of sunshine projecting in whatever direction he faced.
He was one of those people who laughed loudly and often, but instead of it being annoying, you just wanted to feel included.
If he decided not to move with me, I would miss hearing that laughter echoing through my living space.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say I had fallen hard for Shepard the moment I saw him.
Not exactly romantically, yet in a way harder to define, but definitely important.
In fact, we met on a pub crawl and slept together that night.
I hadn’t planned on hooking up with anyone for a long time when I started university because I didn’t want a repeat of what happened with Joey and Maya just three years before.
There was just something magnetic between Shepard and me, and when I really thought about what held us together, it was love, of a sort.
Falling in love with him would be too easy, so I took that option off the table, telling him I needed to focus on my studies and work.
While he was amazing in every way, I just needed him to be something else in my life.
He understood, and while we stayed in each other’s lives and beds, my reluctance to press the romantic relationship button lingered.
He had quickly become my best friend and tried to teach me the fine art of putting the past behind you.
That part wasn’t so easy for me. I was poor, with no one left to help me when student loans exhausted their limits.
I couldn’t ask my foster parents, Mother and Father Park, for more than the monthly stipend they sent me.
I needed every cent I earned from my part-time job at a 50s-themed diner to help support myself.
In my second year, I had aged out of the foster system and refused to take anything from the Parks even though we had advanced to adoption.
I had moved in with Shepard in the so-called “student ghetto” of Kingston to save money.
We had mice, mould, and worse yet, two freshmen roommates who couldn’t find the shower with a map.
Then, in a major tell for how much we had in common, Shepard and I both decided on Dalhousie University’s graduate school in the East Coast city of Halifax for our Master of Library and Information Studies.
I wanted to learn more about building systems for record keeping, retrieval, and all that jazz, whereas Shepard wanted to be a corporate research librarian.
Shepard as a corporate anything struck me as odd, but he had his reasons, mostly to do with his adoptive parents.
When we were successfully recruited to different local institutions in jobs we wanted, we took it as a sign that we had done the right thing with our lives.
However, it soon became clear that Shepard’s true passion was his art and not being a “corporate stooge”, as he phrased it one night when he had made ramen.
Every year he worked less in written information and veered to imagery, painting in the slap-up studio we’d made of a bedroom since we now shared the other one.
I didn’t resent my loss of bedroom because I wanted him to be happy.
How could I not love him after twelve years of sharing everything, including a bed?
Any time someone had asked me out in the past decade, I would chat about it with Shep, and he would encourage me to go—only for me to feel almost like I was cheating on him.
Anyway, we did maintain sexual exclusivity because I had no interest in picking up someone from a nightclub and having a one-night stand ending in syphilis.
I was also devoted to building my career.
I felt I didn’t have time to build a strong foundation with someone new.
My own art was far more prolific than Shepard’s but confined to sketchpads that I kept in a locked filing cabinet, along with anything that had to do with my childhood, before and after the accident.
I was psychic and had been my whole life—hence the voices.
I was fully aware of how that sounded, so I kept it a secret from everyone—at least, from everyone living.
I could give energy to wayward spirits, meaning that if there was a ghost around who wanted to be seen and heard, well, just call me a battery because I could see them and possibly manifest them for others to see.
I wasn’t quite sure on that last one. My abilities were in flux sometimes, as I moved through stages in my life, and I was about to turn thirty.
While most people didn’t or couldn’t believe in psychics, I was the real deal, and I knew unscrupulous people out there would try to exploit me and my abilities.
When I was young, my biological parents told me I must not do more than just softly “touch” someone’s mind if necessary to gauge things like whether they were honest. I should never go digging around in their head without their consent.
I stuck to that code, and the voices that I couldn’t quite block out were more annoyance or parlour trick than the main event.
The big reveal was that I could draw the future, and I was more reliable than any Magic 8 Ball.
I was never really wrong, as best as I knew.
I’d be doing the dishes or working on a spreadsheet, and bam!
I would get a vision, like a short movie playing out in my head, combined with the powerful urge to draw what I was seeing.
I carried a sketchpad and some markers with me in my computer bag, and I would sometimes feel like Clark Kent looking for a phone booth if a vision came somewhere highly inconvenient to stop, drop, and draw.
My drawings were sometimes hit or miss in that they were going to happen, but I didn’t always know when, or I couldn’t interpret correctly what I was seeing.
Unless I drew it a dozen times and it was drilled into my head, with perhaps new details revealed on each page.
It was the only thing I didn’t share with anyone, and I felt cold and sick at the very thought of showing my drawings to even Shepard. After all, who wants to hear about a future that hasn’t happened yet, but I know will be horrible? And one that I also knew we would be powerless to change?