Two Lines

“I have a dentist,” said Corinne.

It was twenty past seven on Thursday morning, the twenty-eighth of August, and she was standing in the kitchen with her car keys in her fist, looking at a man who was frying an egg. She had practiced the sentence in the bathroom mirror for twenty minutes. In the mirror it had sounded breezy. In the kitchen it sounded exactly like what it was, which was a lie told by a woman who had not slept.

“A dentist,” Emory repeated.

“In Waterville. My old one. From before the divorce. He sent a card, he says I’m overdue for a cleaning, and I thought, while I’m thinking about it, while the deadline isn’t —” She cleared her throat. “It’s a long drive. I’ll be gone most of the day.”

“Waterville’s eighty minutes.”

“I know.”

“There’s a dentist in Rockland.”

“I like this one.”

“Okay.” He turned the egg. The fat spat and subsided. He kept his eyes on the pan, and she watched the back of his neck, the soft dark curl of hair at the nape, the line of the shoulder under the old blue shirt. He didn’t say anything else. For an awful second she thought he was going to turn around and ask her, simply, quietly, what are you really doing? And she would have to choose between lying again and saying the thing that was beating in her throat like a trapped moth.

He slid the egg onto a plate and set it on the table in front of her chair.

“Eat that first,” said Emory. “You’ll want something in your stomach. Dentists don’t like it when you faint.”

“I can’t. It’ll —”

“One bite. Plain. No salt.” He turned around at last. He was smiling, gently, and his gray-green eyes were clear and kind and unreadable. “And take the Volvo. I filled the tank last night. I checked the oil, and I tightened whatever was making that noise. A loose heat shield. It was rattling against the muffler.” He crossed the floor and laid his palm against her cheek. “Drive carefully. Call me when you get there.”

“I will.”

“Whatever happens today,” said Emory. “I’m here. All right?”

“What do you mean, whatever happens? It’s a cleaning.”

“I know.” The thumb moved across her cheekbone. “I just like to say it.”

He kissed her forehead, lightly, once. She ate one bite of egg, which stayed down, and picked up her bag, and walked out into the bright gold morning with the sensation of a woman crossing a bridge she’d been told was solid, with the river very loud beneath.

* * *

It was a hundred and four miles, door to door, and she thought of nothing for the first sixty.

She drove with the windows down and the radio off. The Volvo ran as sweetly as it had when she bought it, with a soft deep purr under the hood. The road unspooled between fields of goldenrod and blue chicory. Hay bales lay in the stubble like loaves. The sky was an enormous clear cerulean, and there was a mist in the low places, thinning, pearl-colored. At Augusta she turned north. By Winslow the farms had given way to old brick mills, and the Kennebec showed at the edge of the road, wide and brown and slow, with gulls riding on it like paper boats.

She had thought she would think it through. She had assumed that she’d work it out in an orderly fashion, as she would a sentence: the odds, the likelihoods, the options. Instead her mind kept turning over like a fish in a net, and the same three facts rose up again and again, flashing, bright.

One: four miscarriages. The last at twenty-one weeks. A rupture, an emergency surgery, a man with a gray mustache and a clipboard, saying, you will not be able to carry another pregnancy.

Two: a man’s hand on her stomach in the dark, warm and heavy and still.

Three: it had been six weeks since her last bleed.

Perhaps seven.

She drove past a stand of birches shivering in the wind, and heard her own voice say, quite loud, “It’s perimenopause.”

The car did not answer.

“It’s the beginning of the change. It’s early, but it happens, particularly after — particularly with scarring. Your hormones go off. You get nausea, you skip, you get tired, you get sick at the smell of coffee.” She tapped the steering wheel. “It’s a perfectly ordinary phase of a woman’s life. Pip would say so. Pip would say, Cor, you’re forty in two years, what did you expect?”

You’re thirty-eight, said a small voice.

“Thirty-eight, then.”

And you’ve gone off coffee. And honey. And you cried yesterday at a Folgers commercial.

“That’s grief,” said Corinne. “That’s four months of — it’s — I have a lot going on.”

She was gripping the wheel so tightly her knuckles ached. She loosened her hands. She let out a breath, and then, to her horror, a sob, short and sharp and ugly, that broke out of her like a hiccup. She pulled onto the shoulder of Route 201 and put the car in park and sat with her forehead on the steering wheel while the trucks went by.

It’s not that she was afraid. It was that she was hoping. The hope had got into her somewhere around the second week of August, quietly, without announcement, like a damp getting into a wall, and she had spent a fortnight pretending that it was not there. It was a terrible thing, hope. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She had spent three years learning how to live without it. She had put away the yellow shoes in a drawer and shut the drawer and sat on it. She had told herself, in the deliberate steady voice of a person laying down a burden, that is a room I do not go into anymore.

And now somebody had opened the door, and the light was pouring in, and she was standing in the doorway in her bare feet with her heart in her mouth.

“I can’t,” she said aloud, to the empty car, and wiped her eyes on the heel of her hand. “I can’t do this again. I can’t.”

Then she put on her turn signal, and pulled back onto the highway, and drove on.

* * *

The pharmacy was a CVS on Main Street, the sort that sells umbrellas and birthday cards and bottles of cough syrup the size of a baby’s arm, and it was almost empty at half past ten on a Thursday morning. A man in a green smock was mopping the linoleum. A woman at the photo counter was arguing with a machine. She wandered the aisles with a basket on her arm like a customer buying shampoo, and made her way, with a rapid heartbeat and her eyes on the floor, to Aisle Nine.

Family Planning.

The shelves stood two feet taller than she was. There were boxes in pink and white and teal. There were boxes that promised Early Result. Boxes that promised 99% Accurate. Boxes with a smiling woman in a cardigan on the front, and boxes with a drawing of a stork, and a long section of lubricants and condoms and little foil packets with names like Ecstasy. She stood in front of the tests and felt, absurdly, as if she’d been dropped into a language she’d studied for twenty years and could suddenly not read.

She took one. She took a second. She took a third, from a different brand, and then a fourth, as if the manufacturers might disagree. She dropped them in her basket and covered them with a pack of Kleenex, and a bottle of water, and a box of crackers, and walked to the register with the stiff straight walk of a shoplifter.

The girl at the counter was perhaps nineteen, with a nose ring and a long blond braid and a name tag that said Destiny. She scanned the Kleenex. She scanned the crackers. She picked up the first test, turned it over, scanned it, and set it in a bag. She picked up the second. She picked up the third. She did not look up.

“Cash?” said Destiny.

“Cash.”

“That’s forty-seven eighteen.”

Corinne counted out the bills. Her hands were steady. The girl made change, and put the last test in the bag, and slid it across the counter, and only then lifted her eyes: round, kind, heavily outlined in blue, entirely without judgment.

“Good luck,” said Destiny, softly.

It was a throwaway phrase. She said it to everyone. But something in the way she said it, a little shy, a little earnest, from one woman to another across a plastic counter, undid Corinne all at once. She stood there with her mouth working, in the harsh white light of the store, and could not think of a single thing to say.

“Thank you,” she managed. “I — thank you.”

“It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. Whichever way.” The girl smiled. “My mom says it always is.”

* * *

The bathroom was at the back of the store, behind the greeting cards.

It was a single-stall room, painted pale green, with a mirror that had a crack running diagonally across it and a fluorescent tube that hummed like a bee. She locked the door. She set the bag on the sink. She stood with her back against the door, breathing, and looked at the four white boxes lying in a row with their pink and teal lettering, like cards on a table.

She read the instructions on the first one twice. She read them again.

Remove cap. Hold absorbent tip in urine stream for five seconds. Replace cap. Lay flat. Wait three minutes.

One line means not pregnant. Two lines means pregnant.

She laughed. It rang off the tile. It was such a ridiculous, juvenile, cheerful sentence, like something on a cereal box.

She did it. She did it four times, in sequence, with the grim composure of a person defusing a bomb. She set the sticks side by side on a paper towel on the edge of the sink, and washed her hands, and dried them. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, and folded her hands in her lap, and looked at the wall.

The wall was green. It had a hook on it. The hook held nothing. Somewhere in the store, a speaker was playing a song she half knew, a slow, sweet, sugary pop thing from the nineties, and a child was crying, and a cart wheel squeaked.

Three minutes.

She counted. She did it the way she had counted in the hospital, in the dark, listening for the click of the monitor: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand. She thought of nothing. She was not going to think. She was going to sit here, on this toilet, in this hum, with her hands loose in her lap, and let the time pass, because she had learned that the only way to endure a thing was not to lean on it.

One hundred and ten. One hundred and eleven.

There had been four other times. She remembered each of them as a kind of photograph: a different bathroom, a different stick, a different strip of pink in a different light. The first, in the tiled en-suite of the house in Cumberland, in the quiet of a Sunday morning, when she had laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor. The second, in a Marriott in Boston, on her anniversary, with Graham asleep in the next room. The third, quick and secret, in a department store. The fourth. She had stood in the bathroom of the nursery, with a paint roller in one hand, and watched the pink come up in a single bold line, and then another, and then a third, a plus, and had thought, this is the one. This is the one. This one’s going to stay.

One hundred and sixty. One hundred and sixty-one.

She did not look.

She did not look at the sink, where four small plastic wands lay in a row. She looked at the hook. She looked at the grain of the door. She looked at her own hands, which lay in her lap, palm up, empty, pale, with the thin gold line where her wedding ring had been. They looked like the hands of someone else. They looked like her mother’s.

One hundred and eighty.

She stood up.

She had meant to wait. She had meant to count to the end, and let the clock decide. But she could not sit any longer, and she crossed the little room in two steps and stood at the sink and looked down.

Two lines.

On the first, two clear dark pink lines, side by side, like a railway track. On the second, the same, a little fainter. On the third, a bold blue plus. On the fourth, a small round digital window with the words in black capitals:

PREGNANT 3+

She stood very still.

She had imagined this moment. She had imagined it a hundred times, over eleven years, lying awake in the dark. She’d imagined that she would scream. That she would faint. That she would burst into tears, or run, laughing, into the street. She had not imagined that she’d feel nothing. A great vast silence opened in her, like the silence at the top of a high mountain, and in the silence she heard the hum of the fluorescent tube and the distant crying of the child, and the drip of the tap, and the tick, tick, tick of her own blood in her ears.

She picked up the fourth test. She held it close to her face. She read it again.

PREGNANT.

“No,” said Corinne.

Her voice was perfectly calm. It echoed a little in the green room.

“No. That’s not — that isn’t possible. That isn’t possible. I’ve been told. I’ve been told by four doctors. I have a scar this long.” She held up her hand, thumb and forefinger apart, like a woman describing a fish. “I was told that I couldn’t. I was told. There’s no — there’s no room. It’s — I’ve been sterilized, essentially, by a surgeon. It’s medically impossible.”

The plastic wand lay in her palm, light as a feather.

She said, much more quietly, “The test must be wrong.”

Four tests, said a small, clear, dry voice in her head.

“They’re defective. They’re from a bad batch.”

Four different brands.

“They’re picking up something else. A hormone. A tumor. A — a hCG-secreting —” Her voice broke. “It could be a tumor. That’s what it is. It’s cancer.”

Corinne, said the voice, gently. The test doesn’t know medicine.

She stopped.

The test doesn’t know about the scar. It doesn’t know about the doctors. It doesn’t know what you were told, or by whom, or how kindly. It doesn’t know you are thirty-eight, or that you are a woman who isn’t supposed to. The voice was her own, but it had in it something she hadn’t heard in three years, a note of astonished and fierce tenderness. It only knows what is in your body. And what is in your body, right now, this morning, is a person.

“Oh, God,” whispered Corinne.

Her knees went. She sat down on the cold floor of the CVS bathroom with her back against the door, and a plastic wand in each hand, and her mouth open. Her whole body was shaking. She felt the sob rise, and rise, and she pressed her fist to her mouth to stop it, but it came anyway, huge and wet and helpless, and then another, and another, until she was weeping, rocking, in the middle of the floor, with her forehead pressed to her knees, a long, hoarse, broken-hearted, joyful howl that she muffled in the sleeve of her cardigan.

She cried for her mother. She cried for a pair of yellow shoes. She cried for four small bodies she had never held, and a man with a gray mustache, and a husband who had looked at his phone. She cried for the girl who had stood in a nursery with a paint roller, and the woman who had put that girl away in a drawer and sat on the lid. She cried for the stupid, unreasonable, cruel, miraculous fact that the world was not finished with her.

When she was done, she wiped her face on the toilet paper and blew her nose. She sat for a moment with her head back against the door. Then she put her hand flat against her stomach, below the navel, over the long thin ridge of the scar.

“Hello,” she whispered.

There was no answer. There was only the hum of the light, and the faint warm beating of her own heart.

“Hello,” she said again. “It’s — I’m —” A shaky laugh. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never done it right. Please. Please stay.”

* * *

She sat in the Volvo in the parking lot for an hour.

It was a hot, bright, flat, concrete morning. The lot shimmered. Carts stood in a long steel train at the edge of the asphalt, and a gull stood on a lamppost, looking at nothing. She rolled the windows up, and turned the key halfway, so that the dashboard glowed, and sat in the humming quiet with the white bag on the passenger seat beside her. She had put the tests in it, one by one, wrapped in the Kleenex. She had not been able to throw them away.

She took out her phone. It lay dark and cool in her palm.

She didn’t call anyone. There was no one to call. She sat looking at the little black screen with her thumb over the glass, and scrolled through the faces she knew. Pip. Pip, who would burst into tears and then into practical questions. Who would say, how far, are you bleeding, have you seen a doctor, and then, in a quiet, shaken voice: who is the father, Cor?

Callum, said some small cold voice in her. It’s Callum’s. It has to be. It was perfect. It was hideously, elegantly perfect. She could say it, and Pip would believe it. She could say it, and it would make her an accomplice to her own invention, and Callum Reyes, a decent man in a parrot shirt, would find himself, one afternoon, the putative father of a child he had never so much as kissed the mother of. She put the thought away, ashamed of it.

Emory.

She turned the phone over in her hand.

He would be at the boatyard by now. He would be bent over some planking, with his sleeves rolled, humming, and the late-morning sun on the back of his neck. He would feel the buzz in his pocket, and wipe his hands, and look at the screen, and smile.

He knew.

She had been trying not to think about it. It lay in the back of her mind like a stone in a shoe. Kneeling on the bathroom tile with a cloth in his hand, he had looked at her with an expression of so much calm, tender anticipation. He had not asked. He had not said oh my God. He had said: I think you should see a doctor. She told herself that it was ordinary. That any man would have guessed. That he was twenty-three, and clever, and paid attention to her body more closely than she did herself; that he had seen her turn white at the smell of coffee, and sleep at three in the afternoon, and stop wearing the black swimsuit, and had put it together. It was only an intelligent man doing arithmetic.

It was only that he had not looked surprised.

He’ll be happy. The thought was quick and clean. She seized it, and held on. He will be so happy. He’ll cry. He’ll kneel on the floor. He asked me if I wanted a child, he asked on the boat, and he said, “I’d have held you till morning.” He’ll be wild with joy. He’s twenty-three, and he’ll have to grow up in an instant, and he’ll do it, because that’s who he is. He’ll build the cradle himself. He’ll teach her the names of the knots.

She saw it, then, so vividly that it brought tears to her eyes: the long cedar cradle in the lamplight of the study. The curve of the rockers. His big gentle hands, with their old white scar, planing a runner.

And behind it, rising like a tide, came the other things.

He’s twenty-three. He’s Pip’s son. You lied to her face, in her kitchen, with a straight back, and told her you were seeing a man you’d never kissed. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for. He’s twenty-three. He’s never held a job for more than two years. He’s never lived with anyone. His whole life is a boat and a lighthouse and a woman fifteen years older. In five years, in ten, he’ll be thirty-three, and you’ll be forty-eight, and he’ll look at you across a kitchen table with a child between you, and he will think —

She shook her head, hard.

He loves me.

He loves me. He said it. He said it, on his knees, in a lamp room. He’s been waiting a long time.

And I, thought Corinne, love him.

It was not a doubtful thing. She turned it over, in the heat, in the lot, with the gull on the lamppost and the carts gleaming, and it was as solid as a stone. She loved him. She loved the pencil box and the soup and the key. She loved the way he said her name. She loved his hands, his stubbornness, his stillness; she loved the lonely boy on the granite shelf. And she thought that perhaps she had never really known what that word meant until this morning, in a CVS bathroom, with a stick in each hand.

She put the phone down on the seat.

She would tell him. She would tell him tonight. She would wait until after dinner, and she would take his hands, and she would say it, quietly, in the lamplight of the study, with the sea outside the window; and he would look at her, and the world would change.

But not before she knew.

That was the rule. She had learned it at the cost of her whole body. You did not tell. You did not hope aloud. You did not buy the shoes. You waited until the doctor had said it; until the heartbeat flickered on the screen; until the small gray ghost of the thing had turned itself into a fact that no one could take. You did not give the world a chance to hear.

She took her phone back. She found, with a few clumsy strokes, an obstetrician in Waterville, a practice called Kennebec Women’s Health, and called the number printed under the name. A receptionist with a voice like warm toast answered on the third ring.

“I need an appointment,” said Corinne. Her voice came out steady. “As soon as possible. I’m — I think I might be pregnant. And I have a history. It’s complicated. A uterine rupture. I’m — I’m high risk.”

“Oh, honey.” The receptionist’s tone changed at once. “Hold on. Let me look. How far along do you think?”

“Six weeks. Maybe seven.”

“With a rupture. Okay. Okay, we don’t want to wait on that.” Keys clicked. “I’ve got a cancellation tomorrow at nine-fifteen. Dr. Anand. She’s wonderful. She does the high-risk consults on Fridays. Can you do tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.” Corinne closed her eyes. “Yes. Yes, I can.”

“Bring any records you have. And try not to worry. I know that’s a ridiculous thing to say. But try.”

“I will.”

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Corinne Aldermere.”

“Okay, Corinne. We’ll see you at nine-fifteen.” The voice softened. “Congratulations. Whichever way it goes. It’s a big thing, even just to find out.”

* * *

She drove home in the late afternoon, with the sun slanting low through the windshield and a feeling of lightness in her chest like a bubble about to burst.

She had eaten a sandwich at a diner on Main Street. She’d bought a prenatal vitamin bottle, hidden in the glove compartment under the registration. She had walked up and down the river in Waterville for an hour, along the old brick mill buildings, and watched the Kennebec go by, brown and wide and wrinkled in the light, and said to it, aloud, three times, I’m pregnant, trying the words on her tongue as one tries on an unfamiliar coat. They fit. That was the astonishing part. They fit as if she had worn them all her life.

The sun went down as she crossed into the peninsula. The sky over the bay went from gold to rose to a deep luminous violet. As she turned onto the gravel lane, mile after mile of pines went by on either side, black and shining, with the last light in their tops. She rolled the window down. The air smelled of salt and sweet fern. She thought: I’m going to be a mother. She thought: I’m going home.

Her phone buzzed in the cup holder.

She glanced at it, and the world slowed.

It was a text from Emory. It had come in a minute ago, while she was driving, and it lay on the screen in the small bright bubble, and she read it once, and again, and a third time, with her foot easing off the gas until the Volvo rolled to a stop in the middle of the empty road.

Almost home? I’ve lit the lamp for you. Whatever you found out today — I’m so glad. Love you. E.

She sat very still.

The engine ticked. The pines whispered. Far off, beyond the last bend in the road, she could just see it: a single pale spoke of light, rising and falling, sweeping slowly across the darkening sky from the top of the old gray tower, as it had every night for a month. It touched the treetops. It lit the underside of a cloud. It passed over her windshield and was gone.

She had told him she was going to the dentist.

She read the text a fourth time. Whatever you found out today. It was the sort of thing a person says. It was a kind, vague, reassuring thing. It could mean the dentist. It could mean anything.

I’m so glad, thought Corinne, and her hand, of its own accord, went to her stomach.

The light came round again.