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“No,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” I said with a smile that I hoped seemed more genuine. “I’ll take care of it all.”
“You mean have a…have a…”
“You don’t even have to say it,” I told her. “I mean it. Just put it all out of your mind, and I’ll do everything. You can even lie down for a while, and I’ll get it all worked out by the time you wake up.”
“No!” She stood and pushed my hands away from her. “No, Liam! I’m not going to have an abortion!”
“They’re really quick and easy now,” I told her. I had no fucking idea what I was talking about, but I knew the alternative was a shitload longer and definitely not easy. An image of Tria on the floor of the bathroom took shape in my head, and I had to force it out. “No worries at all.”
“No, Liam,” she said again.
I furrowed my brow as I looked at her, and she looked back at me. She worried her lip with her teeth and brought her arms up around her waist.
“If you don’t want us to keep it, I’ll give the baby to Nikki and Brandon,” she said. “But I’m not going to…to just get rid of it. Not when they’ve been trying so hard.”
“This has nothing to do with them!” I yelled. The tender hold I had on the big red sanity balloon faltered, and the balloon’s string went tight as a gust of hurricane-like winds grabbed hold of it.
“It does if you don’t want…don’t want…” Tria tried to take a deep breath, halting her words.
“No!” I yelled. “You are not going to do this! I’m not going to let this happen to you!”
“I am!” she screamed back at me. “You don’t get to make this decision, Liam. I do. I am having this baby, and if you don’t want it, I will just find someone else who does!”
The image of Tria in the bathroom filled my mind, complete with blood, screaming, police sirens, meat, a black plastic bag, and a tiny coffin. The vision was all shoved into the little bitty room where we stood beside each other this morning to brush our teeth. The images and memories were so overwhelming that the idea of her finding someone else didn’t even enter the picture.
The wind picked up, the thin string broke, and I plummeted.
I grabbed the closest thing to me that wasn’t Tria, picked it up, and threw it against the wall. It ended up being the coffee table, and papers, books, and the little pen-shaped pregnancy test went flying. Tria screeched in surprise, but I was too far gone to stop.
There was too much in my head—floods of memories reappearing, and I wasn’t prepared. I couldn’t handle them.
“Liam, I’m pregnant.”
“Not funny, Aimee.”
“I’m not kidding.”
It was all happening again.
Nearly ripping the still-open door from its hinges, I turned and ran out of the apartment.
*****
Sometime later, I barely registered that I was on the subway.
There were some vague memories of hunting around in my jacket pocket for my transit card to shove into the slot to get on the train, but very little recollection of anything outside of my own thoughts once I made my way to the seat at the very back and plopped down. There was too mu
ch else going on in my brain for me to consider my surroundings. I didn’t really know where I was or what I was doing. There just weren’t enough cycles left in my mind to deal with it.
Tria was pregnant.
I shoved the palms of my hands into my eye sockets to try to keep myself from seeing Tria on the bathroom floor, covered in blood. The kind of panic it brought into my chest and stomach had me doubled over in the seat. If I lost her…if I lost Tria…
I clenched my hands into fists and squeezed my eyes shut.
I wouldn’t survive. I couldn’t go through all of that again, and I wouldn’t. If something happened to her, I’d head straight for the area of town just south of where we live now, spend whatever money I had on smack, and start banging one after another. I’d make sure there was no way anyone could get me to the hospital on time.
