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CHAPTER FIVE
VIVIAN WAS SHIFTING, trying to get comfortable in the waiting room chair and filling out yet another form with her medical history, when Karl came in.
“Hi,” she said, surprised. She’d told him the time and date of her first doctor’s appointment, and he’d said he’d come, but she’d expected some work emergency to conveniently detain him. Despite his touch of her knee on the way home from his mother’s and his promise they would be friends, he’d been the same distant man of the previous week. And he still seemed to work all the time. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I’m sorry. Scheduling my own doctor’s appointment made me late.” He put a heavy hand on her head, smoothing down her hair before giving her neck a reassuring squeeze and sitting down. No, she wasn’t being honest with herself. He hadn’t been quite the same man. Instead of going straight to work after the gym, he’d come home and eaten breakfast with her yesterday and today. They’d talked about how her job search was going, and she’d reminded him of today’s appointment.
And yesterday, instead of getting home from work after she’d gone to bed, he’d come home and taken her out to dinner. As she’d taken a bite of her stuffed mushrooms and peered at the pictures on the wall of the steakhouse that seemed to be a Chicago institution, Karl had turned into a different man.
No fewer than ten people, not including the gruff waitstaff, came to their table to say hello. Each time, he introduced her as his wife, accepted their congratulations, ignored their looks of surprise with ease and asked about their families. She’d started to wonder if the taciturn man she shared an apartment with had fallen into the twilight zone and been replaced by a politician. Then she’d noticed his glad-handing didn’t extend to his eyes. He smiled, but the twinkle wasn’t there. Her husband played Mr. Important out in public, but he didn’t enjoy it.
The man next to her in the waiting room, silent, steady and present, was the natural Karl.
“What are all the forms for?”
“Everything.” She handed the clipboard to him, embarrassed to be sharing her complete medical history with a man she barely knew. But he was going to learn more about her as soon as they got into the doctor’s office so why hide it now? Jelly Bean was his baby, too. “Family medical history. Vitamins I take. Past illnesses. My doctor in Vegas hasn’t sent over all my records yet, but I think they’d make me fill everything out, anyway.”
“You missed information here.”
She looked at the space he was pointing to. “I don’t remember how old I was when I had my first period.”
Karl’s head jerked and he started to blush. “I guess, I didn’t, I mean...”
This time she put the supportive hand on his knee. “It’s okay. We have one night of sex and now my menstrual cycle has become important to both of us.” She chuckled because her other option was to cry. “When we leave this office, I probably won’t have any secrets left.”
“Why’d you come to me instead of finding your father?”
Of course, she couldn’t blame him for asking the question—she’d practically invited it—but still Vivian tried to pull her hand off his knee. He stopped her, placing his hand on top of hers and keeping it there. She could feel his touch all the way down to her toes.
“I thought I should tell you about the child in person,” she said. It was the same stupid reason she always gave him.
“So, still some secrets.” Someday, she knew, he wasn’t going to let it slide.
“Yes.” And she would keep those secrets as long as she could. He needed to know about her health and her body because the child growing inside her was his as well as hers. He didn’t need to know how she’d waited until the last minute to decide not to sell her integrity, and how the fates had punished her anyway.
“You said you wanted me here. I can go back to my office if you need the privacy.”
“No. We’re a team on this—” if on nothing else “—and I’d like a friend.”
* * *
IN THE SMALL exam room, Karl turned his back to give Vivian privacy while she changed into the hospital gown. He cracked the door once she had changed, then took a seat in a chair while she sat on the examination table, swinging her feet in the air. The false intimacy of the exam room, combined with the very real consequences of their night of sexual intimacy, made for an awkward situation.
“Oh, the father is here,” the doctor said as she walked into the room. “This is a pleasant surprise.”
Karl had felt discomfited enough as the only man in the waiting room without the doctor commenting on his presence in that chipper voice people use to inform their dogs a walk is coming. But the woman didn’t seem to notice his discomfort—or she didn’t care—and the visit wasn’t about him, anyway.
“Considering how many times I hear people say ‘we’re pregnant,’ I almost never see the father.” His head jerked up when the doctor sat and patted them both on the knees. She looked old enough to be his grandmother, but he hadn’t expected her to treat them like children. “Good.” Pat. “This should be a partnership.” Pat. “And I expect this means both of you will be abstaining from coffee, alcohol, soft cheese and lunch meats.” Pat. “It’s not fair for the mother to bear those burdens alone.”
He knew about the coffee and alcohol. He hadn’t known about the cheese. How much feta had been in the Middle Eastern food he’d brought home? Had Vivian picked it out? Had she eaten it? Was it even a soft cheese? Karl glanced at her and she lifted her eyebrows in what he expected was supposed to be reassurance, but he still felt as if he was swimming through a bizarre dream the consistency of gelatin and the color of black coffee—with grounds trapped beside him in the jelly.
“So.” The doctor clapped her hands. “I imagine you have lots of questions...”
How had offering a drink to an attractive woman at a hotel bar in Las Vegas led to him sitting in an exam room with a stranger in a hospital gown?
“...let me tell you what’s going to happen at this exam, and you can ask all the questions you want when we’re done.”
Now was probably not the best time to ask that question—or to ask when he was going to wake up. Although, he cocked his head to the side and caught sight of Vivian’s pink toenails as they swayed in and out of his vision, the dream didn’t really seem terrible. Still bizarre, but not definitively bad.
“The last thing we’ll do is an internal ultrasound. It’s early yet, so you won’t see much, but we might get to listen to the heartbeat.”
“The fetus has a heartbeat?” Karl asked, and immediately felt stupid.
“If the date of your last period is right, the fetus may have a detectible heartbeat. Don’t worry, Dad.” The doctor patted his knee again. “People ask questions when they’re scared and sometimes they’re silly questions. Babies are scary and they’re also wonderful. Stick with your beautiful wife, here, and you’ll be fine.”
Vivian’s legs had stopped swinging and her lips had pursed as though she might cry. Or—he reevaluated the brightness of her eyes—burst into laughter. He wasn’t the only one who found this scene ridiculous.
The exam was reinforcing all the many things he didn’t know about his wife. He’d seen the stranger he’d married in a hospital gown, knew she couldn’t remember the age at which she had her first period and knew she’d been exposed to a lot of secondhand smoke on her job. He didn’t know why Vivian had lost her job, why her father was missing or why she wouldn’t tell him about her pregnancy. Until she told the doctor, he hadn’t realized she spent most of her days walking around the city when she wasn’t applying for jobs and cleaning up after the stupid bird.
These were the repercussions of having a child with a stranger. These strange half intimacies of hearing her describe how regular her menstruation had been—really, did such details matter now that she was actually pregnant?—but not knowing if she’d ever gone to college defined their relationship.
Vivian and the doctor were talking about genetic testing, but Karl only heard half of it. This wasn’t how he’d planned to have a baby. When he’d sat at the hotel bar knocking back whiskey and waiting to die because being older than his father was inconceivable, he’d thought back on what he’d accomplished in his life.
And he’d come up short, which had probably been the alcohol and his thirty-ninth birthday talking. He had a job that was more than just important to him, it was important to the city of Chicago. He was the independent watchdog for the taxpayer and that didn’t mean he was looking out only for their money.
The worst effects of corruption and fraud weren’t wasted dollars, but wasted lives. Two dead Milek men on the side of the highway and one dying Milek boy in the hospital were testimony to the devastation a bribe and a blind eye could leave.
He averted his eyes when Vivian started to scoot her butt to the edge of the exam table and put her feet in the stirruplike things. The doctor had a wand-ish instrument covered with a condom and lubricant. The woman who had just been patting his knee was now telling Vivian how the ultrasound would feel compared to a vaginal exam and he nearly leapt out of his chair and headed for the door.
His presence here was a mistake. Whatever was involved in an internal ultrasound was far, far too private for him to witness. They were strangers. He’d planned on having babies with Jessica, who would’ve known better than to ask him to come to the doctor’s office to witness this. Jessica had wanted two children—preferably one boy and one girl. They were going to buy a house in Andersonville and he was going to have the beautiful wife, two perfectly behaved children and a meaningful job. And when his thirty-ninth birthday hit, he was going to compare his life to his father’s and see that he’d lived up to all the man’s expectations.
“Dad.” The doctor’s voice broke through the existential crisis he wouldn’t admit he was having, even in confession, should the priest ask. “If you look on the monitor you can see the embryo. And your date for conception looks pretty spot-on with the embryo’s growth.”
The last, lingering nugget of doubt he’d had about Vivian’s pregnancy burst when Karl looked up. On the screen was some pulsing gray matter and, in a flash of emptiness, a little thing that looked like a mouse standing up and dancing. Only it wasn’t a mouse. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of a mouse. It was his baby and the doctor was saying it was a quarter of an inch in size.
From somewhere in the room came the sound of a horse clopping. Vivian’s wide smile made her cheeks pop like a chipmunk’s, but he didn’t know the source of the sound until the doctor said, “And this is your baby’s heartbeat.”
The blood pulsing in his ears took on the same rhythm of the horse galloping, the sound that the doctor was claiming was his baby. The baby he made with the beautiful woman lying back calmly on the exam table, looking at him as if she expected him to say something.
“Holy shit.” His life was never going to be the same.
* * *
KARL WAS SILENT as he pushed the cart through the aisles of the grocery store. Normally, his quiet didn’t bother Vivian, but there was quiet and then there was the silence that buzzed between them.
“Are you okay?” she asked for probably the tenth time since they’d left the doctor’s office.
“Fine.” He held the plastic bag full of apples high in the air, twisted it and tied the bag in a knot.
Already in the cart were bananas, oranges, clementines, grapefruit, grapes and strawberries that looked pretty but would probably be tasteless since it was only March. And that was just the fruit. They also had sweet potatoes, kale, Swiss chard, carrots, cabbage and a rainbow of peppers. If a doctor sitting on Oprah’s couch had ever called a plant a “superfood,” Karl had put it in their cart. His previously empty fridge was likely to expire with the pressure of the extra work. At least she’d be able to make every recipe on the planet without having to go to the store again.
She weighed the bleak look that had been on Karl’s face when their baby’s heartbeat had filled the exam room and the fact that they were strangers and she was dependent on him. The bleak look won. She put a hand on his before he could bag some rocks masquerading as peaches.
“You are not fine. You nearly fainted at the doctor’s.” A muscle pulsed where his ear rounded into his jaw, but Vivian ignored the warning. “And your silence has a deathlike quality about it. We’re partners in this. Friends, right?”
At the word death the twitch had stopped. Karl left the peaches on the display and moved on to the pears. When he’d bagged five pears, he turned his attention to her. “This is not how I expected to have a child.”
He pushed the cart away from the produce, leaving her wishing she had a bag of potatoes she could bean him over the head with. She caught up to him in the bread aisle as he was reading nutritional information.
“This wasn’t how I expected to have a child, either.” All through adulthood, she’d held on to her dream of a perfect nuclear family, raising children in a house they would own into retirement, the memories made in the home impossible to distinguish from the stuff cluttering the shelves. When she’d decided she couldn’t abort the baby, no matter how desperate her situation seemed, she’d surrendered that dream. Karl hadn’t been offered the same choices she had, and he probably had completely different dreams.
She grabbed one of the loaves and added cinnamon-raisin bread to the cart, as well. “I suspect there’s more to your reaction.”
As they passed the fancy cheeses, Vivian added Gruyère to the cart.
“No cheese.” Karl put it back in the cooler.
“No soft cheese.” She put it back into the cart.
“Huh.” He added a couple more cheeses to the pile, then crossed his arms on the cart handle and pushed his way along the aisle. She’d never seen a man look so uncomfortable while trying to look so relaxed, and again she had to hurry after him.
“Is the cheese for you?”
“No. You seem to like cheese.”
“I can’t eat all that. It’ll go bad.”
“You’re supposed to eat more, and a variety of foods.”
She put her hand on the front of the cart and turned it before he could knock down a display of potato chips with his manic forward progress. “After the second trimester, I should eat an extra three hundred calories a day. That does not mean I get to gorge myself on cheese.”
He sighed. “I’ll help eat the cheese.”
“And the fruit? And the bread? And whatever else you plan to buy me and Jelly Bean while we’re in the store?”
“Jelly Bean?” Finally, she had his attention. “You call our baby Jelly Bean?”
“You call our baby the fetus.”
“Apparently I should be calling it an embryo for another three or four weeks.”
She sighed. “Can we talk about this possessed shopping trip and what happened in the doctor’s office?”
“Not here.”
“Fine.” She navigated the cart past the dairy and around several displays until she’d dragged Karl and his cornucopia in front of the shoe polish and laces. “This is as empty as a grocery store gets. Spill.”
He looked over his shoulder. She wanted to smack him, but she also needed him. No one could call her actions patient, but she was waiting. “Hearing the heartbeat was the first time this became real. Until then I expected to wake up. But it’s not a dream and we’re in this together. I want to make sure you have all you need.”
The warmth in his voice glided above the soft hits that were playing over the loudspeakers. For the first time since she’d sat on her bathroom floor in Vegas looking at the third positive pregnancy test in a row, Vivian felt like something other than a problem. She’d come to Karl because he was the father and he was a fixer. But now...she and Jelly Bean might be something more than a speed bump in his perfectly ordered and sterile life.
His hand didn’t feel cool to the touch when she grabbed on to it—a phantom warmth she attributed to the hope rising in her own chest. “We won’t be left communicating with each other through notes about Jelly Bean’s progress in school.”
“What?” Karl hid his emotions most of the time, but puzzlement was clear on his face.
“I had visions of us as divorced parents exchanging notes through Jelly Bean’s backpack.”
“Oh.” And then he laughed. “What a ridiculous thing to think. That’s what text messages are for.”
She laughed along with him, ignoring the looks they got from passing shoppers.
“Vivian.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I may not have imagined this as how I was going to have children, but I’m finding I could do much worse.”
“It’s not much of a compliment, but I’ll take it.” She lifted up onto her toes and kissed him once on the lips. Then she headed for the cereal aisle before he could read anything other than humor in her expression.
CHAPTER SIX
DINNER EATEN AND the dishes done, Vivian followed Karl around the bar and into the living room. She sat at one end of the couch and picked up her knitting. He sat on the other end of the couch and picked up his book. It was progress. Only a week ago, he’d never been home while she was still awake. Only a couple of days ago, he was sitting in the armchair rather than sharing the couch. They were getting to know each other and, slowly, coming to trust each other.
Sometime in the near future, Karl might even tell her about his day as they sat down to dinner. She might talk about the jobs she was applying for. They might have a relationship outside of the shared parentage of their child.
The rich green wool slid through her fingers. The hat’s shape was slowly emerging out of the yarn and she could begin to picture it on Karl’s head. He needed something more than the righteous fire burning within him to keep his ears warm.
With a child on the way, she should probably be knitting baby blankets and little sweaters, but she wanted to give Karl something that didn’t originate in his own largesse. The yarn was one of the few possessions she’d brought to Chicago that wasn’t a necessity. The wool was soft, and she had needed something comforting with her.
The metal of her needles clicked. The pages of Karl’s book rustled. If, on the other side of the city, someone with a telescope was scanning windows, they would see what appeared to be an old married couple so comfortable with each other they didn’t need to talk—not two strangers with no idea what to say to each other.
“What book are you reading?” Vivian was struck by the sudden and silly fear that a stranger looking in the windows with a telescope knew what Karl was reading while she, sitting next to him, had no idea.
“Hmm?” Karl looked up and it took a moment for his eyes to focus on her across the cushions. “It’s a collection of Herman Melville’s short works. He wrote Moby Dick.”
“I know who Melville is. I may not have graduated, but I’ve taken some college classes. I’m not stupid.”
He turned his head back to the pages, giving her snippy comment all the attention it deserved.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve never said or even implied I was stupid. I don’t know why I reacted so poorly.”
Only she did. The uncertainty of her existence and unwanted helplessness wore on her, coming out in bile when she was least prepared to stop it. Feeling close to, yet so distant from, the man on whom her life currently depended on was unsettling.
Which was no reason to be a bitch when all he’d done was answer her question.
He lifted his head and turned to her again, his face as expressionless as desert sand. “Not knowing who Melville is would only imply a deficit of education. It wouldn’t say anything about your innate intelligence.” Then, though there was no discernible change in his expression, his eyes softened. “I didn’t know you went to college. What did you study?”
“Nothing.” His expression hardened and he was turning his attention back to his book when she started talking again. “I didn’t mean that to be snippy. Working full time meant I didn’t have much time for school, and so I took what I wanted when it was available. It didn’t amount to much of anything in particular.”
She didn’t tell him that the thought of finally graduating from college and facing job applications was terrifying. What if she’d spent all that time and money getting a degree and then still couldn’t get a job other than dealing in casinos? So long as she never graduated, she never had to face losing the security of a job that offered health insurance and paid enough for her to keep an apartment and a car. She never had to leave the comfort of walking through the same doors for sixteen years and the security of knowing exactly who she was and what she was doing, even if she didn’t like it.
It hadn’t escaped Vivian that her father had been responsible for both destroying her chance at college after high school and destroying the life she’d built for herself once she’d realized “college student” wasn’t something she could make work and still hope to eat. She could’ve handled the pregnancy on her own if she’d still had that job security.
