Face Of The Monster

18 - Monster

I haven't been this exhausted in a long time. I feel like all the energy has been sucked from me through a straw. It's all I can do to peel off my clothes and throw them on the floor. I have nothing left after that.

Cande, that goddamn devil girl, is in bed right now, sobbing angry tears. She should be. I feel despicable for wishing pain upon my own child, but she has been truly evil to me today. My legs burn from walking, from running. My wrists ache from keeping hold onto her on our way home.

She nearly gave me a heart attack, that girl did. I thought she was gone forever. "You're a stupid dyke and I hate you," her note said. "I am never coming back. Don't look for me."

Luckily, Cande is thirteen and there are only so many places she can go. I exhausted all her usual haunts and asked around at a couple fast food places (the Denny's lady recognized the picture I showed her) and all signs pointed toward Emily's house.

Sure enough, I found her and Cande huddled together upstairs, whispering about Cande's next move. I screamed at them for so long that Emily cried.

But here's the crazy part: we couldn't drive home. Oh, you wouldn't believe just how terrified I was when she dove for that steering wheel. Thankfully, we were on an empty side street, but we could just have easily been on a busy highway. Or I could have swerved into a tree and killed us! Are you crazy? I screamed at her. She just fixed me with those scary little devil eyes of hers and shrugged.

There was no way I was driving after that. I marched her all the way home on foot, her wrists clamped in my fingers so she couldn't make a break for it.

The door opens. There's Ricky, still warm from the shower. He lays down beside me, giving a grunt of relief. "Feels good to lay down," He says. I want to snap at him that he's been lying down all day, but instead I sigh in agreement. "Are you okay?" he asks.

"Nope."

"Don't get too worked up about it, Emmy." He rubs my stomach with his calloused palm, coaxing a quiet moan out of my mouth. "She's trying to make you mad."

"She's trying to kill me," I correct him. My stomach hurts, too, from all the crying I did after I got back. Phoebe only answered her phone once out of the eight times I called, and even then she only picked up to tell me that she couldn't talk. She's at the hospital with Chloe right now.

"No. She still loves you." Ricky reaches over me to turn off the lights. "Hey," he says, "You're on my side of the bed, aren't you?"

I ignore him, too tired to debate about something so trivial. Tomorrow will be a hectic day. I have to get the kids to school, and probably feed Isabel's spawn too as my sister in law has developed a habit of sleeping just late enough to miss breakfast. Then I have to bring Ricky to the hospital and begin the monotonous hours of questions and preparations that precede the surgery.

He lays his head on my stomach, kissing the line between my waist and my belly button. I can feel him watching me, waiting for a shiver or a moan or a whimper; some kind of affirmation. I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep.

"Emmy?" he shakes me gently, then harder. "Baby? Stay awake. I want to talk."

"You can talk," I murmur. "Go ahead."

But he's adamant. "Listen to me," he says. "I'm dying."

"Playing the cancer card, huh?" I open one eye, knowing I will look completely heartless if I don't.

Ricky shrugs. "I'm just a walking cancer card at this point, aren't I?"

"What'd you want to say?"

"I want to talk about the baby."

I feel myself closing up, my heart folding up and tucking itself back into its hiding place. My first thought is to say there is no baby. But he would know, and he would be upset with me for lying to him. Instead, I sigh deeply. "Ricky, the bottom line is, it's my body and I'll do what I think is best, okay? Just go to sleep. You need some rest for tomorrow." Tell him, my brain is saying. Tell him it isn't his.

But a scary thought worms its way into my head: What if it is? What if my poor, bald, teary-eyed husband is correct and I am totally wrong? I could have been pregnant for up to three weeks before I took the test without knowing it. The baby inside me right now could, in fact, be spun up in Ricky's poisonous DNA like a fly in a spider web.

It's something I've thought of, obviously, but only in the context of life I have already brought into the world. I've wondered, agonized over, whether or not Cande and Ti are in any real danger. I have always planned to get them tested for the gene, but at the last second I always decide I don't want to know. Now, feeling the trusting little pulse of the new thing in my stomach, tiny as a poppy seed, I wonder if it is worth bringing even more pain into the world.

Enrique knows what I'm thinking. "I've had a good life, Emmy, up until now. It will be the same for the little one, even if it does have what I have." He kisses my stomach again, tenderly this time as though there is no membrane of skin between him and the child that is possibly his.

I want to get angry. I need to get angry if I'm going to win this argument. But seeing him like this, so vulnerable, consumed in his own tormenting sweetness, melts whatever seed of hostility was left in me. "You're being selfish," I tell him weakly. "You have to think about me, too. Say you don't make it through the surgery. I can't raise three kids on my own, Ricky."

"I think you can do anything," he says.

"Oh, Ricky." I close my eyes, putting my hand in his hair. For the first time, it really hits me: if he dies, I will lose part of myself. He's bound to me, whether through time or love I may never know. But he is a part of everything in me and everything out of me. Every thought I have is tinged with him, every plan I make decided with him on the periphery. Every word he says represents me and vice versa. To lose that, to lose that wholesomeness that has been our marriage, just might be the end of me. "I love you."

"I love you too," He says. "And you."