Chapter 266: Chapter 266- Not Mine…

She listened to the heartbeat.

The sound of it — the steady, absolute, indifferent-to-all-surrounding-circumstances heartbeat of a baby who had not been consulted about anything that was happening and was simply continuing.

She held onto the sound.

’This is yours,’ she said to it. Silently. The private, internal-voice communication of a woman to the interior of her own body. ’You are his. I know you are his. This is going to confirm it and then it will be over and we will be —’

The whump-whump-whump continued.

Steady. Indifferent. The heartbeat of something that knew what it was even if everything around it was arguing.

Four hours.

That elastic, interminable quality of four hours in a hospital waiting area.

She sat.

She had found the furthest corner of the waiting room — the chair against the wall, the position of someone who did not want to be visible from multiple angles. Her hands in her lap. Her head against the wall behind her.

She thought about the six years.

The ordinary geography of them. The house — that arrangement of rooms in the apartment, which way the light came in the bedroom in the morning, the way the kitchen smelled when he made chai. The fights. The made-ups. That private language of two people who had been together long enough to have one.

She thought about the pregnancy announcement.

The test. The two lines. The way her hands had been shaking so badly she had almost dropped it. The way she had called his name from the bathroom and the quality of his face when he appeared in the doorway and she had held it up and he had looked at it and —

She had never seen him cry.

He had gone to the kitchen. She had heard the tap running. She had known he was crying into the sink the way men cry when they have decided that crying is something that happens in private.

She pressed her face into her hands.

’The test will come back,’ she said to herself. For the hundredth time.

Her phone was off. She had turned it off sometime in the late morning, when the messages from her mother-in-law had started — that chirping, completely-unaware quality of messages from someone who did not know what was happening and was asking when she would be discharged.

Her body.

She had been trying not to think about her body.

Her body was not cooperating with the not-thinking-about-it.

The throb. The continuous, insistent, post-everything sensitivity of her. That wet quality of her underwear that she had been ignoring for hours. The nipples — she had crossed her arms over her chest sometime around the second hour, that covered-up quality of arms doing double duty as concealment.

She was hungry.

She had not eaten.

The baby needed her to eat.

She went to the vending machine and bought a packet of biscuits and ate them standing in front of the machine, looking at her own reflection in the glass front of it. The biscuits tasted like nothing. She ate all of them.

She went back to her corner.

She waited.

The light changed.

That unmistakable quality of light changing from the warm afternoon quality to the different, longer-shadow quality of evening. The hospital’s windows going from bright to gold to the beginning of the cooler, blue-grey quality of oncoming night.

She had been here for seven hours.

She had stopped counting at five.

The waiting room had changed populations twice — the afternoon people replaced by the evening people, the families with their coffee cups and their phones and their specific, waiting-room quality of human beings in suspension.

She watched the door.

She watched it because there was nothing else to watch and because the door was the place the news would come from.

The door opened.

Vikram.

He came through the door with that quality of someone who had been somewhere purposeful and had now arrived at the place they were going. A folder in his hand — not the clipboard, a sealed envelope inside a patient folder, that institutional quality of medical results in their official container.

He saw her.

She stood.

The automatic, can’t-stay-sitting quality of it — her body rising before she had told it to because this was the moment and her body knew it.

She looked at his face.

She tried to read it.

His face was —

Careful.

Not the fury of the morning. Not the cold, administrative quality of the morning. Something different. That careful, contained quality of a face that had received information and was deciding what to do with it.

Her stomach tightened.

“Vikram —”

He walked toward her.

She tried to smile.

The trembling, hopeful quality of a smile attempted by someone whose face was not sure it had the architecture for it right now. She tried anyway. That this-is-going-to-be-okay quality of a smile that was partly for him and partly for herself.

“Now you know,” she said.

Her voice.

The soft, hopeful, this-is-over quality of it. That carefully calibrated gentleness of someone who was preparing to apologize from a position of vindication — ’I was right, and I’m still sorry, and we can rebuild.’

“Please forgive me,” she said. “I know I — what I did was wrong, I know that, and I’m not saying it wasn’t wrong, I’m saying — Vikram, I’m saying this child is yours, and now you know that, and we can —”

He threw the folder at her.

Not — not violence. That clean, precise motion of a hand releasing something at someone. The folder and the envelope inside it hitting her in the chest and falling to the waiting room floor at her feet. The flat, paper-on-linoleum sound of it.

She looked at it.

She looked at the envelope.

She looked up at him.

“You fucking bitch,” he said.

The same words.

But different now. The different quality of the same words when the person saying them has the paper to back them up. That hollow, blown-through quality of a voice saying a thing it has confirmed.

She stared at him.

“Vikram —”

“That child is not mine.”

The silence.

That absolute, world-stopping quality of that sentence in the evening light of a hospital waiting room with the vending machine humming in the corner and other families in their chairs and the whole indifferent machinery of the world continuing.

She looked at the envelope.

On the floor.

She looked at his face.

“…what —”

“NOT MINE.”

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