Chapter 12: What Took

The leaves were coming down along our street by the time my own body started telling on me.

It began with his cooking, of all things — the warm smell out of that kitchen I’d crossed the grass toward my whole life, butter and something browning, the smell that used to mean somebody in there had thought about dinner, had thought about me. Now it reached across the table and my stomach climbed into my throat, and I set my fork down and breathed through my mouth till it passed. Cass ate hers. I pushed mine around the plate.

I’d been counting back for days. A month into school now, and I hadn’t bled since before the night he took the rest of me — he’d finished up inside me most every night since, and there was no telling which time had done it, only that one of them had. My body had always kept its own quiet calendar without me having to look at it. It had gone quieter than quiet now, and sitting there over the sage and butter, I knew exactly what the quiet was.

Cass had been carrying hers since the summer — he’d caught her the very first time, that night on the daybed, and her body had done the arithmetic weeks before mine ever did. She’d missed in August and been sure not long after, and she’d reached for me with it more ways than one — the hand laid low on her own belly where I’d be sure to see it, the night she tried to draw him out of me before he could take — and I’d looked past every one, because I’d had every piece of it in my own two hands for weeks and couldn’t afford to add them up: the plate pushed away, the smells that turned her, the gray mornings, her breasts come in heavy in my own paintings. She told me the whole of it at last, up in her room — I finally let her — cross-legged on the bed, turning over and over in her fingers the drugstore stick she’d kept since August and never made herself throw away; the second line had come up before she’d even capped it, she said, like her body had only been waiting to be asked. She said it the way she said the true things now, no wind-up to it. Then she reached for the joke, because that was still the reflex even with the joke dead in her mouth since July. “Guess I’m keeping it. Not like I get a vote.” A breath that didn’t come anywhere near a laugh. “He’s already picking names.”

That was where it cracked — not on the pregnant part; she’d gone somewhere cold and far-off about that — but on the names, on him already loving it, a whole nursery going up behind his eyes. “It’s going to have his face, June.” Quiet, to the test and not to me. “I’m going to sit across a table from a little version of his face every day for the rest of my life.” Her thumb kept working the plastic window where the line had come up, like she could rub it back down to one. And her other hand had gone flat and low on her own stomach without her watching it get there — the exact place his went, except hers lay soft over it, cradling, not keeping anything in. She found it there and didn’t take it away. She didn’t have to tell me what that was, and couldn’t have.

Then the small dead smile came up — the one that used to come before a joke and now only came before the things that hurt. “Here’s the part I can’t say to anybody but you.” She made herself hold my eyes for it. “Some sick piece of me is proud of it, June. That he wanted me that bad. That my own body gave it up to him first try, like it had been aching to.” Her voice dropped to almost nothing. “Like it wanted him. Like it still does.”

Her hand had gone down between her legs while she talked and pressed there, hard, like she could push the want back out. “That’s what he built this summer. Not the baby. This. My body needs him now — only him — and I can’t stop it. He wrecked me, June — stretched me so wide with the size of him I don’t shut tight anymore. I go slick just thinking about him doing it to me again. My own dad. It’s in me for good now, right beside the baby, and neither one’s ever going anywhere.”