Bump in the Night

The plus sign was so faint I thought I'd imagined it.

I stood in the bathroom of our apartment on Delancey, holding a plastic stick that cost fourteen dollars and felt like it weighed a hundred, and I told myself the second line wasn't there. Fluorescent light does things to your eyes. Dehydration does things to your urine. Stress does things to everything. I had a thesis defense in nine days. I had a boyfriend who still called me his girlfriend after four years, which was starting to feel like a word you use for someone you're not sure you're keeping. I had no business staring at a piece of plastic like it owed me an answer.

But the line was there. Pale as a scar you can barely see, but there.

I sat down on the edge of the tub. The porcelain was cold through my jeans. Somewhere in the apartment, my phone buzzed with a text I didn't check. Probably Marcus, asking if I wanted Thai or pizza, the way he did every Tuesday, as if the world could be reduced to two options and both of them were fine.

I put the test in my pocket. I don't know why. Like I could hide it from myself.

The bathroom mirror had a crack in the corner from when Marcus dropped his electric razor in January. He'd been apologetic for a week. I'd told him it didn't matter, that we'd get it fixed, and we never did. That crack had become part of the landscape of my mornings. I looked at it now and thought: that's what a secret looks like. A break you stop noticing.

I was twenty-eight. Old enough to know better, young enough to still be surprised.

I'd been on the pill since I was nineteen. Took it every morning with my coffee, same time, same ritual. Except in March, when I had that stomach flu and threw up for three days straight, and the pharmacist told me to use backup for a week, and I nodded and then forgot. Marcus and I had sex on the sixth day. I remember it because it was the night his mother called to tell him his father's biopsy came back clean, and he was so relieved he cried in the kitchen, and then he fucked me against the counter with a kind of desperate gratitude that I hadn't felt from him in months. I remember thinking, this is what it's supposed to feel like. This is what I've been missing.

I didn't think about the pill. Not once.

Now I sat on the bathtub and did the math. Five weeks, give or take. Five weeks of a body doing something I hadn't authorized. Five weeks of cells dividing while I sat in seminars on postcolonial theory and argued about the ethics of representation. Five weeks of a future I hadn't planned for, growing in the dark.

The thing nobody tells you about pregnancy scares is that they're not scary. Not at first. They're just strange. A foreign object in your own machinery. You keep waiting for the fear to hit, and instead you get this quiet, curious numbness, like reading about a natural disaster in a country you've never visited.

I stood up. Flushed the toilet for no reason. Washed my hands. Looked at myself in the mirror, at the crack, at the face of a woman who was about to walk into her living room and decide what to say.

Marcus was on the couch when I came out. He had his laptop open and his feet on the coffee table, which I'd asked him not to do approximately forty times. He looked up and smiled, and it was a good smile, the kind that made me remember why I'd stayed for four years. He had a nice face. Not handsome, exactly. Nice. The kind of face that would make a good father.

That thought arrived and I shoved it away like a spider.

"Thai or pizza?" he said.

"Thai."

"You always say Thai."

"Because you always ask, and I always want Thai."

He laughed. Closed his laptop. "You okay? You look weird."

"I'm fine."

"You're lying."

"I'm not lying. I'm just tired."

He studied me for a second. Marcus had this way of looking at me like he was reading a book he'd already read, checking for new annotations. It was one of the things I loved about him. It was also one of the things that made me want to scream.

"Come here," he said.

I didn't move.

He patted the couch cushion next to him. "Come on. You've been in the bathroom for like twenty minutes. Did you fall in?"

"Something like that."

I sat down. Not close to him. Close enough that he wouldn't ask why I wasn't close to him. He put his hand on my knee, and I felt it like a weight. Everything felt like a weight.

"Seriously," he said. "What's going on?"

I could have told him. Right then. I could have pulled the test out of my pocket and put it in his hand and watched his face do whatever it was going to do. I could have said, I'm late, and I think I know why, and I don't know what I want, and I need you to not have an opinion for five minutes so I can figure out what mine is.

But I didn't.

Instead I said, "My advisor wants me to rewrite the third chapter. Again."

He nodded. Squeezed my knee. "That sucks. But you'll get it done. You always do."

That was the thing about Marcus. He believed in me the way you believe in gravity. It was nice. It was also exhausting, because it meant he never saw the moments when I was about to fall apart. He just saw the version of me that kept going.

"I'm going to take a shower," I said.

"Now? We haven't ordered."

"I'll be quick."

I stood up before he could say anything else. Walked to the bathroom. Closed the door. Locked it. Stood in front of the sink and pulled the test out of my pocket and looked at it again.

Still there. Still faint. Still real.

I thought about my mother. She had me at twenty-two, which was basically a child by Manhattan standards, and she'd spent the rest of her life telling me not to make the same mistake. Not in those words, exactly. In the way she'd pushed me through college, through grad school, through every door she hadn't been able to open. In the way she'd said, when I told her I was moving in with Marcus, "Just don't get comfortable." I'd laughed. I thought she meant the apartment.

I turned on the shower. Sat on the edge of the tub again. Let the steam fill the room until the mirror fogged over and the crack disappeared.

Here's what I knew: I wasn't ready. That was the truth. I wasn't ready for a baby, wasn't ready for a decision, wasn't ready for any of it. But ready had never been the point. Ready was a word people used when they wanted to feel in control. The body didn't care about ready. The body just did what it did.

I put my hand on my stomach. Flat. Normal. Nothing to indicate that anything had changed.

But something had.

I stayed in the bathroom until the water ran cold. Then I got out, dried off, put on my pajamas, and walked back into the living room like nothing had happened. Marcus had ordered Thai. He'd gotten me the pad see ew, which I always got, and he'd put it on a plate for me, which he always did, and he'd queued up an episode of something we'd already seen, which was his way of saying I love you without saying it.

I sat down next to him. Ate my noodles. Watched the show. Laughed at the parts I always laughed at.

And the whole time, I was thinking: I have nine days until my defense. I have a decision to make. I have a life that's about to split into two versions of itself, and I don't know which one I'm going to live.

Marcus fell asleep before the episode ended. His head tipped onto my shoulder. His breathing got slow and heavy. I sat there under the weight of him, under the weight of everything, and stared at the TV screen until the credits rolled and the room went dark.

Then I reached into my pocket and touched the test one more time.

Still there. Still real. Still mine.