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Chapter Sixteen - Indefinitely


The next morning, the sun came up bright through the window over the horizon behind the lighthouse. When I woke up, Lauren was already gone from the bed. I climbed out and pulled my sweats on and walked to the bathroom. After I’d done my business, I pulled the paper off one of these little soaps they had sitting on the counter by the sink faucet. It smelled like almond and honey and I sniffed it a few times before actually washing my hands with it and throwing the paper into the trash. I missed the garbage bin and bent down to pick it up and throw it away.

In the trash was a familiar sight.

I picked up the bin and stood there staring down at it… a home pregnancy test box, the wrapper undone, the box open. I felt a lump rise in my throat and I reached into the bin and pulled the box out with my fingertips, carefully shaking it ‘til the little stick came out. I closed my eyes, afraid to see the answer. I like the name Jack, I thought. Jack or Brenda or Sam or -- I opened my eyes.

Negative.

I threw it into the bin and put the bin back under the sink where it belonged.

That’s why Lauren had a headache the night before. It’d been testing day, I just hadn’t known it. I wondered if we’d never stopped trying at all, if all the sex I’d been getting lately was some kind of plot to keep trying without telling me we were trying so I wouldn’t worry about it so much. I felt kinda sick that she’d been lying to me about it.

I paced around the bathroom a few laps before I went downstairs.

Lauren was outside. I walked down the length of the wood walkway, toward the ocean, hugging myself against the cold. Nacho and Igby were out on the sand, chasing the seagulls and sticks Ethan was throwing for them while Lauren watched, sitting on the very end of the wood walkway. I sat down next to her.

“Morning,” she said, still staring at Ethan as he laughed and threw a stick for Nacho, who rushed after it, kicking sand up behind him.

“You feelin’ better?” I asked.

“I’m okay,” she answered.

I reached out and put my arm around her shoulders. Somehow now that I was out here and looking at her, I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d found the test. So I just hugged her instead. I leaned my forehead on her shoulder. Since I’d decided not to mention the pregnancy test to her, I decided I should bring up the other thing that had me upset. “I was talking to Ethan yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I paused. Now that I’d brought it up, I wasn’t sure how to tell her without her thinking I was maybe being a little biased still. But I’d felt haunted about it and I knew the only way to fix it would be to talk to Lauren. She was looking at me with a questioning look on her face. “He brought it up, not me,” I added, “But… Laur, we were talking about dads and he asked what mine was like and I just said that me and him aren’t close, you know, and he asked if my dad drinks and if he’d ever hit me before.”

Lauren’s eyes were nervous as the words came out of me.

“So I… I was pretty honest with him, but then I was like ‘what about you’ and he said that Otis hit him,” I said.

The expression in Lauren’s eyes melted into surprise.

“He brought it up,” I reiterated, “Not me.”

“Fuck,” she whispered and she looked away, back at Ethan as he ran after Nacho, waving his arms across the beach. She bit her lips, then looked down at her hands, “Fuck.”

“I know,” I said quietly. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” she said.




“So you got yourself laid, did you?”

Not hello, not how are you, not any normal form of greeting. No, when I answered my phone when Jordan Knight called around three that afternoon, before I could even say a word he’d blurted that out in a very self-righteous sort of way.

Lauren, Ethan and I were in the little town at a sort of festival thing they were doing. A lot of people milled around me, trying to buy fried dough and hot cocoa from street vendors, whose carts steamed in the cold night air. Everyone was bundled up, the lights glowing from the store fronts warm and revealing crowded interiors. I tapped Lauren’s shoulder and motioned that I’d catch up with her and Ethan. I stepped aside, “I did. A bunch of times since I’ve seen you last.”

“Jesus,” Jordan laughed.

“Dawg, I got laid in a bubble bath,” I bragged.

“So your pisser’s working again okay I take it,” Jordan said the word pisser funny because of his accent. Well, I mean, it’s not a word anyway, that I know of, but in his Boston it was like pissah. I’d heard him say it a few times, usually as a swear. Like one time he cut his hand during sound check on a sharp edge on his keyboard and he was like well that’s pissah. “You, uh, keepin’ him goin’ during…?”

I took a deep breath, returning to the conversation instead of thinking of Jordan and his weird ass accent. “Yeah. No troubles there. Except we aren’t trying anymore.”

“Aren’t trying?” Jordan asked, a surprised tone to his voice. “You can’t just give up, man, it’s the dream!”

“Yeah… well.”

“What happened? I scare you off with my stories of what it’s like when they get older?” he laughed.

My eyes moved to Ethan and Lauren, who were walking on, laughing and talking together, each holding a cup of hot wassail (which is just a fancy ass word for spiced apple cider by the way). I smiled. “Nawh,” I answered, “Fifteen year olds ain’t as scary as you made it sound like.”

Jordan laughed, “You say that now ‘cos you ain’t got one, brother, but when you do --”

“I do,” I answered, cutting him off.

Jordan paused. “Say what?”

“There’s this kid Laur and I are kind of… taking care of, I guess. We found him, he was livin’ out on the street, we kinda took him in, I guess. He’s fifteen. Ethan.”

“Shit, man, I thought you were ‘bout to say you knocked up some groupie in like Sweden in the 90s or some shit,” Jordan said with a laugh, “Jesus Christ.”

I laughed, “Nawh, nothin’ like that. I mean he’s not mine, we’re just taking care of him is all.”

“How long?”

I thought about the 20th and Otis and how reluctant I was to let Ethan go back to him. I shrugged, even though Jordan couldn’t see that, and I replied, “Indefinitely.”

“Well. Let me know if you need any advice,” Jordan said, “They get to be moody when they’re fifteen. They run hot and cold like a menstruating woman. It’s all those hormones, they go wicked insane. He might be cool right now, but trust me, there’ll come a moment when he turns on you and you’re gonna be like what the actual fuck.”

I wasn’t sure I believed Jordan. Ethan was a good kid, he was grateful and gentle and just a good kid all around. He’d been through rough times, but he wasn’t a bad kid. “Yeah, I’ll call you when that happens,” I said, but I didn’t think I’d ever make that call.

When I’d hung up with Jordan, I caught up to Ethan and Lauren and put my arms over each of their shoulders, hugging both of them into me as we walked through the street in the glow of the colorful twinkle lights. “So how’s Jordan?” Lauren asked.

“He’s Jordan,” I answered. I kissed her face awkwardly, making us all tip to one side. We all laughed as we caught our balance.

We got these fried clam strips from a vendor for dinner that came in a greasy cardboard container and walked through an alley way ‘til we were at the ocean’s shore, where we sat under a faint orange glow of a street lamp on the breaker wall and watched the waves crash on the rocks below us. The three of us were getting closer and closer the more we knew about each other as we talked and threw clams to the seagulls that collected on the sidewalk beside us, begging like little feathery dogs.

It occurred to me as we got back to the Jeep a while later, after we’d sampled sugar plums and watched a guy play The Carol of the Bells with an extraordinary assortment of actual bells, that Jordan was right. We couldn’t just give up on having a baby. I wanted one really bad, and so did Lauren, and she hadn’t given up. She was still testing quietly, going through the same struggle we’d gone through since June all by herself. I wanted to give her a baby for Christmas.

So that night, we had sex again, neither of us mentioning that we were trying, but I was trying so, so hard…




I woke up at three in the morning to the sound of someone throwing up and realized Lauren wasn’t in bed beside me. I rolled out and put on my sweatpants and went out into the hallway. The bathroom door wasn’t even all the way closed, the light spilling onto the carpet outside, so I just walked in as she retched again, her face in the toilet, knees tucked under her on the tile. I pushed the door closed, hoping the smell that permeated the bathroom would stay contained and not go through the whole house, and maybe to muffle the sound so as not to wake Ethan up, too. I knelt down beside her without saying a word and ran my hand down her spine softly, then caught her hair up in a fist.

She looked up when she was done puking. Her face was all red. “Bad clams,” she said.

“That’s the danger of seafood,” I replied.

“Fuck seafood,” she groaned and turned back to the bowl.

“Fuck seafood,” I agreed.

I sighed and leaned against the side of the tub, holding her hair out of the way of her throw up. My eyes wandered to the garbage bin, and I thought of that negative pregnancy test. A couple weeks ago, we would’ve been all excited by Lauren wakin up in the middle of the night barfing and she would’ve grabbed a fresh test out of the medicine cabinet, where we had a couple of them stocked up. There’d been one night like that, back in August, where she’d woke up on the tour bus sick and we’d made this huge deal of it, assuming it was the first sign of pregnancy. But since then we’d become less jubilant over such things. They were always just motion sickness or bad clams in the end.




The last day in North Carolina seemed to come so quickly. We didn’t do much, we took a walk out on the beach and played games some, but mostly we just stayed inside. It was rainy and gray outside and the wind coming off the dark blue ocean was sharp, and freezing cold. “The ocean’s way better in Key West in the summer,” I told Ethan when I caught him staring out the window at it. “We’ll take you to our house there sometime so you can see it.”

“Sweet!” he said excitedly, “My dad, too?”

I shrugged noncommittally.

The next morning we’d packed up and gotten Nacho and Igby into their crates and stowed them into the Jeep. We dropped the key to the house off at the real estate place and got on the highway, undoing all the traveling we’d done. I drove this time, and Ethan sat shotgun. Lauren still wasn’t feeling good and she wanted to stretch out across the seat and fall asleep in the back, so we listened to the radio and sang along when we knew the lyrics and talked while she slept.

“Hey Nick?”

“Yeah?”

Ethan shifted a little in his seat, “Tomorrow, will you bring me up to the mall? I wanna get my dad a Christmas present.”

“Sure,” I replied, my hands tightened a little on the wheel at the thought of how close it was to Christmas and how soon Otis would be coming for his kid. Less than a week. “I gotta get Lauren’s present, too.”

Just in case I can’t knock her up in the week, I added in my head.

Besides, you can’t really giftwrap a sperm.

Well. You can, but that’d be just really gross, and also counterproductive to what we were trying to do, considering they were supposed to be like incubating or whatever they do in there.

Ethan smiled, “We just have to stay away from Sbarro.”

I shrugged, “I dunno last time I was by Sbarro I got something pretty good out of it,” I replied.




Back in Nashville, Lauren woke up feeling much better having slept the entire seven hours we’d been driving. She made dinner and I didn’t even complain when there was some spinach on the plate. Bring on the zinc, I thought eagerly.

“That was a good vacation,” I said, snuggling Lauren in next to me in the bed. “Any time you wanna go back to North Carolina and repeat that whole bubble bath sex thing I am ready.”

Lauren smirked, “Who says we have to be in North Carolina to have bubble bath sex?”

I grinned, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean… we have a tub.”

“We certainly do,” I agreed.

“And we have bubble bath,” she added.

“Yes, yes we do,” I nodded. “But would it be the same?” I asked.

A playful smile flickered through her eyes and across her lips, “Well,” she said, “We could go find out.”