Chapter 14: Pregnant, Four Weeks

 

By the fourth week Briar was waking up before dawn to start the morning prayers. The cleaning list had expanded to include the exterior window ledges, which meant standing on a step stool in the cold with her arms stretched above her head until her shoulders burned. Meals were a coin flip. Some days there was real food. Other days there was whatever had been left in the pan from the night before, scraped into a bowl without reheating.

She stopped counting days. Counting made it worse.

---

It was a Thursday when Mary came back from her day off with her left sleeve pulled down despite the warmth of the evening.

Briar was in the kitchen finishing the dinner dishes when Mary came through the back door. She moved differently than usual.

Briar looked at her and looked away and then looked back.

"Are you okay?" she said.

"Finish the dishes," Mary said.

Briar finished the dishes. She dried her hands. Mary had sat down at the kitchen table and was going through a stack of household receipts.

Briar went to the freezer. She wrapped some ice in a dish towel and took the small tin of arnica cream from the first aid cabinet above the sink. She put both on the table in front of Mary.

Mary looked at them. She looked at Briar.

"I didn't ask for those," she said.

"I know," Briar said. "But your sleeve is down and it's warm in here and you're sitting funny, like your ribs hurt." She paused. "My mama used to sit like that sometimes."

A long silence.

Mary picked up the ice pack. She did not say thank you. But she pressed it to her side and closed her eyes for a moment.

Briar sat down across from her.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

Mary opened her eyes.

"Why do you hate me?" Briar said. "I know you do. I've known since the first day. And I keep trying to figure out what I did and I can't. So can you just tell me? Please?"

Mary looked at her for a long time.

"Two years ago," she said finally. "You saw my arm."

Briar waited.

"I had come in with bruising. Here." Mary touched her forearm. "You saw it and you laughed."

Briar opened her mouth. Closed it.

"I laughed," she said slowly.

"Yes."

"Why would I." She stopped. Thought about it tough. "Was there someone talking nearby? Was someone saying something at the same time?"

Mary's expression shifted slightly. "There were people nearby, yes. Someone was telling a story."

"Was it Vivienne?" Briar said.

Mary looked at her. "Vivienne wasn't here that day."

"I know," Briar said. "But before that. Did I ever mention you to her? Did I ever say anything about you having bruises?"

She was thinking back. Two years ago, a letter. She had written to Vivienne while Vivienne was still abroad, the way she used to write when she was lonely and needed someone to talk to. She had mentioned Mary. She had said Mary had come in with bruises and seemed upset and she did not know what to do about it.

And Vivienne had written back.

Briar could not remember the exact words now. But she remembered the shape of them. Something like: oh, you know how Mary is, she's always been dramatic, she bumps into a doorframe and suddenly it's a whole story, don't let her make you feel guilty for nothing.

She had believed it. She had filed Mary away as a difficult woman who manufactured her own suffering. And then at the gathering she had seen the bruising again and Vivienne's words had already done their work.

"I think," Briar said carefully, "that I was told something about you that was not true. And I believed it. And I laughed because I didn't understand what I was actually looking at." She looked at her own hands on the table. "That's not an excuse. I still laughed. You were hurt and I laughed and that was bad of me. That was really bad of me."

She looked up.

"I'm sorry, Mary," she said. "I'm really, genuinely sorry. Not because I want you to be nicer to me. Just because it was wrong and you deserved better than that."

Mary said nothing for a long moment.

Then she pushed the arnica cream toward Briar.

"Put it on properly," she said. "You have to rub it in or it doesn't work."

Briar put it on properly.

---

Mary did not stop the prayers or the cleaning. But the rice started being warm. The blanket was replaced with a thicker one. On Sunday she left a real meal on the kitchen table.

On the twenty-eighth night Mary left the side gate unlatched.

She did not say anything about it. She just left it unlatched and went to bed early and Briar stood in the dark hallway for ten minutes understanding what that meant.

She packed nothing. She took her phone and her ID and the small envelope of cash she had been keeping at the back of the bathroom cabinet and she went out through the side gate into the cold night air and started walking.

She had been walking for maybe twenty minutes when the pain started.

It was low and cramping, the kind she recognized, and she thought: of course, now, of all the timing in the world. She kept walking. The pain got worse.

She stopped at a low wall and sat on it and pressed her hand to her abdomen and breathed and waited for it to pass.

It did not pass.

She sat on the wall and thought about her last period and then thought about the one before that and then tried to count backward and lost the thread and counted again.

It had been a long time.

The pain crested and she slid off the wall onto the pavement, her back against the cold stone, and looked up at the sky and thought: that is not what this is. That is not a period. I don't know what this is.

She reached for her phone. She got as far as opening the screen before her vision went gray at the edges.

And then she did.

---

There were hands. Large ones. Someone saying her name.

She thought: Killian. He came. He noticed I was gone and he came.

She held onto that thought all the way down into the dark.

---

The light was wrong when she woke up. Too white. Too still. Not the bedroom.

She turned her head.

Liam was sitting in the chair beside the bed, his elbows on his knees, his face doing something complicated that it smoothed out when he saw her eyes open.

"Hey," he said.

"Where." Her voice came out wrong.

"Hospital," he said. "Private clinic. I found you on the pavement on Mercer Street."

"I thought." She stopped.

"You thought what?"

"Nothing." She looked at the ceiling. "I thought it was someone else."

Liam said nothing. He handed her a cup of water.

A woman in a white coat came in ten minutes later with a tablet and a printed sheet and the particular expression of someone who had news that required a specific kind of delivery.

"Mrs." she said. "How are you feeling?"

"Weak," Briar said honestly.

"That's understandable." The doctor sat down. She put the printed sheet on the bed where Briar could see it. "I want to go over your results with you. There's something I need to tell you."

Briar looked at the sheet. The numbers meant nothing to her. The words at the top did.

She looked at them for a long time.

"That says pregnant," she said.

"Four weeks," the doctor said. "Approximately."