Strangled - Brian McGrory [69]
“It’s completely understandable,” she added, “but the fact that it’s understandable doesn’t make it any easier on the living people in your life.”
I said, “You’re over us?” I don’t know where I got the guts to ask that question, but I did.
She replied, “Some days, yes. Other days, not really. You?”
I bit my lip and replied, “That about sums it up here as well.”
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you, too.”
A woman’s voice over the PA system announced a preboarding for the flight to Boston, which brought me back to that awful day at Logan Airport when she first left for her new life in San Francisco. I should have stopped her. I could have stopped her. And I didn’t.
She flashed me an odd look, the two of us sitting there amid the soft commotion of passengers all around us rising to their feet and grabbing their purses and computer cases and carry-ons. She said, “I had planned to tell you this if you ever got around to calling me to let me know you were getting married —”
“I didn’t get married,” I said, cutting her off.
She smiled wanly and continued, “But I might as well tell you here.” She paused and gave me a long, familiar look of mild trepidation mixed with excitement, and then said, “I’m pregnant.”
Did someone just set a bomb off? What was that intense white flash? Was I asleep? Would I at some point awake? Any reason I should be this inwardly distraught over a two-word sentence uttered by a woman I hadn’t been involved with in the biblical sense in at least a year?
I said, slowly, calmly, forcing a smile, “I thought you had a glow to you.” I don’t know if she did or didn’t, but it was a pretty good line for its magnanimity and the fact it bought me a little bit of much-needed recovery time.
She smiled in return and said, “I’m not really showing yet, not unless, well, not unless you look really hard. I’ve been a little bit sick, but not too bad. I’m pretty nervous. And I’m really goddamned excited.”
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and smiled more broadly — unrestrained happiness all over her face.
I squeezed her hand and said, “I’m really thrilled for you.” Was I? I didn’t know.
Passengers were filing past us, lining up for the boarding call, riffling through their coats for tickets and IDs, completely unaware of the minidrama unfolding in their midst. Or at least I think they were unaware.
I flashed to a scene a few years before, a summer’s evening at a traveling carnival in a small town in Maine. Her hair was wavy from the sun and her tan skin untouched by makeup. She had just nervously told me she thought she was pregnant, and I scooped her up in my arms and paraded her around the grass parking lot, thinking we were going to be parents together, that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, that I was going to have what was taken away from me before, or at least some sort of approximation of it.
Instead, the tests came back negative, the relationship eventually soured, and, well, here we were. Imagine if I could have looked into the future that night in Maine, and this scene at the San Francisco Airport is what I saw?
Of course, I hid all these feelings and recollections, or at least I hid them as best as I could. I said, “I’m really thrilled for you. And in all seriousness, you look spectacular.”
She beamed.
Left unasked, unanswered, and entirely unstated was the issue of paternity, which, for every logical and illogical reason, I was dying to know, though damned if I was going to bring it up. I did a double-check on her left ring finger and saw nothing but skin. I pictured a tall guy, dark hair, probably an investment banker, maybe a venture capitalist, every bit as thrilled as I was that night in Maine when we had that false alarm. That expanse I was suddenly feeling in my chest was what’s known as emptiness.
She said, “It’s all pretty overwhelming, you know?”
Well, yeah, I did know until I didn’t, which happened in a hospital when Katherine and our daughter died during childbirth. I guess this is exactly what Elizabeth means when she says the dead keep on dying in