It’s my second week taking care of Victoria, and I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of things. I prepare all her meals, and I’ve managed to coax her into eating nearly half of her dinner most nights, although breakfast usually goes right in the garbage. Adam showed me how to do her tube feeds, so I give her a supplement if she doesn’t eat at least half of the meal. She hates getting the tube feeds, so reminding her of this is usually enough to coax an extra bite or two out of her.
Victoria and I have bonded a bit. It’s hard to tell because she doesn’t talk much and she spends large quantities of time just staring out the window. I’ve yet to coax a smile out of her. But I talk nonstop while I’m doing her hair or helping her with meals, and she always looks like she’s listening.
Unfortunately, Eva hasn’t warmed up to me at all. I pass her in the kitchen this morning while I’m preparing breakfast for Victoria, and she doesn’t even attempt to disguise the distaste on her face. I don’t need to be liked by everyone, but I’m not used to the feeling of someone hating me for no reason at all.
“She is waiting for you,” Eva says. I force a smile. “I’m almost ready.”
Eva tugs on her coat. “You always make her wait. I’m sure she is used to it by now.”
“I don’t—” I start to say, but then I wonder what’s the point. Eva hates me. I don’t know why, but I’m not sure I can change that fact. Instead, I try a different tact. “I like your hat, Eva.”
Hey, compliments worked with Victoria. But Eva is not as easily charmed. She just glares at me and walks out the door without even thanking me for the compliment. It’s just as well because I don’t really like her hat.
Adam is returning from his jog just as she’s leaving, and I notice she barely said a word to him either. Clearly, I’m not the only person in the house she dislikes. I wonder why he keeps her around when she’s so outright hostile to him.
Adam looks adorably sweaty and tousled from his run outside. He looks so cute that I forget what I was trying to find in the fridge and just stand there like an idiot until he comes over to me and says, “Excuse me, Sylvia.”
“Oh.” I take a step back. “Sorry.”
He reaches into the fridge and pulls out a water bottle. He takes a long swig that lasts at least a minute, then wipes his lips at the back of his hand. I wonder how far he ran. I can just imagine him pumping his legs as the muscles flex with each step.
Ugh, I need to stop fantasizing about my boss. This is the most pointless crush ever.
I clear my throat. “Nice weather out?”
He nods. “Beautiful. I’m going to keep running until there’s snow on the ground.”
I glance at the stairs. Victoria is supposedly waiting for me, but there hasn’t been one day I’ve come to give her breakfast when she hasn’t been sound asleep in her wheelchair. I don’t know why she’s always so tired in the morning.
“I thought maybe I could take Victoria out for a walk today,” I say. “If you say the weather is nice, that is. I think she’d enjoy getting out of the house.”
“Sure.” He takes another swig from the water bottle. “Maybe after lunch, I’ll help you bring her downstairs. But be careful.” He glances out the window overlooking the front yard. “We haven’t had a gardener in a while and the paths are overgrown.”
“Yes…”
“I should have been on top of that.” He hangs his head sheepishly. “It’s just that Irina, our old gardener… well, she…” He lowers his eyes. “Anyway, I just didn’t have time to think about it with Vicky’s injury and getting the house ready and… all that.”
“Of course,” I say. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”
We arrange to have him help me get Victoria downstairs at around two in the afternoon. I rush upstairs to tell Victoria, hoping she’ll understand what I’m telling her enough to get a little excited about the whole thing. If I can wake her up enough to make her understand.
But when I get upstairs, her head is lolling to the side and she’s sound asleep in her chair.
Eva must have turned on the television before she went. It’s playing an episode of Let’s Make a Deal. Everyone on the screen is cheering—the volume of the TV must be turned up to the highest number, but Victoria is sound asleep. Her lips are slightly parted as she blows air in and out, and there’s a bit of drool coming out of the droopy right side of her mouth.
I sit down next to her and put the plate of food down on the tray Eva set up. I touch Victoria’s shoulder. “Time to wake up.”
Her eyes crack open briefly, then shut again.
“Come on, Victoria,” I plead. “Just eat a little. Then we don’t have to do the tube feeds.”
Victoria hates anything going down her feeding tube. She hates the cans of nutrients we inject if she doesn’t eat enough at meals. And she really hates the medications Adam injects every night. She fights him like a banshee to keep him from giving it to her, but it never works. She always gets her medications.
I scoop up a bit of oatmeal onto a spoon. I hold it out to her, pausing just before touching the spoon to her lips. “Come on. Take one bite.”
I see a flash of her blue iris briefly, but then her eyes close again. “Aren’t you hungry?”
She groans and turns her head away so there will be no chance of getting any food in her mouth. Fine. Every day over the last week, I’ve tried to feed her breakfast for nearly an hour, then ended up having to do the tube feeds anyway. I’m wasting my time.
So I go to the bathroom, where we keep the cans of Jevity—a special formulation of nutrients that tastes horrible but it doesn’t matter when it’s bypassing the mouth. It’s a tan color, and the sight of it makes my stomach turn. I retrieve a fresh syringe and a cup of water to help the tube feeds go down smoothly, then I return to Victoria’s room.
Victoria cracks her eyes open again when I lift the hem of her T-shirt to get at the feeding tube. She watches me for a second, then lays her left hand against the curve of her belly.
“Bade,” she says.
I lift my eyes and see a sad expression on her face. I wish I knew what was going on in her head. I have no idea what she’s talking about. It’s so
frustrating not to be able to understand her speech. It’s like taking care of a…
Oh.
“Baby?” I say.
Her abdomen bulges slightly, but not like there’s a baby inside. It’s more just from the gentle swell of her abdominal contents. But she’s got her left hand on it, frowning. “Bade-bee.”
I clear my throat. “I heard you were pregnant.”
She lifts her eyes from her stomach, still frowning.
“I… I was once pregnant.” I don’t know what compelled me to tell her this. I haven’t spoken about my pregnancy in a very, very long time. Maybe it’s because I know Victoria is the one person I can guarantee won’t ask a bunch of awkward questions or try to comfort me, and she definitely won’t tell another soul.
“You.” She points to my belly. “Bade…”
“It was an accident,” I explain. So far, I’ve told her only happy stories about myself, but I suddenly feel compelled to tell her this one. No matter how painful. “I know you wanted yours, but… we didn’t. We were too young. I was only seventeen and Freddy was eighteen. I still had a year left to go of high school, but…” I squeeze my eyes shut. “We wanted it. We were broke, but we wanted it.”
I had expected Freddy to look horrified when I gave him the news, but instead, he danced around like an idiot. I’m gonna be a father, he kept saying. It was cute. I mean, we were terrified, but his excitement got me excited. I knew we were going to be broke, but we’d be broke and happy. And together.
I see the question in Victoria’s eyes. “How…?”
“There was an accident and I lost the baby,” I say. “Sort of like what happened to you.”
But that’s not true. Not really. Because what happened to me wasn’t an accident.
Freddy walked me home from school that day. He held my hand like he always did, my smaller fingers laced into his bigger ones. When we got closer to my house, he pulled his hand away from mine and wrapped his arm around my shoulders protectively.
“You’re going to tell your parents tonight?” he asked me.
I nodded. “I’ll tell them after dinner. It’s easier to give my father the news on a full stomach.”
Freddy stopped walking and turned to me, a deep crease between his dark eyebrows. “Let me be there.”
“It’s better if you’re not.”
“I should be there. I want him to know I’m a standup guy. That I’m going to take care of you.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
He chewed on his lower lip. “What if he gets really angry at you?” “I can handle that.”
I didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking, which is that I expected my father to get really angry. He hated Freddy and was counting down the days till I went off to college and hopefully broke up with him. But none of that was going to happen now, and I was scared about his reaction. My father was a lot bigger than Freddy. I could imagine him beating my boyfriend to a bloody pulp.
Freddy tried to argue with me, but it was my decision. So that night, after my father had eaten two large squares of Mom’s homemade lasagna, I knew it was now or never. I had to tell him. Before I started to show and he figured it out for himself.
I watched him as he wiped tomato sauce off his ruddy face with the back of his hand. He loosened his belt buckle and undid the top button on his pants. Throughout my entire childhood, my father was always about ten pounds overweight, and lately, it had been edging towards twenty. But he was in good shape. Big and strong from years of construction work.
My mother was at the table too, finishing off a glass of wine. It was the second one I’d seen her drink that night, but I suspected it wasn’t her second one of the night. I was worried my mother drank too much, but when I mentioned it to her, she brushed me off.
“Mom, Dad,” I said. “I’ve got some news.”
His blue eyes lit up. That was the very last time I ever saw my father look happy. “Did you get your SAT scores back?”
“No.” I rubbed my palms against my jeans. I hadn’t been able to eat more than two bites of lasagna tonight. I was too nervous. “It’s something else.”
“Oh?”
I took a deep breath. “It’s about Freddy.”
Any trace of a smile faded from his face. “What? I hope you’re telling me you’re breaking up with him.”
“Dale…” Mom said. It was her warning voice, but I’d never seen her successfully calm my father down. I don’t know why she bothered.
“Did you?” Dad pressed me. “Did you finally toss that no good hoodlum to the curb?”
I looked down at my hands in my lap. “Not exactly.” “Not exactly?”
I couldn’t bear to look at him. “Actually, we’re getting married.”
I could almost hear the steam shooting out of my father’s ears. His voice became a roar. “Married? Are you out of your mind? You’re only sixteen! Why would you get married unless—”
And then he got it.
I can still picture the way my father rose from his chair, his face slowly turning purple. Mom kept saying his name, but it did nothing. I had never seen him this angry in my entire life. I thought I’d seen him angry before, but this was something entirely different. It looked like he was possessed.
“You slut,” he hissed. “How could you? How did you let yourself get knocked up by that little bastard?”
I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like I planned it.
“This is not going to happen.” He pounded his fist against the table. “You are not going to marry him. You are not going to have his baby. I’m not going to let you destroy your future.”
I looked up at him, my heart pounding. “What?”
A vein stuck out on the side of his temple. It throbbed so violently, it looked like it might burst. “Tomorrow we’re going to the doctor. We’re going to take care of this.”
“No!” Now it was my turn to jump out of my seat. “I don’t want to do that! I want the baby!”
“You’re just a stupid kid. You don’t know what you want.”
“I’m old enough to make this decision.” I took a step back. “You can’t make me do this!”
I started to walk away, but before I could, his fist wrapped around my wrist. He’d never laid a finger on me in my life, but he was making up for lost time. There was fire in his eyes and I knew I had made a terrible
mistake when I told Freddy not to come with me. Freddy would have stopped this from happening.
“Let me go!” Tears were in my eyes but I refused to let them fall. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“You’re doing what I tell you to do.” His eyes were like steel. “I spent my whole life working to give you a good life. And this is how you repay me? By getting knocked up by a loser like Freddy Ruggiero?”
I tried to kick at him, but it was no use. He was squeezing my wrist so hard, it felt like the bones might be crushed. My fingers started to tingle. And then, without warning, he shoved me so hard that I fell over my chair onto the ground. I landed hard, on my right wrist.
“You have some nerve!” As he spit the words at me, he kicked me hard in the side. Later, I found out he cracked a rib. “When you’re in my house, you live by my rules, you ungrateful bitch!”
He kicked me again, but I managed to somehow scramble to my feet. My wrist where he had grabbed me was dark red and the other wrist that I had landed on hurt like crazy. And my ribs hurt so badly, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. But I managed to run out the front door, and I didn’t stop running until I got to Freddy’s house.
And that was the last time I ever saw my parents. Funny—I don’t even miss them.
But I do miss Freddy sometimes.
