Page 42 of The Heart We Guard
A baby. I still feel a little light-headed when I say the word.
Baby.
Before I got pregnant, I could most adequately say I liked babies from a distance. And if I close my eyes, I can still feel the rush of abject panic when I realized I’d felt a little sick in the mornings for three days in a row and hadn’t checked off tampons on my wipe clean grocery list in a long while. It’s never taken me so long to count the days backwards.
And there was no question who the father was.
Butcher.
I’d sunk to the floor in the kitchen, back up against the cupboard, unable to move as I counted and recounted the days before conceding I needed a pregnancy test.
“Meh,” he says, wiping my protest away like it’s nothing. “So, you’re pregnant. Think about it this way … let’s say there are about two hundred and fourteen million babies born a year, that means you’re one of the…” He closes his eyes and starts muttering to himself as he calculates the math better than I ever could. “Got it, there’s probably a hundred-ish pregnant people in every two thousand right now.”
“Yes, but this is me, not some random woman you don’t know. And this is my baby, which makes things utterly terrifying. Plus, I’m packing up my life to move to Las Vegas, where I’m going to live with you again for some undetermined length of time while I find a new job.”
I’d already been talking to Wade about moving to Vegas. The idea percolated after I’d seen the Midtown Rebels hanging around the end of my street a second time. It became more concrete after they followed me while I was out for a walk one morning. I’d cut through a lot they couldn’t get bikes through and doubled-back to get home safely. At first, Vegas was just a vacation idea. But it was Wade who suggested making it more permanent when I shared the problems I was having.
“Or start your clinic.”
“Or start my clinic,” I repeat.
Since Butcher left, it’s been hard to think about the clinic. Our conversations about how it might work whisper over every page. When I look at the notes, all I think about is how it felt to be listened to and not judged.
I got a call from Bulldog’s secretary two days after Butcher left. Mendez tried to calm the waters and said all the right things about both of us speaking out of haste and a lack of respect for one another. He apologized. I apologized. But when I told him about the mobile clinic, Mendez had the balls to laugh.
But Butcher?
He believed in the idea.
And so does Wade.
So, I thanked Mendez for the opportunities I’d received at the hospital and for the second chance, but it would be best if we just agreed I could leave on good terms.
“This is unlike you,” Wade says. “Normally, you have your nervous breakdowns silently, on the inside, while looking to the rest of the world like you’re swimming through life like a swan. This must really have you rattled if you’re questioning everything.”
“This,” I say, gesturing up and down my body “is actually progress. You should have seen me in the house after I peed on the sticks.”
I don’t tell him how badly my hands shook, or how hard I cried when I realized my brother would never get to be an uncle.
“Sticks? Plural?”
I laugh at that. “Dude, do you really think I’m going to take one test as concrete evidence? What was it Professor Richmond used to say? One result means nothing. It’s just a data point. Two data points just make a line. But it’s the third data point that makes it a trend.”
Wade laughs. “You did three tests?”
I lean forward. “Wade, I did seven.”
He laughs at that. “Out of the seven, how many gave you a false negative because you had no pee left?”
“I thought of that. Peed into a bowl and dipped them all in it. Then there’s no variable for flow, speed, strength of the start versus the finish.”
He shakes his head and lifts his coffee. “Only you would turn a pregnancy test, one of the potentially best moments in life, into a science experiment.”
He doesn’t know it was the only way I could cope with it. To remove the enormity of it and reduce it to a well-thought-out design of experiments. By thinking how best to approach it, I was able to remove the stress of going to the store by turning it into a procurement exercise. By selecting the vessel I was going to pee in, I was able to reduce it to thinking through the kind of equipment you need in a home lab setup. By grabbing the sticks and tying them together with tape to make sure their nibs were all equal, I could focus on removing variables.
And as I waited the million seconds it took for the results to appear, I felt every single one of my racing heartbeats. Where Wade’s math tried to standardize the experience of the hundred pregnancies in two thousand, the truth is, I bet the story of so many of those people is different.
Some pregnancy tests will be tests for much longed-for children, waited on for years. Some will be last-chance babies, created with the intention of holding fractured couples together. Some will be unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. Marital rape, dire financial circumstances where one more baby might be one too many mouths to feed.
