Ink & Secrets

CHAPTER FIVE:

I bought three tests. I bought two because they were like I was trying for a result and one because it was like I was being careless and three because then I seemed like a person that dealt in evidence.

I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the cold tub and waited.

The bathroom tiles are cream. I've been meaning to re-grout the one by the tap. There's a c***k in the ceiling that follows a diagonal line toward the window, and I've been tracking it for two years, and sometimes I think I should tell the landlord and sometimes I think it gives the room character and today I think about it because it's easier than looking at the three sticks.

I look at the three sticks.

I expected fear. Fear is there. But underneath it is something I didn't budget for. Something quiet, something that feels, impossibly, like mine. Like the first thing in four years that belongs entirely to me.

I made a list. Numbers. Hours. Money. The math didn’t close.

I thought about finding him.

I went back to the Night Lounge twice. I described him carefully to the bartender. Dark eyes, early thirties, sits at the same end, orders something amber, Thursdays and sometimes Fridays.

The bartender is apologetic. No name attached to the description. No regular reservation. He came, he sat, he's not been back.

I hired a search service. The cheapest one I could find, which is still money I can't spare and gave them everything I had. First name, physical description, runs a company, the night of the week.

They came back two weeks later with nothing. It felt designed. Like someone installed a door in a wall and then bricked over the frame.

After three weeks, I stopped trying.

I sat at my kitchen table at two in the morning and I made a different kind of decision.

Not because the math works. It doesn't.

Not because I'm not afraid. I am.

I thought about the company. I thought about Cole Enterprises, which I found in an archived news article about the collapse and whose name I have been carrying in that particular pocket ever since.

I wonder about how he said, "the kind that looks better from the outside" and whether that was a self awareness of a man who was guilty or a self awareness of a man who had inherited guilt that he hadn't known yet belonged to him. I wondered about this while I cooked dinner, while I stared down at 3 a.m. after tossing and turning all night, while I endured the hour-long ride to the beginning of my day. Then I stopped.

Since it is a thinking that produces nothing but a bittersweet and, I would have said, toxic feeling, and I have to make a choice that is totally unrelated to the fact of who he is and what his company has been.

I have to decide for myself.

The decision took eleven days.

It's not simple and I didn’t rush it. I gave it the eleven days it needed.

I thought about my parents. About the apartment with the books and the two pairs of reading glasses.

About what they built and how they built it, not with resources but with the specific stubborn insistence on treating each other as worth everything.

I thought about myself, twenty six years old, still with the wrong math, still with the broken writing and the absent parents and the four years of surviving.

I wondered about the feeling I had on the bathroom floor, the thing beneath the fear, that way of knowing it belonged to me.

On the eleventh day I wrote one line in my journal. I wrote it at two in the morning with the apartment quiet around me and the city outside doing its relentless thing. I wrote:

Because I've been empty for four years and for the first time something inside me feels like it belongs to me.

I underlined it once.

I closed the journal.

I kept the baby.

I really don't know what holding onto him is going to cost me or where it's going to lead me in the end when I have to go back.

" You look like someone hasn't slept in two days, " Nora said when she opened the door.

"Four, " I said, and walked into the kitchen. She came along.

She didn't utter a word as I searched for the coffee, filled a mug and sipped it, hunched at the counter. She can read me well enough to know when she's supposed to back off and when she's supposed to start nagging.

This one, she thinks, needs to be pushed.

"Tell me," she said.

I put down the mug. I looked at her.

"I'm pregnant."

Nora didn’t perform the reaction. She didn’t gasp or hug me or immediately ask a thousand questions. She pulled out a chair, sat down slowly, and looked at me with the specific attention she saves for things that matter.

"Whose?" she asked

"The bar. October."

"Adrian."

The name in her mouth is strange. Strange because I know it and she didn’t. Strange because for all his searching in my head weight, he is still a first name and a glass of amber and a hotel room I left before sunrise.

"Yes," I said.

"Have you told him?"

"I can't find him." I wrapped both hands around the mug. "I've tried. Three weeks. Nothing."

Nora absorbed this. "What are you going to do?"

"I've already decided." I met her eyes. "I'm keeping it."

She didn’t challenge me. She didn’t list reasons or risks or alternatives. She just nodded once, slowly, the way she nods when she's taking something seriously.

"Okay," she said. "What do you need?"

Two sentences. That's all. And something in my chest broke, open, not painfully, more like a window that's been shut too long finally letting air through and I cried.

Actually cried. Not the managed kind, the real kind, the kind I haven't allowed myself in months.

Nora didn’t say anything. She just stayed.

That's enough.

The next nine months were the most exhausting and strangest of my life.

I worked until I couldn't. I sleep when I can. I let Nora help without calling it help, which is the only way I can accept it. She moved in for a month near the end under the fiction that her flat needs repainting.

I wrote at night when I can't sleep, which is often. Not the manuscript but something new. Something that doesn't know what it is yet.

I also searched.

Not constantly. But I didn’t stop. I tried the search service twice more. I try LinkedIn, cross referencing industries. I tried the Night Lounge again, different bartenders, different shifts.

Nothing.

By month seven I've built a profile from fragments: runs a company, this city, early thirties, first name Adrian, orders something amber. It's not enough.

I know it's not enough.

But I keep the name somewhere it won't dissolve.

Just in case.