her dorm, high heels and shame from the previous night making her feet and heart ache; a little girl trudging to school on an icy day, backpack heavy on her shoulders, knowing she will slip and fall, knowing the big kids will laugh at her. These are our walks of excitement and shame and fear, and we do them alone.
I don’t know whether I’m relieved or not when I find the apartment empty, when I fold back the metal tongues on Malcolm’s envelope and slide the contents onto the kitchen table. Maybe some tasks, the most terrible ones, are best done alone, without witness.
Three smaller envelopes stare up at me. I open the fattest one first because the printed name of a law firm in the upper left corner seems matter-of-fact, clinical. That, and I’ve already guessed what’s inside. You don’t need a doctorate in anything to know when your husband has served you divorce papers.
I don’t bother reading through the pages of complaints and affidavits and notices of service. My signature is required on only a few of them, and my future action limited to appearing in court three weeks from now, an action I can avoid because Malcolm has very generously enabled the hearing to occur in absentia. My absentia.
How kind of him.
The other two envelopes, much thinner, bother me. One says To my mother in Anne’s handwriting. The other, Elena, in Malcolm’s pointy scrawl. I open Malcolm’s first.
Inside it are two printed forms, nearly identical. Various-sized boxes on each contain my name, social security number, contact information, and medical data. Gestation, gravidity, maternal age—unhappily flagged as “advanced”—all match my own status on the day I went in for the prenatal Q test, which is also the day I walked out of the waiting room, leaving behind two women who thought of babies in terms of numbers on an intelligence quotient scale.
But something’s wrong with the second copy.
The first page, the page I created in an afternoon so I would have something to show Malcolm, has a bold 9.3 in the results box and a percentile graph just underneath the number. Of course it does, because I made it that way. On the second page, with all my identifying information, there are three words, even bolder, in place of the number:
TEST NOT PERFORMED
And no graph, only Malcolm’s pen asking Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I was stupid? The “stupid” is double underlined.
I’m okay. The room and everything in it is a blur, but I’m okay. I know this because my mouth is forming each sound in the words, over and over. And over again.
I’mokayI’mokayI’mokay.
I should never have lied to Malcolm, but he left me with no choice. If Freddie’s prenatal Q number came in even a millionth of a point below nine, I know what Malcolm would have decided. I know what he would have made me decide.
In the perverse game show I’m currently starring in, envelope number three stares up at me from the small Formica table. Anne’s handwriting, a perfect, practiced cursive, is centered on the front. I slit it open with a fingernail, unfold the cream-colored notepaper, and read. It doesn’t take long, and it burns.
Anne’s letter has no salutation, no closing, and ends with a sentence that I’ll never be able to erase from my vision:
I guess you made your choice. I don’t ever want to see you again.
The “again” is double underlined.
FIFTY
Minutes have gone by, or possibly hours. I’ve watched rain streak the window, pause, and start up again. I’ve listened to the repetitive noise of a distant machine, a generator maybe, and dull, thudding beats in my inner ear. I don’t think I’ve moved from my chair because my feet have begun to prickle with pins and needles.
It’s a pleasure to focus on my feet right now. The pain blots out everything else—the paperwork on the table, Anne’s note.
Through the open door to my apartment, the two Tweedles at the desk tell each other they deserve a break today. One of them—I don’t know which—says he’ll drive