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1.
It had seemed impossible that David would really die. Not when they were so young, when he was basically still healthy, when they were in love. They got the news — David and Allison and his parents, all crowded together, the doctors looking uncertainly between them — in the spring. It's metastasized. And: you need to start thinking about end of life care.
It was spring break. Allison’s old roommate and some of the girls had gone to Atlanta. They were girls she called friends, who called her friend, but she had not been invited, and this insult was one she was turning over in her head, examining and prodding and overthinking, even as David’s doctor — Dr. Martinescu — was looking at David’s scans, consulting a neurosurgeon, realizing she would soon be telling them he had no chance.
Even so, David was okay for a while. Off chemo and no longer vomiting. More energetic. Deep in denial. And they were newlyweds. Allison’s friends were making summer vacation plans and Allison spent three weeks at her in-law’s beach house in North Carolina. It felt more like a honeymoon than a last hurrah, even with all of David’s uncles and cousins and grandparents calling, visiting, sending checks.
And then he got worse. Second wind, Wilson will tell her years later. How it is not uncommon. A rallying effect after a terminal diagnosis. He’d seen patients regain the ability to speak. Suddenly able to walk and run after weeks in bed. All Allison had known was David soon crashed and crashed hard, and while sitting in his hospital room — realizing, dimly, for the first time, that he would not leave that room again — she also realized she'd missed her period.
This had frightened her far more than David’s jaundice or her mother-in-law’s sobbing. She had felt cold and panicked and disbelieving: she and David had not talked about having children. She was twenty. She was pre-med. Her mother had first given birth at nineteen, she’d thought also, as though this fact outweighed the others. And: oh, please, no.
Quietly she had excused herself. Thought about asking a nurse, or a doctor, for help, but it had seemed too humiliating, too much. She’d left the hospital and walked six blocks through downtown Chicago until she’d stumbled on a Rite-Aid. Walked another three to find a McDonalds. A toilet. Sat there in a public restroom that reeked of bleach and stale pee and a vague, diaperish scent. Recriminated herself the entire time she’d waited: for not wanting this, for being a bad wife, for something nebulous like legacy and true love. For the first time, Allison realized her husband was going to die, and soon.
It was a failing on her part, she felt, and strongly. That he was dying, that she was twenty, that she did not want to be a mother.
The two tests in the box were both negative. She was just late. It was just stress.
She gathered herself. Walked back to the cool sterility of the hospital. David would die in just over two months time. The next time Dr. Martinescu checked in on them, Allison cleared her throat and sat up straight and asked about preserving David’s sperm.
2.
“I need you to not freak out,” was how Cameron started the conversation, knowing to say it was a recipe for just that. Sure enough, Chase’s eyes widened and his eyebrows lifted. A part of her was glad to see it: sorry to scare him, but pleased he was scared too: they were at his place, in the endless stretch of evening between cleaning up dinner and drifting to bed.
Chase had made spaghetti. He was no great chef but Cameron liked it when he cooked for her, served her food and cleared it away. They had been dating for six months and she had never returned the favor. Were he to ever ask, she would happily give her usual explanation — feminism — but Chase, she had learned, never asked questions he did not want the answers to.
“Okay,” he said, wary.
“I’m two weeks late.”
His expression did not change for long enough that Cameron’s anticipation began to turn into annoyance, solidified when his look became uncertain. Almost wary. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?” There was power in anger, and that might have been part of why she’d told him this way. “You’re a doctor, you’re in your thirties —“
He raised his palms at her: okay. Then pressed them together, splayed fingers matching fingers, looked off to the side at nothing. “You’re pregnant.” The dread in his voice was, oddly, a comfort.
“Maybe. Maybe not!” Cameron laughed nervously. She hated that in herself: how high her own voice could get, how fast she would speak. Had spent hours in front of mirrors practicing diction, expressions. “I’m not always the most regular. I’m going to buy a test —“
“You haven’t?” he interrupted.
“I thought, as my boyfriend, you’d want to be in the loop,” she snapped, her voice low.
“I do! When there’s something to tell!” Chase climbed awkwardly to his feet, gathering his glass and reaching for Cameron’s. “Did you want more wine?” The question was incongruously polite: he did not look anywhere near her as he asked it.
“Might not be a good idea,” she said poisonously: he scoffed, loud, retreating into the kitchen, and Cameron shifted her position and watched him place his glass on the counter and go through his cupboards and fridge, returning after a minute with a beer. “Is beer the drink du jour for a pregnancy scare?” she asked, genuinely curious under her sarcasm.
Chase’s expression was incredulous. “I don’t know. I like beer more than wine. How can you be pregnant?”
“You went to med school too,” she said darkly, having anticipated this question.
“We’ve —“ He frowned. Wet his lips with his tongue and then a sip from his bottle, looking around the room for answers as Cameron filled in the rest of his sentence in her head. She had a retort about condoms and safe sex ready, too, but instead he winced. “It’s just. It’s only been a few months.”
We’ll take it slow, he’d promised her. That night she’d shown up here, at his door, to let him know she was ready for this. What did that mean?, she wondered, when you got down to it: in her head it meant high school and waiting to have sex until prom. Chase stared at his beer and put it on the table. Scratched at the back of his neck and looked troubled and scared. It would have been kinder not to tell him. To tell him only when she knew there was something to tell. This could, Cameron realized dimly, break them up.
“What will you do if you are?” he asked finally, resting his arms on the table. It was the obvious question, the obvious conversation, and one they were more than capable of having: calm and medical and objective, but his eyes were grayish in the dim and he did not sound medical or objective.
“What will you do if I am?” she retorted.
“Propose,” Chase said, and looked so abjectly miserable that she could not muster offense or a counter argument. In the years to come, she would learn about his parents and sister, born to save a marriage that was already over. A part of her recoiled. A part of her went: that would be the right thing to do. She did not want to marry Chase, and he did not yet want to marry her. But it was right, she thought. It was the right thing to do.
“You wouldn’t have an abortion?” he asked at her silence. She did not ask how he knew. Imagined, sickened, the way House must have passed it on laughing. Silly Cameron. Girlish and weak.
She had no good answer for him. “I don’t know. I’m sure I’m just… late.” Chase wanted to argue, she could see it on his face: the set of his jaw and the way he wouldn’t quite look at her. She wished he would. Propose. Imagined marrying Chase and her first thought was instead of House. He’d have a field day with this: mocking a pregnancy, a quick wedding. He’d call her childish and stupid and careless and he would be right.
Chase’s gaze was fixed off to the side. She did not ask what he was thinking and it only slowly occurred to her to wonder. Propose. Cameron had already assumed he wanted to marry her, if not now then later: he was in love with her, he was devoted to her, feelings she did not — yet — want to examine or prod at or search for in herself. Did he want children? Was he really the sort of man who imagined a house in the suburbs, a dog and a fence and the American Dream?
Were there suburbs in Australia? Picket fences and porches and lemonade in sweating pitchers? It occurred to her in the awkward silence that she really did not know. That she assumed yes but had never thought to ask: it had seemed somehow politer to treat Chase as though he wasn’t foreign, had no experiences that might have differed from her own. That he felt the way she assumed he felt, always. (Propose. His eyes cool and miserable.)
Her embarrassment overtook her. “Do you — do you want kids? Someday?”
He blinked. Tilted his bottle this way and that. “Dunno. Someday, maybe.”
“You’re great with kids,” she said, and meant it: Cameron always felt awkward around children, uncertain how chummy or friendly to act. Chase had always been the one tasked to deal with children or the children of patients, developing private jokes and rapports and confidence without seeming to try. He might, she thought, be a good father someday. And it was disquieting to think. To picture him with a child of his own was dissonent, somehow frightening. She pressed a hand nervously to her stomach.
He shrugged. “I like kids.” He was thinking, she would only later understand, of his sister, who he resented and envied and loved in equal measures, even after abandoning. Especially after abandoning. “What about you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Cameron said, without pausing to examine it or wonder. She watched him take a deep, careful breath. “But not now,” she clarified, quickly, and watched his shoulders lower as he exhaled.
3.
There are condoms in the exam room, a whole drawer full of loose foils ready to be handed out to college kids and teenagers and middle aged men who really ought to know better, but in the heat of the moment — the icy, rushed desperation of the moment — Chase had not thought about them and Cameron had not reminded him.
She texts Chase when her plane lands in Chicago to let him know, hoping — for something — she does not let herself think for what — but his return text is a simple OK, so she spends the drive into the city drafting paragraphs in response: Now that some time has passed (a day) or when you said I never loved you (defiance), and mails the divorce papers instead of texting him back.
Her period is exactly on time.