24th
Second Chance Part 2
A week ago Jess had bought a home testing kit. It was positive and she buried it in her neighbor’s trash can. She didn’t tell Ben. She wanted to, but she didn’t know how. And only because the kit’s manual told her to do so, she made the doctor’s appointment. A child didn’t compute into either of their lives. They were both in school and they both lived from one paycheck to the next. She was a music composition major and he was doing something that was related to cars. She didn’t have time to work and how do you raise a family on a gas station attendant’s salary? Aside from their school loans, they had limited options for financial help. Last year Ben’s father had passed away and his life insurance barely covered the funeral because Ben wanted to make it extravagant and his mother had left the two of them when he was five. Jess spoke with her own parents once a month if they were lucky. The relationship she shared with her family wasn’t the type where she could just call and ask them to take care of her child. ‘Her child;’ not quite a ring to it so much as a buzz, a broken doorbell.
And she wasn’t surprised when her doctor told her that she was pregnant and she wasn’t dismayed but rather just numbed. He said she was nine weeks pregnant and seemed to expect her to be enthralled with his ability to tell her the exact date of conception. She wanted to tell him that the fucking child was never conceived, the concept was too fucking ridiculous to consider conceiving. Pregnant, with child, bearing, rearing, knocked up, the physical manifestation of love inside of her, but still pregnant, pregnant, pregnant. He explained that her apprehension was normal. Normal to whom? Certainly not normal to someone who hadn’t planned on raising a family within the decade. Not even close to normal to someone whose goals gave her four hours of sleep a night and still failed to pay her bills.
Jess sat on the top (third) step of her stoop for over two hours, her elbows reddening her knees and he eyes pressed so deeply into her palms that even the checkered sprinkles had subsided and all she could see was the absence of light. Only when her hands were shifted gently by van der Waals force did her tears have a chance to escape down her arm and onto her green dress. Green almost like money but more like photosynthesis. For a moment she sat epistatic between her mind and the world as she recalled Ben saying something similar about her eyes, a year ago, in the back of his corvette turning maroon as the horizon slowly engulfed the sun. And Jess finally had a chance to inter-chuckle at the irony of her situation. She had stopped buying birth control because she couldn’t afford it.
Ben listened to the multiple messages that Jess had left on the answering machine when he returned but his temporal lobe was too distracted by the front cover of Time magazine lying on his coffee table to properly process her words. And he was too busy undressing and getting oil onto the doorknob as he headed into the shower because it would take at least two beers and one shower to get Ben back into the real world after a day’s work fixing oil lines and showing a woman that her headlights did in fact work but she had spilled coffee onto the switch and that’s why she couldn’t move it because it was stuck in place.
The phone rang while he was in the shower but he didn’t hear it. Ben whistled to himself while Jess sobbed on the other end of the telephone, stolidly listening to the ringing sequence replaced with his robotic voice mail greeting. She felt nauseous and her knees felt as if they were being pulled by invisible twine, giving her no positional respite but the sensation that relief could only come from sprinting down the street until she collapsed. She needed to speak with someone, but not her parents, and her roommate was out of town for two weeks and this was not something she was willing to tell her friends before she told her boyfriend.
The idea of having a child made Ben tremble the first instance he heard it. But after hanging up the phone, the idea began to excite him. He was completely in love; there wasn’t a doubt in his mind. A manifestation of that love was going to fuck up his entire life and he wasn’t sure if that bothered him.
Despite the initial adrenaline-burst of positive excitement, the idea of abortion was Ben’s. And it wasn’t really a pitch but rather a gentle toss like that of a father to son. Jess returned with a weak pitch for marraige. Ben thought about it and he thought about dropping out of school, getting married, and working full time fixing fuel lines and replacing worn pass-filters. And Jess wouldn’t think about it so he had to remind her that she’d have to drop out of school as well. But it’s funny how the mind immediately begins to comprehend something new. Like glancing up from a book, eyes frantically twisting focus, the reality is blurred but already your mind is trying to fill in the missing corners and details while your eyes protest for more time but undeterred, your mind begins to assign meaning to objects that may change in a millisecond when your eyes can tell you everything that your mind got wrong. And the idea of dropping out of school didn’t bother Jess because it was just a blank sheet of paper. School was simply school until she could discern that school was not simply school but that school was only the silhouette of her life. And she heard a violin that wasn’t actually there and a voice told her that she would never forgive her own child for giving it up. Because you never forgive someone for something like that. You think you do, still through the unfocused lens that subtle ire is almost transparent from distention. But years later, when that ire finally comes into focus and you push them to pursue that music which they robbed from you and that ire couples with jealousy as you see them succeeding and you push them even harder because you know that if you push them hard enough they’ll fail and maybe they’ll see how much they took from you and maybe you’ll be strong enough to forgive them.
Jess could sense that even her basal doubts and fears were sky to Ben’s. His eyes were so withdrawn when he spoke of dropping out of school. It was as though he were trying to recall some dream he had had the night before and could only come up with vague details that had no relation to his actual life. She wanted to believe that it was because of a passion for automotive technology that she didn’t understand. But the spiritual evacuation that stood before her had nothing to do with school. And it had nothing to do with his career. She knew that he was questioning whether he could see himself with her for the rest of his life and the thought made her momentarily forget about her own disquietudes and made her feel nauseous and she felt like the child was necessary evidence that Ben truly loved her as much as he averred. But what made her stomach acidically flutter was whether she could raise a child missing half of its limbs.
Neither of them slept that night and even though thousands of couples across the world were having identical internal debates and even though they shared the same bed while some of those couples cursed and beat each other, Ben and Jess knew that they were alone. Half of the bed’s surface area lay between their backs, almost as though it were being reserved for someone. Jess didn’t cry because she heard Ben sob once and knew that he was using every mite of self control to hold back tears that were far stronger than his will. It was the first time Jess had ever witnessed him cry. So much of her wanted to ask him what those tears fell for but she knew that she would never be able to forget the answer.
By morning, the two had both reached the same decision. Jess had a slight ken about the process that she had gotten from an hour of sex education in high school. Beyond that the only orientation she had received was through a few news articles describing ten dead and fifty three injured from a bomb that had blown up a Texas abortion clinic. She didn’t need to ask Ben because she knew that he had made this decision long before the sun had gone down and rather than circulate the thought that his idea of abortion came from his lack of love for her, Jess tried to get physically close to him. But lying on Ben’s chest, Jess felt uncomfortable in that space reserved. As he stroked her back she kept telling herself that it wasn’t a life she would be ending, but rather two lives she would be saving.
The only member of Jess’s family to ever step foot inside a church was her sister Julia. Julia was three years senior to Jess and had “discovered” religion during a degree in political philosophy at California Institute of Technology. Like most young adults, she had undergone a self-induced withdrawal from her values and interests as she progressed further from her parents. Entering college, both terrified and confused, people tend to direct those feelings within, reflecting that all their values had been instilled rather than developed; being a child they had been told what to believe and, to some extent, what to enjoy. And they realize that to overcome those negative feelings they must identify their own interests. Often, this will cause early undergraduate students to engage in activities involving radical political positions, shitty underground music and art, a complete reconstruction of outward appearance, and an entirely new system of beliefs. Julia had stuck with the latter, becoming a catholic, or in the terminology of her atheist parents, “a fucking nutcase.”
Jess experienced some belief reconstruction, but felt comfortable in her youthful agnosticism. Rather than abandon it, she followed it further into existentialism, extensively studying authors such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jess was blessed with a positive outlook on both life and death and her existential sage’s reinforced this peace through their elegant mixture of light and dark. Despite her lack of hesitation when it came to death, Jess had never painted in abortion. Failing to find any wisdom from her predecessors, she was forced to see it in utilitarian terms, finally able to silence her internal debates.
Ben had never experienced a college-induced internal metamorphosis His anxiety was far less trenchant than most. But his ire was not, and he had abandoned his parent’s strict catholic beliefs while attending a private high school. The structural inconsistencies that he perceived in the religious faculty caused him to view devout Catholics as ignorant, intrusive, and vain, unwilling to extend a hand to those they considered out of the Church’s reach.
When they began dating, Jess had recommended a small list of existential works for Ben. The relationship was still immature and he wanted to impress her, so Ben read everything she suggested. While he didn’t agree with much of the things that Jess had found so important in these books, he found some truth and value in the movement and understood how it could make her happy. Regardless of inconsistency, confusion, and love, Ben never lost his belief in a supreme being. One that was omniscient and loving yet vengeful. It’s funny how quickly a child can abandon their belief in a giver of gifts but never abandon their belief in a giver of life.
Driving Jess to the clinic, the car radio was off but it was so quiet that Ben could almost hear the sounds of a DJ through the cheap receiver’s lack of insulation. He felt like he should pray. But he didn’t know why. He couldn’t think of anything he had ever gained from prayer yet the situation seemed to call for it. But he didn’t want to pray because he was afraid that it might bring him closer to something that might hold him accountable and so he thought about his life instead. He had a passion, he was in love, and he was alive. He was alive and he could prove it. Ben glimpsed confidence and was about to reach his right hand over to Jess because he could see her left hand on her thigh from the corner of her eye and had wanted to clutch it madly from the moment he started the ignition but was too afraid it would bring him closer to a person who might hold him accountable when, out of contention to his unspoken thoughts, her hand reached up and turned the radio on.
Jess watched the still trees passing through induced motion, glad that Ben wasn’t trying to hold her hand. The thought of human contact seemed blasphemous to the situation and knew that a situation is far easier to forget when experienced alone. And she could see Ben glance at her every couple minutes in the silhouette reflection on the surface of the window and she prayed that he was finding himself to be so resilient.
The streets were empty and as they traveled mainstreet, passing undispersed shops without a single car parked in front as though God had taken an early break, creating everything required for sentient life but finding himself too exhausted to birth man, Ben’s watch beeped at seven a.m. He waited at a light but went through the red because it was just another thing that had him waiting for someone who wasn’t going to come and he saw Jess shift her arm closer to his. He knew that she was asking him to hold her hand. But the idea of human contact seemed like a lie. He knew that she would never forget and feared Mnemosyne might see his hand. Inside, the trapped air shared between Ben and Jess remained stale and cold and the leather seats still sucked the heat from anything they touched. The car’s heater was active but seemed unwilling to do its job. Suddenly Ben could see a bit of himself in the cold air it gesticulated and he promise himself that he was going to do whatever it took to get them through this together.
