One Good Turn

48

Apregnancy-testing kit.

Jackson had run (literally) back to the flat, dropped his blood-stained clothes on the bathroom floor, jumped in the shower, and washed awayTerence Smith from his life. For a mad second he had contemplated running all the way from the Hatter house to Julia’s venue, but he could see that it might look a little too dramatic to arrive covered in blood. Save it for Macbeth.

He had been multitasking (as they said), pulling on clothes, phoning for a taxi, regarding his harrowed face in the steamy mirror, when he happened to glance down and see it.

He plucked the pregnancy test out of the wastebasket and stared at it as if it were an object from the moon. It was the last thing he was expecting to find, and yet why not? It had never happened in the two years they were together, but here it was. Blue. It was blue. Everyone knew what that meant. It explained everything, her mood swings, her loss of appetite (for sex and food), her odd diffidence. Julia was pregnant! What an extraordinary idea-Julia was having a baby. His baby. We’re having a baby. A baby for Julia. There were a lot of different ways of saying it, but it all came down to the same thing, there was a microscopic new life inside Julia, a small creature nestling inside a burrow inside the woman he loved. He wondered if it was a boy. Wouldn’t that be something, to have a son, to be the father his own father never was. He still had the little peanut baby doll in his pocket, he shrugged his jacket on and felt for it, like a talisman, a rosary bead, turning it over and over in his hand.

A baby would heal Julia. The lost Olivia would somehow be re-born in Julia’s own baby. A baby would make everything right for Julia, and for the two of them. A couple. If they were going to be parents, then one way or another she was going to have to come to terms with that word. A baby would heal Jackson too, close up some of his wounds. What had Louise said? “Sperm meets egg and bam. It can happen to the best of us.” And it had happened to Julia.

Not a new path, but a new world to walk in.