Chapter 12
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The Four Hundred Dollars
Aoife
He arrived at seven on the dot, which was like him, and I had spent the two days between texting him and opening the door trying to be steady enough to say what I needed to say.
I had told Simone on the Monday because I could not carry it alone any longer.
Simone had gone quiet for a moment, her face carefully still the way it went when she was taking something seriously rather than just responding to it.
Then she said, "How are you feeling?" and I said, "Terrified," and she said, "That's fair.
Are you going to keep it?" I said yes, and she said, "Okay.
Then that's what's happening and we'll figure out the rest." I cried, not from fear but from the relief of being believed.
She reached across and put her hand over mine on the table and left it there.
Jensen sat down on the couch. He looked at me in the way he sometimes looked at me when he was paying close attention to something he had not yet identified, alert and still, and I sat across from him and I held my own hands in my lap and I told him.
I watched his face while I spoke. I watched it move through the stages with a speed that told me how thoroughly unprepared he was.
Disbelief first, his brow tightening, his eyes going sharp.
Then something I could not name but which preceded anger, a drawing inward, a quality of withdrawal in his expression.
Then the anger itself, arriving fast and cold, changing the set of his jaw and the flatness of his eyes in a way I had not seen on him before.
"How," he said, and then he stopped and when he started again his voice had a different quality, measured and quiet in the way that is more frightening than shouting. "How could you let this happen?"
I said, carefully, "The antibiotics interfered with the pill. I didn't know that was possible. I don't think either of us knew."
"You were supposed to be on birth control," he said. "That was the one thing. That was the one thing you were supposed to manage."
I looked at him. I thought: one thing I was supposed to manage.
As if the rest of it, all of these months, all of the showing up and the silence and the being available whenever he needed and never asking for more than he offered, as if none of that counted as management.
As if I had been a single useful function this whole time and had failed at it.
"I didn't do this deliberately," I said.
"You are trying to make me love you," he said. His voice was flat and hard, the voice of someone who has decided something and is not going to be talked out of it. "You know that nobody can replace her. You know that and you are doing this anyway."
The words arrived in me the way very cold water arrives, total and immediate.
I did not move. I kept my hands folded in my lap and I looked at him and I thought: he is saying this because he is frightened.
He is saying things he cannot take back and he knows it.
None of that makes it less true that he is saying them.
"I never asked you to love me," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected it to.
"I have never wanted children with anyone except my wife," he said.
"She is gone and I will never want them with anyone else.
You need to understand that." He stood up, and for a moment he looked at me with an expression that was not entirely anger, something underneath it that flickered and was gone before I could name it, something that looked almost like anguish.
Then it closed. "I am not going to be a father to this child.
I'm telling you now that I am not able to be a part of this. "
He reached into his jacket. He put four hundred dollars on the table between us, the bills laid down with a deliberateness that was worse than if he had thrown them. He looked at me once more, his face set, his eyes flat, and then he walked to the door.
"Don't call me," he said.
The door shut behind him. I heard his footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, descending away from me, and then the sound of the building door, and then nothing.
I looked at the money on the table. I looked at it for a long time.
I thought: four hundred dollars and a shut door. That is what these months were worth. That is what I was worth.
Then I thought about my grandmother, who had told me that a person revealed themselves not in the good times but in the moment when something asked more of them than they thought they had.
He had been asked for more than he thought he had. And this was what he had.
I sat there for a long time after he left. Then I stood up. I went to the bedroom. I took the two bags from the top of the wardrobe, the ones I had arrived in the city with, and I began to pack.
I left the money on the table.
I came back for it in the morning, because I was going to need it and there was no point in principles that left you unable to eat. But I left it there that night, because that night I needed to believe that I had some standards that were not purchasable, even at four hundred dollars.
I packed the curtains and the throw and the books and the herbs and the photograph and my grandfather's letter and the cup with the chipped handle.
I packed my clothes and my documents and the small pile of things I had already bought for the baby, the onesie and the blanket and the rabbit from the church sale.
I sat in the empty apartment in the early hours of the morning, and I spoke to my grandmother one more time.
"A good start is half the work," I told her. "I know. I know it is."
In the morning I picked up the four hundred dollars and I added it to what I had saved and I began looking for somewhere else to be.