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It was the last day of my old life. The third week of October 2017. The year I turned forty.
Jo was at school. Iris was at daycare. I didn’t know where my husband, Tony, was.
It’s peculiar what I can’t forget. Our bathroom held the sickeningly sweet smell of geranium-scented cleaner. I wore pants and not a dress. Socks but no shoes. A too-tight blouse. Unwashed hair pinned in a bun above my neck. I sat against a wall, where the taupe paint was scratched, an uncapped EPT developing in my grip. I held the test upside down. I couldn’t bear to watch. A gap beneath the door set a rectangle of yellow light across the tub. Two minutes to know what would become of me. Time passed, a whole life. I flipped the EPT over when waiting got harder than knowing. Two red lines on a white strip stared at me. A second test lay in the box. I ripped its foil package open with my teeth. Right between the sink and the commode, I crouched down, swearing in disbelief. I was still breastfeeding twelve-month-old Iris, still recovering from pregnancy and birth, still lonely the way a mother is when she can’t find the person she used to be.
I knew when it happened. The deaths of our fathers had brought us close. Tony and I had fumbled to find each other in our unlit bedroom. He’d reached for me and I held him. There are people in life you feel you’ve known before. I’d never met Tony. He’s a big man, a strong man. He weighs one hundred pounds more than me. His eyes are blue, so clear and blue they seem empty and foreign and unreadable. He’s a combat veteran, marked emotionally with scars of bullets he survived. Tony prefers life be raw and unpredictable and intoxicating with risk—or so the years of our marriage tell. Tony’s father was dead. He didn’t know how to say how much loss hurt.
We fucked sweetly in our bed. He didn’t pull out. I didn’t ask him to. When he comes he unravels. The wall between us drops for a few miraculous seconds. I’d wanted to please Tony. I’d demonstrate my love by taking all of him.
[ Return to the review of “Loved and Wanted.” ]
I’d been careless and stupid.
Two more red lines.
I threw the test across the room. Of course, it hit the tile over the bathtub, flying back at me. Our situation was disconcerting. We couldn’t afford another baby. We were like most Americans. No savings, no emergency fund, lots of debt. Lots and lots. Professors at West Virginia University, Tony and I held the exact same position. Identical jobs. Tony made more than I did. And he didn’t even want the job. He was always trying to quit, looking for shinier work. Hollywood writing work. Like so many women, my money was earmarked to look after the children. Seventy percent of what I took home would go to childcare, if we could find it, which I didn’t think we could if we had another baby. It had taken a year and a half for a spot to open in a good daycare for Iris, not an uncommon thing in small towns. Demand exceeds supply. There were so few options. I’d placed Iris on several waiting lists six weeks into my first trimester. Each one was the same: write your name on a line and pray.
Most household tasks and chores fell on me. Night feedings. Bills. Boring paperwork. Someone always needed to be fed or rocked or talked off the ledge of a tantrum. I didn’t have time to be pregnant. I divvied minutes. The night before I took the EPT, Tony stood in the living room and lifted our upright Dyson by its handle, looking it over as if it were some rare thing. He tried to unlock the detachable hose, squeezing it. Seven years we’d owned that vacuum cleaner. And then Tony asked me how to turn it on.
Our marriage—like all marriages, I assume—is complex, its own country. In our country, we were fighting most days. We were broke. We were overextended. We rarely touched. Talk was tense even about the good things, anger clipping our voices. We argued so much we forgot the original argument. Our marriage was hung on fantasy. A storybook about freelance writing windfalls. A few things: I won’t tell you every detail of my marriage, who was good or bad or hurt the other. For my children. For their relationship with their father. My marriage is part of the story; it isn’t the point of the story. Had my husband been a financially stable and faithful, kind hero, the cost of daycare would have been the same, the potential loss of my career the same, the distance and barriers to reasonable health care the same. I can blame Tony for not providing economic stability—or time—for me. The money and time that would have made it plainly possible to safely provide for another child. Reprehending Tony might be briefly satisfying, but to do so is to lose focus, to take an occasion when I was handed shame and doubt solely because I was a pregnant woman, and make it about my husband.
In my tiny windowless bathroom, positive pregnancy test in hand, I thought, this is why women opt out of work. This is why we discourage girls from trying in the first place. I had sex for the first time when I was thirteen, not old enough for sex. I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. The women in my family were waitresses and administrative assistants. I’ve worried all the years after my first pregnancy scare, how a baby might hold me back.
I’d worked so hard. College, though my family couldn’t afford it (I took on enormous student loan debt). Years and years in graduate school. Now a tenure-track job. Tony was going to quit—we could both feel it coming. I was the stable earner in our household. A third baby at forty and my professional life was over. Moments like these, I want my mom. I tell her most things first. Telling Mom is like telling myself. I phoned her, crying. I didn’t want another baby. I wanted an abortion.
“Oh, Christa.” Mom sounded disappointed in me, the way I was disappointed. I’d failed her. Mom gave up every dream of her own for me. She’d worked two jobs or more my whole childhood, never any help. At twenty-three, Mom had her tubes tied, right on the cesarean surgical table. That never sounded extreme. After years of my father hitting her, two was enough. Two was the punch line. My father had wanted my mother to abort me. I never thought that fact anything other than a fact. It had nothing to do with me. It never hurt. I’d imagine a curtain drawn. Everything black and blank and peaceful without him.
[ Return to the review of “Loved and Wanted.” ]
A long pause.
Mom said if I wanted another baby, I could do it. If I wanted to focus on the children I already had, I could do that. Maybe Mom was right, though I was leery. I’d called her crying and panicked the morning Trump won too. It had been tense between us; Mom insisted the country would be fine, don’t be dramatic. Nothing would change. It’s always been a man’s place. Four years later we still remind each other how correct I’d been. But never mind. Mom reassured me we live in a free country. Choice is a given.
“You’re right, Mom.” As the adult child of an abused woman, there is a code Mom earned: Don’t upset her. Do less harm than good. Take care. Let her know you’re safe. “I’ll be okay,” I half whispered. Where in Mom’s house was she? At the kitchen table, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, readying for the night shift? “I’ll talk to you later. After work.” I pressed the red End Call button at the bottom of my phone. For the first time in my adult life, I longed to live at home again. To have the care of Mom’s meals, and the electric bill paid.
I went back for the EPT, to the bathroom. The little plastic wand was overturned beside the tub. It looked so small there, and harmless, like a scrap of littered paper. I picked up the test, flipped it over in my palm. Still positive. Lines brighter than before. I balanced on a tightrope strung between defiance and disbelief. I held my phone above the double-red-striped viewing window, snapped a photo, and texted the image to Tony without comment. I didn’t want him to see the picture. I wanted him to feel it. A big fat positive like a kick to the gut.
Surely this news would propel Tony to change. A scare like this would dare him into responsibility. He’d own his part. Make it better. Somehow. I felt powerful as I waited for him to respond to my buckshot, as if my being right could protect us from being broke. But then again, this must be a mistake. I’d laugh about it tomorrow. How I’d frightened myself.
Tony wrote back immediately. “You’re joking?” and then, “Baby? Stop.” Baby, one pet name he calls me.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Upstairs.”
“You’re in the house?”
“Yes, in the office.” I used to have an office; Iris’s bedroom now.
Tony home all that time, I hadn’t been by myself. I gathered no comfort from the knowledge, only questions. Was our house soundproof? Or had Tony heard and ignored me, as a neighbor ignores the inconveniently loud fight next door? To be heard and not helped, the lowest rung of solitude. But then again I wasn’t alone, with or without Tony: a tiny rider burrowed in me.
Floorboards two stories up creaked with the weight of my husband. Tony was coming down. Stair by stair. I met him at the banister, a step above the landing. I placed my hand over his hand, on curved walnut wood. “I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing for nothing, a girlhood habit. I said it as if getting knocked up was solely my doing. “Hold me,” I said. “Please.” I looped my fingers through Tony’s fingers, pulled him to my level. We stood face-to-face then for a short time. I averted my gaze. Tony’s eyes were full of concern. No matter to me. I couldn’t see him, as I felt he’d spent years not seeing me.
I didn’t want to fight. Not now. I pressed my cheek against Tony’s chest. I draped his arms around my shoulders, asked for affection. Tony wore a black cotton T-shirt decaled with a blue dinosaur. I closed my eyes and breathed him in. Seven years of marriage, his body of musk, and soap, and sweat, and sex. A hit of the good stuff.
Tony walked me to the living room and sat us on the sofa. He made his body a perch. I leaned back and into him. Tony’s belly was warm, warm and soft. He hooked one leg around mine; we were wrapped. One body. I wasn’t going anywhere. Neither of us knew what to say.
Birds squawked outside the front window. Car doors slammed closed on the street. I didn’t want Tony to say anything. I needed him to listen. Just silence. But all of a sudden I wanted to pummel Tony, anger out of nowhere, though he did what I wanted by keeping quiet. I thought I might like to slap him. A little zap to the cheek, harmless, so he might feel what I felt. Shocked from his body. But I didn’t of course. I lay there with him, arms crossed, fear tickling through me like ants march.
I don’t know how much time passed. Enough for the boil to cool. “I’m afraid,” I said into the bare-silent room. “I can’t do this,” though I was unsure what this was.
“Baby,” Tony said gently, and then buried his face in my hair. “It’s your body.” My handsome husband. He said nothing else. It wasn’t his place. His openness, his mercy pained me. How dare Tony be so good to me now, when it was too late to forget how hair-raising the years before had been.
I loved him. No matter what, we’d lose.
I called my OBGYN and scheduled an appointment. Their office is on the other side of town, and named after a place called Cheat Lake. Summers I’d take Jo and Iris to swim in the Cheat River, just a left off the highway and up Fair Chance Road. We’d walk through shady, mosquito-infested woods, towels tucked under our arms. Bites were worth the dip. The water was always brown and cold. Speed boats churned the river’s bottom, swirled it around, like chocolate at the bottom of a glass of milk. Little bits of bark floated at the surface. Jo stood in the waist-high water. Iris sat at the shore shoveling dirt into her mouth. I could pull them back if I needed to.
Why am I telling you this?
In 1994, in the first of two incidents, a deluge of poison water from an illegally sealed underground mine at T&T Coal exploded from a Preston County hillside. The torrent shot into Muddy Creek and merged into the Cheat. Heavy metals lowered the water’s pH. The river ran rust orange for miles and miles. Fish and plant life were obliterated. A year later, another blowout. Then the Cheat was one of the most endangered and polluted waterways in the nation.
It took more than twenty years, but now it’s swimmable. What was dead is reborn. There are tributaries of fish, native bass and perch. The forest around is lush. The history of reviving the Cheat is long. The short answer is people who loved the land and water rallied. They call themselves the Friends of the Cheat. They didn’t turn a blind eye. They raised funds. They fought bad laws. They didn’t give up.
[ Return to the review of “Loved and Wanted.” ]
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