Page 101 of The Deepest Lake

The pain is the problem.

The pain is the problem. I look up, blinking. That’s it. Or part of it.

Moments later, I hear the truck.

When Eva walks in, I shout before she’s even fully in the room.

“I wasted the test! I forgot you have to do it in the morning when the HCG is higher and your urine is more concentrated.”

Eva sighs, smiling. “Oh, shoot. You’re right.”

I’m right. I’m right.

She pulls the box out of her yoga wrap pocket, shaking it. “But we have two tests!”

Of course we do.

“Now don’t waste this one,” she says, heading back to the door, looking agitated about something beyond my stupid pregnancy test. “I have to go to Antigua. I won’t be back for three days. But the morning I come back, do your test, and do it right.” She puts on a forgiving smile. “No more excuses!”

Three days.

What I remembered, as my leg throbbed after that last bucket squat, was to think about the unintended ways you get a false positive. Nothing as stupid as dipping a stick into a can of soda. But other things can do it: medications, like certain anti-anxiety meds. And also raging infections, especially the chronic kind.

I look at my leg. “Sorry about this.”

I mash up a handful of antibiotic pills, in case anyone thinks to count later this week, and dispose of them in the pee bucket, where they dissolve. There’s no going back.

It takes a day for the bump on my leg to turn purply-red again, and another day for the fever to come on. The fever, and the nightmares it brings back—Barbara, black water, drowning—almost make we want to give in and take another pill, but I resist.

The wound at the spot where the bone is almost poking through keeps changing shape, the tender skin over the bump crusting over, partially healing, then reddening again, with yellow pus along the blackened, scabby edges. It looks very, very bad. I’ve succeeded in ramping up the infection. I just hope I don’t regret it like I’ve regretted so many other things I’ve done.

The morning that Eva is due back I faint on the way to the pee bucket. When I come to, I reach a hand down to touch my leg and feel the damp spot where the sore has broken open again. Bile stings my throat. I swallow hard, crawl to the bucket, and manage to piss on the stick.

I’m so exhausted when I get back to the bed with the stick clutched in my urine-splashed hand that I close my eyes and fall into a restless sleep.

When I wake up, I remember to roll over and look.

And there they are: two lines.

I sob with gratitude.

30

JULES

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“Can I touch?” Eva says one day when she stops by briefly—no new delivery of groceries, she was just so curious, and things are getting busier back at Casa Eva, and she didn’t know when she’d be coming next. “I mean, unless it’s too private.”

I want to burst out into crazed laughter. Private?

I force a shy smile onto my face, slide to the edge of the bed, and push my belly out.

Eva lifts my shirt and places her palm just above my navel.