“He slept through the whole movie,” Bess tells Aaron.
“Do you want me to take him now?”
Bess startles. “Oh, yeah,” she says, a tiny bit flustered. “Sure. Here.” She thrusts him toward Aaron.
“Thanks for watching him. I got to spend some time with Sam, so that was nice.” He settles Miles in his arms like he’s transferred a sleeping baby a million times, which I’m pretty sure he has.
“Sam. Oh, yeah. Right. Sam,” Bess says, like she’s still a little muddled. She scrubs her nose with the palm of her hand. “Did the girls enjoy the movie?”
“Very much.” He stares at Bess like he’s waiting for her to announce a revelation. But he’s smart enough not to goad her into it. “Well, I guess I had better get the girls to bed.” He stands up and instructs his girls to gather all their belongings and pick up any trash they left behind, and Mr. Jacobson loads them into his red golf cart to take them to the cabin. Then they’re gone.
I look up and see that Jake and Katie are walking toward the big house and they have all their children in tow. Suddenly, it’s just me and Bess left, and we’re still sitting on the blanket in the middle of the open field. Instead of getting up, Bess lies back on the blanket and stares up at the stars. She says nothing.
“Want some company?” I ask her.
“Sure,” she says hesitantly, like she’s not sure how to answer my question.
I lie down next to her and stare up at the stars. I point toward a constellation. “Jake told the kids that one is called piggly-wiggly.”
She giggles softly. “It does kind of look like a pig.” She turns her face toward me. “I’m sorry I got upset tonight.” Her voice is low and quiet.
I try to smile and reassure her, but it’s dark so I don’t think she even notices. “It’s fine, Bess. No harm done.” I reach over and pat her forearm with my fingertips. She doesn’t jerk away, and I am somewhat mollified by that.
“I wiped snot all over your sleeve.”
“My shirt’s washable.”
She lies quietly and stares up at the stars again. “Do you remember the night we watched that same movie, in this same spot, back when we were almost twenty?” Her voice is barely more than a whisper.
“Vaguely. Why do you ask?”
“I was pregnant for the first time.”
I reach out and take her hand in mine. She doesn’t reciprocate the squeeze, but she doesn’t pull back or slap me either, so I take that as a win. “Now I remember.”
“I was scared to death.” She snorts out a self-deprecating laugh.
“So was I, Bess. So was I.”
She turns to face me. “You didn’t seem like it. You seemed like you had accepted it so readily.”
“I don’t think I had accepted it, exactly. I remember I was terrified of what was going to come next. But I knew I wanted to be with you. That part was never in question.”
“Did you want to be a father?” she asks.
I lie still and absorb the question. My answer will be wrong no matter what it is. I can feel that before I even open my mouth. “If I could have chosen it right that moment…I think I would have wanted to wait to be a father,” I say slowly, trying to make the words come out the way I want them to. “Looking back, I should have taken more precautions. I should have taken more care. But I didn’t, and we got pregnant. We didn’t plan it, but then there it was. It was our reality. So, I got myself ready, in my head.”
“I have a confession. I was relieved when they told me that the baby wasn’t viable, that there was no heartbeat and that there never would be one. And I…I still hate myself for that.” She turns her gaze back toward the stars. “I didn’t want it, and so I was relieved when it was gone. And you? Were you relieved too?”
“Yes, Bess. I was relieved too,” I admit. I hate it, I hate admitting it, but I was. We were so young. We were both just starting college. We were both working part time and going to school full time, and we were doing it in different states. We saw one another sporadically, and we’d filled up our time with late-night phone calls when we could stay awake long enough to make the call.
When she’d told me she was pregnant, I’d made plans to transfer to a college closer to her so we could live in the same place. I’d moved. I’d changed colleges, and we’d gotten a place together. Her parents didn’t like it, but we didn’t let them deter us. We got our apartment together and we became a family. We got married a year later.
“That baby might have been an adventure,” she says quietly. “Do you think I willed it away? By not wanting it enough?”
“Sweetheart, I don’t think you have that kind of power. No one does. Bad things happen. And they happen to good people.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. So quiet. Then: “Were we good people?”
I turn to face her. “How can you ask that? We were just kids.” I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “We were kids playing at being adults, doing adult things. But we weren’t adults. Not really. We still had a lot of shit to figure out.” I pluck a blade of grass and start to play with it in my fingers. “I still feel like I have a lot of shit to figure out, most days.”
Silence falls over us, but it’s peaceful. It’s not frantic or raw, like the time we normally spend together. I don’t feel like I’m being punched in the gut over and over. There’s a stillness in the air.
“You haven’t signed the divorce papers yet,” she says finally.
I wince, closing my eyes. “No, I haven’t.”
“Why haven’t you signed them?” Her voice is soft and cool, like the flip side of a pillow, all of a sudden.
My shoulders lift in something close to a shrug. “I’m not ready.” I’m not ready to give up on us.
“Do you have any idea when you might be ready?”
I sigh. “No, Bess, I don’t.” This conversation has evolved into the same kind of conversation we always have. Next, she’ll start giving me one-word answers. She’ll avoid my gaze. She’ll close herself off. I can already feel it. I roll to my knees and stand up. “Are you ready to go back to the cabin?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “I’m going to lie here for a few minutes. You go ahead.”
“I can wait with you.” I don’t want to leave her.
“I’d like a few minutes alone, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay, Bess,” I reply. My usual reply when things turn this way.
I huff out a breath, straighten my spine, because it’s the only thing I know how to do. I collect our trash and carry it with me, retreating back the way we came. I leave her there alone in that field, both of us wondering why I won’t give her what she wants and sign the damn divorce papers already.
24
Bess
I hear the golf cart as it comes back up the hill. I don’t get up, though, until I hear Mr. Jacobson cut the engine. I lift my head, and I see him closing the case on the old movie projector, and he picks it up to set it on the back of the golf cart.