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“What kind of person could eat at a time like this?” I demand, as the odor grows more intense, wafting through the air like poison, doing future damage to my taste buds.
Melanie doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even open her eyes. The nurse pretends she hasn’t heard, but later when I hear her whispering just outside the door for someone to bring a fan, and I know she has.
I take a seat in the cold, hard chair and fold my arms. Nothing in this room is made for comfort. Melanie doesn’t seem to care. They have given her something for anxiety. “The meds should kick in soon,” I say.
Again, she doesn’t acknowledge I’ve spoken. Maybe they already have.
I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees. I start to tell her this is for the best, but she knows that deep down, even if she can’t see it yet.
Thankfully, the doctor comes in, saving me from further meaningless chitchat. I study his expression, his serious expression as he reads the words on the screen, notes the nurse has charted.
The baby is a boy, Melanie said. She wanted to name him Ethan. I did not have an opinion. I’ve always thought it bad luck to name a child before they are born.
The doctor pats my wife’s knee. “Shall we proceed?”
She opens her eyes then. They meet mine. I nod slightly. Melanie looks up at the physician and nods her head in agreement.
I check my watch. This is where I’m supposed to say I wish I could take her place. The truth is, I don’t. It wouldn’t matter anyway. There’s no point in wishful thinking. That’s not how this works.
I feel the nurse watching me, watching us. I might pass out. The sight of blood, the metallic smell, it makes me dizzy. I reach over and grab my wife’s hand. She doesn’t pull away. But I can feel that she wants to.
“Don’t worry,” the doctor says. “We’re just starting with an exam.”
I squeeze lightly. I’m not good at these things, so I repeat the words I’ve practiced. “It’ll all be over soon.”
“I’m going to pick up the dry cleaning,” I say to Melanie. “Then I was thinking about stopping for Indian food.” I can’t get that smell out of my mind. I refuse to let their incompetence ruin my favorite dish for me. “Hungry?”
“No,” she tells me.
“You haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday.” I can’t blame her. I pretty much lost my appetite then, too.
“I’m fine.”
You’re not fine. You’re a liar. I don’t say this, of course. There’s time for that.
Thankfully, Melanie let me off the hook yesterday when she asked me to step out while the doctor performed his exam. The pregnancy resolved itself, she said, and that was it. She doesn’t want to talk about it, and I get it.
Needless to say, I haven’t had the chance to bring up the fact that I’m aware she’s been lying to me. I know about her past. I also haven’t yet worked out what to do about it. When an event like this occurs, I am forced to draw on other areas of expertise. In the mathematical theory of stochastic processes, time is a stochastic process associated with diffusion processes that characterize the amount of time a particle has spent at a given level. How this relates is, Melanie’s lie is not a new one. It was not random. Therefore, I decide it can wait until I’ve had proper sustenance. I pat her head. “I’ll grab you some soup, just in case.”
The morning prior an email from Adam arrived interrupting my breakfast. Adam likes to send emails during non-work hours. This one was different.
The subject line read: Only open if you’re alone.
Never a good sign.
I wasn’t alone. But I opened it anyway.
Staring at me on the screen was a picture of my wife, in a precarious position.
I remember where I know Melanie from, Adam wrote. My kid brother’s bachelor party. She was the entertainment, if you catch my drift. And let’s just say…he still talks about her. You lucky duck, you.
The simplest answer is most often the correct answer. Occam's razor is the process of paring down information to make finding the truth easier. According to the problem-solving principle, when presented with competing hypothetical answers to a problem, one should select the one that makes the fewest assumptions. This is how I come to my hypothesis as it relates to my wife.
Why w
ould Melanie lie about her past?
Her sexual history, of which I did a full accounting of from the very beginning, was supposed to have included two previous partners. Not exactly ideal, as I would have preferred none, but excusable, I guess, for someone of her age and generation.
