The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [91]
He was buttoning his shirt when he heard Regina’s car on the brick-like dirt beside the cottage. So unlike Regina to be so late, she who would have wanted an hour anyway to put herself together. He braced himself for panic, or at least for a whine about being stuck in a terrible traffic jam. The roads had simply crumbled, she would say; there’d been a dust storm on the AI.
But that was not her news.
—I’m pregnant, his wife said from the doorway. Flushed and radiant, as if, even in the car, she’d been running toward him with her blessed announcement. She looked beautiful, the burst secret giving her a color and a gaiety he hadn’t seen in, literally, years. We won’t have absolute results until Friday, but Dr. Wagmari thinks I’m three months along.
Thomas stood, unmoving.
The tide, responding to a crack in the universe, drained from the pool that he had, until that moment, thought of as his life, his essence, his soul, though he hadn’t been absolutely certain of the existence of the latter until this moment. The loss, the physical sensation of loss, was devastating and utterly complete. And oddly comforting, like a truly sad thought. He couldn’t move or speak, even knowing that not speaking was unforgivable, would never be forgiven. And in the silence, he felt the cry beginning, a silent wail tearing through him, obliterating in an instant the odd comforting sensation, replacing it with a soundless scream. His life was over. It was that simple. Even as a new life was beginning.
—What’s wrong with you? Regina asked, perhaps hearing a faint and distant echo of the silent scream. You’re just standing there.
—I’m . . . Words deserted him. His system, trying to save itself, was shutting down bit by bit.
—You’re stunned, she said.
Still he couldn’t move. To move was to go on with the other life, the one he would have after this one. How hideous that it should be such joyous news that hurt so much. Yes, he managed.
It was, apparently, enough. Regina moved to embrace him, petrified statue, and his arms, involuntary appendages, responded with something like an embrace on his part.
—Oh, I’m stunned, too! she cried. I never thought. Oh, God, isn’t it fabulous?
His hand, without signal from his brain, gently patted her back.
—It’s what we’ve always wanted, she said, burying her face into his shoulder and beginning to sob.
Tears popped to the lower lids of his own eyes as well, horrifying him, and he tried to blink them back. They seemed treacherous, beside the point now. Though they, too, would be misread, might be taken for joy.
She pulled away from him, remembering the hour, ordinary things, already having crossed over into the new life.
—I’m so late, she crowed happily.
______
He sat on the bed in his underwear and socks, his shirt half buttoned, left unfinished by the natural disaster, as women holding cooking pots had been found at Pompeii. Thinking half-sentences from time to time, not often, the rest a misty white blank. I need to warn and If only I hadn’t. Thinking, in particularly lucid moments, and as all men will inevitably try to calculate, The night of Roland’s party. Having obeyed the biological clock, he and Regina were being rewarded with a child. But then the mist furled, and the fog swamped him, and he wanted never to have to move again. Bitter irony. Had he not just said he would do the honorable and courageous thing? Unthinkable now. Not possible.