It burns in Claire, this sudden knowledge. This certainty. Whatever Jackie is talking about, whatever this music is expressing, this joy and connection and aching melancholy? It’s alien.
“Like the songs? Not everyone does,” Jackie says. She pauses, and then sighs again. “Maybe that’s for the better.”
“No. I don’t think I’ve loved at all,” Claire says. Something in her is pushing,pushing—to talk, to listen, to discuss this terrible feeling with Jackie. To purge it somehow, with someone who might understand. “I don’t think I know what it feels like.”
A warm hand settles over Claire’s. When she finally looks up, the expression on Jackie’s face is unimaginably tender. Understanding.
Claire has never been looked at like that before. Not by Pete; not by anyone. The strange feeling she’s been wrestling with gives way to something else. It’s bigger, taking up even more space, pressing everything else against the walls of her mind.
Panic.
“I’m sorry,” Claire says. Her breath hitches. Her throat is getting tight, and the words are getting all tangled there. “I shouldn’t be saying that. I love Pete, I do. He’s my husband, and I should give him what he wants. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I—I—”
“Claire,” Jackie says. She squeezes Claire’s hands; the balloon recedes enough for her to take a breath. “You’re safe here.”
It’s inexplicable—technically speaking, Claire is veryunsafe here. Even just being in this kitchen is breaking a rule that could cause a fight worse than the one she and Pete have already had, but even so Claire believes her.
The weight of everything comes down on her at once. Her fights with Pete, and with Martha. The reality of a family she doesn’t want, looming closer and closer. The endless cycle of her life.
At least with Jackie, she’s not alone.
The tears come so suddenly that trying to stop them is a losing battle. Claire buries her face in her hands, choking on a sob, butit’s too late. Jackie makes a quiet noise, sliding out from her booth seat, and Claire feels the bench dip next to her instead.
An arm lands around Claire’s shoulders.
Claire trembles under the weight. Not because it’s bad, but maybe because it’s too good. She’s not used to crying with anyone else around. Pete hates it when she cries. Usually, she only indulges the urge behind a locked bathroom door.
“I’m sorry,” Claire gasps into her hands. Jackie’s arm is tight around her, and the pressure of it helps. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me. Oh, I feel—sosilly.”
“You don’t ever need to apologize to me for feeling,” Jackie says. The smell of her shampoo fills Claire’s senses. It’s deeply comforting, though it only seems to make the tears come faster.
“I have nothing to cry about,” Claire says, repeating the mantra her mother gave her to get through the tears on her wedding day. It didn’t make them stop then, and it doesn’t work now. “Nothing at all. I have a good life.”
“You have choices, you know,” Jackie says, with a strange note of urgency. “Your husband is stuck in the last decade. Things are changing. Thingshavechanged.”
“What things? What choices? It doesn’t matter what I do. This is my life, Jackie.”
“I can get you birth control, if you want it.”
That’s enough to stop the tears. Claire looks at Jackie sharply. “You can…how?”
“I know someone,” Jackie says. Her eyes are dark and intense. “People who can take care of it. Is that what you want?”
“It’s against the law.”
“I know,” Jackie says, smiling gently. It softens the strangeness of her eyes. “That doesn’t always make it wrong. Remember?”
Claire sniffles. A tissue is pressed into her hands and she blows her nose noisily, wiping furiously at her eyes.
Jackie shifts. Her arm is still around Claire’s shoulders, and it’s making her feel warm all over. “Maybe this is rude, but…how have you gone so long without it happening if you aren’t on the pill?”
Claire balls the tissue up in her fist. That’s the rub, really—though Claire is grateful for it, she has no idea how she’s escaped motherhood so far. It’s as if her dread has poisoned her womb, made it inhospitable for the children Pete wants so badly. Intentionally or no, it’s her fault. “I don’t know. Pete thinks there’s something wrong with me. My doctor wants me to see a specialist.”
“Did you ever think that it might be him?”
“Pete?” Claire says. She frowns, distracted now from her own self-loathing. “It’s a woman’s job to give her husband children.”
“No, it isn’t. And men can be infertile, too. He shouldn’t have you thinking it’s all your fault,” Jackie says. That intensity is back, tenfold; her arm tightens around Claire’s shoulders almost to the point of discomfort. “You don’t deserve that.”
