“Get out,” she said.
I scurried around her, beating a hasty retreat to the safety of the sidewalk outside. But before I made it out the front door, Tom stopped me.
“Ione,” he said.
Vanessa came out of the kitchen.
“Go, I’ll talk to you later.”
“There you are,” she said to him.
I swung open the front door as they confronted each other. The shouting reached the street and before I could pound my first step down the sidewalk, I heard the sentence that would echo in my mind until I saw Tom again.
“You asshole,” she sobbed. “I’m pregnant.”
VANESSA
A good day starts with a clear mind. It’s a philosophy Vanessa has long espoused, probably since she first learned to meditate in yoga class so many years ago. The place where she learned—Lotus Studio, in Norman, not far from the university—became a refuge during a time in which her relationship with Tom had transformed from a shelter into the storm itself. It had been before Tom’s affairs and well before the whole debacle with Mark. Somewhere in those middle years of their marriage, they had lost their way to one another. And now, it seems to Vanessa that the path that could lead her back to Tom had become too overgrown with resentment and dashed expectations to ever be successfully tread again.
On days like this, when she wakes to this heaviness, she returns to her practice in silence. Though there is a part of her that has grown too worn to care, she grabs her threadbare yoga mat and heads for the sweat lodge just as dawn peeks over the hills.
The compound is quiet—not many have stirred yet—but minimal sounds of activity, conversation, and life bounce like rubber balls over the flat ground of Tom’s ranch by the mesa. Vanessa looks up, away from the path, toward the direction of the voices. She squints and then opens wide her eyes, trying to get the most information she can from the pre-dawn light. She sees, beyond the pasture and the fence, two vehicles. The small distant forms of people move from one to the other and she knows.
They’re here for Tom.
The thought does something to Vanessa. It stirs within her a desire to protect—a maternal instinct that she’s felt only once before, long ago in what feels like a distant echo of her current life. The desire wills her to protect not Tom, but Birdie. Tom’s weakness disgusts her. She knows that this spells the end for him. But for her, it might only be the beginning.
She treks on to the lodge, eager to spend some moments in the quiet solitude that her practice affords her. Something that has become harder and harder to come by as more people have made a home on the ranch.
She pulls back the wool curtain, and inside it’s not yet scorching hot with the mid-August heat. It’s warm though, and after a few minutes of light stretching, Vanessa breaks into a sweat.
She loves to sweat. Like fire or tears, it cleanses. After an early morning yoga session in the heat followed by a cool shower, she knows she’ll feel better. And there’s something else.
She reaches into her pocket and retrieves something small, wrapped in a napkin. She unfolds the paper cloth and ingests what she considers to be a meditational tool. Something to up the ante, spiritually awaken her, and allow her to access the second sight.
She begins and she waits for that first glimmer of the surreal to overwhelm her.
It comes on slowly. At first just a feeling of fever, like her blood has begun to run hotter in her veins, which feel somehow too constrictive for the life force that surges through them. Then, she knows she needs to open her eyes for the next part.
She looks forward, across the sweat lodge. A bead of perspiration finds her eye and burns it, but she doesn’t blink or flinch because across the room, in the darkness, she makes out a shape—the silhouette of a person—that’s at once jarring and familiar.
Mark.
That life that felt so far away in the quiet hours of the morning stares back at her, pinpoints of light in his pupils like confetti shimmering on New Year’s Eve.
He speaks. A constant stream of gibberish that Vanessa strains to make coherence of. She knows she must—that the words he speaks are the very thing that has brought her here this morning.
Vanessa watches as the form that is and is not Mark moves toward her. She’s glued to the worn yoga mat, unable to go to him or step back into the real and present moment. Transfixed, she struggles to make out anything in his string of non-words. And slowly, something emerges.
The baby.
He’s speaking about the baby. His face contorts in sorrow. He’s telling her something about the child—it’s in danger. There is a stillness to it. Sometimes, Vanessa has thought she could sense the energy of the baby. But now, as Mark pleads with her to summon it to her, she can’t. All she feels is emptiness, like an abandoned crypt, lonely and hollow.
As she looks on at the image that is and is not Mark, she feels the hot pulse of a tear roll down her cheek.
“Tom,” the Mark-thing speaks.
How many times had she heard Mark speak Tom’s name? Over dinner telling a joke, over the phone asking if he was available to talk, and then all those times in private, his lips to her ear, begging her to leave him. And God, how she wishes now that she had.
The form of the thing that is and is not Mark comes close. His face—the face she knows still as well as her own—is inches from hers. She feels his fingers in her hair and smells his cologne. That scent that always reminded her of a fresh rain. She lets his energy envelope her like a dust devil, swirling over one of Tom’s precious fields.
Mark speaks Tom’s name again.
