Chapter 30: Two Lines

On Wednesday morning, the kitchen smelled wrong.

Mrs. Ruiz was at the espresso machine with her Café Bustelo going, the coffee Rachel had loved since her first week in this apartment, and today it smelled like somebody had set a tire on fire in a parking garage.

Rachel’s mouth flooded with spit.

She made it to the sink. Barely. She gripped the stone edge and heaved up nothing but water, her eyes streaming, her whole body cold and sweating at once.

A hand gathered her hair off her neck and held it there. Warm. Steady. It smelled like onions and Jergens lotion.

“Breathe, mija.” Mrs. Ruiz turned off the machine with her other hand without looking. “Through your mouth. There.”

“It’s the coffee. Something’s wrong with the coffee, it smells like tar…”

“The coffee is fine.”

“Delia…”

“I raised four children, mija,” Mrs. Ruiz said softly, still holding her hair. “That isn’t the coffee.”

Rachel stared into the drain and did no math at all.

* * *

Kessler called at three.

“Julian Cross came to my office Monday,” she said, no hello.

Rachel sat down on the guest suite bed. “I told you not to call him.”

“I didn’t. He called me. He asked if he could make a sworn statement, and whether you’d want him to, and I told him that was a question for you. He said he’d already asked you for enough and this one was about what he did, not about you.” Paper moved on Kessler’s end. “Sworn and notarized. He set up the October thirtieth dinner. He invited your husband and Ms. Sutton to watch his CFO. He put you at that table and didn’t tell you who was coming. And he saw Michael take hold of your wrist in the pantry hard enough to leave marks, and names Mrs. Ruiz as a second witness. Paragraph fourteen is dead.”

Rachel couldn’t say anything for a second.

“There’s a catch,” Kessler said. “Once I file it, Whitfield reads it, and Whitfield has lunch with Harold Kemp. A CEO swearing he used a dinner party to spy on his own CFO, with the man’s wife as the bait. His board will have it by Friday. He knows that. I told him twice.”

“Then why did he do it?”

“You’d have to ask him.” A pause. “If you want it withdrawn, he says you only have to tell me. I’m not filing until you say.”

Rachel looked at the locked door of the guest suite for a long time.

“File it,” she said.

That night she heard him come home, heard him stop outside her door the way he did now, and keep going when she didn’t open it. She didn’t open it. But she stood on her side with her palm flat on the wood until his footsteps were gone.

* * *

Thursday she rode the D all the way back to the Bronx, under the park, over the river, to the Duane Reade on Fordham Road. Nobody she knew shopped here anymore. That was the point.

The tests were locked behind plastic, like razor blades or Similac. She pressed the little red button and it played a chime over the whole store. Ding-dong. Everybody in aisle six looked up.

A girl with box braids and a name tag that said KEISHA came with the key, looked at Rachel’s face, and didn’t say a thing. Rachel took the First Response two-pack, $18.99, then the Clearblue digital, then put the digital back, because it said PREGNANT or NOT PREGNANT in words, and she couldn’t stand to read it in words.

She paid cash. Her own money, from the agency’s first deposit into the new account in her name only, Moore, the one Kessler had made her open.

On the train she read an ad for a personal injury lawyer about two hundred times. HURT? CALL BERT.

* * *

She waited until Mrs. Ruiz went home. Then she locked the guest suite, and locked the bathroom inside it, and checked both.

She read the instructions twice. She did it, set the stick face down on the counter, and stood at the window with her arms around herself, watching a horse carriage crawl along the park drive. Three minutes. The longest since the bus shelter on Linden Court, waiting for Michael to call back.

She turned it over.

The control line came up fast and dark. Fine. That one always showed up.

And then, while she watched, as if somebody were drawing it with a fine-point pen, the second.

Faint, then not faint at all.

Rachel sat down on the edge of the tub like an old woman. She opened the second test and did it again and watched the whole three minutes, and the second line came up just as fast and just as pink, and she laughed, a terrible little laugh with no air in it.

Two for two. Thanks, First Response. Very thorough.

She pressed her shaking fingers flat against her knees until they stopped, and then she started counting.

October fourteenth. The night before the locks. Michael, all soft voice and wine and his hand on the back of her neck, one last night to make things right, babe. One finger.

November sixth. The night she walked past her own door and knocked on Julian’s. Two fingers.

Twenty-three days apart. With a cycle that had never once in eighteen years done what it was supposed to. She tried to work it the way Mr. Abernathy would have, columns and rows, last period, ovulation, and she couldn’t even remember the last period. September sometime. Before the lockout. She’d been too busy being a wife to write it down.

The math just sat there with two answers and refused to pick.

Somebody knocked. Not on the bathroom. On the guest suite door, out past the bed.

Rachel swept both sticks into her lap like a kid hiding a report card.

“Rachel?” Julian, through two doors. “Delia texted me you were sick yesterday. I’m not coming in. I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

“Fine!” Too loud. “I’m taking a bath.”

A pause. She could feel him out there, deciding whether to believe her, and deciding it wasn’t his to decide.

“Do you want company?”

Her eyes burned. “Not right now.”

“Okay.” Another pause. “There’s soup. Delia made the chicken one before she left.”

She listened to him go. Then she wrapped both sticks in a wad of toilet paper, put them in the box, put the box in the Duane Reade bag, tied it in a knot, and pushed it to the bottom of the bathroom trash under tissues pulled out by the handful, until the whole can was white and soft and innocent.

The woman in the mirror looked pale and wild-haired and about nineteen. She had her mother’s chin. She was holding her stomach without having decided to.

“It could be either of them,” Rachel whispered.