Merit
Granite Harbor, Maine
Spring 2002
I tap my foot on the bathroom floor and chew at my thumbnail, wanting to throw up but trying to refrain.
It could be negative, and that would be great. That would be fantastic. That would make everything a whole lot better.
Throwing up would be bad.
Morning sickness.
What if it’s really morning sickness and not the fact that I’m eighteen years old and watching a pregnancy test?
“Oh, God,” I groan as my stomach turns and twists, and my heart races.
My dad is going to kill me. This is not the future he wanted for me. This is not the future I wanted for myself.
College will be out the window.
“Oh, God.” I stand and pace the bathroom floor, taking my temples and rubbing them.
No, no. It will be fine, I think to myself. I have Ryan. We’ll be okay. Ryan will make this all right. He’ll talk some sense into me. We’ll make a plan to get married. We’ll get our own place. I have a job at Café by the Sea. Betty Lee will understand and give me extra shifts until my belly explodes.
“Oh my God.” My hands begin to shake.
Just breathe, Merit. I rub my sweaty hands on my jeans.
I glance at the test still lying on the bathroom counter, waiting for it to spit out my future.
Our future.
Ryan will make everything okay.
He’ll make it okay.
He’ll make it doable.
I glance at the test again.
A plus mark.
It’s a fucking plus mark.
That can’t be good for a teenager leaving for college. For a woman who had no plans of having a child, I can’t be good for a baby.
This could be good for a married couple wanting to have a child.
This could be good for others.
Not for me. Not for us.
“I’m-I’m pregnant?” I say out loud, more to convince myself.
I run to the toilet and throw up the cereal I ate this morning. Several times until there’s nothing left, I throw up.
Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I crouch down next to the toilet and try not to cry.
I feel guilty for crying.
I feel sorry for this baby.
This was not my destiny.
A knock at the door makes my insides explode with fear. A door I’ll have to eventually walk beyond. Face life. Face the looks of others. The disappointment. The shame.
“Yeah?” I yell through the tears that want to fall.
“Mer, you’ve been in there for twenty minutes. What the hell is wrong with you?” It’s Eli.
My stomach drops. My brother. The one whose life isn’t falling apart. The brother who still has his senior year ahead of him. He has Grace. And prom. And a future.
We’re fundamentally different now.
Mom, I could really use your help right now, I pray quietly to myself.
“Ryan’s here,” Eli says. “We’re going downtown.”
Fuck. Shit. Not now. I’m not ready to face him. Not ready to tell him. Playing this game I’ve asked Ryan to play, the don’t tell my brother that we’re dating but kind of not dating game.
Ryan’s life is about to change, too.
I stand, dizzy, and I grab the counter to steady myself. “I’ll be out in a minute.” I wipe my nose on the back of my hand again. I grab the pregnancy test and examine it closer. Pregnant. “Shit.”
I grab all the evidence of my life change and throw it in my purse, unlocking and opening the bathroom door. I drove all the way to Augusta to buy one. There’s not a chance in hell I’d buy a pregnancy test at Ring’s Pharmacy or Granite Harbor Grocery. I’d make the gossip ring in thirty minutes, tops.
“Hey,” Ryan says from the hallway at the door of Eli’s bedroom.
“Hey,” I say. I slip into my bedroom and shut the door behind me.
There’s a knock. A soft knock.
Ryan peeks his head in.
Tears start to burn at the corners of my eyes, my back to the door.
“Mer, you all right?”
No.
“I’m fine.” I hear the door quietly shut behind him.
There’s hesitation in his steps.
Don’t you dare cry, Merit. Stop it this instant.
“Mer, what’s wrong?”
I feel his hand slide up my arm. I wince.
“Violet?”
Please don’t call me that anymore, I want to say, and I’m not sure why I don’t want him to call me that anymore.
I turn to face him. We’ve committed this act together. He has to know.
“Ryan,” I sigh and reach into my purse. My hands shaking, I hand him the pregnancy test.
He takes it in his hand and stares down at the test and back at me. “What’s this?”
“It’s a positive pregnancy test, Ryan,” I whisper.
He sits on my bed. Stares.
He’ll make this okay. He’ll tell me everything will be all right now. He’ll take me in his arms. Tell me he loves me and that we’ll get married and that he’ll take shifts at the harbor during his senior year.
“This can’t be right,” he says.
“What?”
“We wore a condom, Mer. This can’t be right.”
I’ve had a whole three minutes to process this before he knew anything. A whole three minutes to figure out what I can’t seem to wrap my head around, so I’m no use in assisting with the understanding department.
Any minute now, he’ll make this okay. Right?
I’ll just wait.
We don’t say a word.
I join him on the bed. Not the same one that got us into this predicament. That was a bed of blankets at the harbor. In the darkness, below the moon’s light, where he pushed, and I took whatever he offered, unable to get enough.
We shook when he finished.
I didn’t know what an orgasm was until two days after we made love. When he used his fingers and then his tongue under my summer dress. It was just past noon, and we were in the shade of an old evergreen, a secluded place just past the harbor.
Maybe I’m romanticizing the situation we’re in to avoid the current situation altogether.
Ryan’s head rests on his hand, still staring at the positive pregnancy test. Silence fills us like air, consuming us. Questions we can’t answer. Answers that are just beyond our reach perhaps. A situation we shouldn’t be in. And yet the silence is too deafening to hear anything else. Not the sound of the blood pumping from my heart to other parts of my body. My thoughts, too, have become quiet.
The silence turns eerie. Cold. Dark.
Then, he says, “You’re sure it’s mine?”
It takes several minutes for my brain to comprehend the question he asked. It takes me a minute to round up what’s in my head to answer the question I’m not sure he really asked in the first place.
“What?”
“You’re sure it’s mine? The baby.”
My thoughts are just a step behind my mouth.
“What do you mean?” Truly, I don’t understand what he’s asking.
Is he asking if I’ve slept with someone else? Is he asking if there’s another father?
Just a step behind.
Disbelief can squander. Flounder. Like a fish out of water. It can flip and flop on an old deck, waiting for someone to do the right thing. Waiting for someone to understand the predicament and take action.
But anger starts first. Just at the end of my spine and quickly reaches my chest and then my mouth. Then, it registers.
“You’re asking if I had sex with someone else?” The disbelief meets my tongue, and reality pours in.
He doesn’t answer. He knows the truth. He knows it. I know it. And God knows it.
“I just want to be sure—”
“What?” I’m still trying to register, compute.
He shrugs, like it’s no big deal.
I whisper my next words because I’m afraid, if I don’t, I’ll sound like I’m yelling. Even though I don’t want to yell. I keep calm for Eli’s sake. Because Eli doesn’t know a thing about Ryan and me.
“Ryan, you were my first. And you think I’m just going to mess around with someone else?”
Ryan shakes his head, placing his elbows on his knees, still holding the pregnancy test. “You’ve got to get an abortion. I can’t have a kid right now. I’m a junior in high school, Mer.”
I can’t breathe.
I need to throw up.
The room spins.
And I can’t manage a rational thought.
I’m alone in this world full of people with a tiny seed inside me.
The sound of my pulse can be heard in my ear.
A loud ringing.
“Besides,” I hear him say, “you’re not the only one I’m sleeping with, Mer. Come on, you know there are no guarantees in life.”
It’s hard for an eighteen-year-old girl to hide pregnancy, especially living in a small town. Hiding the overindulgence in soda crackers and soda. Blaming it on a bad flu—in spring.
I drove to Portland two days ago to do what I needed to do, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, large black sunglasses, and red lipstick. I couldn’t have a child on my own. I wasn’t ready for one. I hadn’t been to the doctor yet. Fear was my keeper. I couldn’t give this child the life it deserved.
I sat in the parking lot, tears streaming down my face as I stared at the brick building.
You understand right? I touch my stomach.
I can’t give you the life you’re owed.
I’m sorry.
Looking in the rearview mirror, I wiped my mascara away, pushed my sunglasses over my eyes, and marched into the clinic.
I didn’t expect the clinician to check for a heartbeat.
She did.
And hers—I just knew she was a girl—was strong.
I wept quietly as I listened to the sound of her heart.
The music of her beat.
“Are you ready, Miss Young?” the clinician asked.
I lay there, on the sterile chair, shirt up, my stomach exposed, listening to the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. I believed this girl had been made with love. I believed this girl would overcome. And I believed she and I were meant to be.
Tears rolled.
My heart ached.
I wanted so badly to do what I had come to do.
But love won. A mother’s love won.
Without a shred of fear, I said, “No. I’ve decided I can’t do this. I’m keeping my baby.”
The clinician sat back. Smiled. “All right then. Let’s schedule your next checkup.”
I began to wonder on my way back, with this child growing inside me, what clinicians felt when they were asked to do things like abortions.
Do some women use it as a form of birth control?
Do some women do it without a second thought?
Are some women like me?
I supposed we all wore a different conscience as people made by God. I supposed we all walked this world differently. But, when I heard that strong little heartbeat, I knew this little girl was my destiny. And, whatever that looked like, it didn’t matter because we’d figure things out together. I had to be her strength until she could stand on her own two feet.
I drove two blocks down to Books Galore and bought a day-by-day pregnancy book. Without my mom, without Ryan, I’d navigate this on my own.