19
The Lake Sumner motel, room number five
We returned to the motel after rehearsal. Wesley and Haas went ahead with the rest of the company to dinner across the street, and I stopped in our room to freshen up first. I realized as I was buttoning my only unwrinkled shirtdress that I hadn’t bled yet that month.
I paused and stared down at my stocking feet. I counted the weeks backward.
I was late.
My pocket agenda was tucked in my suitcase beside the pile of delicates I had recently hand-washed in the sink and hung up to dry over the shower curtain rod. I crouched back on my heels and peeled it open across my knees, paging to last month and scouring the grid of weeks for the little pencil-dot I put beside each day I bled.
There, the last one: a month and two days ago.
I hadn’t been off my own very punctual clock since after the rescue surgery—the doctors told me the general anesthetic could throw my body’s schedule for a loop, and it certainly had. Aside from then, I was always regular to a fault, to the very day.
Yet now here I was. Late.
I shut the diary and sat on the floor for a moment with my knees drawn tight against my chest.
I was late.
It could be either one of them. The mechanics of the three of us sleeping together had become an unsolvable tangle as we’d spent more and more time together. It was impossible to point to either of the men with conviction.
Late.
Slowly, stiffly, as though obeying a tiny pilot in my head and not my own volition, I stood up and replaced the little book back in my suitcase. I sat down carefully at the vanity and prepared a dose of powder.
I couldn’t tell anyone.
I waited very patiently and stared through the brittle hollow of my own shock until the Lady entered the edge of the mirror as though she had simply been taking air out of sight.
“Did you ever have a child?” I asked her, very softly.
For a long beat, she looked at me with an unshakable stare.
“Do not ever ask me about my child.”
I looked away from the indomitable heat of her eyes. “We were careful,” I blurted.
“Were you?”
I glared and pointed at her in the mirror. “Don’t do that. Don’t make me doubt myself.”
“Is it yourself you doubt, or one of them?” The Lady pointed at the bed.
“It can’t be them.”
The Lady barely raised an eyebrow. “And whyever not?”
I shook my head. The compulsion to scratch at my arms prickled through my mind for the first time in weeks. I prepared another dose of powder. My hands were shaking. “It—I don’t want this,” I babbled. “I don’t want to, I can’t—”
“Don’t be daft, girl,” the Lady said coolly as I sniffed it down and winced, pinching at my nose to keep the stinging at bay. “You cannot unmake what’s been made.”
Girl. Once, she had called me woman.
My lip curled up in a snarl as I glared at the Lady. “I take my pills!” I snatched up the plastic circle of round pastilles in their neat rows from beside my lipsticks to wag them sharply in the mirror.
“And ingest as well a gallimaufry that would cross the eyes of Hecate herself,” the Lady snapped, her voice banded with steel. “You mix your magicks.”
She spat on the floor at her feet.
I stood and clamored my purse back to rights. “I don’t need you.” I glared up at her, watching me through the reflection, and tasted the bitter tang along the back of my tongue. “I don’t need your lectures.”
I slammed the hinged sides of the vanity shut, putting away the glass. The room fell into a thick, sudden stillness.
Alone.
I stood in the middle of this empty, silent place and caught my breath.
I glanced at the face of my cocktail watch. “Shit,” I hissed to myself, stumbling into my shoes and hurrying from the room without another thought.
Wesley and Haas were at our usual table. I slid into the booth and gave them both my most charming smile. Wesley passed me the rest of his drink, which I chugged in one quick go.
“Christ, Jack, no reason to rush catching up. We have all night.”
Wesley grinned at me. Under the table, Haas’s hand slid warm and possessive around the curve of my thigh. My grin faltered, only barely.
We ordered and ate. Haas didn’t quit touching me. My skin prickled meanly, even through the mask of the powder. I excused myself to the restroom with only half my plate finished. Wesley stood as I did. “Are you alright?”
I patted him on the arm. “I’m fine. Just—a little woozy, need some cold water on my neck.”
I darted a disarming grin at Haas. He was watching me. “Hurry back,” he said, smiling as well.
I couldn’t tell them. Not either of them. I could hardly bear to tell myself.
In the bathroom, I paced and paced and paced in front of the mirror but repeatedly found myself the only figure in my reflection. Even leaned close to check the edges of the glass, as though the Lady was hiding just around the bend—nothing. She had left me alone, like I’d told her to.
As I washed my hands, I found the pink marks of unconscious scratching alongside my scars—shallower, brief in their bright anger, yet stinging all the same.
The final dress rehearsal for Macbeth arrived three days later. I still hadn’t bled.
I couldn’t bear to be on my own in my tiny, cluttered dressing room. It rang with far too much portent, the past rising up from inside its own mouth—I hurried down the bustling backstage hall to Wesley’s dressing room, dodging actors and set pieces with only my paint left to do, and knocked briskly.
“Can I come in?” I asked at the jamb.
Wesley opened the door with a smile, which faltered when he saw my face.
“Lock the door,” I whispered as I moved past him.
Wesley wedged his chair under the door handle before turning to look at me. “I’ll stop this dead if you need me to, Jack. Say the word and it’s done. We can just go home.”
I could see it in him, too; the memory like thick smoke dimming the light behind Wesley’s eyes. I wrapped my arms around myself, pinning my hands down under my elbows to keep from scratching.
“No, not…I think I’m pregnant.”
Wesley went very still. The quick work of backward calculation danced over every little twitch of his body: the brief flare of his nose, his lashes blinking rapidly, the slow intake of a breath he let out and then drew again before speaking. “Should I be congratulating you,” he murmured, “or helping you come up with a plan?”
“I don’t know, it—all I know is that I can’t tell Felix. I can’t. He doesn’t need to know.”
Wesley swallowed. “Do you think he’s the father?”
“Regardless of whose fault it is, you would be the father. You’re my husband.” The sudden, ugly prickling of tears made me look away. “You’re my husband, Wesley.”
With a careful lulling sound, Wesley crossed the small space between us and held me close with a tight, centering embrace. “We’ll figure it out,” he said into the high pile of my hair pinned up at the crown of my head. “Do you want me to tell Kline to pull the plug?”
“No. I’m fine. I want to do it.”
“Then get ready in here, could you? I don’t want you to be alone right now.”
Wesley held me for a few more moments before stepping back to arm’s length. He searched my bare face and leaned over to his makeshift dressing table, where his paint kit was laid out. I had interrupted his ritual.
“I’ll do yours,” he said lightly, uncapping a liner pencil and taking up his lighter to heat the end of it, “if you’ll do mine.”
Together, we drew each other’s faces to dramatic attenuation. I painted his lips. He tinted my eyelids. I powdered his neck. He blushed my cheeks.
We beheld ourselves in the spotty mirror when finished, standing side by side. I gave him my best, most valiant smile, fully seated in the Lady. “I’ll be alright,” I insisted and squeezed his hand in mine. “It will be wonderful.”
I could feel my eyes tearing up, but I forced them to hold. He’d done such a fine job on my tight-line.
Wesley didn’t look away from the glass, as though to turn from it would ruin the moment. “I wish there were an audience here to see you do this again. You’re sensational.”
“It doesn’t matter. The only person I care about seeing it is you.”
The call for places went up.
Wesley lifted our hands and kissed the heel of my thumb so softly the red hardly transferred. He looked at me with a heady mix of pride and sorrow. “Break a leg,” he said, with all the weight of I love you.
“Toi toi toi,” I said—a tear tripped down from my lashes as I pressed the smile wider onto my face.
I did not steal down a dose of powder as I crossed to the other side of the stage.
For the next five acts, I would be in full communion with myself. I would face the curtain entirely lucid, in all my own miserable splendor, and I would live.