“The smart ones,” Ginny teased.
“Yeah, yeah. I can take you home, let you sit in the dark eating cold cereal.”
But Ginny knew Peg wouldn’t do anything like that, even if they’d been closer to Ginny’s house and it would’ve made sense for Peg to turn around. As it was, by the time they got into Peg’s driveway, the wind had kicked up further and the snow had become so thick it turned the afternoon to dusk. Peg pulled into the garage and shook her head.
“I hope we don’t lose electricity.”
Ginny made a face. “You’d better not. The only reason I came with you was for the food and the warmth.”
“And the entertainment,” Peg pointed out. “C’mon. Let’s get inside.”
It hadn’t been as long Peg seemed to think, but it had been long enough that nostalgia crept over Ginny as she sat at her sister’s kitchen table with a mug of Peg’s homemade cocoa in front of her, along with a plate of shortbread. Instead of watching movies, they played cards and laughed about old stories. They filled themselves with cocoa and cookies, and Peg never did get around to making the goulash, which was okay since every time Ginny called Sean’s number she got a message saying his number was unavailable.
She called her house four or five times as the afternoon wore on, becoming night, but each time the phone rang and rang without the answering machine picking up. That meant the power was off. The sixth time, she was able to leave a message for Sean, saying she was on her way home and would be there soon.
“The power’s back on. Can you give me a ride home?”
Peg looked at the clock. “You’re not staying for dinner?”
“Couldn’t get ahold of Sean,” Ginny said, already gathering her coat. Her back ached from sitting in the hard kitchen chair, but she wasn’t going to tell her sister that. “He should be almost home by now. At least the lights will be on for him.”
* * * * *
All the lights were on, blazing forth from every window, when Ginny got home. She waved as Peg backed out of the driveway. The snow had tapered off drastically an hour or so before stopping, so the roads were passable.
Humming, pleased with the afternoon despite how it had begun, Ginny let herself in the front door. Sean, who seemed to come from nowhere, his face a strained mask and his hair askew, swooped down on her immediately.
“Where the hell were you?”
Taken aback, Ginny shrugged out of her coat and hung it on the coatrack by the front door before looking at him. “I was with Peg. I left you a message.”
“I didn’t get any messages!”
“I tried your phone,” she said patiently, biting back her own instant anger that had been jerked upright by his tone. “I kept getting an error message. But I left one on the answering machine.”
She saw at once by his expression that he hadn’t even checked, but before she could point that out or make an explanation, he’d launched into her again.
“God dammit, Ginny! You pissed and moaned about me going in to work today because you said the roads were too bad, then I come home to find you gone, every freaking light in the house on…your car still in the driveway. What the hell was I supposed to think? You couldn’t leave me a goddamned note?”
Oh, how tempted she was to snap back at him, to curl her lip. Instead, she pushed past him and down the hall to the kitchen, keeping her pace steady. Not running, not giving him that effort. In the kitchen, she looked at the answering machine, blinking merrily with one message. Hers, it had to be.
She turned as he came in after her. “I did leave you a message. It’s not my fault you didn’t listen to it. And I told you, your cell phone—”
“There’s nothing wrong with my fucking phone.”
Ginny blinked, slowly. She took a step back from him. “Are you calling me a liar?”
His shoulders heaved and his fists clenched, lightly, but clenched just the same. He said nothing. Her gut twisted. Her heart became stone. She had a thousand words to say to him, perhaps many more than that, but she bit them all back, chewed and swallowed them. Ginny shoved them deep inside her to join everything else she’d pushed down.
Sean scowled. “I came home and you were gone. All the lights were on, and you weren’t here. No note, nothing.”
Her chin lifted, just a little. “So…what? You thought I just ran off and left you? With all the lights on? Without my car?”
“Someone could have come for you.”
“Someone did come for me,” she told him. “My sister.”
Sean shook his head, just barely.
Ginny sighed and shifted to ease the ache in her back. Her belly rippled with Braxton Hicks and the baby’s kicking. She winced as she tucked her hands beneath it, wishing she could lift it in a sling and somehow relieve at least some of the weight.
She pointed at the blinking answering machine. She sounded weary, because that was how she felt. “I left you a message. I’m sorry you were worried.”
“I thought you’d gone off with him.”
She’d had a hard-enough time catching her breath lately, but at this every molecule of oxygen left her. She sagged, fingers clutching at the countertop. Her tongue had gone thick, her lips numb. “Oh, Sean. No.”
“I thought, well, this is it. She’s gone. She finally did it. But the least…” his voice broke, and she saw with growing alarm that her stoic husband was close to tears, “…the least she could fucking do is leave a note!”
“I went to Peg’s, that’s it!” Her own voice rose, razor-edged with hysteria. “I didn’t go off anywhere. I wouldn’t. Sean, I—”
He turned from her when she tried to touch him, and Ginny let her hand fall to her side. She had no right to force him to let her soothe him. She had no right to anything, really, and she would take none.
“Just tell me something, because it’s been driving me crazy thinking about it.”
She swallowed hard, prepared to give him all the details, the few there were. “What?”
Sean scraped at his eyes with the fingertips of one hand, the other’s fingers tucked into his belt loop on his hip like he was afraid what it would do if he didn’t keep it tethered. “Did you love him?”
It wasn’t the question she’d expected, but as soon as he asked, she knew she’d been foolish to think he’d ask anything else. “No.”
He looked at her, his expression horridly naked. “Then why?”
“Because you wouldn’t touch me,” she told him simply. She spread her fingers and gave a half shrug, her words the truth, with nothing to redeem them but that. “You stopped hugging me, kissing me, touching me. You stopped all of it, Sean. It was like living with my brother…no, worse than that, because I’ve never doubted, even when he was being mean to me, that my brother loved me. And for a long time, with you, I wasn’t sure.”
“I never stopped loving you,” he said hoarsely.
She hated the sound of tears in his voice. She hated that she’d done this, broken him somehow. Tearing off the scab was supposed to help an infected wound leak its poison, but this…she’d never wanted this.
“I wanted my husband there for me. I needed you. And you just…went away.” She wanted to touch him, but mindful of his last reaction, kept her hands at her sides. “I know you were grieving. But you wouldn’t talk to me.”
“I was. I couldn’t bear it, how much you’d gone through. How I almost lost you too.” He shook his head and began to pace. “Seeing you in the hospital, knowing I’d done it to you…”
“You didn’t do anything to me.” She wanted to empathize with him, or at the very least find an edge of sympathy for his agony, but all she heard was him burdening himself with what had been her pain. Making what happened to her, somehow…his, not even theirs. But just his.
Typical, she thought. Turning the loss of their baby somehow, into his private torture. That h
e’d somehow been responsible, or that he could’ve done anything differently. It was typical of his need to fix things, regardless of what had broken them or how much worse his efforts at tinkering made them.
“I got pregnant. We both wanted kids. Something was wrong. We lost the baby.” She took a deep breath, hating that she had to be the one, once again, to walk him through this. “It happens to a lot of people. We’re far from the only ones. And it was a blessing, I think, because we weren’t prepared to have a child with special needs, or even to lose a child after it was born.”
He shuddered, still pacing. Every so often his hand crept up to tug through his hair. “I couldn’t stand to think about it happening again.”
“So…you just stopped…” she shook her head, trying to piece this together, to make sense of it, “…you stopped touching me.”
“I had to.”
“Despite what the nuns might’ve told you in the third grade, Sean, hugging doesn’t lead to pregnancy.”
He stopped his pacing, thank God. He looked at her. “You just…you were at me. All the time.”
This was not how she remembered it, not at all. Ginny remembered needing to hold him and be held. To grieve together. And later, when her body had healed enough for it, to make love to him again and find that closeness that had always been so much a part of their marriage.
“I was at you?” She tried hard to think on it, to recall if she’d been some sort of vamping siren, skimping around in lingerie or accosting him in dark corners. “You think wanting to have sex with my husband is…what…wrong? Weird? Abnormal?”
“You were at me about having another baby.”
With the counter behind her, Ginny couldn’t move backwards. Her fingers slipped and gripped on the laminate. One nail bent and broke. Wincing, she held it in front of her to watch a small bead of blood form beneath the nail she pulled off and tossed into the sink drain. She sucked at the blood, and it was only half as bitter as all the things she wanted to say.
“And I couldn’t do it,” Sean said. “I just…couldn’t.”
Again, Ginny racked her brain to think if she’d been the one pushing for another child. All she could think of was telling him, at the time, it would all be okay. They could try again. They could always try again. She remembered saying it from the hospital bed. She remembered saying it in the shower with the hot water pounding over her aching body as the blood leaked down her legs and into the drain. She’d said it to comfort him.
“I thought you wanted a baby,” she told him and reeled with the idea that all this time she’d been trying for something he didn’t even want.
“Not enough to risk losing you.”
She’d been wrong to think Sean had never feared losing anyone, she saw that now. But, try as she might, she couldn’t make herself sympathize with his choices.
He started pacing again.
This time, she reached out and grabbed his sleeve, hard enough to stop him. “Stand still. Look at me.”
She waited until he did, his gaze naked and horrid and hard to face, but she forced herself to do it. “I am fine. This baby is fine. Nothing is going to happen to this baby, or to me. You’re not going to lose me.”
His sharp bark of laughter surprised her enough to let go of his sleeve. Her husband’s mouth twisted—not quite a smile, not quite a sneer. He closed his eyes for a long couple of seconds, and when he looked at her again, his gaze was flat and hard and assessing.
“I already did.” He gestured at her belly. His shoulders sagged. He let himself sink into one of the kitchen chairs and buried his face in his hands, squeezing his head like a man in the grip of a migraine. “Didn’t I?”
She sat across from him and took his hands, forcing him to let her hold them. She squeezed his fingers. He didn’t look at her, but that made it easier and she was grateful for that.
“No. Never.” There’d been times when Ginny was uncertain of what would happen and where her path would lead, but of this she had never been unsure. “You did not lose me.”
He looked up at her. “I didn’t want to watch you go through that again, and I was right, wasn’t I?”
Disturbed, she squeezed his fingers again. “No. You’ll feel differently when the baby comes. You’ll see, it will be all right, and we’ll be okay—”
“I don’t know if I can,” he said quietly.
Her heart started breaking. “You don’t know if you can what?”
“Love it. Be a father to it. I figured I’d try, you know? I’d do my best. But I’m not sure I can.”
“Oh, Sean. Of course you can. You’ll love this baby. Lots of people are scared about becoming parents, but…you’ll see. You’ll be an amazing father.”
“But I won’t,” he told her steadily, “be the father.”
“Of course you—” He wasn’t talking about being afraid. Being incompetent. “What? Oh— What the hell?”
She snatched her hands from his. It would’ve been her turn to pace, if she’d been able to push herself away from the table, to get her bulk moving quickly enough. Instead, she sat, trapped by her inertia.
“I wondered if you were going to tell him,” he continued conversationally, like they were discussing the day’s mail. “But he didn’t seem to know. I saw him look at you at the Christmas party when they came in. He was surprised. Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Because it was none of his business,” Ginny snapped. Her heart raced. Her stomach churned. She thought she might vomit or pass out; her hands trembled. “Sean, you are the father of this baby.”
He shook his head, pushing away from the table, and she grabbed for him, snagged his sleeve but couldn’t keep him there. He jerked from her touch and stood so fast the chair tipped over behind him. She jumped at the crash and put her hands on her ears for a moment. She closed her eyes.
“You are the father of this baby,” she told him, not wanting to see him not believing her. “I swear to you.”
“I can’t be.”
“You are!” Ginny shouted, glaring at him.
They stared at each other. She shuddered. He backed up to the doorway as though he meant to flee, but stayed.
“I can’t be,” he said again. “I had a vasectomy.”
Ginny tried to draw a breath and could find nothing but dust in her throat and lungs. She choked on it, gasping. This was…this was…
She became aware of him shaking her. Her head lolled. Sean cradled her, slapping lightly at her cheeks until she shoved him away from her. She struggled to her feet, facing off with him.
“What in the actual fuck do you mean, you had a vasectomy?”
He looked as she imagined she had when confronted with the acknowledgment of her infidelity. Guilty and somehow defiant too. The world tipped, but she refused to slide with it.
“I couldn’t take the chance of getting you pregnant again. I couldn’t.” His tone had turned pleading, and he held out his hands to her.
She refused to take them. “I can’t believe you’d do something like that without even telling me!”
“I knew you’d say no.”
She spit to the side, her disgust so thick it was like some living thing she needed to eject. “You should have told me. We should have talked about it. We could’ve talked about lots of things!”
“I knew you wanted a baby—”
“No!” The word slashed at her throat. “You wanted to fix the situation, Sean, the way you always do. You wanted to fix it so you didn’t have to worry about me getting pregnant, so you didn’t have to worry about anything. It was all about you, like it always is!”
“That’s not true!”
She shook her head and made a shoving gesture with her hands, though she was nowhere near him. “When? When did you do it?”
“The weekend you were gone to the art show.”
“In P
hilly.” She laughed dully. “Oh Christ, Sean. Jesus Christ.”
“I know you were with him. And it was almost eight months ago. You do the math.”
“You don’t know shit,” she told him flatly, her rage undiminished, but finding herself incapable of raising her voice. “And you do the math, you son of a bitch. I came home from Philly and we made love. Remember? After we went to that Italian place. You couldn’t even wait until we got upstairs. We did it in the living room. Remember that?”
The sex had been some of the best they’d ever had, and, now, even the memory of that pleasure was destined to become pain. Ginny pressed her hand to her breast, pushing on her heart, willing it not to burst. She swallowed around the lump in her throat.
Without looking at him, she shook her head. “You know it takes a few weeks after a vasectomy to be completely sterile, right? They did tell you that, didn’t they?”
He didn’t answer at first, and when she forced herself to look at him, she saw another combination of guilt and defiance.
“Did you even read the paperwork or pay any sort of attention, Sean? Did you? No,” she said before he could, “because you never do. You never pay any fucking attention!”
“I went back a week later, like they said. I was all good.”
“Yeah, well, we fucked before that, didn’t we?” She straightened. “This is your baby, and you want to know how I’m so sure?”
He said nothing.
“I didn’t fuck Jason in Philadelphia, that’s how I know. In fact,” she added as though it were a casual admission, when it was anything but, “I never slept with him. Not once. I never even kissed him, so how’s that for being absolutely sure he’s not the one who knocked me up?”
Sean blinked. She held up a hand to stop him from speaking. His mouth opened, then closed.
“I did not have sex with him. Never. But I did have sex with you and, vasectomy or not, you are the one who fathered this child. So I would suggest you pull up your big-boy pants and start dealing with it. Because this is…this is how it is,” she gasped, breaking down at last. “This is how it fucking is!”