Chapter 4 Two Lines

Two pink lines, 6:10 a.m., on the edge of my mother's bathroom sink.

I'd bought the test at the all-night pharmacy on Harbor Street at five, along with a bottle of water and a box of ginger snaps, and the man at the register had looked at the three things together and then at my face and said, "Good luck, sweetheart," without saying which way he meant it.

I sat on the closed lid of the toilet in Helen's narrow pink-tiled bathroom and looked at the stick for a while.

My first thought was arithmetic. My last period had started at the end of January. Obstetricians count from that day, so I was seven weeks pregnant on paper, though the night it really happened was only about five weeks back.

The nausea I'd been blaming on night shifts and nerves and the smell of the hospital cafeteria wasn't stress at all. The tiredness wasn't the call schedule. My body had been running a textbook first trimester for weeks while I stood in operating rooms holding retractors and told myself I was coming down with something.

My second thought was that the timeline didn't care what Rhys believed about me. It just was.

I wrapped the stick in toilet paper and put it in the pocket of my cardigan.

---

Helen's house was the width of one room and the height of three. The stairs ran straight up the middle, steep as a ladder. When I was small I used to sit on the fourth step from the bottom and watch her get ready for night shifts in the hall mirror, pinning her watch to her uniform, putting on lipstick she'd have chewed off by midnight.

I sat on the fourth step now, in the dark, with my knees under my chin.

She'd been dead three years and four months. Pancreatic cancer. The kind they find too late because it never makes a fuss until it's everywhere. She'd been a nurse for thirty years and she'd known what it meant the day they showed her the scan, and she'd made a joke about it in the oncologist's office so the young doctor wouldn't cry.

That was Helen. She told terrible jokes. She told them at funerals. She told them at the bedsides of dying men. She told them to me in this hallway, the night before my first day of medical school, the night before every exam.

Why did the nurse carry a red pen? In case she needed to draw blood.

Mom.

You're smiling. Don't argue with me, I can see you smiling.

I wasn't smiling now. I was counting back those five weeks, and I knew exactly where they landed. February. The snowstorm that shut the city for two days, when the hospital closed the clinics and I came home at noon instead of midnight, and Rhys was home too, because the roads were closed and even he couldn't get to the office.

He'd been in the kitchen making coffee. He'd turned around when I came in, and for once he'd looked at me properly, and he'd said, You're soaked, and handed me a towel.

That was all it had taken. A towel and a closed road. I'd lain awake afterward in our cold big bed, his arm heavy across me, and thought maybe. Maybe this was how it started. Maybe one day he'd look at me the way he looked at Vivienne Sutter across a ballroom.

When the roads opened he was gone before I woke. That night he didn't come home.

I put my hand flat against the pocket where the test was.

I had made a great many choices in three years so I wouldn't be a wife who caused trouble. But I had never been a person who hid things. I'd go to Lantern Row and tell him. I'd say it plainly, in the hall, before I picked up the pen.

And then I'd sign his papers anyway, because a man who could answer I wasn't there with one word wasn't a man you raised a child with. But he would know. Nobody would ever be able to say I'd kept it from him.

I got up and washed my face and ate two ginger snaps standing at the kitchen sink.

---

My key still worked.

I'd half expected him to have changed the locks. It would have been like him to have had it done on Sunday afternoon, with a locksmith paid double, as the lawyer had been. But the key turned, and the door opened on the hall with its black and white tiles and the narrow table where the papers still sat squared to the edge, and the freezer bag beside them was gone.

Hanging on the brass hook by the door was a camel-colored coat.

Long, soft, belted. Expensive in the way that only looks simple. I didn't own anything like it. Rhys didn't wear camel. On the runner below it, one on its side, lay a pair of nude heels, the kind that make your legs go on forever in photographs, kicked off by someone who'd come in and not bothered to line them up.

I knew whose they were. I'd watched those heels cross the ballroom at Larkmoor on Saturday night, straight to my husband's elbow.

Upstairs, behind the bathroom door at the top of the stairs, water was running. The old pipes in that house knocked when the shower was on. I'd listened to that knocking every morning for three years from the kitchen, waiting to hear his feet on the stairs.

I stood in the hall and listened to it now.

I could have gone up. I could have stood outside that door and found out exactly who was behind it and why.

I didn't. I put my hand in my cardigan pocket and closed it around the test, wrapped in its toilet paper, and I left it there.

---

The kitchen was the room I'd spent the most time in. I'd eaten breakfast at that table every morning of my marriage, mostly alone, with a textbook propped against the fruit bowl. I'd learned the coronary arteries there, and the twelve cranial nerves, with a mnemonic Helen made up that I can't repeat in front of the children.

I sat in my usual chair and took the cap off the pen I'd brought.

Benedict Carrow's office had flagged every page that needed a signature with a little yellow sticky arrow. Sign here. Initial here. Date here. There were twenty-three of them.

I read none of the paragraphs around them. I'd decided on Helen's stairs that I didn't care what was in them. If he wanted to take everything, he was welcome to it. I'd come into his house owning a stethoscope, an anatomy atlas and my mother's chipped mugs. I could leave with less.

I signed my name twenty-three times. My handwriting didn't shake once. I'd had a lot of practice signing things while other people watched me, waiting for my hand to give me away.

When I'd finished, I put the pen down and looked at my left hand.

The band was plain platinum, narrow, a little loose because I'd lost weight that winter. Edmund had chosen it. Rhys had put it on my finger in the chapel at Larkmoor without looking at my face, and I'd looked at his the whole time, memorizing it in case it never happened again.

I worked it over the knuckle. It took a moment. Then it came, and my finger looked strange and pale and new, like skin under a dressing.

I set the ring on the last signature page, beside my name, where he couldn't pick up the papers without touching it.

I thought about writing a note. I even pulled the pad toward me. Then I thought about what I'd write, and every version of it began Rhys, I'm pregnant, and ended with him reading it standing in this kitchen in his towel with Vivienne Sutter's coat on the hook behind him, and I put the pen back in my bag.

Upstairs, the water stopped.

I stood up fast. On the fridge door, under a magnet shaped like a lobster, was the one photograph of Helen I'd brought into this house: her on the seawall in Old Harbor in her old blue parka, laughing at something outside the frame, her hair blown sideways. I took it down and put it inside my coat, against my chest.

I didn't take anything else. Not my books, not my winter boots, not the mugs. Let him box them up, or throw them out. I didn't care which.

I heard a door open upstairs. I was already in the hall. I closed the front door behind me without a sound. I'd had three years of practice not waking him.

---

I drove to Old Harbor without deciding to. I parked across from the fish market because it was the one place in Bramport I knew would be awake and loud and smell of nothing to do with any Calloway.

The trucks were backed up to the loading bay. Men in orange bibs were swinging crates of ice and cod down onto the concrete, shouting at each other in three languages. Gulls stood on the roof in a line, waiting for mistakes.

I took out my phone and called my program director.

He was in his car. I could hear the turn signal ticking. I told him I was resigning my internship, effective immediately, for personal reasons. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "Margot, is this about Saturday?" and I understood that the whole hospital already knew.

"It's about me," I said.

He tried. He was a decent man. He said I should take leave instead, that I was the best intern he'd had in years, that this would blow over. I thanked him and said no. When I hung up my hands were cold, and I sat with them pressed between my knees for a while and watched a man hose fish scales off the loading bay into the gutter.

Someone knocked on my window.

It was a woman in a rubber apron and a wool hat, sixty or so, with a paper cup in each hand. She'd sold my mother fish for twenty years, and I had never learned her name. I rolled the window down.

"You're Helen's girl," she said. "The doctor."

"Yes."

"You've been sitting here twenty minutes looking like you got bad news." She held a cup out. "Tea. Milk, two sugars. Helen took it that way, I figured it runs in the family."

I took it. It was too sweet and much too hot. I'd got through the ballroom and the ICU and the policeman with the cold and twenty-three yellow arrows without crying once, and I nearly went over a paper cup.

"Thank you."

"She told me a joke once about a lobster," the woman said, "that I still can't get out of my head. Worst joke I ever heard." She slapped the roof of my car twice and went back to her crates.

I drank half the tea. Then I scrolled to a number I hadn't called since October.

Last autumn, a professor from Zurich had come to Boston to give a lecture on valve repair, and I'd asked her a question afterward that had made her put down her water glass and look at me properly. She'd taken me to dinner.

Two weeks later, she'd sent me an email offering me a two-year research fellowship in her lab at the Kantonsklinik Zürichberg, with a path into cardiac surgical training at the end of it. It was the best offer I'd ever had.

I'd turned it down. I'd told her I was married, and that my husband's life was here, and that I couldn't leave. I'd thought, at the time, that this was what a wife did.

It was a quarter past eight in Bramport. In Zurich it would be early afternoon.

The phone rang three times. I put my free hand on my stomach under my coat, over the place where nothing showed yet.

A woman answered in German, brisk and impatient. Then a pause. Then, in English, "Dr. Fairley?"

"Professor Sommer." My voice came out low, the way it does when I'm frightened, and I made it come up. "In October you offered me a fellowship. Is it still open?"

The line hissed. Somewhere in Zurich a pen tapped on a lab bench.

"In October," she said, "you told me you could not leave your husband."

"I've left him."

It was the first time I'd said it aloud. It sounded like someone else's case history. Then it sounded like mine.

"I can be in Zurich on Saturday," I said. "I'll take whatever the fellowship pays, and I'll work harder than anyone in your lab."

"Everyone tells me this."

"Then let me be the one who means it."

A short dry sound came down the line. It might have been a laugh. "I will write to you tonight," Professor Sommer said, and hung up.

I sat with the dead phone against my ear. Out on the loading bay, the man had finished hosing the concrete, and the gulls came down all at once on what he'd missed.

My hand was still flat on my stomach. I didn't move it.

Rhys had the papers and the ring. He wasn't getting this.