Chapter 30: What the Body Knows

I threw up on a Tuesday.

Not dramatically. Not the cinematic kind that arrived with warning and appropriate timing. The inconvenient ordinary kind that happened at six forty three in the morning when I was standing at Damien's kitchen counter making coffee and the smell of it, a smell I had loved for fifteen years and associated with every good morning I had ever had, hit me in a way that had no precedent in my personal history with coffee and sent me directly to the bathroom with no time for dignity or preparation.

I knelt on Damien's very expensive bathroom floor and was thoroughly ill.

Afterward I sat with my back against the cool of the bathtub and looked at the ceiling and did the arithmetic that women did in these moments. The quiet private arithmetic of dates and timings and the particular calendar of the body that most women maintained without thinking about it the way they maintained breathing.

I did the arithmetic twice.

The answer was the same both times.

I sat on Damien's bathroom floor for a long time.

Noah knocked on the door at seven fifteen. "Mia are you in there."

"Yes," I said. "I'll be out in a minute."

"Daddy says breakfast is ready," he said.

"Tell him I'll be right there," I said.

A pause. "Are you sick," Noah said. With the direct diagnostic interest of a small person for whom illness was a subject of genuine curiosity.

"I'm fine," I said. "Go eat your eggs."

His footsteps retreated down the hall.

I stood up.

I looked at myself in the mirror above Damien's sink. The woman who looked back at me was familiar and also, in this moment, slightly altered in a way I could not have explained to anyone who was not currently standing in my skin. The same face. The same eyes. The same Mia Santos who had been a waitress in a Bronx diner six weeks ago and was now a woman with a solo show in March and a studio with north facing windows and a man who said her name like he was allowing himself something.

Slightly altered.

I went to breakfast.

Damien was at the stove. Noah was on his step stool supervising. The apartment was warm and ordinary and smelled like eggs and toast and the particular morning quality of a home that had people in it who were at ease with each other.

Damien looked up when I came in.

He read my face.

He did not say anything immediately. He handed me a glass of water instead of coffee and that single substitution told me that he had heard me through the bathroom door and had processed the information with the quiet efficiency he applied to everything significant and had made a decision about how to handle it which was apparently water first and questions later.

I drank the water.

Noah explained something about a dream involving a very large pterodactyl and a misunderstanding about territory and I listened and responded in the right places and felt Damien's eyes on the side of my face with that focused complete attention that I was not currently able to meet.

After breakfast Noah went to his room.

Damien and I stood in the kitchen.

"Tell me," he said. Quietly. Without pressure. Just the door open.

"I don't know yet," I said. "I need to know first before I tell you anything."

He nodded.

"Okay," he said. Just that.

No pressure. No reaching into the space I needed to occupy alone for a little longer. Just okay, and the glass of water refilled and placed beside me on the counter and his hand briefly at my back, warm and certain and entirely present, before he stepped away and gave me the room.

I went to the pharmacy on the corner at nine while Damien took Noah to playgroup.

I stood in the family planning aisle for three minutes.

I bought two.

I came back to the apartment and went to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub and waited the required three minutes with the test on the counter and my hands folded in my lap and my eyes on the ceiling and my mind doing the thing minds did in these three minutes which was go very quiet and very loud simultaneously.

I looked.

I looked for a long time.

Then I sat back down on the edge of the bathtub.

I was still sitting there when I heard the front door. Noah's voice arriving in the apartment with its usual decisive energy, announcing something about what had happened at playgroup involving Felix and a situation with a boy named Felix which was a new development and apparently confusing for Noah who had strong feelings about name duplication.

Damien's voice. Low and patient. Listening.

Then small footsteps going down the hall.

Then quiet.

Then a knock on the bathroom door.

"Mia," Damien said.

I looked at the test on the counter.

"Come in," I said.

He opened the door.

He looked at me sitting on the edge of the bathtub and then he looked at the counter and then he looked at me again and his face did several things in rapid succession that resolved into the complete stillness that meant something enormous was happening beneath the surface.

He came in.

He sat beside me on the edge of the bathtub.

We looked at the test on the counter together.

"Okay," he said quietly.

"That's all you're going to say," I said.

"I'm still arriving at the moment," he said. "Give me a second."

I gave him the second.

He took a breath.

"Are you alright," he said.

"I don't know yet," I said honestly.

"Physically," he said.

"I threw up this morning," I said. "Otherwise fine."

"And the rest of it," he said.

I looked at the test.

"I'm working on the rest of it," I said.

He nodded.

We sat on the edge of his bathtub in the quiet of the bathroom and the morning moved around us outside the window and down the hall Noah was conducting what sounded like a negotiation with Felix about the name situation.

"The show is in March," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"That's four months away," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"The timing is," I said.

"Mia," he said quietly.

I looked at him.

His eyes were very dark and very steady and doing none of the things I had been afraid they might do. No calculation. No careful management of something inconvenient. No reaching for composure as a way of creating distance.

Just present.

Entirely, completely, without reservation present.

"I need you to tell me how you feel," he said. "Not about the show or the timing or the practical architecture of this. How you actually feel."

I looked at the test.

I had been running the arithmetic since six forty three this morning. The practical arithmetic and the emotional arithmetic and the life arithmetic of a woman who had arrived six weeks ago with seventeen dollars in a checking account and a sketchbook full of paintings nobody wanted and was now sitting on the edge of a billionaire's bathtub in a building with her name on the studio directory holding a positive pregnancy test.

I had been running it for three hours.

And underneath all the arithmetic, underneath the timing and the show and the practical architecture of it, there was something that was not arithmetic at all.

Something warm and terrifying and entirely certain.

"I feel," I said slowly. "Like I am standing in a doorway again."

Damien was very still.

"And this time," I said quietly. "I can see both sides clearly." I looked at the test. "And I am not afraid of either of them."

He exhaled slowly.

His hand found mine between us on the edge of the bathtub.

"Mia Santos," he said.

"Damien Cole," I said.

"I need you to understand something," he said carefully. "Whatever you decide. Whatever this becomes or does not become. I am not going anywhere."

I looked at him.

"I know," I said.

"I mean it," he said.

"I know you mean it," I said. "That is not what I'm afraid of."

"What are you afraid of," he said.

I thought about it honestly.

"That I want this," I said quietly. "Already. That I have been sitting here for three hours running arithmetic and underneath all of it is something that already wants this specific thing and I do not entirely trust how fast that happened."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Fast," he said. "We have known each other six weeks."

"Yes," I said.

"Six weeks ago you were a waitress in a Bronx diner," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"And now," he said.

"And now I am a woman sitting on your bathroom floor who already wants the thing she is supposed to be carefully considering," I said. "Which is either the most honest thing about me or the most reckless."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"It is the most honest thing about you," he said quietly. "It has always been the most honest thing about you." He paused. "You have never once pretended to feel something other than what you felt. Not in the restaurant or the studio or any of it. You have always been exactly where you were." His hand tightened over mine. "This is the same."

I looked at him.

"It's fast," I said.

"Everything about us has been fast," he said. "And everything about us has been real. Both things are true simultaneously."

I looked at the test on the counter.

Then I looked at Damien.

This man. This complicated slowly opening man with his son and his brother and his mother and his north facing windows and his bad drawings and his good heart and his hand warm and certain over mine.

"Okay," I said.

He went very still.

"Okay," I said again. Firmer this time. From somewhere below arithmetic.

Something broke open in his expression.

He put his arms around me and I leaned into him and he held me the way he held things that mattered most to him, with that careful tightness that was also, underneath it, something considerably less careful and considerably more real.

We stayed like that for a long time.

Then from down the hall Noah knocked on the bathroom door.

"Are you both in there," he said. With the suspicious specificity of a small person who had noticed an unusual pattern.

Damien and I looked at each other.

"Yes," Damien said.

"Why," Noah said.

"We were talking," Damien said.

A pause. "In the bathroom," Noah said. Deeply skeptical.

"Yes," Damien said.

Another pause. "Okay," Noah said, apparently deciding this was above his current capacity for investigation. "Mia I told Felix he cannot be called Felix anymore because there is a boy called Felix at playgroup and it is very confusing. Can we think of a new name."

I pressed my face into Damien's shoulder.

"We'll think of one at lunch," I said. My voice was not entirely steady.

"Good," Noah said. His footsteps retreated.

Damien's chest was moving.

I lifted my head and found him doing the thing where he was trying very hard not to be as moved as he was and failing completely.

"He is going to be a remarkable big brother," I said softly.

Damien looked at me.

Something moved across his face so large and so warm and so completely unmanaged that I felt it like the north facing light.

He kissed me softly.

Then he reached past me and turned the test face down on the counter.

"Come on," he said quietly. "Noah needs help naming a rabbit."

I stood.

I took his hand.

And we walked out of the bathroom and down the hall toward the sound of Noah's voice and the ordinary extraordinary morning and I understood with the complete certainty of standing in a doorway knowing which direction you were going that this was not the most reckless thing I had ever done.

It was the most true.

And then my phone in my pocket buzzed.

A number I did not recognize.

Again.

I stopped in the hallway.

Damien turned.

I looked at the screen.

The message was four words.

Four words from a number with a Connecticut area code.

Four words that meant that somewhere in a facility in Connecticut a man was having a good day.

And had been told.

And had found a way to reach the woman his son loved.

The four words were.

She is worth everything.

I stood in the hallway and read it four times.

Then I showed it to Damien.

He read it.

He stood very still for a moment.

Then he looked at me with eyes that were doing something I had never seen them do before and hoped to see them do many more times.

They were bright.

"Your father," I said softly.

"Yes," he said. Barely above a whisper.

I took his hand.

He held it.

And Noah called from the living room that he had decided the rabbit should be called Gerald and needed confirmation that this was acceptable and Damien looked at the ceiling and I laughed and we walked toward the sound of our son naming his rabbit.

Our son.

I had thought it.

Just like that.

Naturally and without negotiation and without the arithmetic.

Our son.

And I understood in that moment that some things did not require arithmetic at all.

Some things simply were.