Abortion has never been a term to evoke much emotion from me. I have no religious beliefs—never have. It’s not something on my radar if I’m honest. I hear the arguments, see the hostility, and none of it bothers me one way or the other. I have my beliefs, and I’m satisfied with them. I’ve also been blessed to have a girlfriend that had always shared those beliefs, despite her religious family. We’ve always agreed that it was in everyone’s best interest, if it were ever required, to “terminate” the pregnancy. This was never much of a discussion.
Earlier we had been at a friend’s house watching a stupid Disney movie. They were all into that garbage—Kat, Kevin, and his girlfriend. I was driving that night, so when Kat and I finally got back to my house and I was relieved of my duty, I treated myself to the usual glass of Jameson. I thought Jameson was garbage. In Dublin I thought it was garbage, in Chapel Hill I thought it was garbage, and in Los Angeles I thought it was garbage. Kat loved it. She had coincidentally been on the same tour of the Jameson distillery as I had in Dublin, only a year later. We even had the same tour guide—Sean. I always got the impression that she came back thinking Jameson was the shit because of its bullshit “tradition”. I didn’t even have a preference for a particular whisky, and it was pretty much all I drank, and I still hated Jameson. That’s how I knew it was shit.
“Drink a water. I just bought a new pack.” I told her, probably too enthusiastically. She obliged but didn’t return the enthusiasm. The night had gone perfectly fine. We’d laughed, and joked, and had fun with our friends. But she was a little off now, and I knew why, but I ignored it. “Keep drinking. Come on!” I encouraged. She was taking one big gulp, holding it in her mouth, then forcing it down. I was hoping for more of a chugging action. “You only need five seconds’ worth.”
She had peed at the Ralphs by my house. I was annoyed at her eagerness to relieve herself given the nature of our impromptu shopping trip. She had run straight to the bathroom in the back of the store, while I perused the candy aisle conveniently located right outside of it. I grabbed some gummies—the kind shaped like hamburgers, and hotdogs, and pizzas. Then I waited. When she finally emerged, we both understood which of the two possible options that particular amount of bathroom time indicated. Normally I would have commented on it, or she would have beat me to it. We continued on. One thing was left on the list—the only thing really.
Back at home, that one thing was now an empty pink box torn open on my dining room table. There were instructions unfolded and laid haphazardly—instructions that she had bitched through the entire time I was reading, claiming to “already know” what they said. She seems to “already know” a lot of things. Sometimes she’s right, but a lot of times she’s wrong. I wasn’t going to chance it with this one.
At this point she was in the guest bathroom, with the faucet running, shower on, and music playing from the speaker on her phone. We went through fairly extravagant measures to mask our business in the bathroom. I was waiting on the couch, a little nervous about her silence. She would normally be yelling things to me from the bathroom, saying funny things, providing commentary, and so on. Then suddenly she yelled “Oh shit!”
I was confused because I knew that wouldn’t be her reaction to the news we were, or weren’t expecting. “What?” I called back, getting up from the couch. She didn’t respond. Now outside the bathroom door I continued, “What happened?”
“I dropped the cup,” she replied.
“How? Did it spill everywhere?”
“No, like, in the toilet,” she answered.
I could hear things rustling about behind the door. I figured there were way too many uncomfortable things going on at once in that particular moment so I remained outside. “Jesus. Okay well don’t flush it, it’s plastic.” I urged. These were the kind of things that she unfathomably required emphasis on. Of course, this was all said over the sound of a flushing toilet.
“Shit. Wait. Fuck,” she didn’t really need to say much more than that.
She finally opened the door and came out, blocking my view of the toilet with her body. I wasn’t going to look anyway—I didn’t need to. There was never that definitive gulping noise when a toilet bowl has been completely evacuated.
“Just pee right on the stick this time,” I insisted, handing her the second of the three tests. She looked at me as if I didn’t need to say that. She gives me that look often. I wish she was self-aware enough to grasp that for every redundant, unnecessary statement, there are ten that should be redundant and unnecessary, but aren’t.
After forcing her to drink some more water and waiting awkwardly for ten minutes, she wound up in the master bathroom. I remained on the couch. A couple minutes passed. At this point I was more curious about how things were going in there, rather than the actual result. I finally heard the door open.
“Well,” she yelled down the hall.
“That wasn’t even three minutes,” I yelled back. I got up quickly and jogged to my bedroom where she was standing with the bathroom door open. Her hands were empty. She was silent. I looked at her face and she had the same teary-eyed look of numbness that I’d only seen when we almost broke up six months ago. She didn’t really need to say anything. I paused, “Are you sure you read it right?”
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