He returns his focus to Birdie. Vanessa looks at Ione. She realizes what he’s about to do. The baby isn’t coming fast enough to suit him. He draws Birdie’s shirt up, revealing a pale moon of a belly, taut making room for her child.
He lays the knife against her skin.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmurs. He reaches a hand up to touch her cheek. She recoils from him, turning her face away. Anger seizes him.
“Tom!” Ione cries in the darkness. She steps forward, her legs coming into the light again.
“Step back,” he growls at her. His voice is unrecognizable. Vanessa feels a chill descend her spine, using her ribs like the rungs of a ladder. This is it.
“Tom,” now Vanessa speaks. Her voice calmer than her counterpart’s.
“I have to do this,” he says. He looks at Vanessa, his eyes almost serene. The wildness that was there has retreated back into its master. “You understand that, don’t you?”
Vanessa says nothing.
Birdie screams as the blade penetrates her stomach.
VANESSA
7 YEARS AGO
Vanessa didn’t shred the results of Tom’s test. Something made her keep them. She tucked them into the nightstand drawer on her side, next to where she kept her phone. She’d started putting it on Do Not Disturb sometime over the course of her affair with Mark, the idea being that if he texted her in the night, Tom wouldn’t hear it. Not that Tom gave her the same courtesy. There were many nights she woke to find him slouched, sitting up on the side of the bed, discerning messages on his phone when he should have been curled next to her, his heartbeat keeping time with her own through the night.
When she looked back at it, she thought she might have kept them to punish him. She thought there might have been a part of herself that wanted him to see them—that wanted him to know there wasn’t even the most remote possibility that the child was his. She wanted to hurt him the way that he had hurt her. Worse, maybe. Definitely, if she was being honest with herself.
But like so many of the wounds within their marital body, she let it fester. She hoarded the information like the nuclear codes. She was ready to bring them out when they became necessary—when the apocalyptic moment of their relationship finally came.
As the weeks went by after the ultrasound, she could feel that moment encroaching on the carefully constructed semblance of a marriage they were fostering. She felt like a failed horticulturist, nurturing a plant that she’d begun to suspect, on some level, could never survive the winter.
In spite of that knowledge, she promised herself that she would try one last time. If not for Tom, then for the ability to say, when it was all over, that she had. She wondered sometimes if he was entertaining the same notion of things. If he hated coming home on time, leaving the university and his affair behind. It had been weeks since she’d caught him in the middle of the night on his phone. For all she knew, the affair with Ione was over.
But then one night, she heard him on the phone.
It was well past midnight. His voice was strained, arguing. It wasn’t the kind of conversation that he’d have with a colleague. It was intimate. The tone that of a man trying to reason with a woman when he was so obviously in the wrong.
Vanessa sat up in bed, able to hear Tom in the study that was next door to their room.
“I love you,” he said.
The words were razors spit from his mouth into Vanessa’s mind.
She sat up straighter, her body straining alongside her ears to hear the nuances of the conversation. Maybe he was ending it.
“I want to see you,” he pled.
Something about the way that Tom was speaking made Vanessa realize he was leaving a voicemail.
“I’ll leave her,” he said it as easily as though he’d been reporting on the temperature of the pool outside. It came off of his tongue like an observation so mundane that it didn’t arouse even the slightest feeling in him. There was no pain in his voice, no regret. There was no hint at the fact that they’d shared eleven years of marriage before this point. “Call me back.”
The words were like a lit fuse to the anger she’d buried so deeply over the affair—the affairs—this one and those that had come before it. She’d played the role of dutiful wife. She’d taken her place beside Tom and never asked for more. She could have followed her own career, advanced as a nurse, maybe gone back to school. But she hadn’t. She had sacrificed so that Tom could do all of those things. And for what? So that he could screw his students, come home to her at night, and pretend like everything was fine?
She threw back the covers, no longer concerned about making noise. She wanted him to hear her. She wanted the sound of her footsteps to quicken his heartbeat, to make him hang up the phone in what he thought was time enough to conceal his vocal missive from her.
She padded into the study and just as she’d thought, he’d gotten off the phone. He was sitting the device on his desk as she walked in.
“One of the adjuncts caught a student plagiarizing,” he said with a smile as though to say, what can you do?
“At 1:15 in the morning?” Vanessa’s voice quavered.
Tom shrugged and stood from the desk, leaving his phone behind. He stepped up to her and placed his hands on her shoulders as though she needed to be comforted. She shrugged him off.
“It was her, wasn’t it?” Vanessa’s eyes stung with tears. All the rage, the betrayal, the heartache that she’d held so close to the vest was bubbling over the edge of the pot, ready to meet the flames below and evaporate in a cloud of flesh-burning steam.
“Who?” Tom said with a
