Lara was twenty-six years old.
Dave suspected first.
He brought home a test kit and presented it to her late one night while she was in bed reading.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, confused and on edge. There was a hardness to his eyes she knew well and her fear spiked.
‘Are you pregnant?’
‘What?’
‘You’re late.’
She frowned. ‘Maybe a couple of days.’
He reached out and squeezed her left breast.
‘Ow! What are you doing?’ She shoved his hand away.
‘Tender,’ he said, as if delivering his foregone conclusion.
He made her take the test while he waited downstairs for her. He was pacing when she arrived. He held out his hand for the test strip to see it for himself.
She handed it to him like a guilty child, and pulled the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands and tucked them under her armpits. She was pregnant and in shock and feeling a whirlpool of emotions, from hope and joy through to dread and shame. She stared at the floor, waiting for him to say something.
At last he stopped pacing and took a deep breath. ‘Lara, please come and sit,’ he said, and his voice was quiet and soothing. They went to the wooden dining table with the hard, uncomfortable chairs.
She sat as directed. He continued to stand. The overhead light was a little behind him, casting his face in shadow.
‘You have to have an abortion.’ His tone was flat, calm and authoritative, the same manner in which she imagined he might one day deliver bad news to a patient. No room for discussion. Yet the impact of his words on her was like running at force into a brick wall.
‘What?’
‘Lara, you’ve been on medication for a long time and it has a high chance of affecting the foetus.’
‘But it might be okay,’ she said, shoving her hands underneath her legs, her shoulders hunched. What he didn’t know was that she’d stopped taking her mood stabilisers months ago because she couldn’t cope with the drowsiness and nausea. She couldn’t see straight and had felt herself forgetting what the world looked like without them.
She’d developed a sneaky method of pretending to take them when he handed them to her each morning, tucking them up between her back teeth and cheek until he’d gone, when she would spit out the pills and wash them down the bathroom sink. Maybe one or two of the tiny contraception pills had been accidentally washed away too.
The mood stabilisers were the dangerous ones for pregnancy. She and Constance had talked about it during one of their sessions about possible futures. It was a long time ago now. Dave wasn’t a fan of Constance; he said she gave Lara false hope. But back then, Constance had made it clear that having bipolar didn’t mean she couldn’t one day be a good mother. When the time came, she said, they would have to look carefully at her medications. Lara knew a little bit about which ones were safer for pregnancy. She’d have to check with Constance, of course, but it might still be okay.
‘And you have an illness,’ the medical voice went on.
‘Yes, but…’
‘You aren’t capable of raising a baby.’
His words punched her. She looked up at him, the shadows moving across his face as he walked around the table and came to sit beside her. She didn’t even know if she wanted a baby. But shouldn’t they at least be talking about it?
‘Lara, I work and study eighty hours a week. I can’t be here to help you the way you would need. And then there’s the high probability that you would pass on this very serious, debilitating illness to the child.’
She was defective. Shouldn’t be bred from.
‘Can we slow this down a little?’ she asked, her hands under her legs going numb now, distracting her from the pain Dave’s words had just injected into her heart with surgical precision. ‘You’ve always said you wanted children—one day, I know, in the future when your career is settled. But maybe this is it? You’re doing well now, nearly finished your med degree…’
‘I don’t want this baby,’ he said, sounding disgusted.
The room spun. Her heartrate increased. ‘Because…?’
He looked at her pityingly and pulled the hand nearest him from under her thigh and held it, stroking it like a cat. ‘Because it’s yours.’ He sighed regretfully and discarded her hand.
Lara struggled for breath. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t want a baby of yours,’ he said again, slowly, as if explaining to a child.
Mocking her.
He was never going to marry her. He’d never intended to. He’d been playing her this whole time.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she mumbled.
‘You need to have an abortion,’ he said again, back to his soothing, trustworthy doctor’s voice. ‘It’s the best thing you can do for yourself. You’ll never handle the huge hormonal surges that make even the sanest woman struggle.’
Sunny. The sanest woman she knew would be Sunny.
‘You’d have to go off all your medications, medications that might have already deformed the baby’s heart, spine or brain.’
‘Stop saying that.’ She clutched at the edge of the table as the world began to sway.
‘And even then it might not survive. Then you’ll have the trauma of miscarriage and maybe surgery, and you and I both know you couldn’t handle that. And even if the foetus is okay and you somehow make it to term without falling into a pregnancy-induced psychosis and having to be hospitalised, you’d still have the postnatal depression and all of that before you got to be a real mother.’
A real mother.
Dave folded his hands neatly on the table, the overhead light now making his cheeks hollow out and the greying hairs over his ears take on a yellow glow.
Lara gave up trying to talk. He’d out-argue her at every turn.
Besides which, he was right. All discussion of medication aside, she wasn’t fit to be a mother. Dave was the person who knew her best, and if he was telling her she was delusional to even consider keeping this baby then she was sure he was right.
‘And then there is the child to consider,’ he went on.
Please stop. Her body had frozen rigid while her insides were slippery with movement.
‘If the child survived, and if by an absolute miracle it wasn’t harmed by the medications you’ve been on, it would have a mother who was completely dysfunctional and unhinged. Devastatingly for all concerned, it would probably grow up to be your carer.’
She vomited then, right into her lap, trying to catch it with her hands. She stared at the mess, her nose pinching and her throat burning.
Dave flinched and moved his chair away. ‘And then of course the great tragedy would be that it might be just like you.’
Tears slid down Lara’s face.
She’d never realised how truly fucked up she was.
She’d never truly let herself think about what a burden she could be in the future.
Dave got up and went to the kitchen, where he rummaged through cupboards and turned on the tap. He returned with a wet tea towel and handed it to her. She dabbed weakly at herself.
‘Thank you,’ she managed to squeak between the sobbing.
He sat beside her and rubbed her back. ‘Lara, honey, you see? You see what a mess you are? I hate seeing you this way. It hurts me so much that I can’t be a better partner for you. It hurts me that I can’t heal you.’ He dropped his head, his fists balled to his forehead. ‘I should be able to fix you.’
‘What?’ She was shocked into silence.
‘I’m a psychologist and almost a medical practitioner but still I can’t help you. You are so filled with pain,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see you like this. It hurts too much.’ He beat his chest with his fist.
‘Stop,’ she said, catching his wrist.
‘I need you to have an abortion,’ he said, his words grinding out through his teeth. ‘I can’t stand the thought of watching what it will do to you. If you won’t do it to save yourself or the child then please, do it for me.’
‘Okay, okay,’ she whispered, just needing it all to stop. ‘I’ll do it for you.’
Dave made her an appointment to request the abortion pill for two days later. But when the time came, she was still curled up crying in bed, where she’d been ever since she found out about the pregnancy. Dave came to sit in the heavy chair near the bed, one he’d put there because he said he spent so much time at her bedside he may as well be comfortable, and placed his leather-bound book on the bedside table.
‘I can’t do it,’ Lara sobbed. ‘I know I can’t keep it, but I can’t do it either.’
He’d been listening to her for two days, and for two days his voice had drilled into her, reminding her why she couldn’t keep it, reminding her she couldn’t cope, that she was defective and no one would want her for a mother, and this episode she was having, right now, was further proof of that.
‘I can’t go,’ she pleaded, reaching for his hand.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s an impossible situation, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said, relieved he finally understood.
He nodded slowly. ‘So because I love you so much and because I want so much for you to be out of this pain, I’ve come up with another solution.’
Lara gulped. ‘You have?’ She pulled herself up to sitting, leaning against the headboard.
‘My love for you is so great that I would sacrifice my own happiness for yours.’ He paused and shoved his hand into the pocket of his taupe pants, then brought out a medicine bottle.
‘What are these?’ She wiped her nose on her sleeve.
‘These are a ticket to freedom, to a place of no more pain for you or the baby.’
She reached for the pills. A whole bottle.
‘I want to help you. I can’t stand seeing you in this much pain.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She began to cry again, clutching the bottle to her chest.
‘It’s okay. It can all be over now for everyone. We will all be better off.’ He stood and went to the wardrobe and opened the doors. Up on the shelf above the rack was a large mound of cream coils. He pointed to it. ‘Rope. I thought I might take up sailing.’
Rope.
He was giving her options. Not to live, mind you. Just options on how she died. But she could see it, the welcoming abyss. Finally, she’d be free of this pain. She wouldn’t have to make the awful choice to terminate this baby. She and the baby could both just drift off together.
‘But won’t you miss me?’ she whispered.
‘Yes. But my love for you is greater than any concern for myself. Please, honey, let it all go. Escape this illness that is ruining your life. Let all this suffering end and finally find the peace you’ve been looking for.’
She did want it. She wanted peace, to be free of this pain and free of the torture of her mind and free of fear.
The rope was too difficult. But the bottle of pills in her hand? All too easy.
Dave stood and kissed her on the forehead and picked up his book. ‘Goodbye,’ he said firmly, and there was no question in her mind that he wanted her gone. He left the room, leaving her to make her choice.