Second Chances

He breaks the silence with a heavy sigh. The chair responds with a creak and a groan. There’s an ache in his jaw, but he ignores it, fixes his eyes on hers, instead. It’s Laurel, he begins and is deluged with the anguish of seeing his once fearless wife made feeble in the green upholstered recliner. He asks if she remembers her first appointment — when the nurse asked him to step outside because he wouldn’t stop asking questions and interfering with her work. There’s a soft chuckle in his exhale. Betrayal floods his wife’s face, her fingertips and the corner of her lips give a series of twitches. She suppresses a shiver of her spine and sets her jaw. He stands up and forces his admission past his lips.

“I freaked out when I made it outside. I tried making it to the car, but couldn’t catch my breath so I sat on that bench beneath the sycamores. Laurel came out a few minutes later— to have a smoke — and she saw me and apologized and asked if I needed to talk. I couldn’t even get a word out. I broke down. I cried on her shoulder. She held me.”

He takes a moment to catch his breath, maybe give his wife, who is finally starting to look like her old self again — What’s it been? Three months since her surgery? — a chance to say something. When she doesn’t, he squares his shoulders, inhales slowly through the nose, and resumes his confession. He considers every word.

“The next time I saw Laurel,” he says, omitting how he’d sit and wait out on the park bench until her break, “she asked me to lunch at a place around the corner.” They ate and talked and drank.

“Nothing else happened then,” he lies, “I’m sorry.”

The words hang in the space between them for a moment before falling, shattering like the wedding gift china they never used but always set the table with when they had guests. The woman before him holds his stare like a vice.

“Do you love her?” and though her voice doesn’t waver, her hands tremble against her dress.

He knows he should feel some sort of remorse— some guilt or shame, at least. Maybe he should even say he wants to take it all back and do things differently. But he knows that’s not the truth, and suspects his wife would, too. She doesn’t deserve his lies or the cruelty of false hope, he laments. He respects her too much to face her with those empty platitudes. His wife deserves the truth, and if he’s being honest with himself, he wants to tell her the news, and his family and friends, and every person he comes across on his evening walk; even the cashier who sold him the condoms at the corner store near Laurel’s house.

He gives an almost imperceptible nod, “She’s pregnant. I found out today.”

“You bastard,” she whispers, falling into the soft, velvet dining chair.

He’d long since resigned himself to the abrupt end of his bloodline. While his wife burst with excitement when they discussed adopting after her hysterectomy, he admits now that the idea devastated him. He understood and supported his wife through the fainting and the fatigue; the doctor’s appointments; the not knowing; and finally, the diagnosis. Then, came the chemotherapy and more appointments and the cancer’s not responding, the surgery and the recovery. Yet, raising some other man’s child was something he could never do.

Don’t get him wrong, he supported, even commended the men who did. But he could never love that child as his own, would never see himself as its father. The mere idea of the child calling him Dad made the room spin and his mouth flood with saliva—

No, that would never be ideal. He would grow to resent his wife and the child, of course. And they would not deserve that.

No.

He’s not a monster, after all. What he’s really doing is saving them from misery, he convinces himself.

This child, on the other hand, is his… and surely, he can grow to love Laurel. How could he not, now that she is with child. His child. Yes, now he is determined to love her. He will love her. He’ll make love to her. He’ll bury his face in her breasts and suckle on the skin there, sweet with her sweat. He’ll kiss down her taut and swelling stomach. He’ll devour her, thank her, and savor every drop she pours forth in his honor, as he had done hours prior.

Again and again and again.

He closed his eyes and could almost see Laurel basking in his praise on the blue sheets in the room right above where he now stood. His eyes flitted up towards the ceiling, recalling the elation he’d felt making love to Laurel after she’d come knocking at the door this morning— could it have really been only this morning? Life comes at you fast, his father told him once.

“Gin, I want a divorce.”

Her eyelids flutter; she rocks and sways. He lunges forward and catches her by the shoulders before she tumbles from her chair. Her body tenses for a few moments, then goes limp. Before moving, he takes a few deep, shaky breathes. Then, with little effort, lifts her in his arms like a sleeping child and carries her up the stairs to her bedroom. After changing her into her pajamas and tucking her into bed, he calls his sister-in-law, scribbles a note on the blue notepad in her nightstand, refills the carafe, and walks out the door.

She wakes engulfed in silence.