Isa

I lay awake in bed, listening to Lorenzo get ready. It was early. It had to be earlier than usual because I tended to get up before him. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to still be asleep. Did he have a meeting that morning? Why was he up so early?

It wasn’t because of what I had told him last night, was it?

He had said he wasn’t mad.

He had said he wasn’t mad, but then he hadn’t said what he did feel. His face had been blank. I could have told him that the sky was blue and he would have had the same nonplussed reaction. Did he just say that because he didn’t want to make me upset? Was he actually mad?

The only way to know for sure would be to ask him, but what if he just said what he had said the night before again?

Like he sensed me thinking about him, I felt his hand on my hair, he smoothed it off my face and kissed my forehead. I opened my eyes slowly and looked up at him like I had just woken up.

“Lorenzo?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you, babe. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.” His hand stroked my hair, and he kissed my forehead again. He made to leave, but I held onto him.

“It’s early, come back to bed,” I said. He sat on the bed next to me and looked down at me, stroking my cheek with his thumb.

“I have to go, baby, and you need your rest,” he said gently. I smiled and held onto the hand that was touching my face. I kissed his palm and pressed his hand to my chest.

“Is there nothing I can do to make you stay?” I said. He smiled and kissed me, caressing the inside of my mouth with his tongue.

“Not today. Get some sleep. I’ll see you soon.” He gave me one last sweet kiss and left.

Humph. Thwarted.

Not only hadn’t I gotten answers, I also hadn’t convinced him to stay with me. I rolled onto my front and hid my face in the pillow. He was sort of right. I was tired. Last night had been... let’s just say I could still feel him.

It had been amazing. I had never let anyone do that to me before. I thought he had a dominant streak in him, but I could never have anticipated what he asked me to do on the chair while he watched. I felt an ache between my thighs just remembering it. So what if I still didn’t know what he thought about the baby. He would tell me later. I was just about to fall asleep again when I felt something in my abdomen. I sat up. I knew, I knew it wasn’t the baby...the thing was hardly the size of a Brussels sprout yet. I held my stomach, and then it hit me. The worst surge of nausea I had ever felt in my life. I scrambled for the bathroom, throwing up a sour, hot liquid and heaving when my stomach was completely empty.

I flushed and collapsed onto the tiled floor.

Ow. That was horrible. My body felt weak, and my mouth tasted sour. I gave myself a minute before I stood and washed my mouth out with mouthwash. There it was...morning sickness. I was slowly checking off the symptoms for early pregnancy. I could deal with being tired all the time, but the throwing up, they could keep it.

I heard my phone ring and went back into the bedroom. Checking the contact, I saw it was Lorenzo. “Hello?”

“Isa,” he said. “Did you go back to sleep? Did I wake you?”

I was up before him every day, so no he didn’t wake me, and he knew good and damn well that he hadn’t. Suddenly something like anger started to rise in me. He had left that morning to avoid talking to me.

“No. I was awake. What is it? Did you forget something at home?”

“No. I wanted to speak to you.”

“You left really early this morning,” I said. Passive aggression was not the answer, but I was upset.

“I did. Listen. I won’t be home for the next few days.”

“Why? Where are you going?”

“I just need a few days away, Isa. I need to think... after what you told me last night.”

And there it was. Of course, that was it. He was scared. He was scared, and now he was running away from me. He was pushing me away. It wasn’t even as if we were a real couple or anything, but I thought we had been getting along lately. Was I wrong? The conversations, the sex, the intimacy... was I wrong to interpret that as closeness? Part of me just didn’t want it to be true. I hadn’t expected him to be jumping for joy...that would have been an even more of a shocking reaction, but what the hell was this?

“I thought you weren’t mad.”

“I’m not, Isa. I just need some time.”

“Time to do what?”

“This doesn’t have to be a fight.”

“Just a simple question, Lorenzo. Time to do what?”

“I don’t exactly get this kind of news every day, Isa.”

“And you think I do? I am the one with the human being growing inside of me, Lorenzo. This might change a lot of things for you, but it changes more things for me.”

“What do you want from me, Isa? I have to be gone for a few days. All I need is a little time.”

“Lorenzo, do you really think that right after your wife tells you that she is pregnant with your first child is the best time to take a vacation?”

“It’s not a vacation. Christ, Isa, why are you being like this?”

“Being like what, Lorenzo? You are the one who is running away.”

I heard him sigh. It was quiet wherever he was, so I couldn’t even try and guess what the location might be. Where would he go? His family most likely had more homes dotted around the city and likely in the suburbs somewhere, too. There were always hotels, as well, for him to do his thinking.

“Isa. Please. I just found out that I’m going to be a father. I just found out last night. Of course, I need some time to get used to this. It isn’t like you just told me you got a haircut or something. This is serious. How long have you known?”

“Since we got back home from the last hotel.”

“What? So a week or so? I’m not even asking for that long, Isa. Look. If you’re afraid and you don’t want to stay alone, you can call my mother.”

“I don’t want to call your mother; I want to be with my husband.”

He sighed again.

“Just a couple days, babe. Just a few days. I’ll be back before you know it.”

He hung up then.

I put the phone down and went up the stairs. I felt sick to my stomach, and it wasn’t because I was pregnant. What had I done? All the progress we had made. All the times we had smiled together. It was all gone. It was as if we had taken ten steps up and I had just shoved us back to the bottom of the staircase. Tears started spilling down my face.

This was awful. This was terrible. Why did he feel he had to leave? What the hell did he need time to do? Even if he did need time, he couldn’t spend it with me? What kind of man abandoned his pregnant wife, right after he learned he was going to be a father? I was no fool. I knew rejection when I felt it.

And then he had tried to pass me off to his mother. It wasn’t her I wanted. It was him. We were in this together. I was carrying the child, but the child was his! We were married. Why would he think it was okay to leave at a time like this?

I fell onto our bed and rolled into a ball. I felt crushed.

If he felt he had to be away from me when he was thinking, that could only mean one thing. There was no way he was thinking something good. I wrapped my arms around my midsection as all the dark, horrible thoughts from the day I found out I was pregnant came flooding back. He wasn’t thinking about how happy he was going to be as a father. No. He wasn’t brainstorming baby names. He was probably on the phone with his lawyers asking how to get out of legal parenthood. He was likely on the phone with my dad, telling him that he would be sending me back home.

I swallowed, thinking the worst possibility. He was making calls to clinics trying to find one that would perform an abortion. The thought terrified me to death. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. If he tried it, I was out the door. If he really didn’t want the kid, I would make the decision for him and I would leave.

Was he really that upset about it?

Could he possibly think that I was lying to him? Trying to manipulate him? Was he on the phone asking for a lab that would perform a paternity test? Did he think it wasn’t his?

I couldn’t take it. I had to talk to someone. My parents were out of the question because they would immediately ask about Lorenzo. His mother was out of the question, too. She probably knew already if he was telling me to go to her while he was away on his thinking trip.

I called Marina and waited impatiently as she picked the phone up.

“Hello?”

“He’s gone.”

“What? Isa?”

“He’s gone. I told him last night, and now he’s gone.” I barely got the words out through my sobs.

“Oh no...where are you?”

“Home. He’s gone, Marina. He told me... he said—”

“Don’t. Just stay there. I’m coming to get you, okay?”

I quieted down by the time she showed up. Carlotta probably let her in because I hadn’t moved when I heard the doorbell ring. I wasn’t crying anymore, but that was likely because I had just managed to tire myself out. She took kind of long getting to the room, probably because she didn’t know which one was the master suite. When she finally found me, she came straight to the bed and squeezed me in a tight hug.

That set me off again. She was such a great friend. She probably had things to do but she was there with me, comforting me in place of my husband, who had more important things to do.

“What happened, sweetie?” she asked me.

“When I woke up this morning, I didn’t find him. He had already left.”

“To go where?”

“I don’t know. It was too early for work, but I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t want to make it into that big of a deal. His job isn’t the most regular one in the world. He probably had some weird meeting he had to attend. But then, he called me.”

“He called you? From the meeting?”

“He wasn’t at a meeting. Maybe he was. He didn’t say where he was. He just told me that he would be away for a few days because he wanted some time to think?”

“That was the word he used? Think?”

I nodded.

“He said that he was going to be away for a bit because the news was really big and he wanted some time to think about it.”

“He has to leave to be able to think?”

“Apparently.”

“What the hell would he be thinking about without you? It’s not as if he’s in a position to make any independent decisions about your future child. You’re carrying it.”

“I don’t know if that’s enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lorenzo’s rich, Marina. He’s rich and he’s powerful. He could do anything.”

“What are you thinking? That he wants to take it from you?”

“Or make me get rid of it,” I said quietly.

“Isa, he wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t he? I thought that too initially, but now I’m not so sure. Why would he leave? If he left he obviously has things or is doing things he doesn’t want me to know about.”

“You need to call him.”

“So he can tell me how hard it is to think around me again?”

“You need to find out the facts. The only way to know what he’s feeling is to ask him. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he loves you, but he does care about you. He wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble to keep you safe if he didn’t.”

“My marriage is over,” I said miserably. “It never even got to the part when it could have been fun yet.”

“I’m not leaving you here like this. We’re going.”

“Going where?”

“I don’t have to be into work for a number of hours, but you need to stop moping. It’s not good for you.”

“It doesn’t make a difference, if I’m not moping here, I’ll mope wherever it is you want to take me.”

“Fine. You don’t care about yourself, think about this...it’s bad for the baby.”

That one got me.

“Get in the shower and get dressed.”

“No,” I pouted.

An hour later we were at Campania and I was rolling fresh pasta.

Usually, I got tunnel vision when I cooked. It was still pretty early in the day so the chefs were still doing mainly prep, but it didn’t matter. Marina thought that occupying my hands would help me stop thinking about Lorenzo, but the prep was too repetitive and routine to truly engage me enough to stop ruminating. She had dragged me to Campania, which I suppose was the best place she could have taken me. I was familiar with the space, so I could move around in my semi-catatonic state and not fall on my face. I morosely julienned cucumber and carrots.

I was going to be Lorenzo Montorini’s pregnant ex-wife within the next three months. Our fathers were going to kill each other, and half the New York City underground was going to collapse. That was how this story was going to end. I was going to be a divorced, single mother—and Lorenzo would cede all legal rights to the baby. I would be out on my ass with nothing because we had no prenup and he would be able to make sure I wasn’t entitled to anything from our time together.

Or even better. He would make me have an abortion on the grounds that I made him get me pregnant in order to indebt him to my father. The kid was the thing that would make sure my father always had one up on him even if we ended up divorcing, which was what was going to happen. That was what he had left me to think about, wasn’t it?

How would he do it? Would he give me the respect of at least telling me himself to my face, or were we going to communicate through lawyers from then on? How the hell would I pay for legal counsel that could rival his?

***

I COULDN’T SLEEP IN the house that night. Everything made me think about him, and when I started thinking about him, it was only a matter of time before I began thinking about the baby and all the terrible things that were going to happen if Lorenzo was as angry as I thought he was.

My options were limited. I moved out of my own apartment right into Lorenzo’s house and the apartment was already being rented by somebody else. If he kicked me out, I would be homeless. There was always my parents’ house. They wouldn’t turn me away, but there was no way I would be able to lie to my mother that everything was all right. Everything was not all right. She would be able to tell right away.

I wanted to go. I wanted to see her again. The last time I had was at the wedding. My father, too. They would know that something was wrong. Was that so bad though? They were married. They had been married for years. They knew what it was like. If anything, they should be able to empathize.

I was married. I couldn’t go running to my mom and dad whenever things were rough between my husband and me. There was the fact that he had run away from me first...but that didn’t make it right. Maybe if I left the television on for long enough, I would fall asleep in front of it. That was worth a try. Or maybe I could invite Marina over so I could at least have another person in the room as I cried.

I might have been semi-useful during prep, but there was no way I could have been any use to anyone during the busy lunch service. Marina had to work, so I had nobody to bore with my thoughts about my impending divorce. I decided to head home, walking.

***

THE SAME VIOLENT WAVE of nausea that had dragged me from bed in the morning, pulled me from bed the next day. I heaved into the toilet, wondering what on earth I had done to deserve this. I had been to Catholic elementary and high school, so maybe that was why I had managed not to employ contraception with Lorenzo. I knew that wasn’t the truth; I had been to Planned Parenthood enough times through college to educate myself on the risks associated with these things. Lorenzo wasn’t my college boyfriend though, he was my husband. That was not a good enough excuse not to have gotten on the pill or gotten a diaphragm or something, but it had seemed harmless enough at the time.

In the very beginning, it had just been twice. We had had sex two times, but all it took to conceive was one time. It only took one time, and it only took one sperm. Lorenzo was so hot and perfect that it made sense that he would also be extremely virile. If anyone’s genes needed to be passed, they were his. And whether he wanted them to be or not, they were.

Nothing. He had given me nothing. I had watched my phone, waiting to see that he had called me or at the very least sent a message. Nothing. There was the option, of course, that I could have called him...but to say what? Yeah, it would have been nice to hear his voice, maybe ask him what was up and where he was, but when it came to that other thing, there was nothing I could have done. The ball was in his court, and he had put it there himself. I was waiting for him because he had asked me to wait. What could I do?

For all, I knew he was filing for divorce and I would be served in the next forty-eight hours.

What the hell was I supposed to do with myself all day? I couldn’t go to Campania. I couldn’t go see my parents. Marina would have only been able to entertain me till her shift began. I needed some hobbies. I needed to join some groups or something. What did I even like to do besides cook? Would I turn into one of those people who ran a cooking blog? If it meant having something to do besides worry about the state of my marriage, then yes. I would.

Staring at the empty address bar of my browser, my fingers took on a life of their own. In seconds, I was logged into Amazon researching different breast pumps. Was I going to breastfeed? A lot of women didn’t, but it was supposed to be good for the kid. What happened to the milk if you didn’t feed it to your kid? Did you just reabsorb it? Did you milk it out of yourself like a cow?

Thinking of milk, was I still allowed to have tea and coffee?

I thought about it and realized I had no fucking idea.

None.

I had more questions than answers. How was I going into this so clueless? When was I even supposed to visit the doctor to get the fetus checked out? I had no clue. Why did I still not know anything? How and why had I let this much time pass since I had found out that I was pregnant before I actually started taking steps to educate myself on how to raise a kid?

Babies were expensive. The kid would need furniture and clothes. There was a ton of accessory items that needed to be procured as well. The decision to keep the baby when I found out about it had been instant, so how had I fallen into complete inertia? Just because Lorenzo didn’t know where he stood, didn’t mean I had to stick myself in whatever limbo he was still in.

A knock at the door after I had spent hours online made me jump. It was Carlotta. She had been around a lot more often now that Lorenzo was gone.

“Mrs. Montorini, I’m done for the day. I’m heading out.”

“Thank you, Carlotta, see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Something came for you a couple hours ago. I left it downstairs on the dining table,” she told me. I thanked her again and resumed my frenzied googling before heading downstairs to eat something. I felt like Doritos but also raspberry sorbet. I settled for a plate of the ziti that Carlotta had cooked and stashed in the refrigerator. Settling down to eat my reheated meal, was when I saw them. It was a bouquet, but likely the largest one that had ever been recorded in history. It was huge, definitely more than twelve roses.

I held the roses and inhaled their sweet scent. They were white. I noticed a piece of card, lodged between the stems. I pulled it out. It was covered in writing, Lorenzo’s handwriting, which I had never seen other than when we were signing the marriage certificate.

‘I don’t know if I can be a good husband and father. But I want to try more than anything.-M’

I read the note then reread it. I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face. It wasn’t as good as having him here supporting me, but it was something. This was his olive branch. He was going to try. He wanted to try, and that was all I really wanted. I wanted him to make the effort, and he was going to do it for me. He was going to do it for us.

I put the flowers in a vase and went upstairs. This was great. This called for a celebration. I ran the bath and poured in the bubble bath. I pinned my hair up and slid inside. The flowers were a sign. I was going to treat them as an invitation. He had communicated, and his answer was what I had hoped it would be. Sure, he wasn’t here gushing about how happy he was to become a dad, but I didn’t need that. All I needed was for him to try, and he was. I reached for my phone and carefully dialed his number, careful not to get water on it. He picked up after two rings.

“Did you get the flowers?” he said instead of a greeting.

“I did. Traditionally, you’re supposed to give your wife red roses,” I said playfully.

“Come on, baby. You know traditional is the last thing that describes us.”

“Don’t ‘baby’ me. I’m mad at you.”

“What is it? What did I do?”

“You made me wait a whole day before you let me know you weren’t going to divorce me.”

He laughed at that.

“Why would I divorce you after we just got married, Isa?”

“The way you left... I was so scared you hated me after I told you that I was pregnant.”

“I don’t hate you, Isa. You’re my wife. You’re going to give birth to my child.”

“Do you think you’re ready to become a parent?”

“Honestly, no. I don’t know the first thing about parenting, but I know I could do it if you were with me.”

“You really mean that?”

“I do. Our relationship started rough, but not a lot of guys get set up the way that I did with you. I think we’d make a great team. The way that we started doesn’t matter because being stuck in the past doesn’t help anything.”

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“I’m excited.”

“When are you getting back?” I asked.

“A few more days. A week at the very most. Something came up.”

“More thinking?”

“No more thinking. Work.”

“Where are you?”

“Isa...you know I can’t tell you that,” he said.

I sighed. I wasn’t going to push it, not when he was making an effort. “What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

“Everything I want to do involves you,” I told him.

“Like what? You want me to take you out again?”

“I want you to take me down again.”

He was silent. I heard him clearing his throat.

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m in the tub.”

“You’re already naked... I wanted you to undress for me,” he said. The bath water was hot, but it didn’t matter. The heat I felt between my legs was searing.

“I wish you were here,” I said.

“If I was there, we wouldn’t be in the tub.”

“Where would we be?”

“We’d be on the bed. You’d be wearing something pretty, with lace that I could peel off of you.”

My free hand went between my legs and stroked my clitoris.

“I’d wear something nice for you. I’d wait on the bed for you to get home.”

“Are you imagining me there with you? Are you touching yourself like it’s my fingers inside of you?”

My eyes shut as I let the fantasy take over.

“I wish it was your hands, Lorenzo. I wish it was your cock. You’re so big.”

“Can you feel me kissing you? I would kiss all the way down to your perfect tits. I would suck on your nipples till you screamed. I’d hold your legs apart and eat your pussy till you couldn’t move.”

“Lorenzo, I’m so close. I wish you were here fucking me.”

I shuddered silently as I came.

“The first thing I want to do when I see you is take you, hard and fast on the bed. Wait for me, okay?”

“Don’t take too long. I can only stay entertained with my hand for so long,” I said.

“I can’t wait to see you,” he said.

I smiled. The statement was so sweet following what he had been saying just a breath ago about how he wanted to pound me. “I can’t wait to see you, too.”