Certain Vague Hopes of Disaster

On these early mornings, His handsome sleeping face reminded Jane why she desired him. The feral attraction that had brought them together. She wanted to pet him now in his restful state. Jane had been stealing more and more of these moments recently. She didn’t know why. Maybe, she thought to herself, maybe it was the swelling in her belly. Maybe it was the hope that she might be able to steal this moment forever. As Jim rolled over he burped, and the stench of cheap liquor slapped Jane across her face. Rising up, she mused to herself that at least it hadn’t been the real thing.

​The weather outside was dreary — residual mist from last night’s rain hung over the street. The neighborhood was in the early stages of waking up. A jogger ran by focused on the road and the will to keep moving his legs. These early mornings provided Jane with the opportunity for the faintest bit of hope. She liked watching the rising sun wiping away the tears of the night before.

​As she made breakfast, she thought about how she would break the news of their imminent child to him. She discovered the news only a few weeks prior. She reminisced on the conflicted emotions she had felt at the positive pregnancy test. She held on to the idea that hers was the 1 in 1000 case that that the pregnancy test miscalculated. Day by day, the swelling in her belly reprimanded her wishful thinking. She’d been wearing more loose-fitting clothing so that Jim wouldn’t notice. Although, he didn’t notice much of anything in his drunken stupor. Soon, the full moon of her belly would be undeniable. She his favorite breakfast of blueberry pancakes, over-easy eggs, and bacon would make the news more digestible.

Things hadn’t been easy for them over the course of the last two years. Jim’s mother and father had died in a car accident on a retirement road trip. They wanted to do all the things they weren’t able to do when they were young. They had Jim at a young age and got married shortly thereafter. When they retired, they decided it was a chance to be eighteen again. Jim cried the night he heard the news of their mangled car on I-40 near Little Rock. It was the first time Jane had ever since him so vulnerable. He covered his face and sobbed softly into a throw pillow. He didn’t leave the house for days after. When he finally left, he came back in a drunken reverie angry at the world. He wasn’t the same Jim any more. He wanted her then. But, when she rebuffed his advances, “Jim, I think you’ve had too much to drink. Maybe you just want to get some rest?”

He didn’t bat an eye, “Well, I guess that means I’ll have to go find some fun elsewhere.”

She tried to stop him. She pleaded with him about safety. About getting pulled over. Or worse, about meeting an end like his parents. At the mention of the recently deceased, he became incensed. “Bitch! Don’t you ever mention my parents again.”

She tried to console him: “That wasn’t what I meant baby.” He shoved her hard, hard enough for her to fall.

“Maybe they were right about you,” he said as he slammed the door behind him.That was the first time Jim hit her in a drunken rage. He apologized the next day. The apologies became less frequent and excuses took their place. “Can’t you see what I’m going through?” During these self pitying monologues she often wanted to ask him the same question.

Her goal now was to break the news of the pregnancy to Jim without any melodrama. His depression had turned suicidal a few months ago. He had been in an accident, so they said. He ran into a tree while driving on a deserted road. The officers told her he had been remarkably lucky. They requested that Jane take him to see a psychologist. The officers said the absence of skid marks on the road was very weird. It meant the brake weren’t used.

When they went to replace Jim’s car, she thought about the accident nonstop. She peppered the car salesman with questions about the incidence of brake failures in Toyota Camry’s. She asked about the airbag deployment system. Seeing Jim’s visible annoyance, she stopped short of asking if they could change the car’s color from it’s current bloody red.

Those thoughts stayed with her as she finalized his morning meal. She brewed a cup of the Colombian coffee she had bought a few days ago at the Farmer’s Market. She sat with a cup of the dark roast and played a crossword puzzle as she waited for Jim to wake.

A gruff voice asked, “What’s the occasion?” Jim had a quizzical look on his face as he appraised the situation certain that something was afoot.Jane replied, “Oh, I know how much you love blueberry pancakes so I made you some. I brewed a Colombian roast too. It’s pretty delicious!’

She would have made a terrible spy. As soon as she had made her mind up to tell him, her face was a billboard that she had something to say. He was hungry so he put aside, for a moment, any misgivings of the purpose of the lavish breakfast. She paid attention to the details of his his desire. The pancakes were burnt at the edges like he liked them. The blueberries concentrated in the middle an island in an ocean of batter. The bacon was crisp and the eggs runny. The food was good. He expressed the first words of gratitude that he’d expressed in some time. “The food was good Jane. Pancakes were almost like Ma’s.”

She smiled to herself as she cleaned off the plates to place them in the dishwasher. She hoped he would like the food. Even though she was agnostic, she had almost prayed he would like it. She said, “there’s been something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

He looked up the quizzical look returning to his face as his eyes squinted reflexively. He replied “yeah?”

“Well you see,” she was unsure now what to say even though she had practiced the lines in her head the past several days. “Well the thing is, I think I’m, I’m pregnant. We’re having a baby.”

He didn’t say anything. He looked at her unblinkingly as if he hadn’t heard her. Suddenly, she felt the cold of the linoleum floor beneath her bare feet. She realized that she had been grasping the edge of the sink with such force that her hands had turned red. He got up and shook his head. “So, this meal was some sort of trick. You make a meal like my mother used to make to tell me you’re going to be a mother too. This is some sort of sick trick.”

He left in a hurry. Grabbing his keys from the coffee table and a jacket hanging on the back of a chair. There wasn;t enough time for Jane to process the accusations. She was taken aback. She stood dumbfounded as he marched off.

After several hours, after the emotional shell-shock had begun to wear off, she went to look for him. Jane drove for hours looking for him in fear of what might have happened or what he might have done to himself. She went to the bar where had become a regular patron, but they said he hadn’t been there that day. She drove by his parent’s old house — the one with huge oak tree out in front. The same one where Jim had proposed to her. But he wasn’t to be found there. She went by the psychologists office, where Jim was going twice a week to work through the grieving process. Dr. Culver said she hadn’t seen him but that Jim was showing signs of improvement. Exhausting her options of places to look and herself, she decided to drive back home.

The drive back home was horrendous due to a traffic accident on 78. She always wondered why people gawked at the victims of traffic accidents as if it were a show. She always wondered this until she saw the crumpled bloody red Toyota Camry. She saw the EMT loaded with a figure on a stretcher. She was shocked to feel a certain sense of relief. A giddiness unknown to her for two years. One might say joy even. It wasn’t a coldness exactly towards the deceased. It was a certain sense of bitter happiness that his pain was alleviated, hers too. As she reached the bottleneck of the hold-up she looked for the skid marks near the crumpled red sedan. She saw none. She hoped that the airbag deployment system had been a comfortable pillow during the last moments before his final sleep.

It hadn’t occurred to her to stop. In fact, once she passed the bottleneck it hadn’t occurred to her that she was driving recklessly. She gripped the steering wheel, her hands turning red once more, as she became enlivened by this new freedom. When she arrived at her house, she was bursting at her new-found power and freedom. Seeing the remnants of breakfast that morning, she began to cry at first little quiet sobs then loud effusive ones. In the middle of all this she began to laugh. There she was a weird laughing crying sob overtaking her that she didn’t notice the figure in the doorway.

“What’s the matter with you,” asked Jim. She whipped around and the color left her face as she fainted head first towards the floor.