Twenty-nine

The ride to the airport was silent. The plane ride was silent. The ride to our house was silent. We unpacked silently. We ate dinner silently. We watched TV silently. We went to bed silently. It was awful. It was like we finally got everything out in the opened, and we didn’t know where to go from there.

Over breakfast the next morning, I finally broke the silence. “So, ah, I think I got over my brief case of laryngitis, what about you?”

Adam looked up from his cereal and made brief eye contact with me. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

“Well, say something.”

“f**k you.”

Fair enough. I grabbed the muffin I was eating and went into my office to call Billy, hoping he could offer some insight to my problems. I sank down into my comfortable leather chair (a house warming present from Adam’s mother, I’m sure it was given grudgingly) and dialed the familiar number, hoping he was at his desk.

“Hey, Billy.” I greeted him after he answered the phone. “Tell me what to do when the only words my boyfriend will speak to me is ‘f**k you’.”

“That’s a new one.” Billy sighed into the phone. “What happened now, Mantha?”

I briefly explained what triggered our fight as he listened, making sympathetic noises as I spoke. After I finished, he offered his brotherly advice. “You guys have to talk.”

“What if we don’t want to?” I asked softly. “What if Adam’s just waiting for me to hop on a plane and fly home?”

“Sam, California is your home. Not Rhode Island. You have no where to go here anymore. You don’t have an apartment, Mom doesn’t have the house, and we don’t have any room here. You’re pretty much unemployed, so you can’t afford to rent. You are home. Right now.” Billy reminded me. “And you left Rhode Island specifically to work things out with Adam, so you’d better do that. You know that I’m not the biggest supporter of your relationship, but you left here for a reason, so you’d better work at it.”

“I hate it when you’re right.” I groaned. “Tell me something happy. How’re my favorite niece and nephew?”

“They’re good. I’m taking them camping next weekend to give Elyse a break.” Billy told me. “She’s driving herself crazy working, taking care of them, and going to school.”

“Must be tough.” I sympathized. “At least you guys are still talking, though.”

“It helps.” Billy half-joked. “Listen, I’ve got to get back to work. Call me later if anything changes. Or even if it doesn’t- that would be worse.”

We hung up the phone and I went back into the kitchen, where Adam was on his second bowl of cereal. I paused to wonder how he never gained a pound, and cursed the fast metabolism that I didn’t have. If I ate that many carbs I would pretty much balloon up- not that that stopped me most of the time.

“We need to talk.” I sat back down at the table. “About something, anything. The f**king weather, I don’t care. I can’t sit here in silence anymore.”

“So leave the room.” Adam didn’t look up from the newspaper he was reading. “Or would that be too much of an inconvenience for you?”

“Silence is good.” I changed my mind.

A few days later things weren’t any better; Adam and I had barely spoken a handful of words to each other, and when we did actually exchange utterances, it was mostly about who was showering when or when I was going to be home from work.

It was just really tense and awful in our house, but neither of us left. I figured he would have set up camp at his parents’ or one of his friends’ houses, but no such luck, we were destined to live the rest of our lives in silence. We didn’t even seem to want to talk; the non-fighting was just as stressful as actual fighting, and I think we wanted to avoid a different kind of altercation.

Elyse was flying out to see me the same weekend that Billy was taking the kids camping. She wanted to get away but not spend too much money, and staying with me meant she only had to pay for her flights. It would be a relief to have someone to talk to, anyway. Adam was going to be gone for most of the weekend; I couldn’t tell you to do what, since telling me would have involved a whole paragraph of exchanged words between us. For all I knew he was going to stay at some brothel all weekend.

He didn’t really say goodbye when he left, although that didn’t surprise me. I didn’t even bring my cell phone with me to go pick up Elyse; I was that sure he wasn’t going to call to make things right. Maybe a weekend apart would do us some good, but I didn’t have high hopes. I was getting ready to lead a life of silence; since Billy so nobly pointed out that I had nowhere else to go.

Elyse looked worn when I picked her up. She normally looked pretty put together and almost model-esque for a mother of two who had a full time job and was putting herself from grad school, but today she looked completely beat up. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and I hadn’t seen that since the day she delivered Brad. Her dark hair showed that her highlights were growing out, and was just thrown into a messy bun.

“Am I glad to see you.” She greeted me with a tight lipped smile and a hug.

“It’s good to see you, too, Elyse.” We had never been particularly close, but we always got along pretty well. “You look, well, you look a little worse for the wear.”

“Yeah, little bit.” She agreed, adjusting the strap of her duffel bag. “Hey, do you think we can go to the drugstore on the way back? I need to pick something up.”

“Sure, but I probably have whatever you need.”

“Do you have a spare pregnancy test laying around?” Elyse laughed shakily. “Because that’s really all I need right now.”

“What? Are you serious?” My face broke into a smile. “That’s great! Have you told Billy yet?”

“Not since he told me two was just the right number.” She confessed. “He said that the other day. I don’t really know what happened, I guess my birth control isn’t strong enough anymore, but I’m definitely very late. I couldn’t bring myself to take the test alone. So can we go get one?”

“Of course.” I assured her. “You know, if you are pregnant, it’s not like Billy won’t want another. He just likes his plans, but we all know they don’t usually work out the way he wants.”

Elyse laughed a little. “You’re probably right. He was the one who wanted wait to have Jenny until we had been married five years. We had Brad right about then.”

We stopped at CVS on our way home to get a pregnancy test, and Elyse took it up to the bathroom right away when we got back; now she wanted to know the truth, and fast. I wondered how Billy would take the news if she was pregnant, and if she would ever tell him about the scare if she wasn’t.

I always thought of Billy and Elyse as sort of the poster couple for happiness. They clearly loved each other a lot, and appeared to be perfect, even to someone that talked to them a lot like I did. But I guess it wasn’t always gooey love poems in their lives; Elyse was legitimately nervous to tell Billy about the prospect of a third child. It really made me want to rethink this whole love thing and how it really worked.

Billy was a good guy, and he loved Elyse, so if she was pregnant, he would be ecstatic, and I think deep down Elyse knew that, but she was just nervous. They had planned on Jenny and Brad, and I guess since the third kid was coming out of left field, she was a little frazzled. I don’t blame her; things that I didn’t account for always frazzled me.

Elyse came back downstairs to wait it out with me, and we were making small talk while she obviously didn’t pay any attention to what I was saying and just watched the clock. Adam came in while we were waiting, from where, I don’t know. He was dressed pretty casually, so I assumed he had just been out with his friends.

“Oh, hey, Elyse.” He greeted her with a friendly smile. “Have a good flight?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t too bad.” She stared at the second hand of the clock on the mantle.

“That’s cool.” He smiled again. “Well, I’ll see you later, I’m sure. Since you’re in my house and all.”

Then he went upstairs without acknowledging me at all. “Wow, he really just pretended he didn’t see you.” Elyse marveled. “Intense.”

“Very.” I agreed. “It’s very Dawson’s Creek, that’s what it is. Very high school. It’s sickening.”

Elyse was about to respond when Adam came flying down the stairs, ignoring the last few completely and catapulting himself into the living room. He stood in front of me, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, looking concerned. “Hey, Elyse, can you give us a second?”

“As long as you have minty fresh breath when I get back.” She shrugged and headed towards the basement where we had another TV.

“Baby, why didn’t you tell me?” He asked plainly, and I looked up at him in confusion.

“First of all, don’t ignore me for a week and then call me ‘baby’.” I began. “And second of all, tell you what? That your toothbrush is purple and it makes you appear a little fruity?”

“It is?” He took the toothbrush out of his mouth to examine it. He had a little toothpaste on his lower lip, and I wondered what made him come running downstairs. “It is. This is all beside the point. Sam, if you’re going through something like that you have to tell me! Even if we’re not…getting along really well. I would have been sitting here with you instead of Elyse. You know that, right? You have to know that!”

“Adam, I really don’t know…” I trailed off as he began to speak again.

“Sam, I know we sometimes suck at getting along, but if you’re going to have a baby, I need to know!”

“It was positive?” I finally saw the light. Adam thought I was pregnant. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, it was pink.” He confirmed. “And it said pink meant a baby on the back of the package. God, you’d think you would know how to read the results on that thing. And I don’t know why you didn’t tell me; I’m going to be a father to this baby whether it’s working out between us or not, you need to know that, Sam.”

“Oh my God! Elyse!” I took off down the stairs, Adam in tow. “It was positive!”

“It was?” She met me at the bottom of the stairs. “Holy s***, I’m having a baby!”

As we were hugging excitedly, Adam stood on the bottom step, leaning against the railing, lost in thought. “So, let me get this straight. Elyse is pregnant, you are not.”

“Right.”

“Oh, thank God.”