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Shiv’s knee bloomed blue and purple. It hurt to stand on so she stood. In front of the open fridge in her suite kitchen, she fished out a half-jar worth of Zabar’s pickles with the short of her nails and ate like it was a thing she could win at. It’s not that she wanted fucking pickles; she just figured this was what you were supposed to do when you were pregnant and your father was dead and your brothers were bastard boy kings and your husband merely a bastard. Taste brine, choke a little. After five, she felt filled to the point of nausea with cliché and vinegar. She cracked open a bottle of Le Montrachet and sank onto a stool to think about what kind of mask Tom would wear when she told him about the pregnancy.
She had a kind of pathetic fantasy where she sprang it on him out of nowhere and his whole face fell off, his whole bullshit, obsequious, remember when we were in France and you liked it all so well thing — just oozing wetly onto the floor, leaving jutting bone behind.
It had occurred to her first when he followed her upstairs after she’d slipped at the apartment. She’d gotten maybe twenty-seconds of peace in the bedroom where her father had peed in a closet corner and once nearly had her palm his cock. Then Tom was knuckling at the door, all Midwestern politesse, as though he would actually go away if she told him not to come in.
“What,” she said, when he stuck his stupid oblong head around the door, blinking. The bedroom was dark, like it had been years ago when she’d crept up, and the floor was still carpeted wall-to-wall in that way Shiv hated because it made everyone soft-shoe and pussy-foot around as though they weren’t always already doing that.
“Just wanted to see if you were alright, is all.”
“Right.”
Tom Fred Astaired across the carpet, toward where Shiv was sitting on the edge of the bed. His brogues made a hushing sound. When he got close enough she could see his suited knees and ankles, and it made her realize the sting in her own.
“And are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Alright.”
“Oh, yeah. Great. One of the best days I’ve had, actually. Pretty much it’s you flying to Paris four years ago and then this. Close second.”
Tom didn’t shift at all on the carpet. Before, she’d been able to make him dance. “I see.”
He didn’t see shit. To prove it, she put a hand to her belly for her own amusement and said nothing.
“I’ve never been in here,” Tom said. Evidently he wasn’t looking at her, anyway. “It’s — strange. The inner sanctum.”
The room smelled like some old person, and her father’s cologne. The curtains were over-long, dark blue. It was pretty horrible, actually. She wished Tom would say it.
“Well,” she sniffed, "if he really loved you, daddy would have taken you here and made sure you felt it.”
Tom swallowed hard. It strained his voice. “I don’t want to fight with you, Siobhan,” he said. As though he hadn’t followed her upstairs to take whatever she might give him.
“Are we fighting? I thought this was just a good old fashioned she-gets-quietly-screwed divorce.”
“I’m not going to let you get screwed.” Tom had the gall to sound galled, his voice low.
“You’re not going to let me? Sorry, I didn’t realize you were the patron saint of spousal court screwing. Is that the plan you were cooking up with with every attorney in New York? How to win friends and fuck my ex-wife, but, you know, not too hard?”
“Shiv, will you just—?” Tom made to crouch in front of her, so she stood up fast, buttoning her blazer as she went. It was awkward: the motion and the posture, Tom squatting roughly level with her stomach. Pain twinged all the way up to her inner thigh. She dug a hand into her hip so hard that she could feel the weird, wrong shape of her belly through layers of fabric. Then she talked into open air, frowning down at Tom's prone head.
“Will I just what? Let you kiss up to me now that your bulwark is gone? Let you throw yourself at me? Throw myself at you? I don’t need that, Tom.” She was keeping her voice impressively calm, she thought. She imagined other people, faceless but men, mostly, looking at her and nodding approvingly at how very nicely she was not getting hysterical. “You need it, and so you think I do. But I’m fine. And you’re on ice so thin it’s basically all fucking eggshell. So I don’t need to do this. Ever. You can crunch along just fine without me or not. I don’t care. Don’t call me if you drown.”
Tom stayed crouched on the floor, one hand braced against the carpet. “I hear you, Shiv,” he said to her middle. “But I also know — I know that you need a friend right now.” He chinned his face up to her, and she looked at a piece of rug beyond his head and wondered if her dad had ever been incontinent over there.
Shiv said, “You’re not my friend, Tom. We are not friends. That’s not what this is.”
To her horror, this was a kind of reminiscence. It hit her as soon as it was out of her mouth: something she had said to him, in Cannes, of all places, when she was not yet thirty-one. Surprise made her look right at him, and she could tell he heard it, too. He got that liquid look in his eyes, the same as on the stairs, the one that she knew he thought meant something real.
This was when she first thought she’d say it, if only to warp the echo. We are not friends. Also, I’m pregnant. What would his face do? She’d really like to know. How long would it take him to do the calculus, to tally up how much she was worth to him now? Would he coo and stay cool? Or would he glitch out, unglamored on her dad’s thick carpet, his cheeks gone soft with the same kind of dumb-dog wonder that had made him say, Then what is it? the first time. That had made her think he really did not know.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course not. I know.”
“Great.”
He heard, he knew, he saw. What a fucking crock. To think that, and then to think it a virtue — absurd. Real people knew the wisdom of covering their eyes and ears. When her dad had tugged her hand in this bedroom, years ago, she had not known it, though she had heard and seen and felt it done.
“Could you leave?” she asked tightly. “Could you just like, fucking leave me alone? Could you do that for me?”
“Of course,” Tom said again. He put out a hand toward her like to steady himself as he stood and his fingers caught just the outer edge of her knee. It sang a queasy tender note.
“Fucking ow,” Shiv hissed, her leg kicking up involuntarily. “Don’t touch me.”
“Sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean — Hey. Shiv. Are you sure you’re — “
“Do what I asked, Tom.”
He did. She liked it. For the first time in a long time, she liked something. How she had said go, and Tom had gone. It was so different from when she said no and her brothers said yes, even if it was somehow the same. She liked it. She hated her dead father’s horrible bedroom. She sat there alone but for her betraying body for long enough that she knew she wouldn’t meet anyone on the stairs. Then she took them three at a time and walked the ten blocks back to her hotel.
At the St. Regis, she thought about their strict no pets policy. She did not give a shit about it, usually. Mondale was too fucking stupid be cooped up in a hotel, anyway. He would yap at noise from other units, piss on the carpet like it belonged to him. She was thinking of this, dog piss and misbehavior and the way the mutt used to come lolling up to her for a wet kiss when she got home from work, even if before she left she’d smacked him on the ear for trying to eat black olives off the table. She was thinking of this as she scrolled Apple News in front of the television. Above obits there were already early rumors of Kendall and Roman’s crowning.
A text pinged at the top of her screen. It was from Tom. Call me if you drown?
The motherfucker, really, truly. The question mark made her want to spit. She didn’t need a life-jacket, if that was what he was offering. She needed a drink stronger than the one she had and a clean easy medicated abortion that she could be sure she wouldn’t always regret. A little pill, a bit of blood, a smarter dog — one that wouldn’t piss in corners and would let her prop her sore leg up on his warm back.
She typed: I won’t, thanks. Hit the backspace. Fuck off. Backspace. Why? Backspace. I passed my swim test in college. Backspace. Tom’s blue bubble glowed grossly in the suite. She’d not put on any lights, though it had been nearly dark when she screwed the lid back on her fat jar of pickles.
Outside, New York was the same low grey simmer that Paris had been for that entire awful summer. She could pretend she did not feel the same as she had then. She was older, wiser, marrieder, more wholly an orphan; she could pretend she did not feel worse. The difference was that she knew how much pain she could take, now, and she hadn’t then. But knowing didn’t mean anything. She knew that.
Shiv typed, Ok, and hit send before she could change it. Then she skidded her phone away from her and rolled up her pant leg to press long, hard and careful on her bruise.