A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,108

that there would be major repercussions. If he cooperated now, nobody would bother prosecuting him. Still, Elm pictured herself enormously pregnant, taking the train to Sing Sing and waiting for visiting hours in a room with greasy handprints on the Plexiglas dividers. She freed one hand and put it on his head, ruffling his hair. She felt a wave of love, and a sense of relief remembering that he too was fallible, that mistakes and misjudgments were the hallmarks of humanity.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all right. We all make mistakes.” We all lie, she could have added.

That night Colin wrapped himself around her in bed and slept with his hand on her stomach. She lay still, sleepless but comfortable, watching the lights travel across the ceiling and wishing she’d had the courage to admit her own secret. She could be sleeping now like Colin, soundly and righteously, instead of willing her breathing to be rhythmic, focusing on moving air in and out of her lungs to match her husband.

She realized that her opportunity for unburdening herself had passed. Now it was too late and she could never tell him, never tell anyone. The weight of this knowledge pressed on her and she rolled over, letting Colin’s hand slip over her hip to rest on the empty sheet between them.

Ian looked at her quizzically across the table. “You’re pregnant, admit it. Or admit that you’ve joined some weird cult. Otherwise there is no excuse for not ordering a martini.”

“What if I’m just not in the mood?” Elm asked.

“Impossible,” Ian said. “Admit the state of your uterus, or I’m ordering you a kamikaze and you’re chugging it.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll admit it, I’m pregnant.”

“Aha!” Ian said. “Congratulations!” But his voice was hollow. “How long have you known?”

So the lack of inflection was jealousy at being left out of the loop. “I couldn’t tell at work yet.”

“So I’m just work to you?” Ian sat back and grinned goofily, but Elm could tell that he was genuinely hurt.

“That’s right. You’re a rung on my ladder to success.”

“Stepped on, again!” Ian flung the back of his hand to his forehead.

Elm wondered if that’s how easy it was, if that’s what would put everything back to normal. She had dreaded telling him for weeks, worried about his reaction and his ability to keep it a secret. She didn’t want him to make a big scene, to turn it into a cause for boisterous celebration. He was prone to making everything into a big production, and Elm just wasn’t ready.

Wasn’t that the way of it, she mused. You worry so much about something and put it off and then it turns out not to be worth even a third of the anxiety. And then something you didn’t think would be important turns out to be a bigger deal than you thought, worthy of concern and strategy.

They toasted with seltzer water and Elm let herself smile, just a little, from the inside, instead of out of sheer muscular will. And then her chicken sandwich with garlic mayonnaise and roasted red peppers looked delicious and she ate it as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks. They even indulged in a chocolate soufflé.

After the CVS she spent a tense two days in bed waiting for the cramping and spotting to stop. They did, and the report came back: a boy (quelle surprise) and a clean bill of health. Elm let out a long exhale. The next hurdle was twenty-five weeks, the limit of viability, and then she could relax a bit, although not fully until week thirty-four, when he’d be full-term, but then not really until his actual birth, and even then not until he was past SIDS age, and then he’d be into skateboarding and rock climbing like Ronan. Who was she kidding? She would worry for the rest of her life.

Colin said nothing further about the situation at work. He said he didn’t want to worry her, and there had been a stay of execution while the investigators untangled some jumble of cords in other departments. Colin said he was doing nothing at work all day, playing Scrabble online with some insomniacs in New Zealand, reorganizing his files, exchanging jokes with coworkers in the canteen.

“It’s horrible, Elm,” he said. “Like it’s obvious that we’re going to starve so we’ll have to eat someone and we don’t know who it is. The fat guys are especially afraid,” he joked.

She scheduled a meeting with Greer for the following week. Everyone