Helena
Dominick was silent for a long time.
There were so many things I wanted to say, but I just couldn't find the words. Even if I could, I wouldn't have known where to start.
I just wanted to cry.
Instead, I opened my eyes and looked at him.
He was staring at my stomach.
"You're due in less than eight months, aren't you?" he asked.
"Yes."
What else could I say?
There was another silence, this one long enough that it felt like all the air was being sucked from the room until my lungs threatened to burst. There was nothing left to distract me, no lies left that I could tell myself. All I could do was wait, helplessly staring the horrible truth in the face.
Nothing would ever be the same between us again.
Dominick ran his hands through his hair and sighed, shaken by the news. He took a few steps back, retreating into a corner of the examination room, and just stood there for a while, his expression hidden away as he rubbed his eyes in dismay and disbelief.
I shivered, and the throbbing of my heart felt like it was freezing in my chest. Beat-beat-freeze, beat-freeze-beat. The erratic rhythm would've been maddening, except having something else to focus on was all that could keep me sane.
"How?" Dominick finally asked, the word breaking minutes of cold silence. "Why?"
"I didn't plan for it to happen this way," I said, my throat dry. "Obviously."
"What did you plan for, Helena?"
"Going through my life without ever meeting you, or even knowing who you were. Just like how it happens to everyone else who uses a sperm bank," I said, drawing my knees up to my chest and hugging myself as I sat on the cold examination bed. "They contacted me last year, telling me that they would not keep your sample for much longer. By all logic, it was going to be my last chance to give Ali a full-blooded sibling."
"So you said yes," Dominick continued, almost breathless.
"Not right away. Bringing another life into the world isn't something you do on a whim. I thought about it a lot at first, and for a long time I just couldn't decide. Eventually, I went away with Ali for a week. We took a trip to Maine, and we rented a beach house. It was beautiful there. We spent our time looking for shellfish and baking pies. It was far from our normal, but we both enjoyed it. It gave me a lot of time to reflect."
"And you asked Ali if you should do it?" Dominick asked as he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
"No, at least not directly. I just asked how she felt about the idea of having a little brother or sister. I made sure to explain to her how much work it would be, and how I'd need to split my attention and give a lot of time to the baby."
"And she agreed?"
"Yes. She was very excited…she started asking a lot of difficult questions about it. Like how I could reproduce asexually," I said, remembering how funny the question had seemed, particularly her use of that word. Of course, Ali seemed both very old and very young at the same time, leading to amusingly naive questions worded with surprising sophistication.
Dominick chuckled a little, too, and for the first time I felt like I could breathe again. I was still being crushed by an intense weight of guilt and worry, but now it felt just a little bit lighter.
"I explained again how I did it before, getting pregnant with her. How I never met you, but thanks to the magic of freezers and turkey basters it didn't matter."
"You actually said that?" Dominick asked, surprised.
"Not quite in those words," I explained. "But I've never tried to hide the truth from her, either. She had a right to know, and she was asking directly…besides, have you seen the internet? No amount of monitoring or firewalls can stop everything. I can't even imagine what she would've gotten if she had tried Googling it."
"Fair enough," Dominick said. He didn't exactly sound happy, but the fact that he was speaking to me at all gave me courage.
"So we talked about it. A lot. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I bet that's when she decided to track you down. Lord, maybe she even thought I needed to find you to make another baby. That would be ironic."
"Ironic how?"
"Because then we never would've met if I hadn't done this. But because I did this, maybe we won't…," I began, trailing off and tearing up as I struggled to say the words. "We won't be together anymore."
"Helena," Dominick said, taking a few steps forward and putting his hand on my shoulder. My skin reacted immediately to his touch, warm and reassuring.
I shivered.
"I've been dreading this day," I said, sniffling despite my efforts not to. "You have no idea."
And then he finally asked the big question.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"You were a stranger at first," I said quickly, almost automatically. I had imagined this moment more times than I could count. So much so that I dreamed about it, sometimes. And in those dreams, I'd inadvertently rehearsed half a hundred different speeches. "I needed to be careful, to protect my family."
"You didn't trust me," Dominick said.
"I didn't know you. At all. Can you blame me for being careful?" I asked. "I heard what Alton said about me the other day. He thinks this is all a big scam."
"I didn't agree with him," Dominick pointed out.
"No, but you told him you talked to your lawyer about me. You were being careful, too, Dom. Just like I was."
Dominick chewed his lip and let out a soft sigh, nodding his head a little. "But that was a long time ago. Why didn't you tell me after that?"
"At first you were a stranger, and I couldn't tell you because I didn't trust you. Then you weren't a stranger, and I'd been hiding something huge from you. It was such a gradual, seamless transition, I didn't know how to deal with it. I handled it badly," I said, a tear running down my face. "And I tried to tell you. Over and over. But something always happened…I always let something happen. I'm sorry."
Dominick chewed his lip in thought before nodding slowly.
"The nurse explained that it was just low blood pressure, and you were fine," he said finally. "Is—how is the baby?" he asked in a soft voice, a hushed tone that was so delicate I'd never heard him sound like that before. It took me a second to adjust to the change of topic.
"Probably fine…the probably is what's taking so long. They couldn't see anything wrong, but they wanted to run a few more tests to be sure."
Dominick's body relaxed visibly, even as he still carried obvious tension in his neck and shoulders. Moving even closer, he sat down next to me on the hospital examination bed.
Without saying a word, he put his hand on my knee.
And we waited.