Finding Center (6 page)

Zed

Last Tuesday, I didn’t think the meetings were working the way I needed them to work. Today, it’s better. I talk, about my new leg and about freedom to move comfortably, and how shaky it felt to be in pain. How that reminded me of the pain pills they had me on after the accident, the gateway to alcohol for me. Anything to numb the pain, both physical and emotional. Today, it feels good to say that pain’s a trigger for me and I hadn’t really known that until I sat down in the meeting.

It’s a long way to the surface from the bottom of the ocean.

Tonight we’re celebrating Amanda’s thirty days sober. We’re going bowling after the meeting. As we head out, I turn my phone on and am surprised to see a notification from Aly. She’s texted
and
left me a voice mail. I frown as I listen, trying not to worry. She’s not usually needy or clingy. And she knows exactly where I am tonight.

“Hey.” Her voice sounds soft and tired. Like it does when she’s cried. My heart slows down so the rest of the world can leave me and her behind. “Just wondering when you were getting home tonight. Let me know. Love you.”

Dan elbows me. “You’re still coming to bowling, right?”

“Yeah,” I elbow him back, distracted. “Calling Aly back. Give me a sec.”

The phone rings a few times before Aly picks up, her voice more sleepy than soft. That’s reassuring. “Hi.”

“Hey, Kitten,” I say, looking up into the hazy light-filled night sky. It’s finally not hot as balls out here. “I’m going bowling with a few people. I thought I told you that.”

“Probably forgot,” she says. I hear rustling, like she’s turning over on the bed. It’s only eight thirty but she hadn’t been feeling well for a few days. She stayed home today and now I feel kind of like a dick for not checking in with her earlier. “I’m sorry.”

Dan moves in front of me, turning to stop me in my tracks. He raises his eyebrows and I shrug a little. Like hell if I know what’s going on. I turn to the street as I ask her, “Everything okay?”

“It’s fine. Just wake me up when you get home, okay?”

“Sure.” The conversation feels weird and guarded to me, but she answered, and all sounds fairly normal on the other side. We say goodbye and hang up. But I think she’d tell me if she needed me to come home for something, so I have to just put it out of my mind. I shove my phone back into my pocket and say, “Alright. I’m ready to kick some ass.”

“One point five legs of cocky asshole coming right through,” Dan shouts, shoving me forward through the rest of the group walking ahead of us. We’re all laughing when we find All-Star Bowling Alley.

“What happened?” Amanda asks as she sips a Coke nervously and watches me wrestle a bowling shoe onto my prosthetic foot. It’s a workout to switch shoes. I don’t even bother with a sock. It’s not like that foot’s going to get a fungal disease from the shoe.

“Car accident,” I say, pointing just above where my mechanical knee is beneath my slacks. “A sign post went through the car door, through my knee. Everything below the knee was crushed. They tried to save it but amputated a few days after the accident. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Holy shit,” says Amanda. “Were you drunk?”

“This was pre-alcohol for me. We were hit.” I rub my forehead. It’s like all of the injuries come back to me every time I tell this story. We survived, Aly and I, but at a cost. Not just the physical injuries. I didn’t know it then, when they first told me they were going to have to amputate and that’s what I was most angry about. Now I know that was the easiest part of this whole journey. Resiliency is something I discovered, not something I was born with.

“The other person?” she asks tentatively.

“The other driver was fine. I was driving and my passenger also survived. You’ve heard me talk about Aly before, haven’t you?”

“Oh wow,” Amanda says and then slides away, staring at me with a strange expression on her face. I can’t worry about it too much. Amanda’s always been a little odd and we’ve never clicked well enough for me to dig. Besides, I remember. The thirty-day mark feels like forever.

It’s not until later when Dan pulls me aside and says that she had been a drunk driver in an accident that her curiosity makes sense. The driver who hit me and Aly hadn’t been drunk. Just distracted. He got a broken foot. Our baby died, my career ended and Aly lost her tenuous hold on sanity.

At the end of the first game, I check my phone. Dan looks over and says, “Your Aly Spidey sense is tingling.”

“Is that what you call your dick?” asks another guy, earning laughs from a couple of others.

I roll my eyes at him and turn back to Dan. “Yeah. I mean, she sounded fine.”

“Go home,” Dan advises, looking calm and knowing. “You play a shitty game of bowling anyway. It’s not like we’re losing the guy that’s bringing the game home.”

“Fuck off,” I say, but stand up. I congratulate Amanda and pack up my stuff, bundling for the long walk to the Metro. I’m halfway down the block when I decide that it’s worth the extra money. I hail a cab that takes me across town, over the bridge and to the apartment.

The TV’s on in the apartment, but it’s gone to the advertisement screen for the on-demand programs. Aly’s asleep on the couch, her face tucked onto her arms and a pillow. There are remnants of a sandwich on a plate in the kitchen, which relieves me a bit. At least she ate. It’s been a toss-up the past few days. I hate playing food police but we were about to have that discussion. I flick on the kitchen light, knowing that’ll be enough to wake her. Sure enough, she stirs while I’m washing the dish off and putting it in the drying rack.

“You’re home earlier than I thought,” she says sleepily. “Are you that bad at bowling?”

“That’s what Dan said,” I call back, pretending to be hurt. Stepping into the living room, I dry my hands and lean over the couch to kiss her. She tastes like tea. “Hi. How’re you?”

“Mmm,” she murmurs. A noncommittal noise. Hard to be surprised.

She lifts both hands and gestures shyly to me. I move around the couch to slide onto the cushions next to her. It takes a moment to arrange ourselves but then she’s snuggled up on my chest, her arms wrapped around me. It’s not that we aren’t frequently on the couch this way. It’s that she’s shaking a little, her breath rattling, even after I wrap my arms around her and hold her firmly. I don’t say anything. My Aly Spidey sense usually extends to knowing when to push her and when she needs time to gather her thoughts. Guts say she’s gathering her thoughts right now.

“You know,” she begins, her voice muffled. “That I’m on the pill. And that I switched the type of pill around six weeks ago?”

The gears in my head are slow to turn. I’m stuck in trying to figure out what happened, instead of what she’s saying. I frown. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I’m pregnant.”

I learned six years ago that my body could betray me. Losing a leg tends to do that to your psyche. You stop taking shit for granted. Your right hand can open jars? Good for you. Teach your left hand too. What happens if you lose your right hand? I lost a career—I lost something that I loved, something that kept me alive and all of my friends including Aly because I lost my leg. But I also learned to love the parts of my body that forgave me. My liver. My kidneys. My lungs. My upper body. My mind. My heart.

My heart’s never been the kind to skip around and dance. I’ve felt Aly’s pulse jump around beneath my fingertips, but mine’s always been so fucking steady and reliable. Literally and metaphorically.

But not right now.

Right now?

Heart.

Stopped.

I don’t even think it stopped the first time she told me she was pregnant. Last time, it was panic and guilt that hit me first. This time, there’s an explosion of fireworks in my chest and the only word I have for it is
joy
. I swallow the feeling down in exchange for breath.

Aly sits up a little bit, trying to read my expression in the splash of the kitchen light. I sit up after her, so our legs remain tangled, our eyes locked. She looks as tired as she is anxious, her eyes drooping and bloodshot. She’s been crying. I don’t know when she found out, but she’s been crying and waiting for me to get home, and don’t I feel like the biggest fucking loser on the planet right now.

I kiss her with an apology dying on my lips. “Pregnant.”

“Yeah,” she says, holding my hands against her cheeks. Her skin is warm and it wakes me out of my heart-stopped slumber. Her eyes remain closed. “And God, how embarrassing is it to get accidentally pregnant twice in your life. You’d think I’d have learned the first time.”

I press my forehead against hers. “Shh. Aly, shh.”

She stops babbling. I whisper, “Holy shit.”

Her laughter’s soft and pained. I say it again, a little louder, trying to secure my thoughts around it. The idea feels fragile, like I could drop it and break it. I can’t tell if Aly’s shaking or I am. The what-ifs begin to bubble up but I force them away. Aly will make enough room for anxiety and fear. I can’t afford that. “We’re having a baby.”

It’s the second time in my life I’ve said those words to Aly. I honestly thought they’d never be said again. We hadn’t talked about kids, ever. I wasn’t even sure Aly could get pregnant after her eating disorder, but that’s what we thought last time too and were surprised. Birth control had been a necessary precaution, a step toward feeling like adults making a life together.

“Saying I’m pregnant is no easier the second time than it was the first,” Aly says, her words eerily reflecting my thoughts. She lowers my hands. “I’m scared, Zed.”

I
am too
is the wrong response here. So is,
It’s going to be fine
because how the hell do I know that. I only know that I can’t say those things. Even if they’re truthful, I know better than to say it. I pull her close to me again and we wrap our arms around each other. “I know.”

“Are you happy?” she whispers into my neck.

“Incredibly, joyfully, absurdly ecstatic,” I whisper back. “Of course I’m happy, Aly.”

She won’t be able to dance.
Fuck
,
Aly not dancing.
Where are we going to live?
No.
Wait.
Not yet.

Then Aly’s phone goes off, the soft words of an unfamiliar ringtone filling the space. She sighs and untangles herself, leaning over to the table. She answers the phone, one hand still on my chest. “Hi, Dr. Ham.”

I lean forward a little at the mention of Aly’s therapist. She listens for a minute and then her eyes flicker up to mine. “He’s home. He got home a few minutes ago. Yes, I told him. We’re okay.”

Ham must be saying something because Aly looks at her hand on my chest, smiles, and then laughs a little. “I’ll keep that in mind. Okay. Thank you.”

She hangs up and I pull her back against me. Her hands are warm and small, her hair brushes against my face, and she is everywhere. “I know your brain is working a million miles a minute.”

She smiles into my neck, her fingers curling behind my ear. “That easy to tell?”

“But tonight?” I whisper against her forehead. “Forget everything else. Just be happy.”

Her breath draws her closer to my body, but nothing like the way she lets it out, sinking into every curve and slope of my own body. “I am happy. I
am
.”

Aly

I lost my first pregnancy. I barely knew I was pregnant when trauma ripped that tiny heartbeat from my body. No one other than Zed had known I was pregnant until the accident, and without him, there was no one with whom I could share my grief. My mother, who endured multiple miscarriages before adopting me, tried, and I know that she understood better than most.

But I still had to go home to my apartment after the accident and clean up all of the books I’d bought about pregnancy. The first time I opened my laptop after the hospital, the browser popped open to a website where I had just registered to track the baby’s development. For weeks, I’d get an email that said,
Congratulations! Your baby is this many weeks old! Today your baby developed these body parts.

But it was a lie. My baby was dead. And my baby was so small, there was nothing to bury. Nothing to hold. Nothing to name. Someone told me it’d be easier that way, the same way that someone else told me that it must be easier knowing that I hadn’t done anything wrong, that I could just blame the car accident.

Maybe that’s how blame works but it is certainly not how guilt works. The night after I tell Zed, I wake up with a jerk. For a moment, I think I’m back in Philadelphia, in my tiny apartment in a small bed facing the window. For a moment, my body pounds with the deep muscle aches that lingered for months after the accident. I take another breath and the memory of pain fades.

I wait for the nausea but my stomach’s steady and sure. I swing somewhere between the past and present.

I roll over toward Zed and the sound of fingers tapping away on keys. He’s upright in bed, legs stretched out in front of him, laptop on his thighs. The blue of the screen reflects back in his eyes and his mouth’s set in a small frown. His left leg ends just above the knee. We’re here, in the present.

He glances over and closes the laptop. “Hey. Good morning.”

“You’re up early,” I say softly, sliding my fingers over the sheets to his bare hip. “What’s up?”

“Reading. Researching,” he admits, catching my hand and pulling it up to his mouth. He kisses each of my fingertips. “It’s been a while since I read about pregnancy.”

I stiffen, pulling my hand away. “Don’t do that.”

He blinks at me. “What?”

I roll away from him and out of bed, crossing the room toward the bathroom. My heart pounds and my hands shake and behind me, Zed curses softly as he tries to catch up to me. But I’m faster than him, especially since he doesn’t have his prosthetic on, so I shut and lock the bathroom door behind me. I dig through the bag underneath the sink and pull out one of the pregnancy tests I bought yesterday.

Zed knocks on the door. “Aly. You have to let me in.” There’s a pause before he adds, “Literally and figuratively. Aly.”

“No,” I whisper, my hands shaking as I pee on the stick. I set it on the counter and stare at it, hands in my hair, digging into my scalp until the pain’s all I can feel. I don’t feel nauseous. I don’t feel nauseous and he was on the websites and I shouldn’t have told him because—

“Kitten,” Zed says, and something bumps against the door. His head, maybe. “This doesn’t work if you’re shutting me out. What’d I say? What happened?”

“Be quiet,” I snap. I rock onto the balls of my feet. For what feels like minutes but I know is only a few more heartbeats, the bathroom and the apartment are utterly silent. Zed’s not moving or speaking, and I’m just tearing at my hair and standing on my toes, waiting for confirmation that my nightmare hasn’t come true.

The second line shows up on the test. I sink to the floor, pressing my forehead into my knees. The tears come, unwelcome, and the harder I try to stop them, the worst the sobs become. On the other side of the door, Zed knocks, slowly.

“Aly.” His voice is hoarse.

I reach up and unlock the door, then curl up in a ball on the floor. Zed opens the door cautiously. It brushes against my thigh and I turn toward the toilet. He sucks in a breath, and then exhales it as he reaches over me and picks up the pregnancy test. I bury my head against my legs, sobbing, my breath heaving in and out of my body. Zed sits down in front of me, his leg stretched out next to me.

“I’m not an expert on reading these things, but it’s positive, Kitten,” he says, his voice hesitant and confused. “So—I just am not really sure why you’re crying.”

“I thought I lost it,” I manage to say between tears. “No morning sickness and you—you.”

“Jesus, Aly,” Zed croaks and shuts the door, scooting across the floor to pull me into his lap. He wraps his arms around me, warm and steady and sturdy, and I burrow against his chest, breathing him in. He takes my hand and runs my palm down his scratchy cheek. He keeps his face scruffy to cover scars but I know where all of them are. I’ve kissed them a hundred times.

We sit there on the floor until I stop crying and Zed pulls away from me a bit. His eyes are red-rimmed but calm. He brushes my hair out of my face clumsily. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper and then turn away from him. “God, my face is all splotchy now, I can feel it.”

“Oh, stop it,” Zed mutters, kissing my shoulder.

I lean back against him and he wraps his arms back around me. “You can’t go on those websites. It’s bad luck.”

“Aly,” he whispers against my skin. “I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. But a website won’t make you lose the baby.”

“It’s tempting fate.”

“Be less Russian for ten seconds.”

“I’m not being Russian. I’m telling you that—”

“I know. I hear you. But it’s just a website. And you’re still pregnant.” He pulls my hands off my face. His hands, large and warm and familiar. I unfold his fingers from his palm and trace the lines of his hands, up every knuckle and to every nail. He keeps them short to play the piano. He always has. He jostles me a bit with his left leg. “Are you going in today or are you staying home?”

“Going in,” I murmur. “Madison will gloat if I miss two days.”

“You should tell Jonathan,” Zed says.

“I’m not telling anyone until I’m through the first trimester,” I say immediately, looking up. “And neither are you. Did you tell anyone?”

“No,” Zed says, looking frustrated.

“I didn’t want to tell you right away,” I admit. “Ham said I had to.”

Zed thumps his head against the wall. “I don’t want to fight but can I send Ham a fruit basket?”

“He’s allergic to strawberries,” I deadpan in return.

The corner of Zed’s mouth twitches. “I’ll leave them out.”

“I’m not trying to fight,” I whisper. “I just don’t know how to stop my brain when it spirals like that.”

“I know,” Zed says simply. He touches my earrings. “But we’re better at this together.”

“There will be bad days,” I whisper. “What if the bad days are too bad?”

“There were bad days before this,” he says simply, playing with a long strand of hair behind my ear. “And we’ll handle any bad days to come. I promise. That’s what we do, Aly. We’re pretty good at weathering storms.”

I close my eyes and revel in his touch. He’s right. We’re better together. We’ve weathered enough storms to know how to hold on to each other. And inside of me, deep down in me, is something we created together. It’s only right that we protect it together. I nod against his chest. We stay there until the last of our alarms goes off and we can’t delay any longer.