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Under the blankets, looking up at a blank ceiling, and then over to the second bedroom that would be the baby’s, I talked to myself because I had no one else to talk to. “I’m pregnant,” I said up into the comforter. The comforter lived up to its name just a little bit. It felt good to be hiding from the world in bed, especially when the world wasn’t providing much support for my pregnancy.
“I’m pregnant,” I said again, with nobody around to hear it. It felt good and bad and scary, but mostly just lonely. And my emotions were on edge. Every shutting door in the apartment building felt like a hammer to my head, and every recollection of the tone of Aiden’s voice during our phone call felt like a monumental abandonment.
My phone rang. I hadn’t yet gotten around to changing the ring sound to a baby cooing. Or, more realistically, a baby crying.
According to caller ID, the call was from Aiden. No thanks. After that previous conversation, I had no interest in talking with him. Even thinking of talking to Aiden made my stomach tighten and my teeth clench. From now on, it was just his baby and me. Let Aiden be the anonymous semen donor. Let Aiden keep driving his truck. Let Aiden think my pregnancy was delusional. I would still have a beautiful baby in my arms after nine months of low-grade misery.
Chapter Six - Aiden
I called to apologize that very same evening that I’d told off Eleanor. I’d called her still from my delivery truck on the way back to the depot. But she didn’t answer. She also didn’t answer all the times I tried to call again that same day. I texted Eleanor the next day to ask whether she was alright, and that overture also went unanswered.
Fine. I could take a hint. Things hadn’t worked out between us since that first night. She wanted to be left alone, whether temporarily or permanently. Maybe that was the message Eleanor was sending with that bizarre “Do you want kids” stint. Or maybe she was just hungry for attention. Either way, it didn’t bode well for the possibility of us as a couple.
She hadn’t seemed so eager in the first place. It was Eleanor’s silly coworker at the front desk who’d pushed her into my arms, or me into her arms, or something like that, whatever it had been.
And that time, Eleanor and I had read Lord Byron. We had our evening of passion on the library sofa — maybe that was just our mutual horniness and loneliness manifesting itself, nothing more. Maybe it had only been two desperate, lonely people satisfying their basic physical needs. Maybe she didn’t want anything more to do with me than just getting fucked, getting her rocks off, clearing the pipes, or however it went. Librarians had pipes to clear just as anybody else did. Just as UPS drivers did, in fact.
“Are you seeing anybody?” the OkCupid questionnaire asked. No, of course, I wasn’t. Totally single. And ready to mingle. With women who weren’t batshit crazy and who didn’t disappear after an evening of sex, preferably.
But every dating profile I saw online only made me miss Eleanor more. Nobody could match her in looks. Those green eyes. The way she whispered poetry at night on the library sofa. The way she hid back in her secret room. The way she’d kissed me furiously that magical night. The girls online didn’t have anything like Eleanor’s intelligence or clearly enunciated speech or adorable bookish nerdiness. They were just usual, typical. Eleanor was — special.
The dashboard of my work truck reminded me of it constantly: Eleanor. Right before me, on the speedometer, Eleanor. On my trip logs, Eleanor. Was I obsessed, or was the universe, even the inanimate universe, trying to tell me something? Maybe I owed Eleanor another chance. The library was a fun place to visit anyway. Maybe I owed the library another chance too.
I took a long lunch break on Friday, exactly two months after that hot night on the third-floor reading sofa. I’d pop into the library and see what they had; maybe I’d even see the Khalil Gibran book I’d donated or the Lord Byron book we had read together that night.
I felt oddly inconspicuous, in a good way, pulling up to the library in an Uber car instead of in a big grumbling UPS delivery truck and having changed into a t-shirt and sweats instead of my UPS uniform. In the UPS truck I’d felt every corner of the world staring at me and scrutinizing my moves, maybe even my thoughts. The cameras and GPS trackers all over the truck and even the uniform only increased my paranoid feelings. But when I arrived in a regular, non-UPS car, wearing regular, non-UPS clothes, it was as if I could do anything, be my own man, do whatever I wanted.
