Chapter 20: Saturday, October 21, 2016 (Morning)
Dawn stared at me, watching my expression. I don't know what she saw because I had no idea what I was feeling at that moment.
"A few months before the party, I had a miscarriage, Will."
I put a hand on her knee. I hadn't the foggiest notion of what to say. I sat up and crossed my legs. Our knees were barely inches from each other. Dawn was still gauging my body language, and I hers. She looked extraordinarily tense. She was acting very guarded.
She scoffed. "What, Will, no witty barb?"
There was ice in her voice. I suddenly felt like a hare being stared at by a coyote. I watched her eyes. They conveyed anger and I didn't know why. I felt my defenses rising but swallowed them down.
"No," I said as calmly as I could.
She stared coldly at me for several moments then broke. She burst into tears. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed in wracking breaths. I reached out and took her shoulders in my hands.
"Come here, Devo."
She crawled forward across my lap and into my arms. I held her close to me. I simply held her and stroked her back. I felt her tears on my neck and shoulder. Her chest shuddered as she tried to mute her cries. She was unable. She curled into a ball and sobbed.
"Jeez, sweetheart. I am so sorry," I whispered.
There was nothing I could do but hold her close and support her as she released what seemed like years of anxiety in streams of tears. I'd somehow stabbed my love between her shoulders. If I could have turned back time five minutes, I would have given my life to do so.
"Dawn, I didn't mean to push you. Please forgive me."
I was trying to understand. I had absolutely no idea. I didn't know she'd been pregnant. I didn't know she'd lost a baby. I had no common ground on which to stand. I had absolutely nothing to offer her. She said it'd been ages ago, but a bizarre pang of jealousy struck me. It took me several minutes to dismiss it, but I held her as she wept.
"God, Dawn. I don't know what to say."
"Don't say anything. Just hold me. I'm not angry with you. I'm sorry for snapping."
Her emotions gushed while I remained quiet, stroking her hair. When she was close to exhaustion, her crying eased. I held her body to mine, listening to her breathing begin to steady.
"Jeez, Will. I don't know where that came from."
"Something tells me that, as painful as it was, you needed to let it out."
"I guess I've been holding it in for a long time and you just happened to pull the pin. Now only four people in the world know what I just told you. I never even told my aunt or uncle. You're the first person I've told in more than fifteen years. The only others who ever knew were my friend, her doctor, and a bastard-ass, fuck-wad, cock-hat, heart-raping, chicken-shit, cum-stain of an asshole."
I didn't intend to, but I couldn't help but chortle at her expletive-ridden description of a certain someone. My reaction must have eased a little more of her tension because she chuckled. She uncurled herself and sat facing me in my lap, wrapping her legs around my lower back with her arms under mine. She rested her chin on my shoulder.
She sniffled loudly. I pulled away to get the box of tissues from the nightstand because her face was a mess. I folded a pair of tissues and wiped the drips from her nose and upper lip and used another to blot the tears from her eyelashes and cheeks. I gave her the box before drawing her close to me again. She was quiet for a few moments.
After a few minutes, she uncurled herself and sat back on the bed with her knees touching mine. She blew her nose.
"So … I got pregnant the August before Y2K. A guy I'd been dating for a few months, who I won't dignify by ever speaking his name, managed to woo me into his bed because he told me almost the exact same thing you said at the party."
"Dawn, I honestly don't remember talking to you that night."
"I know. Let me finish. When I missed my period, I peed on a stick, and it was positive. That day is way too easy to remember. I was watching the clock waiting for five minutes to go by. It was 6:18am on September 8, 1999 when I saw the blue plus sign."
She paused. "Is a positive pregnancy test a pass or a fail? It depends on one's state of mind, you know?
"After what he'd told me, my state of mind was that I'd passed. I was
happy
. My happiness outweighed the surprise. That night, I told him I was pregnant. He seemed all happy-happy, joy-joy, too.
"We never talked about getting hitched. I guess I'd just assumed he'd … well … I was stupid and naive.
"About two months later, I started cramping really bad during one of those boring peer review meetings we used to have. I went to the restroom and saw I was bleeding. I went home without saying a word to anyone.
"I had no idea what was going on. I called my former roommate. She was my best friend and a nurse at an OB-GYN practice. It turned out she had experienced the same thing the year before. Do you remember Sophie Evans?"
"You asked me to be your plus one at her wedding, but I couldn't because I had to go to Tokyo."
"I'd forgotten that. Anyway, my own gynecologist couldn't get me in, but Sophie finagled a favor and got me into her doctor's practice that evening. I would've been almost three months along, so when the doctor couldn't find a heartbeat, she told me I was miscarrying.
"I called dipshit that night. When I told him what was happening, he hung up on me and completely disappeared. I never saw or heard from him again. His apparent happiness was fucking
fakery
. I spent the next four days at home trying to find him while in the worst emotional and physical pain I'd ever experienced. The man I'd shared a bed with just up and disappeared. The shithead just simply … evaporated into the wind. His roommate told me two days later the jerk had packed up and stuck him with the rent.
"I slept on the couch starting that night. I couldn't stand being in my own bed anymore. That was just a few months before I bought this house. I needed to start over. So, yeah. Those were, by far, the worst months of my life."
"I definitely remember how you weren't yourself back then. I can't even begin to imagine what you went through."
"Yeah. It was pretty rough. My objective half knew it wasn't uncommon. Didn't make it easier emotionally. The doctor was compassionate. She probably thought it'd make me feel better when she told me I was young and perfectly healthy and could try to get pregnant again any time. She didn't know my pregnancy was unplanned in the first place. I remember thinking, 'Yeah, right.' As if I'd ever again trust a man to use a rubber correctly.
"Did you know miscarriages can cause postpartum depression?"
"No, but I suppose it makes sense," I answered.
"Sophie was so reassuring and comforting because she had gone through it. She let me cry on her shoulder for weeks. I have no freaking clue how I'd have managed if she wasn't there for me.
"Will, do you remember when we spent our first night together in Kentucky and I told you about an experience that left me with an emotional scar?"
I nodded.
"He was the first guy I let … um … do that. After what he did to me three months later, I couldn't even stomach the thought ever again."
I nodded as the light came on in my brain. I understood the man who'd abandoned her was douchebag number one, and douchebag number two was someone who didn't seek her consent. He was not at all a man and deserved her retribution.
Dawn continued. "William, I can't describe the sheer
hatred
I felt for him.
All
men. Any human with a Y chromosome was dead to me. That's where you come in, because what you said at that party made me sick to my stomach. I actually
hated
you for saying it.
"Listen to me, Will. I hope you know those feelings are long gone. Do you understand me? Do you believe me?"
"I do. I remember later how you started coming back out of your shell. It all kind of makes sense now," I said.
"Good. I overheard you talking about me to a couple of your friends. You didn't say it to me. You said it to them, but I overheard you. It sounded almost exactly like what that idiot said which … well—"
"What'd I say?"
"You said, 'Dawn Vo is the kind of person I'd like to marry.'"
The memory flashed into my head. I suddenly remembered everything.
"You obviously had no idea I was nearby. When I heard what you said, it made me sick to my stomach. I was so nauseated that I ran to the bathroom and puked because, all of the sudden, the taste of that asshat was in my mouth. The experience a few months earlier came back as if it'd just happened.
"Will, I wasn't drunk that night. I hadn't been drinking at all. But when you asked me if I was okay, I lost control of myself. If it had been any other man asking, I might have just walked away, but it was you. I was confused. I was so messed up that a part of me felt like I'd
betrayed
you. My defenses just went nuts."
I only wanted to hold my love tighter. I pulled her into my lap where she'd been. "Dawn, please forgive me for hurting you."
"
Shit
, Will! You don't get it!"
"I guess not."
