Chapter 39: Breaking It Down

"Charlotte," I said, swallowing what felt like twenty or so dry cotton balls. I was pale and weak and feeling light-headed.

"Huh?" she asked, snapping out of a daze.

"I was looking at the wrong side."

"What!?"

"It's positive. Look."

I showed it to her. She looked. Her lip trembled, and then she rolled away from me, suddenly shaking with silent sobs. She cried hard and long and suddenly Stephanie was knocking on the door. I shoved the pregnancy test back into the box and chucked it into the cupboard under the bathroom sink.

"Is she okay?" Steph asked. I was peeking at her through a crack in the door.

"It's this whole thing with Amy's mom. It's really getting to her."

I was nearly crying myself. The bald faced lie was conveniently disguised.

"You both look a wreck. You should come to bed."

"I'm just gonna talk to her for a bit more. We'll be along. Don't wait up."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. We just need to talk some things through."

"Kay."

She left and I relocked the door. Charlotte was still crying bitterly.

"What am I gonna do, Anthony? I'm fucked! Completely fucked. Totally."

"We, you mean. We're fucked. You mean we, right?"

"I don't even know if it's even yours. What if it's not even yours? I fucked so many guys this month, before you, after you. How could I forget to take my goddamn pills!? I'm such a fuckin' idiot!"

The idea that it could possibly not even be mine hit me in the gut like a solid, heavy kick, but I was already fairly numb to stress at that point. I just sat there in a daze.

"But it could also be mine, right? You had way more sex with me than anyone else the past few weeks."

She turned over and sat up. She put her forearms across her knees and rested her forehead on them. She didn't look up at me.

"Okay, listen," she began. "You've now officially gone way beyond anything a boyfriend should be expected to endure. First I cheated on you with Vincenzo, then with these guys at that party. I treated you like trash and dumped you, and you took me back again. That's way more than I deserve. Now I'm fuckin' pregnant and I don't even know if it's yours. How much shit can you be expected to take from me?"

"What are you saying, Charlotte?"

"I'm saying I already didn't feel like I deserve you, and now this! You need to scrape me off the bottom of your shoe and toss me away once and for all. I'm not worthy of you. Not even a little bit."

She broke down again and I sat there and watched the tears trickling down her naked thighs. I was stunned. I was dazed. I was going numb.

"So what, you breaking up with me again?"

"I never wanna be an arm's length away from you as long as I live. But at the same time I feel like I'm destroying you inside. Everything I do seems to cause you pain."

"So you're breaking up with me again? Just tell me. Yes or no."

I could hear it coming in her tone of voice, in her sighs, in her sobs.

"Don't you understand, Anthony? If it turns out that this baby isn't yours, oh my god! I would sooner die than break your heart like that! Not again! You don't deserve this."

"You're talking crazy, Charlotte. There's gigantic chance that this baby is mine, and what then? Then it means that you're part of my life forever, and we better damn well sort out our shit really quick because no kid deserves to be brought up by two parents carrying on like a couple of idiots all the time. Drama, drama, drama. We gotta decide once and for all what's what and stick to it. This is crazy!"

"Please don't yell at me. I can't take it, Anthony. I feel bad enough. Please don't be mad at me."

"I'm not fuckin' mad at you!"

I was mad, terribly mad, but not at her. I was scared too, terrified even. But at the same time, slowly going numb. Uhg!

She broke down sobbing again anyway though. My tone of voice was scaring her. I don't think she'd ever even seen me mad, not since that day I fought Trevor in the school hallway.

And that reminded me of something.

"Charlotte."

"What?"

"Do you remember that time you were sick at school? You fainted and had to be taken to the nurse's office?"

"Yes."

"Didn't you say that you were sick all that day, that you felt like throwing up?"

"Yes. I ... I was throwing up. I remember now."

"And don't girls throw up when they're already pregnant?"

"You mean morning sickness?"

"Whatever it's called."

"That's not supposed to happen until the woman's been pregnant for a few weeks."

"Well hadn't we been having sex for a few weeks before that?"

"It all happened so fast. I don't remember how long it was."

Charlotte went into the cupboard, took the pregnancy test out and looked at it again.

"When's the last time you definitely remember taking your pill?"

She thought about it. And as she thought about it, she began ripping up the pregnancy test box into little shreds and dropping them into the toilet.

"I remember definitely taking it the first night we had sex, after you brought me home and I told mom all about it. After that I'm not sure."

"Well when does this ovulating thing take place? That's when you got pregnant, right?"

She thought about it. Now she was ripping up the instruction booklet and adding that to the pile of shredded cardboard in the toilet.

"My last period was like two weeks before we did it for the first time. It ended on the Sunday night before we were paired up together for studying and we did it like a week later, right?"

"Something like that."

"So then the whole week after we first did it would be when I was fertile. Mom always said to be extra careful the week after the week your period ends. I'd already forgotten my pill for like a week by then. I was so fuckin' in the clouds that whole damn week. So that must have been it, sometime in the week after we first did it."

"Doesn't the pill last a couple of weeks or something, even if you forget?"

"Anthony, I'm pregnant. Obviously it didn't last."

"Right. I guess so. But if we're looking at that day you were sick as being when you were already pregnant-"

"I don't know, Anthony. That could have just been ordinary sickness. You're not supposed to get morning sickness until like four weeks in or something."

"Are you sure? Maybe it was different for you?"

"What difference does it make, Anthony?"

She sounded like she was getting impatient now too. I didn't hold it against her. She was even more stressed out than I was.

"Maybe it happened the very first time we did it, when we made love in my bed, or any of the times after that, that night when I fed you cherry tomatoes and wrote that petal poem, remember?"

"That was the best night of my life."

She dropped the last shred of paper into the toilet and picked up the stick again. She stared at it for a moment, looking like she was hoping against hope.

Look at her, Anthony. The mother of your baby. She's so beautiful.

She was turning it over and over in her hands, looking at the little plus sign from every possible angle. Then she turned and looked at me. A stray hair spilled down across her eyes, and she blew it up and away from the corner of her mouth.

"Still love me, Anthony?"

In answer I took the little blue stick from her.

"I'm gonna keep this, okay. Because when we're old and gray, and sitting with our grandchildren on our knees, I'll still have this as a souvenir. I'll remember this night for the rest of my life."

She stared at me, and then slid over between my legs and snuggled into me. I held her there, curled up in my arms, with her cheek against my chest, my chin on her head, and we rocked back and forth. She was pregnant. She was keeping it. And it was most likely mine. I just held her. She was curled into a little ball in my arms, hugging her knees and rocking with me on the bathroom floor.

I still have that little blue stick.

"You know, Anthony, I think Sheila knew about this."

"Why do you say that?"

"Yesterday morning, when we were recording the vocals, she kept calling me baby over and over. 'Let's do another take, baby.' 'One more time, baby.' 'Way to go, baby.' I didn't think anything of it at the time, but now..."

"Maybe she found your packet of pills when she was looking for those poems."

"While we were at the dance!"

"She must have found them and put two and two together maybe."

"My calendar! In my room! It has all the dates and times of my periods and stuff. I keep it in the drawer by my pills."

"It would have been easy enough for her to do the math. She's a smart cookie."

"So if she realized what was going on while we were at the dance-"

"And then I came home and told her we were broken up."

"Then she changed the whole movie, just all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, she overhauled the whole movie, made it all about us..."

"She knew you were pregnant, so she changed the whole movie to get us back together."

We sat in silence for a moment. My head was spinning. My heart was aching. My body was exhausted. But all that was suddenly irrelevant because I was completely stricken with awe. Then Charlotte spoke again.

"Dammit, Sheila Unger. Just when I thought you couldn't be more awesome."

She was crying again.

"You think that's what Amy saw in the movie?" Charlotte asked me after a few more moments of silence. "Maybe that's it. Maybe she saw what Sheila knew."

"If you didn't even know you'd forgotten to take your pills, how much less would Amy know? No. Amy was seeing something else in that movie. I'm sure of it."

"But what?"

"That we were beautiful. That's how she put it anyway. Whatever that means."

"We? No," Charlotte said, blowing the stray hair away again. "I was just me. If anyone was beautiful, it was you. You looked absolutely god-like."