What winning looks like

Alexandria’s POV

The scan was on a Tuesday.

I hadn’t told Jamie about it. I’d carried the referral in my bag for two weeks, taking it out occasionally and looking at it the way you look at something you’re not ready to act on yet. The date crept up regardless, the way dates do, indifferent to whether you’ve sorted out your feelings about them.

Monday night I was in the bedroom reading — actually reading this time, the book he’d gotten from the Fremont Street shop — when he came in from his study and sat on the edge of the bed on his side and just existed there for a moment the way he’d started doing lately. Not demanding anything. Not announcing anything. Just being in the same room as me in a way that didn’t cost me anything.

“I have a scan tomorrow,” I said. To the book, initially. Then I lowered it and looked at him. “Eleven am. At the clinic on Decatur.”

He was very still.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to come,” I said. “I’m just — telling you. Because you should know.”

He looked at me carefully. “Do you want me to come.”

The question sat there between us and I turned it over properly instead of answering from reflex. Did I want him there. In the small clinical room with the paper sheet on the table and the cold gel and the grainy screen. Did I want Jamie Grayson in that room with me.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“That’s okay,” he said. “Tell me in the morning.”

He got up and went to the bathroom and I lay there looking at the ceiling turning it over and over until I fell asleep still undecided.

In the morning I was sick for twelve minutes by the bathroom clock, which was actually an improvement. When I came out Jamie was in the hallway with water and ginger biscuits and the expression of a man who had been waiting quietly and was pretending he hadn’t been.

I took the biscuits.

“You can come,” I said. “If you want. But you don’t have to perform anything in there. Don’t — don’t hold my hand for the sake of it or say the right things because you’ve decided that’s what this moment requires. If you’re in that room I need you to just be in it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do,” he said. “I’ll just be in it.”

Dr. Osei looked up when we both walked in and her expression did a small careful thing that doctors do when a situation has changed since last appointment. She recovered quickly.

“Mr. Grayson,” she said.

“Doctor,” Jamie said. He sat in the chair against the wall. Not beside the table, not hovering. The chair against the wall, slightly back, like he understood his role in this room and had already placed himself accordingly.

I got up on the table. The paper sheet crinkled. The gel was cold even though Dr. Osei always said sorry before applying it.

The screen came on.

I stared at it. I’d seen the first image three weeks ago at the hospital, small and grainy and more suggestion than reality. This was different. Clearer. An actual shape on the screen, small curved spine, the flutter of something that Dr. Osei pointed to with her pen.

“Heartbeat,” she said. “Strong. Right where it should be.”

I heard Jamie make a sound.

Not a word. Not anything articulate. Just a small involuntary sound from the chair against the wall that I had never heard him make before in my life. I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on the screen because if I looked at him right now something would happen in my chest that I wasn’t ready for.

“Everything looks good,” Dr. Osei was saying. “Growth is on track. Given the bleeding episode, I want to keep monitoring monthly for now, but there’s no indication of ongoing concern.”

I nodded. I was still looking at the screen.

She printed the image and handed it to me and I held it with both hands and stared at it.

Eleven weeks and four days. The size of a fig, apparently. I’d read that somewhere and it had seemed abstract until right now.

On the way out Jamie held the door. Not performing it — he just got there first and held it, the way you hold a door for someone carrying something.

We walked to the car in silence.

Inside he sat in the passenger seat and I sat in the driver’s because I’d driven myself and he’d met me there and the logistics of separate cars meant we were now parked next to each other in a clinic car park on Decatur with nowhere to be for a moment.

He was looking at the scan photo. I’d handed it to him without deciding to, just passed it across while I found my keys.

“It’s real,” he said quietly. To the photo, not to me.

“Yes.”

“I keep thinking I’ve absorbed it and then—” He stopped.

“And then,” I said.

“And then it gets more real.” He looked up. His eyes were doing something I had never had occasion to see in them before and I made myself look at it directly rather than away. “I don’t know how to do this, Alexandria. I want to be—” He stopped again. The words were giving him trouble in a way that had nothing to do with not knowing what he wanted to say. More like knowing it and not being sure he’d earned the right to say it yet. “I want to do this right. The baby. You. I want to actually do it right.”

“I know,” I said.

“But you don’t believe it yet.”

“I believe that you mean it right now,” I said carefully. “I’m waiting to see if you still mean it in six months. In a year. When it’s not a crisis anymore and the ordinary days come back and there’s no suitcase by the door to remind you what’s at stake.”

He looked at the photo again.

“That’s fair,” he said.

“It’s not about fair,” I said. “It’s just where I am.”

He handed the photo back. I put it in my bag next to the referral it had replaced.

Outside the clinic car park a Tuesday in Las Vegas was happening, oblivious and bright.

“I’ll see you at home,” I said.

He nodded. Got out. Walked to his car.

I sat alone for a moment with my hand on my stomach and the morning quiet around me and the full complicated weight of what my life had become pressing gently but firmly on my chest.

I wasn’t winning.

Neither was he.

That was maybe the most honest place we’d ever been.

I started the car and drove home.