A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,104

set her purse down on the kitchen table and took off her shoes.

Thirsty, she took a container of orange juice out of the refrigerator and stood there drinking it from the carton. Then she became aware of movement behind her. She spun around guiltily, spilling some orange juice down the front of her shirt.

“Hey,” Colin said. His hair was comically disheveled. “How’d it go?”

“Fine. I hate those things.” Part of Elm’s duties as a board member of the New Jewish Institute consisted of glad-handing donors at galas that often ended late. She reached in for a piece of cold pizza. It had gone pale and slack, and Elm wondered what it was that made mozzarella look like dead flesh after refrigeration. How often did they eat pizza? Would it stunt Moira’s growth, being raised only on breaded chicken and tomato sauce? Would it hurt the fetus? She put it back down. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

Colin turned obediently and sleepwalked back to the room. When Elm went into the bedroom, though, she could feel that Colin was awake, more so than he’d been a couple of minutes ago.

Elm pretended not to notice and took off her suit, hanging it carefully in the closet and then putting on her nightgown. She climbed into bed backward, trying not to wake him, but he rolled over toward her, not touching her. “How’d it go?”

“You asked me that already.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“It was good.”

“Brilliant.”

There was a pause.

“Elm?” Colin asked. He pitched his voice high. It contained concern and seriousness.

“Hmmm,” Elm said, answering but not encouraging. She was tired. She wanted to sleep.

“Are we all right, then?”

“Of course.” Even to herself Elm sounded disingenuous. She tried to change the subject. “Moira go to bed without fuss?”

“I mean …” Colin ignored her. “I just feel …” he trailed off.

Elm felt a sense of panic invade her again, welling up like an undulation of nausea. Without thinking, she said, “I’m pregnant.”

Colin sat up quickly. “Really?” He put a hand on her upper arm. She rolled over to face him.

“Yup,” she said. She watched his face break into a wide smile. Even in the dark she could see that his excitement was unfeigned.

“God, Elm, that’s … great, fantastic, stupendous! When? How do you …? Which?” He was unable to spit out an entire question.

“I think about four weeks,” she said. “I took two at-home tests.”

“Elm, I’m so happy. This is what we wanted. Wait, is it?”

“Of course,” she said. “How can you ask that?” She sat up then too, genuinely injured. Had she really been so hostile these past weeks?

“I’m just … I hope the timing is all right. When do you think? I mean, with my work …” He began to babble, a sign that he was nervous. Now she laid a hand on his thigh.

“June, I think.” She didn’t think. She knew. “I’ll go to the doctor in a couple of weeks. What do you mean, the timing?”

“I’m just worried about work, is all. Don’t mind me. I’m so excited. Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” He put a hand on the small bulge of Elm’s stomach where the skin was slack and a roll of fat had accumulated.

“Who knows?” Elm said.

There are holes in a marriage, Elm thought, periods of time for which if you were drawing a graph of marital compatibility there would be an absence of data. These dispersals are gradual, like not noticing that someone you see every day is getting fat until you are apart from them and return to find a different person from the one you left. It finally dawned on Elm that she and Colin had been gradually wandering in different directions. When she got married, Elm thought, as all brides do, that it was Colin and Elm against the world. She had assumed there’d be secrets, but from others, not between them, or if there were they would be minor: hiding chocolate in a stash, not necessarily telling him that someone had tried to pick her up at the gym. She had never imagined the need to keep a secret from him and found it incredibly difficult.

The urge was upon her nearly constantly to tell him, not only because she wanted to unburden herself but because it felt like an itch, a continuous low-level irritation, a desire to blurt out what she was thinking. She began to censor herself, and the effort was so great that she cut down on what she was