Cora
I try and go about my normal routine: get up, shower, cover my tattoos and get to work. But for the third day in a row as soon as I sit up my belly twists and I have to run through my apartment to the bathroom, sprinting at full speed so that my vomit hits the bowl and not the floor, or the wall, which happened the first time this horrible sickness struck. I hate calling into work, because my contract sucks and I know that sooner or later they’ll just replace me, but more than anything I hate being sick because I can’t sing. I try to, but then my belly punishes me for it with another round of sickness.
A large part of it comes from fear: fear of not knowing what’s happening to me, fear created by checking the Internet for symptoms. At first I thought it was a twenty-four-hour bug, but the Internet informed me that I could very well have a rare form of brain tumor with symptoms only showing up in my belly. After I call work—apologizing, groveling—I call the doctor and arrange an appointment. Luckily, I get health insurance with the dentist job.
I drive to the doctor with a brown paper bag on the passenger seat, ready for round two—or three, or four, or five. I pull to a stop and take a deep breath, telling myself I’m not going to be sick. I won’t let that happen. No way. I take several deep breaths, repeating this mantra to myself. And then I’m sick in the paper bag and I get out of the car, wiping my mouth with my sleeve.
Sitting in the doctor’s office is hell, with the little kid in front of me whining at his mom to give him her credit card information for some cellphone game, an old lady sitting next to me who seems intent on winning the Fart of the Week competition, and a teenage boy who reeks of weed opposite me, who keeps glancing up and smiling as though in invitation. I close my eyes and think of Loki strutting into Asgard to insult all of the gods, accusing them of all sorts of things, like saying Freya sleeps around too much, before Thor comes in to stop the nonsense. That calms me a little. By the time the doctor calls me in, I’m thirty percent certain I’m not going to puke again.
The doctor is a tall, wide-built woman who reminds me of pictures of my own mother: sturdy and maternal in all the ways I’m not. She wears her hair in blonde ringlets to her shoulders. I think her voice is sweet until she says, “You’re pregnant.”
“What?” I reply, sitting on the chair opposite her with my hands between my legs. “I don’t think I heard you properly. What did you say?”
“Miss Ash, I am happy to say that you are expecting!”
“Happy,” I repeat.
She squints at me. A picture of a mountain hangs from the wall with the caption: No Climb Too Tough! I want to ball it up and shove it down her throat when she next opens her mouth. “A baby is always a blessing, I’m sure you’ll agree, Miss Ash.”
“It’s always a blessing, is it?” I pick up a pen with an alien head on the end and start tearing at the rubbery Martian with my thumbnail. “That seems like quite a general statement to me, Dr. Hughes. Doesn’t that seem like a general statement to you? I’m sure we can both think of hundreds of times when a baby isn’t a blessing.”
“Well, be that as it may—”
“Is that really part of your job?” I snap, vaguely aware that I’m making a fool of myself. “I thought your job was to do the doctor’s work, and leave the judgments at the door. So what? You find out I’m pregnant and now we’re best friends, and we’re supposed to bake cookies together and giggle over what to name the thing? Is that it?”
“It’s not a thing, Miss Ash. It’s a baby—”
I put down the pen—the alien is a cyclops now—and massage my eyes. I swallow bile, acidic as it slides down my throat and bubbles in my belly. “I would like some information on abortion, please.”
“Miss Ash …”
I open my eyes, glaring at her. “I haven’t read up on doctor’s rules recently, but it seems to me that if you finish the rest of that sentence you could be in some trouble. Are you really going to try and talk me out of making my own decision, Doctor, especially when you know jack shit about me? For all you know, I was—I’m not even going to say it, but you really need to change your goddamn attitude.”
I don’t remember standing up or leaning over the desk or placing my fists on the expensive wood. I lift my hands and step back, curtseying in what I hope is a comedic way. “Please.” My joke doesn’t diffuse the situation. She just looks at me like I’m crazy, which I’m starting to think I might be, just a little, since so many people look at me like that.
“I have some pamphlets,” Dr. Hughes says, opening the drawer with quite a bit of passive aggression. She slides them across the desk. “There you go. But please, think carefully.”
“Fine.”
I snatch them up and leave the office, stewing all the way to the car, wishing I could take Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and toss it at the building. I place the pamphlets on the passenger seat next to my sick bag and start the car, heading for the nearest convenience store. There’s no way I’m leaving this up to Doctor Hughes. I need a second opinion.
Half an hour later I’m sitting on the toilet with three pregnancy tests laid out on the bathtub. I pee on them one by one, trying not to let my mind stray to Logan and the consequences of all this, to stray to that one heated night. Could one night of pleasure really spread this far, have such far-reaching effects? Could my life really be changed forever because I screwed a man with muscles and hair like a Viking? I pace around the apartment while the tests are processing, picking up clothes and tossing them into the wash basket. I clean my bedroom of tissues and even strip and change the sheets, all so I don’t have to face reality. But reality always wins.
I return to the bathroom and look down at the tests: positive, positive, positive.
“So Dr. Hughes wasn’t an evil liar,” I whisper.
I go into the living room and drop onto the couch, staring at my reflection in the TV for what feels like a long time. A baby, a real-life baby, a human life, in here—I prod my belly—growing inside of me. Near the same place I put pizza and beer, there’s a little cell that’ll grow into a baby unless I do something about it. I think about the planned trajectory of my life and how it does not, at any point, involve becoming pregnant by an outlaw biker. I even wrote a list once, when I was deciding whether or not to become Cora Ash. “Get Pregnant by Criminal” was not on there.
Have I been thinking about Logan these past weeks? At night, sometimes, has my hand strayed down between my legs, toying with myself and pretending that it’s him? Have I sometimes closed my eyes and remembered the feeling of perfect vulnerability when he entered me from behind? Perhaps I have, but that doesn’t mean I should start a family with the guy … even if my thoughts of him have extended beyond the sexual, to that morning when he was making coffee; maybe I could have spoken to him; maybe we could’ve grabbed breakfast.
I take out my cellphone and dial Mr. Polly, my father’s will executor. Then I hang up the phone before the first ring and curse myself for an idiot.
I leave my apartment and find the nearest payphone—who knew they still had these things?—and dial him from there, ignoring the smell of piss and cheap beer, the crude graffiti on the broken glass.
“Hello, Polly,” I say.
“Melissa?” he barks. “Is that you?”
“It sure is.”
“You sound … are you drunk?”
“Drunk. You could say that. Drunk on life. Life’ll do that sometimes, won’t it?”
“You’re ranting. Where are you? You’ve dropped off the face of the earth.”
“No, just off the face of your earth. I want to check some technicalities about this whole baby thing.” I wonder if I’m a essentially a selfish person to think this way: a new apartment, the freedom to pursue singing without interruption, a cushion of money to fall back on. “Is there anything in the will that says I have to keep the baby after it’s born, or can I give it away to a poor couple who can’t have one of their own, or something like that?”
He pauses, and then says, “No, there is nothing that says you have to keep it. You only have to give birth to it—and be married at the time of the birth.”
“Married. There’s no wiggle room on that part?”
“No, Melissa, there’s no wiggle room, and frankly I find it offensive that you would insult your father’s final wishes by—”
I hang up and return to my apartment, thinking. I have no clue what I want to do. It seems like the choices fall into two camps: get rid of the kid or marry Logan and get my money, and then make some childless couple happy. I’m sure there are organizations that do that sort of thing. For a moment I think about what it’d be like to hold the kid, to feel his or her tiny hand in mine …
“No, no, no.”
I need to contact Logan, but I have no way of doing so. I don’t even have his goddamn cellphone number.
I grab my leather jacket and head down to my car. There’s only one thing for it: drive to every dive bar in this town and ask for him, one by one, like some ancient Norwegian queen travelling the land looking for fealty from each one of her chieftains. I glance at myself in the mirror, tired-looking and red-eyed from all the puking, and laugh grimly. A queen … yeah, right.