“Are you sure?” I was able to mumble. It was the only thing I had at the ready. Every other thought and feeling and word was tied up with each other, all fighting their way to my throat.
“I am. Completely,” she said. There was a finality to that. No ambiguity.
“Oh,” I said, cursing my sudden inability to speak.
“So far, the only person that knows besides you and I is Ava,” she said. I turned to look at Ava at the bar, and she kind of half waved at me, then realized that meant she’d been watching us and I saw it and suddenly turned her back to me again.
“Ava,” I said, as if the name was foreign to me. I couldn’t think. I certainly couldn’t speak. Emotions and thoughts were coursing through me at lightning speed, and none of them slowed down long enough for me to concentrate on them. Instead I just looked back to Amanda, who looked like she was getting upset.
“Ava, yes. She is the only person I trusted. I talked to her about it, and she told me about how she hid her pregnancy and how I needed to tell you as soon as possible,” she said. I nodded and stared at the table. A glass was in front of Amanda, and it just registered that it was filled with orange juice. I had never known her to drink orange juice except in the breakfasts that we had in the hotel room just upstairs.
The mornings after we made love.
Upstairs.
Where we made a baby.
“You told Ava,” I repeated, encouraged by the fact that I was able to repeat something rather than immediately begin blurting out the mathematics of how the baby had been conceived and where, like was on my mind. Images of Amanda’s naked, succulent body, wrapped in the bedsheets, and around my hips coursed through my memories. I tried to shake them off.
“Yes. Ava. She is the one who convinced me to come out here. She encouraged me to fly here today. She even arranged it and paid for it,” Amanda said. I noticed something in her voice. It had gotten cold.
“So, you flew back. To tell me you’re pregnant,” I said, my brain finally feeling like it was registering the situation, putting all the blocks into place and getting me back on track to being able to meaningfully contribute again.
Amanda sighed and threw her cloth napkin down on the table in front of her. She grabbed the orange juice and drank the remainder of it in one big gulp, then sat it down and stood up.
“I knew I shouldn’t have said anything,” she said. “This was a mistake.”
Before I could get words out of my mouth, she stomped away and was out the door before I could stand. I looked over to Ava, whose eyes were wide, and she took off after her while I stood there, dumbfounded and speechless.
34
Amanda
I didn’t have time before dinner to check in to the hotel, so I had just left my luggage at the front desk and gone straight to the restaurant. Fighting tears, I crossed the lobby back to the desk. I didn’t want to cry, but the tears were welling up, and I just couldn’t push them back any longer.
All I could hope was that I would manage to get up to my room before they came spilling out. I got up to the desk, and the clerk smiled at me.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I left my luggage here a little while ago, but now I’m ready to check-in.”
He looked at me strangely. “Check-in?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have a reservation for tonight. It’s under Amanda Myers.”
He continued to give me that confused look for a few seconds, then turned to his computer. He clicked a few buttons, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, but there’s no reservation under that name.”
“What do you mean there’s no reservation?” I asked. “I made it this morning.”
He shook his head again. “I’m sorry, but the hotel is completely booked, and I don’t see a reservation under the name Amanda Myers.”
“If the hotel is booked and you don’t see my reservation, why did you keep my luggage at the desk?” I asked.
“Did the person who took it from you ask your room number? Or your reservation confirmation number?” he asked.
“No,” I said. This was going spectacularly. I let out a sigh. “Can you check one more time? Maybe it’s under a different variation of the name? A misspelling?”
“I’m happy to look again,” he said. “But the only reservation that was made within the last three days was made this evening just before a gentleman arrived. Everything else has been booked for quite some time.”
“Then what happened to my reservation?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m very sorry for the mix-up. Unfortunately, sometimes things like this happen. Can I help you find somewhere else?”
My jaw hurt from my teeth gritting so hard. It wasn’t this man’s fault, as much as I wanted to blame him for it. I just felt ridiculous standing there with my luggage at my feet and nowhere to go.
“Yes,” I said.
A couple of minutes of clicking buttons later, he gave me a smile.
“You’re in luck. It looks like there is a room available. It’s in the town of Astoria. If it’s alright with you, I will take the liberty of making a reservation for you,” he said.
“Go ahead,” I said.
He finished, printed out a confirmation, and handed it over to me. As soon as I looked down at the name of the hotel, I felt my heart sink. It was a motel. There really wasn’t any other option. I wasn’t going to be able to get a flight back to San Francisco until the next day.
I knew if I called Ava and asked if I could crash at her place for the night, she would let me. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Not only did I not want to talk about what happened yet, but I also didn’t want to be somewhere Tom could find me so easily. The look on his face when I told him was plenty. I didn’t want to deal with any more right now.
Just like he had been by showing back up at the office to talk through what happened before I left Astoria, I knew Tom was the kind of man who would want to talk about this. I had purposely not glanced back in the direction of the restaurant since getting to the desk and was hoping with every fiber of my being he wouldn’t approach me right now. But it wasn’t like he was just going to go about his life pretending the conversation in the restaurant never happened.
Eventually, he was going to want to talk to me about it again. I just needed time before that happened. I didn’t want to be at Ava’s house and have him show up for an awkward confrontation with his family right there to witness it all. I hadn’t wanted to be by myself when I headed to Ava’s earlier in the day, but now it was exactly what I needed.
I called for a cab to bring me to the motel and resigned myself to settling in for the night. The paper-thin walls gave me a front-row seat to the various activities and events going on in the rooms around me, and combined with the thoughts rushing through my head, I struggled to get to sleep. Finally, exhaustion got the most of me, and I nodded off.
It didn’t last long. Only a few hours after I fell asleep, I woke up. My body was still on my work schedule, but I managed to will myself back to sleep for a little bit longer. The next time I woke up, it was to the sound of my phone ringing. I had the sinking feeling it was Tom, and I definitely wasn’t in the headspace to start my morning with talking to him.