Control

Ever amid the sweets of life
Some evil thing must be.
-L.E.L.

“Laura was pregnant. Twenty something weeks she said. I would have said she was cute. I’ve said it before. Once or twice. When I knew her growing up.” She was swollen in the front, like she had had a severe reaction to a bee sting. This made her sallow and withdrawn, as though the baby was drawing more from her than she had to give. “I don’t know how well you know Laura. You probably know her better than I do. She hasn’t told me anything about you. Where you’ve been. You know the rumors at least. Right? It’s okay, I’ll fill in what you don’t know. It’s not just her story anyway. Here, let me get a coffee; grab that table in the back and I’ll tell you all of it.”

Laura moved in with me when she was sixteen. It was an idiotic reason. She had gotten suspended from school when a classmate had decided to get rid of a bag of pills on the drug dog day by slipping them in her bag. Her uptight parents had blown it out of proportion and kicked her out, refusing to listen to reason. “So she told me.” I had lived down the street from her all of her life. I was, for all intents and purposes, her older brother. So when she came asking for help I had sighed and swung the door open wider.
“I’m sure it looked scandalous, a sixteen year-old living with a junior in college of the opposite sex. My word to God, I was the least of her worries. She is my sister. And I was busy. Remember the internship with the engineers I had? I was always working.”
I should have paid more attention.

It was one of those days in August when the air outside was humid enough to suffocate – the beginning of my senior year – when I came home to find her balled up on the couch. Not unusual, but the TV wasn’t on and she hadn’t said a word to me. “You know, chatterbox.”
‘Laura?’
Nothing.
I had started in the kitchen. Food was a good idea I thought, but I kept peeking over the bar. She was hidden by the back of the couch.
‘Laura, what do you want to eat?’
When she didn’t answer again, my hand dropped from the open cabinet as I turned to look at the place I knew she was. With a sigh, I walked around the bar to stand over her. “And that was when I saw the pregnancy test on the coffee table in front of her.” She wasn’t looking at it. I couldn’t speak. I stepped back with my hands on the back of the couch, bending to look at the floor. We stayed that way for what felt like hours. When I felt I could speak without my face cherrying, I righted myself and hopped over the back of the couch to sit beside her. “‘Is it positive?’ I asked her then. I remember that clearly. I wanted to hear the answer from her.”
Her silence said more than words could have.
‘Whose is it?’
Very slowly, Laura pushed herself up and turned her head to look directly at me. Shaking her head, she said ‘It’s no one’s.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I said!’
‘Bullshit!’
‘It’s not! I’m not lying!’
The fierceness crashing in waves in her sea blue eyes was enough to convince me she believed what she was saying. “My first thought then was that the test she’d used had read wrong. But the test on the table did say positive.” I covered my eyes with my hand, massaging the skin on either side with my thumb and middle finger.
‘What am I going to do?’ she asked me, her eyes now drowning.
‘Wait until Saturday,’ I told her. ‘There’s another test in the box you got this from?’ When she nodded, I continued ‘Use it on Saturday. We’ll see what that one says and go from there.’
She nodded. When Saturday rolled around, she sat next to me, our legs pressed side-by-side for the comfort of the other’s presence, as we stared openmouthed at the second positive test. I questioned her again, which sent her into a high-pitched defense of herself. “I didn’t want to believe it. That’s probably why I stopped at the drug store that next Monday and bought another box for her. The third positive brought the tears. I’d never seen her cry. Not even when she had broken her ankle or when her grandmother had passed away. It shocked me, but I think it startled her more.
“I didn’t know what to do. So I confided in Melanie – the girl with the dark hair that works at the coffee shop on campus, you know. I met her freshmen year, physics lab.” I went on my break between classes in the middle of the day. I must have looked terrible – she gave me a free drink and, shouting to her coworkers, pushed me out to a table. She said nothing while I explained Laura to her, and pushed the loose strands of mocha hair behind her ears when I stopped. “She told me she knew a girl who worked at a clinic a couple of blocks away. They could get Laura a free test and go over the options with her there.”
Laura agreed to go with a shrug and I skipped my class Friday to go with her. The clinic Melanie sent us to had that sterilized feeling that all doctors’ offices did. It was bright though, full of windows and Easter-like pastels. There weren’t any children’s toys lying around like I imagined with all the vivid colors, but then I figured out why. “It was an abortion clinic.”
They got us back in doctor time, which is to say whenever they felt like it, and shuttled Laura into the one stall bathroom, shoving the plastic cup into her hand. After several minutes of silence between us in the otherwise empty room once they got her up on the table and sucked blood from the crook in her arm, the door opened again and the nurse reappeared. “Sure enough, the tests confirmed it. Laura was pregnant.” I watched her the whole time while the nurse was delivering the news and while we waited for the doctor’s consultation. She stared at the poster of the growth chart of babies on the back of the door the whole time. “I wasn’t even sure if she was breathing.”
The doctor knocked twice and stepped inside the room, clipboard in hand. He introduced himself as Dr. Ebner and sat on the stool, placing the clipboard in his lap.
‘Well, we’ve got a few options at this point,’ he said to Laura. ‘And ultimately, it’s your choice.’ He left the room, to give her time to make her decision, and I followed him out.
‘Are you the father?’ he asked when I caught him in the hall. When I shook my head, he continued, ‘It’s always a shame when things like this happen.’
‘If she chooses to abort?’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘I’m a doctor at an abortion clinic. It won’t bother me.’ He glanced at the clipboard in his hands again. ‘Though I suppose since she’s underage, I’m required to have parental consent to do anything for her.’ He was standing close enough that I could smell the stench of cigarettes that seemed to seep from him.
‘Her parents aren’t really involved anymore. They threw her out more than six months ago.’
“Not to mention that they wouldn’t really be understanding, no matter whether she chose to abort or keep it.”
‘You her guardian?’
‘She lives with me.’
He stopped for a moment, thinking. ‘I can work around the parental consent so long as you are willing to fill out the paperwork, if that’s what it comes to. Substitute you in place of them.’
“I remember thinking then that he sounded resigned. It confused me a little. But then it finally hit me where I was standing and who I was talking to.” His eyes were dark and the lines on his middle-aged face were deep.
I swallowed. ‘If that’s what she wants.’ The doctor nodded and continued on his way down the hall. I paused, watching him until he disappeared around a corner, and returned to the room where I’d left Laura.
She was sitting on the edge of the exam table, swinging her feet into the side. The metal thunked with every swing, and Laura was staring at the same spot she had been. It was a strange combination, her actions and expression – both very childlike and very adult. It surprised me how grown up she looked even as helpless as she was.
After about twenty minutes, the nurse that had seen us in came back, holding another clipboard.
‘Do you have a decision? It’s okay if you need more time.’ I noticed her look was very similar to that of the doctor. Laura didn’t answer right away. The nurse was about to ask again, when Laura looked up and found the nurse’s eyes.
‘No, it’s okay. I’ve made up my mind. I’m keeping it.’ Her eyes were steely, an ocean turned to ice.
Instantly, the nurse’s expression changed, as though those were words she had never heard before. She had left the door open and stuck her head out as soon as the words sank in, telling all the nurses walking by that someone was going to keep their baby. All of them smiled wide enough to break their faces, stopping to congratulate Laura and to add a skip to their step.
‘Are you sure, Laura?’ I asked, placing a hand on her shoulder.
She nodded, turning her frozen gaze to me. “There was nothing I could say. So I didn’t.” I patted her on the shoulder and stood there, watching her as she sat, iceberg-like, in front of her decision.

“And then there was Neil. He’s the med student, who’s not actually a student anymore, who lives across the hall. We drink together on Thursdays. He was skeptical when I told him about Laura. The med student in him couldn’t absorb the idea.”
‘Bullshit!’ he said, setting his shot glass on the bar with an empathetic thump.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘She’s probably just afraid of getting in trouble.’
‘You never saw anyone coming or going?’
He said no, he hadn’t. I knew he’d tell me if he had. That’s the kind of man he is.
“Well, a little while later – maybe a week or so – he developed a nasty case of bronchitis that brought laryngitis with it. His voice grew scratchy, then hoarse, then all he could do was croak, and then he couldn’t speak at all. The bronchitis cleared up in a few weeks. He’s only just now started to croak again.”
Around the time Laura first learned she was pregnant, Neil had just earned his residency at St. Lucy’s. Working in a hospital was expected to cause illness – everyone was really compassionate and understanding when he first got sick. It was the fact that he couldn’t speak that cost him his position until he recovered – a doctor that couldn’t speak wasn’t that useful.

I did what I could to keep Laura in school. She fought me on it, especially when the morning sickness set in. It frustrated me. The whole situation did. I wanted to beat sense into her, make her listen to me when I said she was making a mistake. “I didn’t say that exactly. Not to her. I couldn’t. Not after watching her at the doctor, even though that determination seemed to disappear as soon as we got home. As a result, I started spending all of my free time with Melanie.”
I actually enjoyed reconnecting with her – I hadn’t really seen her since freshman physics. “I had had a crush. She didn’t. Distanced us when I asked her out and she turned me down. But she had just gotten engaged to a graduate three years our senior. “I was genuinely happy for her. Kinda surprised me that all of those feelings I had had been laid to rest.”
By week two of my complaining about Laura, Melanie told me to bring her by, that she would talk to her. When I did, I was not allowed to be there. Melanie sent me away, told me to come back in an hour. “So, with nothing better to do, I sat on the bench outside the coffee shop, taunting the pigeons. Throw back to my childhood because I was bored.” They were giggling when I went back in and refused to tell me why. “’She’s a good girl,” Melanie told me later. ‘She really admires you, you know.’ I knew it, but it didn’t stop her from being a teenager.”
I came home one night in mid September to Laura standing over a simmering pot in a lemony-clean kitchen. She sat me down with a plate of spaghetti and sat down with her own plate across from me. For most of the meal, she watched me eat while twirling her fork through the marinara soaked noodles.
‘More?’ she asked when I finished. She jumped up and scooped up my plate before I’d finished answering her.
‘What do you want?’ I asked when she brought my plate back, piled high. She stepped back with her hands clasped in front of her, wiggling sheepishly.
‘Some friends are going to the amusement park downtown this weekend. Can I go? Please!’
It disturbed me that she was asking as though I was her parent. I tried not to show it, focusing instead on fiddling with my fork.
‘I don’t think they let pregnant women on the rides.’ I looked up at her stomach. I couldn’t help it. ‘No roller coasters at least. Still want to?’
‘Yes, can I? Please, please, please!’
I knew Laura. The curl of her lips and glint in her puppy dog eyes told me she was already there in mind, carrying on without having listened to a word I said.
‘Mind if I tag along?’ Her face slipped for a second, but the smile never dropped. ‘It’d be fun. I’ll bring Melanie. Maybe Neil. We won’t bother you.’
‘I can go if you do?’
I nodded.
‘Deal!’ And she skipped off, leaving me to do the dishes.
On Saturday, we woke up early and arrived at the park when the mist of early morning still clung to the ground and the sun was just beginning to creep through the clouds at the edge of the sky. Melanie and her fiancé, Clark, were waiting beside the ticket windows and most of Laura’s friends were waiting a few yards away. She bounded over to join them and I sidled over to Melanie.
‘Nice to finally meet you,’ I said, holding out my hand to Clark.
‘Likewise. Good to know Mel does have more than just her girlfriends.’ This earned him an elbow in the ribs from Melanie. ‘Mel’s told me about your situation,’ Clark said, motioning to the gaggle of teenage girls clustered, laughing and shouting, a little ways away. ‘You’re a good man.’
“The comment stings now, looking back. Then, I shrugged, looking over at the girls myself.” ‘I’m trying.’
As soon as the last of the girls arrived, we made our way into the park. Most of the girls jumped in the line for the first roller coaster they came across. Laura was absentmindedly moving in the direction with them. I caught up with her and tapped her in the shoulder, pointing to the sign that had the red circle over the picture of the pregnant woman. She rolled her eyes, but stepped out of the line to stand with me. “I decided, to be fair, I wouldn’t ride that one so she wouldn’t be alone.”
‘It’s not fair,’ she said. The words were quiet, as though she was trying to not let me hear it.
‘You knew about this,’ I reminded her. She folded her arms across her chest.
After that, at least one of her friends always sat out with her. They didn’t pay much attention to me, but I could still sense the hostility radiating from Laura, so I followed Melanie and Clark and the other girls on the rides to get away. “There were very few things Laura could do with the rest of us. By the end of the day, I could tell a difference in her.” She was quieter, even though she still laughed and joked with her friends, and the look of the sun on the ocean in her eyes had faded into the depths. She kept at least one hand near her stomach, even after we got back in the car.
‘You okay?’ I asked her.
‘Yep. I’m tired though.’
‘Did you have fun?’
‘Yeah.’ She fell silent for a moment, staring out the window as we drove. ‘It sucks – having to be grown up.’
And for the first time, I could pity her. Ever since the day I had found her balled on my couch, since the clinic visit, I had convinced myself that she had made her choice. She could live with it. She was her own person and she had done this to herself. “But her words kept coming back to me – ‘It’s no one’s!’ I couldn’t understand her situation. I’d never be able to. And because of this, I think I finally understood just how alone she was.”

The trouble probably started long before it became evident to anyone, besides Laura. Maybe it didn’t. Laura won’t talk about it – wouldn’t then either, if there was anything to talk about. In the days that followed the amusement park trip, Laura surprised me by cleaning up after herself, by going to school without argument. It impressed me how much she was stepping up. I told her that one night as we stood over the heap of dirty dishes. I saw her blush out of the corner of my eye – flattered, or maybe just pleased with herself. It made me smile – I could see the little girl that had tagged along with us older kids on our cul-de-sac adventures standing in my kitchen. “And yet, for whatever reason, I felt as though she had matured. As though she had reached a level of adulthood that even I haven’t found, though unadmittedly so. I decided she could handle it.” I broached the topic later as she sat playing solitaire over the open textbook in her lap.
‘Have you thought about college at all?’
‘A bit.’ She didn’t look up from her game.
‘It’s your senior year. Surely you’ve got some idea what you want.’
‘Well sure. But there’s really not much I can do for me now that there’s this.’ She gestured, whole hand, to her stomach. It wasn’t venomous, the way she said it, but it made me stop. “It’s easy to say now that some part of me wanted to back track there, redirect, but that would be painting myself in a better light than I deserve.”
‘I’ve been meaning to ask. Why did you choose to keep it?’
Her finger stopped on its way to turn the card pile and she deflated against the couch. ‘It wasn’t something I ever thought about. Not seriously. I didn’t want it. But then, I know what it’s like to not be wanted. And I didn’t want to do that to someone else more.’
And I knew she was talking about her parents – controlling, overbearing, dysfunctional but only behind closed doors, wanting to live vicariously through the live doll they had created. ‘You’re not them.’
‘I know.’
“Even now, I’m not sure that she does.”
‘I don’t think you’re thinking this through,’ I said. Her wilting in the memory of her parents’ disservice had made me angry. ‘How are you going to raise a child? Provide for it? What about the father?’
Laura shook her head, chewing her lip.
‘Who’s the father, Laura?’
‘I thought–’
‘What about a job? School? Where are you going to live?’ And with that, the tempest of thought stilled around her and I knew I had gone too far.
Laura got to her feet in what felt like slow motion, never taking her eyes off me. ‘If you don’t want me here, I’ll leave.’ She was shaking. I thought she was mad. ‘If I’ve outstayed my welcome, I understand. I thought – I hoped you could help. But I guess I was mistaken. I’m sorry!’ That was when I saw the tears leaking out the corners and I understood. She hurried away and the bathroom door slammed.
“Here, I have to admit that since Laura found out she was pregnant – no, since she moved in even, probably – I had had the fantasy of providing a home and a family of sorts for her. Not in that I ever wanted to marry her or get her pregnant. But I think the baby growing in her, even though it wasn’t mine, was giving us the illusion of that family space. Laura had basically just admitted the same, going even further in saying she wanted me around as the dad since there was no father. And I had just overturned all of that.”
I followed her and stood outside the bathroom, trying to find the words to apologize.
‘Laura?’
No answer.
I put my forehead on the door and asked again, ‘Laura?’
‘No,’ was the muffled reply.
‘Laura, I’m sorry! Please open the door.’
‘Hold on!’
‘Laura!’ I was knocking.
‘I’m peeing! Hold on!’ Behind the door the toilet flushed, as so did I. When there were no other sounds and Laura didn’t seem to be coming to talk to me, I tried the knob. And to my surprise it wasn’t locked. Laura was standing over the sink, staring into the mirror. When I opened the door all the way, she turned to me and I noticed her hand smeared and stained red, illuminated by the white sink it was still resting on.
‘What happened?’ I asked, rushing over to her.
She looked down, seeming to notice it for the first time and I saw the fear and disgust. ‘Just a cut. I was trying to clean it up.’
I held her hand under the faucet until the water ran clear, but couldn’t find where it had come from, and then took her out to the couch and wrapped the blankets around her so she could sleep.
“When I got back into my room, I realized I hadn’t apologized. My courage was gone. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to.”
The next morning, we didn’t say a word. She left for school before I was ready for work. And it would be late before I saw her again because I was meeting Melanie once I got off. She’d offered to tutor me - she’s a math genius and both calc four and thermodynamics together were tearing me a new one. Not to mention the middle of the semester is always the worst. Professors seem to forget that we students have more than just their class.
I got to the coffee shop first and picked a table close to the window. I like people watching and it would be easier to find Melanie when she arrived. I didn’t have to wait long. A car drove up and parked in the metered spaces out front and Melanie got out of the passenger side. I, creeper-like, watched her grab her bag, still visibly talking to the driver. She shut the door and moved to the curb when Clark emerged from the driver’s seat and caught her. “I had started getting to my feet so I could meet her at the door, but stopped in that awkward crouch over the chair like I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted.” Melanie and Clark stood like that for several more minutes, he with his hand on her shoulder, she facing him and moving her hands as she talked. Clearly a fight. Clearly a fight they both were trying to downplay. “When Melanie did finally break away from him, I had sat back down and pulled out my book to make it look like I hadn’t been looking on. I waited several seconds before looking up and waving her over. And yet I could still feel the eyes on me from the outside, and I wished I hadn’t picked the window seat.”
‘You know, for being a Clark, I’m not really getting a superhero vibe,’ I said, trying my best to be nonchalant and offhand when she sat down.
‘Yeah.’ She tapped her fingers on the table, looking at something over and beyond my head. ‘Have you ever made a decision, and later questioned whether you made the right one?’
‘Yeah, it’s called differential equations,’ I said in a clear moment of sarcasm. I don’t have many of those.
Melanie grimaced and punched me jokingly on the arm. She perked up after that.  ‘Clark’s jealous,’ she said, obviously trying to be as off-the-cuff as I had been. She had lounged back in the chair with a joking smile.
‘Of calculus?’ I was on a roll.
She laughed it off, redirecting the conversation to what I needed help with and motioned to my calc book with a Vanna White grace that would leave me with nightmares. “I told her this, which only made her laugh more. Soon, Clark was replaced by the numbers and by our jokes about them.”
I didn’t think about it again.

Neil and I went out Thursday the week of Halloween to the popular bar down on Tenth. He came pounding on my door around six and told me he couldn’t take being cooped up anymore. Or really he signed it to me. “It wasn’t really Sign Language. He didn’t have the patience to learn it. But he still couldn’t speak by that point.” He suggested the place because he had heard the drinks were good, but I noticed him eyeing all of the women within his line of sight the whole time we were there. I burst out laughing after we had gotten the first couple of drinks into us – Lady Killer Neil wouldn’t be able to do anything with his voice on what seemed like a permanent vacation.
It wasn’t too late when Melanie walked in. “It was easy to remember why I had had a thing for her, dressed up as she was.” And in right behind her was Clark. Neil and I waved them over, but the two claimed the booth on the other side of the room that had just become available. Melanie shrugged, looking in our direction, and slipped in to sit across from him. We turned back to the bartender and ordered another round, leaving them to their date night.
“Now, Neil and I were never irresponsible drinkers. Okay, well maybe when we were freshmen, but who wasn’t then? Come around midnight, we were both pleasantly buzzed and happy.” It was about then that I was grabbed by the shoulder from behind and swung around to face Clark, who had a very irritated look on his face.
‘I want you to leave Melanie alone,’ he said with a slur. I could smell the alcohol. He had laid it on thick.
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘She’s tutoring me.’
He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘Don’t fucking touch her. She’s my fiancé!’
‘Look, just calm down. Nothing’s–’ But he was done pretending to listen. The punch was a clumsy one, thrown with the coordination of a man unsure of where the floor is. Even in my state of inebriation, it was easy to avoid. “I wasn’t sure what had gotten into me, whether it was the alcohol or if it was just the fact that this guy was annoying and drunk himself, but I threw one back. Hit him on the nose.” He blinked, as though the alcohol was preventing him from realizing what had happened. When the blood started trickling out seconds later, he still didn’t do more than blink cross-eyed, but when the flow started to gush, he bent double and cradled his swollen features. By then, the burly friends of the bartender that sometimes acted as bouncers were pushing us apart and Melanie appeared from the direction of the bathroom and hurried over to Clark. My knuckles were throbbing.
‘Keep your hands off,’ Clark said to me once he straightened, the blood now giving him a thick, gurgling accent. ‘C’mon!’ And he grabbed Melanie’s wrist and dragged her out of the bar. “I could see it in the gorilla-ish fellows that they wanted to throw me out after him, but they only politely ushered us after we paid our tab.
“We stumbled around the block, laughing at nothing and making rude noises at the pigeons still out. Because we’re mature drunks. As we were sitting on the street corner of the small park, my phone started ringing. Melanie’s number.” Thinking she was calling to apologize, I had my plan to brush it all off all ready on my tongue. As soon as her voice came through, I was up and running, shouting and Neil and talking calmly to her every other sentence. I had no way of knowing whether Neil understood what was going on and there was nothing he could tell me to help because, of course, the jerk couldn’t talk.
Luckily the place we were going wasn’t too far away. And there was Melanie, still with her phone to her ear. She was disheveled, as though the clothes she had on had been thrown on in a hurry. It was pretty obvious even from the distance that she had been crying. Her lip quivered when we ran up to her. She looked like she wanted to be comforted, but she had wrapped her arms around her as if that was the only thing keeping her together and seemed to shrink.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘It was Clark.’ Her lower lip trembling as she fought tears. She looked devastated, like she didn’t want to think about it. ‘He. . . he was drunk. He. . .wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
Neil, the med student, was instantly beside her, trying to convey something to her through his eyes.
‘Doctor?’ I managed to splutter out to her, hoping that was what Neil was getting at.
She shook her head. ‘Please, no. Can I just go home with you tonight? I don’t want to be alone after. . .after that. Please.’
I was worried. She got in the car without a word and sat completely still once we started moving. But she seemed alright for the most part, other than being a little quiet and skittish in the backseat. So I took her home.
The other surprise was waiting for us when we got there. While helping guide a dazed Melanie, I opened the door to my apartment to find Laura lying on the floor. Neil rushed in ahead of us. I sat Melanie in the first chair I could find and ran over to help him. He ran his fingers over critical areas, signing to me in the waiting minutes to get her a glass of water. If the situation hadn’t been so serious, I would have laughed at the one-handed pantomime. Laura came around quickly, and explained in a foggy manner that she had passed out. “Neil motioned for me to take her to the hospital. To take them both. Just to be safe.”
Neil got them both back in the ER in record time. Melanie was patched up and put in a bed to be watched until a psychologist could evaluate her in the morning. Laura told the nurse everything she could remember. She had been on her way back from the bathroom, back to the couch, when everything went dark and she couldn’t remember anything until we were standing over her. They ran test after test after test, keeping us both up until dawn. Laura was pale and drawn, huge bags sagging under her eyes. For a bit there, it was almost like she was wasting away. The only thing that didn’t have that pall was her swollen stomach. We both went back with them, trading places as the night passed, meeting at the coffee pot every couple of hours to keep ourselves awake.
At her request, I stayed with Melanie when the psychologist came in around 8. After her nearly two hour evaluation was done, I went back to Laura and Neil, who had written an entire novel practically about what the doctor said. Skipping all of the medical jargon he used, even when explained it to me, I gathered that most of the tests came back saying there was virtually nothing wrong. There was a small abnormality somewhere, but after an ultrasound and a scan, they had determined it was nothing serious. They were both discharged, Laura told to rest for the next few days and Melanie was to stay with someone who could watch her.
“So they both went back with me. And it was only after they were both wrapped under blankets and sleeping that I realized that it was already after noon, and that the class I had missed that morning was one I had a test in that day.”

Laura was confined to the couch. “But really, because I’m such a gentleman, she got my bed.” I think Melanie found some measure of solace in mothering her. She called out of school and work for the week claiming to be not feeling well. I think Laura enjoyed her presence too. She stayed the whole week, sleeping on the couch that Laura had been vacated from. Suddenly surrounded by so many females in such a small space, I made up a makeshift bed in the kitchen, to give them both as much privacy as possible. “As for the test I’d missed, my professor was being kind enough to let me make it up, but I felt that the damage had already been done. The stress and long night had caused me to forget half of what I needed to know I felt like.”
At the end of the week, I tangoed around Melanie in the kitchen. She was making a lunch for her and Laura.
‘Can I talk to you about that Thursday?’ I asked her, hoping that I would get more than the awkward silence.
She pulled the ham slices with the same deliberateness as she had before I started speaking. ‘I suppose.’
I waited, hoping she would continue on her own. She moved on to slicing the cheese, still without speaking. I was at a loss for how to handle the situation – I felt like we were standing on opposite sides of the same pane of glass, even though I could nudge her with my elbow from where I was.
‘I’ve been trying to ignore it,’ she said once the pile of cheese slices was the appropriate size. ‘Pretend it didn’t happen and that everything’s fine. But I guess this isn’t something that should be ignored, huh?’
‘Probably not.’
She arranged the cheese on top of the two stacks of ham, neurotically aligning them with the edge of the bread. ‘I don’t know what happened. I’ve never seen him like that. He’s never. . .done anything like that before.’ Her voice faltered.
To give her space, I walked over to the fridge for the sweet tea.
‘I know what I need to do,’ she continued. ‘I guess I’m just scared because I’ve got in my head how it’s going to end already. And I don’t want it to. I really thought I wanted this.’ She placed the top piece of bread on each, completing the sandwiches and wrapped them in napkins. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done.’
‘Anything to repay you for calculus,’ I said. She gave me a weak smile and went back to my room where Laura was waiting. “She left that afternoon, heading back to her own place, without another word to anyone but Laura.”
The calm that came during the first couple weeks of November ended with that second week when Laura finally got back up out of bed. The day she staggered out from my bedroom to the kitchen, her phone went off where she had left it on the counter. She stood there holding it, staring at it until it went to voicemail. Only then would she tell me that it had been from her parents. The same parents that had thrown her out at the beginning of the year wanted her to come home for Thanksgiving the following week, the voicemail said when we listened to it later. “She put it on speaker.”
She agonized over it all week, sometimes forgetting to eat. I caught her cradling her stomach several times when I would get home at night, like she was trying to make up for the wrongs in the world by holding the growing baby inside. It tortured her and, by extension, me. In the end, she didn’t return the call and she decided to come with me to my family, where my mother doted on her and gave her the biggest plate of whatever she asked for.
On the way, we drove past her house. The whole three seconds my car was in front of it, her head was glued to the window, turning as the motion of the car carried her past. No one was standing outside, waiting for the wayward daughter to return. “I tried not to look, to pretend like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. For Laura’s sake.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget the date – December twelfth. I was at work when I got the call.” It was from Neil. He had started tapping Morse Code-like into the receiver to let people know it was him. Since the laryngitis had set in, it was next to never that Neil called anyone. He hung up after getting my attention and I checked my text inbox. I had one new, from Neil, and all it said was St. Lucy’s. It’s Laura.
I immediately called, but the front desk staff had no information. My boss tried to hold me, but I think the frenzied look in my eye made the effort only halfhearted. I got to the hospital in record time, only to sit with Neil in the waiting room for hours. Or what felt like hours. I’m not entirely sure. Neil had a notepad. On it, he wrote, She knocked on my door somehow. She was bleeding. It’s bad. When the doctor came out, he said pretty much the same, but in medical terms I mostly didn’t understand.
‘She’s experiencing a spontaneous abortion, more commonly known as a miscarriage. There could be any number of reasons for this; we think she might have an incompetent cervix. We’re thinking the worst has passed by this point, but there has yet to be any significant sign that would indicate the tissue has been expelled. We may still need to perform a dilation and curettage.’
I shook my head, trying to get around the thought of Laura lying in a hospital bed going through all this. ‘May I see her?’
‘Not yet,’ the doctor said, and disappeared back to do whatever doctorly duties he had.
We weren’t allowed back until the next day. Laura was pale and slept most of the time Neil and I were there. The prominent bump that had been her stomach now looked like a flat tire.
‘It’s like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn to look, there isn’t anything there. You wonder if anything was ever really there at all, or if you just imagined the whole thing,’ she told us, looking out the window. I guess in many ways it’s true. Sometimes I wonder if the last months haven’t been a really bad dream.
That was all Laura said to us.

That was a month ago. Neil started talking again only this last week, and the first thing out of his mouth to me was ‘Well, I guess we’ll never know now if that was your baby after all.’ He said it with a wink and a nudge, but I didn’t laugh. Everything’s still so fresh on my mind it’s hard to joke about it.
Melanie gave me coffee when I stopped by. She broke off her engagement and relationship with Clark. She told me this while I was once again studying books so hard my eyes were threatening to cross.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Me too,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I really thought he was the one. I thought I could make it work.’ She shook her head. I still swing by at least once a week, for the free coffee, yes.
Because of the constant in-and-out of the hospital I’ve been having to do, my grades took a hit and it’s looking like I’m not going to be graduating in the spring anymore. My teachers have all been really understanding, but there’s only so much that can be done when the stress piles up like that. I don’t blame Laura, or Melanie, or any of them because it’s not their fault.
Laura’s been in the hospital the whole time, not really because there’s any more complications. The baby’s gone. Everything cleaned up and took care of itself in the first few days. She’s in there because she wouldn’t eat. Not consistently at least. She’d lost a lot of weight – more than the doctors say is healthy for a girl her age.
“I didn’t know what to think earlier when she was finally discharged and there was some guy – you – waiting out front when I wheeled her out. She stiffened when she saw you. I’m sure you saw how her expression changed. She doesn’t know what to say to you. And I’m guessing that since you’re here talking to me, you don’t have the balls to say anything to her.
“Truthfully, I wanted you to see her. To understand what she’s been through since you left. Since everyone left her. To know how it impacted not just her, but the rest of us around her. I guess it’s me being insensitive – being a dick – but it never was about you.
“It’s us and how unprepared we were. None of us were ready for something like this. But anyway, Laura’s contacted her parents. She’s going back to them at the end of the week and is going to deal with it until the end of the school year.
“I hope it was worth it.”