I watch the second hand of the clock hanging from Monique’s wall tick around second-by-second as I wait for her to bring the coffee and sandwiches. They say that anticipation of death is worse than death itself. Based on yesterday’s experience, I tend to agree with that notion. The wait is enough to drive any sane man out of his mind.
Tick, tick, tick.
Monique and I haven’t spoken a word about the pregnancy since I had arrived a little over ten minutes ago. She merely marched me to her room and asked me to wait while she fixed us something to eat and drink. I hear Monique’s mother yelling in the kitchen while I watch the second hand on the clock go around ten more times and I can only sit and wonder why I didn’t just pull the trigger again and again as many times as was required to get this over and done with.
‘I’m sorry you had to hear that,’ Monique says as she enters the room with a tray in her hands. ‘She can be such a cow sometimes.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say with a quiver in my voice. ‘There’s very little that you can tell me about delinquent parents.’
She shoots me a look but doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. I can be such an idiot sometimes. After she puts the tray down, she takes a plate with sandwiches and one of the coffee mugs and hands them both to me. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘I hope it’s okay.’
I take it from her and nod.
Monique turns on the stereo and in the background Kurt Cobain strings his lyrics like a wounded guitar. The irony is killing me. ‘So did you tell them yet?’ she asks and bites into her sandwich.
I don’t have to. I already know what my father would say. If you can stick it in, you can stick it out; see it through to the end. He always had a way with words. My well-meaning mother would cry about her little baby boy that messed up his life and her ideal dreams of what was supposed to be his perfect future. She always wanted me to become a dentist (own practice, big house, submissive wife, and 2.4 children), and soon enough had convinced herself that this had been my dream too. I look at my sandwich: ham, cheese, and tomato. Although it looks flaccid, it tastes quite refreshing. In fact, it’s the best damn sandwich I’ve had in years. ‘Didn’t have time yet,’ I say and sink my teeth back into the soft bread.
‘It’s been over a week,’ she reminds me.
‘I-did-not-have-time-yet, okay?’
She doesn’t respond, but merely takes another bite and washes it down with a gulp of coffee.
‘Did you tell your mother yet?’ I ask.
She shakes her head. ‘Didn’t have time yet,’ she says flippantly. ‘Wanted to tell her today, but she’s been moody and crying all morning. I don’t think right now is the best time to tell her.’
‘What’s she upset about?’
Monique shrugs.
I allow a moment of silence while I formulate the next part of our conversation in my mind. ‘So what are we gonna do?’ I ask. I’ve already made up my mind that the abortion route might just be the best way to go. Since no one else knows about the pregnancy yet, it appears to be the perfect solution to the problem. Afterward, Monique and I can shake hands and each go our separate ways. Still, I ask her because I want to see how she thinks; what options she’s considered and down which roads she simply would not tread.
‘I don’t know,’ she says and a sob escapes from her mouth. A single tear trickles down her cheek and my stomach twists into a knot. ‘I don’t . . .’
I take her in my arms and hold her for a moment. ‘It’s gonna be okay,’ I say while gently rubbing my hand down the back of her head. ‘It’s gonna be fine.’
More sobs flow from her mouth and with it come the waterworks, the streams of tears that slide down the side of my neck and leave a wet patch on my shoulder. When she’s done crying she looks up at me expectantly, as if I’m the one with the answer to all of this; as if a mere snap of my fingers would undo all our problems. It makes me sick to think that I couldn’t even successfully kill myself, let alone make all our problems disappear. I suck at everything, even suicide.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asks my question right back at me.
This is it. Ground zero. Speak up now or forever hold your peace. I don’t want to mention the abortion outright, so I lay it on gently. ‘We have a few options,’ I lie. In my mind there’s one option. Now I only need to get her to see it that way and we’ll be fine.
She sits upright, suddenly, like a dog that just heard someone snooping around outside. ‘Really?’ she asks and washes the question down with some more coffee. ‘Like what?’
‘Well,’ I begin. There’s no turning back now. I take a sip of my own coffee to delay the inevitable, if only by another second or two. ‘We could drop out of school, get married, have kids, and let that be that. We could make the most of a bad situation.’ I figured I’d begin with the most obvious option first and get it out of the way. We’ll work our way down the list and then play pin-the-tail to see which one we’ll be going with.
She frowns and waves the suggestion off like an annoying mosquito. ‘What else?’ she asks.
‘You could carry the baby full term and we can have someone adopt it.’
Less of a frown this time, but still not entirely what she wants to hear.
‘There is one other option,’ I say and re-position myself on her bed. Ground zero. Might as well go for gold. ‘We could always terminate the . . . the . . . we could have an abortion or something . . .’
She looks at me as if I had physically struck her with a fist, although in her eyes I can see what appears to be a glimmer of hope; the realization that there might be light at the end of this tunnel after all. Who knows? I wonder if we will look back at this situation twenty years from now and laugh about it; about how simplistic the seemingly overwhelming problems we now face would look years down the line. They say that hindsight is 20/20. One always looks at past mistakes with crystal clear clarity. I guess I will have to wait and see about that. ‘Are you serious?’ she asks. All of a sudden that glimmer; that sparkle that I interpreted as hope is gone and in its place is a dark and cold gaze that makes my blood turn to ice. It’s hard to determine what answer she’s looking for by just the sound of her voice, but that freezing stare removes all doubt.
‘It’s just an option,’ I say with a coarse croak in my voice. I hate sounding so pathetic to myself. Be a man, damnit! ‘Look, I just want what’s best for everyone; for you, me, and our parents.’
‘And the baby?’ she asks and I instinctively know that I’ve crossed the line; that invisible unspoken barrier that people lay down at the beginning of each conversation. ‘How is having an abortion the best choice for everyone if the baby ends up dead?’
‘I . . . I was just . . .’
‘It’s my baby and my responsibility,’ she says and the implied singularity is not lost on me. ‘If taking the baby’s life is an option, then I would have to take my own as well.’
If she only knew about last night, she would not be making that statement so boldly. I guess she has a point though. We would have to see this thing through to the end; like it or not. We screwed up, and now we’ll have to live with the consequences. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It was stupid to mention it. And it wasn’t even my idea to begin with.’
She looks up and studies me with an intense silence for a long time.
&nbs
p; Tick, tick, tick.
‘You told someone?’ she finally asks in a hiss-like whisper. ‘You actually went behind my back and told someone?’
I shake my head. She’s making this sound worse than it actually is. This entire discussion played off differently in my mind. It was a lot better; way more simplistic. ‘You know very well that Andrew and I share everything,’ I say in my defense. ‘If you can’t turn to your best friend in your hour of need, who can you turn to?’
‘Wait,’ she says and puts down her mug. ‘Who did you speak to?’
‘Andrew.’
‘Andrew Sanders?’
‘Yes.’
She frowns and looks confused with a hint of irritation in her facial features. ‘Where?’
‘At school.’
Geez lady. What’s with all the questions?
‘That’s impossible,’ she says.
‘Why?’
She looks at me like a mother would look at her child that scraped a knee and takes my hand in her own. I wonder if that’s her maternal instincts kicking in. ‘Because he’s been dead for almost two years,’ she says. ‘You know that.’
‘What . . .?’
‘The car accident,’ she reminds me. ‘He was killed. His father lived. Don’t you remember?’
The image of the car pinned under the sixteen wheeler flashes through my mind. This headache is killing me.
‘His father never got over it. He blamed himself and took his own life only weeks later.’ The tone of her voice is sincere, as if trying to guide me through memories that I’ve blocked out. ‘Do you remember? He shot himself.’
.44 hollow points. I remember! He shot himself because he believed that he was responsible for Andrew’s death. Then it hits me and I rip my hand out of hers.
‘It’s okay,’ she says in that motherly tone and reaches out to touch my cheek. It’s then that I see the marks on her wrists. She went down the road; two grooves sliced in parallel on each wrist. She probably bled out in minutes. My mouth burns and my hand instinctively reach for the wet spot at the back of my head. When I hold it up to my face, I look at my blood-soaked palm in bewilderment. ‘It’ll be fine.’
I can hear Monique’s mother wailing in the kitchen.
She’s been moody and crying all morning.
‘What the . . .?’ I ask. The words escape my mouth in small puffs of smoke. The pungent stench of Sulphur stings my nose. It’s only then that the realization finally sets in. The gun did go off last night. The bullet did come out. I’ve made my bed and now I’m about to sleep in it. My dad’s going to be so pissed at me! In the distance I hear his voice one last time as the proverbial white light engulfs me.
- - - * * * - - -
‘Turn it off,’ Edward Livingstone said. ‘Let us sign the forms and then switch it off.’
‘No,’ Cathy pleaded and tightened her grip on her son’s hospital gown. ‘Can’t we just give it another day?’ she wailed. ‘Just one more . . .’
Edward shook his head. ‘You heard what the doctor said, Cath. There’s no way that he will ever come out of this thing, and even if he does, he will have permanent brain damage. He’ll be a in a vegetative state for the rest of his life. Is that what you want?’ he asked. ‘And we’re not even talking about the medical expenses. We will be bankrupt soon enough and to top it off, he will probably never realize who we are.’
‘But at least he would be alive,’ she said, barely audible over her sobs.
‘To do what, Catherin? For your own convenience? He will never be able to walk again; never be able to talk; to play with his friends; to eat food without the use of an IV tube. Is that any way to live? Is that how you would want to live?’
Cathy didn’t answer. She merely wrapped her arms around her son and sobbed into his pillow, her face next to his. ‘I can’t lose him, Edward. I can’t . . .’
Edward took her in his arms and pulled her tightly against him. ‘It’s okay,’ he whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ He had to be strong where she couldn’t be. He had to be her rock now. Someone had to make a decision about their son’s fate and he wanted the responsibility to fall on him rather than his wife. He wouldn’t want the burden to rest on her shoulders. He would allow them to pull the plug and live with that knowledge for the rest of his life. That was the responsibility of a father; the life-long consequence in exchange for a moment of adolescent passion. He will deal with it. He made his bed, and now he’ll sleep in it.
* * * The End * * *
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