“These are good,” I say. “When are they from?”
“About five years ago,” she says. She walks over close to me, and her shoulder presses against my arm. “That was the last time I was pregnant.”
I look closely and I can see her slightly rounded belly. There’s barely a bump, but I can see it. “You were pregnant.” I look over at her. “Oh, Bess,” I say, as I realize that a tear has just trailed from the corner of her eye down her cheek.
“Sorry,” she says as she wipes it away. “There’s no evidence of any of the other babies. They all just kind of went away. But that one, that one was real.” She sucks in a breath. “That one got a casket.”
“Bess,” I croon, and I reach out to put my arm around her. “I never knew.”
She shakes her head. “Nobody knew. I’d had five miscarriages by then. I was terrified to tell anyone about the pregnancy, afraid to make it real, so I made Eli promise to keep it to himself. We didn’t even tell our parents. When things went wrong, I was glad we didn’t tell anybody. We buried that baby by ourselves, with no one the wiser.”
“Bess,” I say soothingly, but I quickly realize there are no adequate words. There are no sentiments I can share or words that will comfort her.
“None of the rest of them were real.” She reaches out to touch the photo. “But that one was real. I felt that one move. I felt that one dance in my belly. She was a girl. But she came way too early, and there was nothing they could do.” She draws in a ragged breath. “And then she was gone.”
I stare at the picture. The joy on her face in the photo is the old Bess, the one I used to know. It’s the one I’ve started seeing tiny glimpses of in the past few days.
“After that baby, Eli refused to try to get pregnant again. He said it was too hard on me.”
“Was it? Too hard on you?”
She shrugs and gives me a self-deprecating grin. “Maybe. I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “But I resented the hell out of him for making the choice for the both of us.”
“Didn’t you guys talk about it?” I stare at her. She has all my attention because Bess wears her heart on her sleeve and you can see every emotion on her face. Or you used to be able to. Now she’s more of a shell of her former self.
“He refused to discuss it. When we had sex, he used a condom.” She glances at me and gives me a mischievous grin. “TMI? Sorry.” She shakes her head and the grin fades. “There was no getting around it. He refused to get me pregnant again.”
“And that was when you started hating him.” Not a question. Just a statement.
“No,” she corrects me on a heavy exhalation. “That’s when I started hating myself.” She quietly starts to clean up her chemicals, transferring them from pans to containers. “The one thing I wanted to be in life, I couldn’t be. I blamed myself. It was my body that failed me, not Eli. But then that hatred and contempt I had for myself started to seep into everything I did. When Eli pulled out a condom, I would freeze up. The first few times I ignored it, thinking he would eventually change his mind. He didn’t. And, eventually, I pulled away entirely.”
“Does he know this is how you
felt?” I ask. “Sometimes men don’t understand.” That happened with me and Lynda. Sometimes she would have to spell out how she felt for me because I truly didn’t understand.
She shrugs. “I have no idea what Eli knows.”
“I’m sorry, Bess. If Lynda and I had known, we would have been there to support you both.”
“You and your perfect family made me jealous as fuck, Aaron,” she admits, more than a little snarl to her voice.
I step back, surprised by the vehemence in her tone. “My perfect family?”
“Yes, your perfect family. You and Lynda met, and you fell in love so quickly… You never doubted she was the one, did you?” She stares at me like she’s watching my face, looking for lies.
“No, I always knew.” A little smile tugs at my lips when I think of her. “She was my world when it was just the two of us. Then she made my world bigger and better with the kids.” I choke out a laugh. “Not going to lie, though. Miles was a complete surprise. I thought we were done with two.”
“See, you were able to make babies even by mistake,” she says quietly. “And I couldn’t even make one on purpose.” She hops up to sit on the counter and looks at me. “I hate you,” she says and gives me an affectionate punch on my arm. This is the Bess that has always been my best friend. She’s the one that I can talk to about anything.
It’s time. “I need to tell you something,” I say. I wring my hands together, and she stares at them, her brow creasing.
“Okay,” she replies slowly, drawing out the word.
“Tomorrow, when I go for chemo, I’m going to see the doctor instead. I’m going to tell him that I’m ready to stop.”
“Stop the chemo? Can you do that?”
“I can do anything I want.”