PRESENT TENSE
Chapter Sixty-Six
February 19, 2004
Rose gagged miserably, bent over the toilet in
the master bathroom. She had been sick several mornings a week since late in
January, and every time she thought she was better, the illness came back with
a vengeance. She usually felt better later; the sickness was mostly early in
the morning. By mid-morning, she felt fine.
Rose groaned miserably under her breath as
she stood up and flushed the toilet. Jack was worried about her, she knew. He
fussed over her when she got sick, and had been pestering her to go see a
doctor for the past week. She was beginning to think he was right. Even though
she felt better later, the morning sickness was persistent.
She grimaced at the thought. Morning sickness
made it sound like she was pregnant. She shook her head at the thought,
rejecting it, then looked at herself more closely in the mirror, reconsidering.
Could I be pregnant? she wondered. It didn’t seem likely. She took her
pill each morning at the same time to make sure that she didn’t get pregnant. But
no form of birth control is foolproof, her mind nagged her, except
abstinence. And they certainly hadn’t been practicing that!
Rose opened the medicine cabinet, taking out
the packet of birth control pills. She started to take one out, then stopped,
counting them to be sure she hadn’t missed any.
She hadn’t. Everything was right on schedule.
Nevertheless, she found herself thinking
back, trying to remember the last time she’d had her period. With a sinking
feeling, she realized that it had been in December. She had been so busy since
that she hadn’t noticed its absence.
She looked at the packet of pills, debating
whether to take one. If she was pregnant, she didn’t want to do anything to
jeopardize her baby’s health, but if she wasn’t, she didn’t want to get
pregnant. She and Jack had planned on waiting at least another year before they
started their family.
Rose shrugged to herself. Most likely, she
wasn’t pregnant. Being sick in December had no doubt thrown her cycle off. She
tried to forget the fact that being sick or being under stress had never thrown
her cycle off before.
I probably just have babies on my mind, she thought, setting the pills aside and reaching for
a washcloth for her face. Jack knocked on the door.
“Are you okay?”
"I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute,"
she called, turning on the water and soaking the washcloth under it. She heard
him sigh, but ignored him.
As she washed her face and applied her
makeup, Rose thought about the baby that Helga had brought into the household a
month earlier. She had been in the hospital for two days following the birth—a
decided improvement over the drive-through deliveries of a few years earlier—and
had been brought home by Jack on the afternoon of January twenty-first, after he
was done with work for the day.
Daniel had no shortage of adults doting on
him, and he adored the attention. Whenever he cried, someone would pick him up
and see what the matter was, be it his mother, his cousin, or Jack or Rose. The
infant adored all of them, though Helga was the one who fed him and cared for
him the most, especially at night.
Helga had set up space for the baby in her
own room for the first few months of his life so that his crying wouldn’t wake
up the entire household, but the walls of the house were thin, and Rose had
heard Daniel wailing sometimes at night. The cries usually stopped quickly as
his mother picked him up and tended to his needs. Helga often looked tired in
the morning from being up all night caring for her newborn, but she was still
on maternity leave, so she could sleep while the baby slept.
Rose wondered what Helga would do when she
went back to work in a couple of weeks. Helga had complained that she didn’t
want to leave Daniel in daycare, but the hospital was not equipped for her to
bring him to work with her. Prior to the earthquake, Memorial Hospital had had
a daycare program for the children of employees, but with the changes following
the earthquake the program had been discontinued. Helga had checked out different
daycare centers, but was leaning most heavily toward a college student that
Jack and Rose had introduced to her. The young woman was looking for a day job
while she went to school at night, and had spent years helping to care for
younger siblings and baby-sitting other people’s children. Most importantly,
Daniel seemed to like her, a definite plus as far as Helga was concerned. The
hours would be long, but the student was willing to come to the house to watch
Daniel, and in the meantime Helga had begun sending out her resume in search of
an office job that would have shorter hours. She had no choice but to work,
since she was the sole support for herself and her son, but she wanted to be
able to spend as much time as possible with him.
Rose jumped as Jack banged on the door again.
"Rose, hurry up! I have to get ready for work."
Rose realized that she had been staring at
the mirror, lost in thought. Scooping up the packet of birth control pills, she
looked at them and then tossed them back into the medicine cabinet. She wasn’t
taking any chances. There were other forms of birth control available that
wouldn’t jeopardize a baby’s health, if she was carrying one, and would still
be effective if she wasn’t.
The only question was, how was she going to
explain it to Jack?