Enchanted Dreams (15 page)

Given how close they had been, David could not fail to notice the change in Emilie. He was, of course, being patient and understanding, which she would have found comforting before but now only made her feel more caged in and agitated. He tiptoed carefully around her, advancing only with the meekest of gestures, offered up like tender little peace offerings. So far he had not confronted her directly or pushed her for answers. But she could tell that he was becoming frustrated.

The conclusions he had drawn, when at last David confronted her, surprised Emilie. It was the same day her mother had confronted her, just later that afternoon.

"Just what happened between you and the bartender on the ship?" he asked.

Emilie stared at him, speechless. She struggled to remember any of the bartenders on the cruise and failed.

"I woke up and found you missing from our bed that night," he explained patiently. It almost seemed as if he had already had the conversation several times in his head. He spoke with an odd calm, Emilie thought, as she watched him. "It must have been about two in the morning," he continued. "I went out to look for you and finally found you in the lounge with the bartender. You were sitting in a booth in the back and you were all over him." He spoke completely without anger. It struck Emilie like a rehearsed speech. Yet she felt it cost him quite a lot to pull it off. She was particularly shocked that he hadn't mentioned it before this. A strange feeling of unreality came over her. She felt like a character in a play.

"You're mistaken, David," she told him truthfully, mimicking the same calm tone that he was using. "I never spoke to any bartender on that cruise ship, other than to order a drink. And I certainly wasn't 'all over' anyone."

"Are you telling me I don't know my own wife when I see her?" he asked, his voice rising the tiniest little bit.

"What I'm telling you is that I never left our cabin in the middle of the night to meet a bartender or anyone else on board that ship. Maybe you only dreamed you saw me." She spoke the words with conviction but the hairs were rising up along her neck. What exactly had happened that night? She only remembered the one incident, but how had she managed to get into the bright room to begin with? Where was she? She had originally assumed that she had been taken from their cabin in her sleep. She had come up with that scenario through a series of deductions that seemed to her the only possibility.

"Then where were you that night?" he demanded.

"What night?" she asked.

"The night you disappeared from our bed. The night that changed everything between us!"

"What do you mean?" she asked, blushing slightly. She wondered if he actually knew something that could enlighten her as well.

"You know perfectly well what I mean," he said, allowing his frustration to show at last. "I'll be honest. I figured you had a little fling that you regretted afterwards. I suppose that's why you've been so strange lately. I thought I'd give you a little time to get over it, but frankly my patience is running a little thin here, Emilie."

She stared at him, aghast. "A little fling?" she repeated, truly astounded now by his composure. For an instant, she felt the old stirrings of admiration and love for him. His love for her was humbling. She was thoughtful for a moment, genuinely touched. "So you thought I had an affair and you said nothing?"

"The first time I got up and found you in the bar, around one-thirty, I figured you were just having a good time, so I left you alone. I went back to bed. I actually managed somehow to fall back asleep. But when I woke up again around five and you still weren't there, I got a little concerned. I went back up to the lounge but neither you nor the bartender were anywhere to be found. But then around five forty-five, about the time I got back to our cabin, you were there in bed, asleep. I don't know…" He paused a minute, apparently too choked up to continue. Emilie waited breathlessly for him to recover. He looked at her when he had composed himself again. "It was so out of character for you, I decided to just leave it alone." After this both of them were silent. In a while, he added, "It wasn't really us. That whole vacation…I just figured we could put whatever it was behind us and get back to normal, but that doesn't seem to be happening."

"I did not have an affair with anyone."

"Where were you, then?"

She was silent for a moment, wondering what to say. "I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I don't remember getting up and leaving our cabin that night," she told him honestly.

"What about going to the bar?"

She shook her head. "No."

"You don't remember
anything
about that night?"

"No," she said again, thinking to herself,
Not anything I could tell you about.

David looked at her for a long moment. He seemed to sense that she was keeping something from him, although it appeared he wanted to believe her.

"Well, then, would you kindly explain why have you been so…different ever since that night?"

"I don't know, David," she said. "I really don't know." There were so many things she didn't know. She didn't know why she felt so different about him now. She didn't know how she got out of their bed that night and ended up in the bright room. She was alarmed by the possibility that David might really have seen her with one of the bartenders. She had no memory of being in the lounge or talking to anyone. Was she there before or after the incident? Could the bartender have had something to do with what happened? Perhaps someone had slipped something into her drink. Did something really happen in a bright room or was it all just a hallucination of some kind? Could she even be certain that the events she remembered ever really happened?

But she almost immediately rejected the idea that the incident might not have been real. It had happened. The memories were too vivid. The taste of metal was still in her mouth.

And she was pregnant. That was no hallucination. Yet, she and David had spent most of their time on that cruise holed up in their cabin, until that night. Even before they left for the cruise, they were intimate nearly every night. It was not entirely impossible that the child was his. The odds were probably better that it was. There had only been that one incident on the cruise, and she couldn't even remember all of the details. Given what David just told her, there surely was some question about what happened that night. And even if it did happen the way she remembered it, she reminded herself again that it was only the one incident. What were the chances that a single incident would result in pregnancy?

But on the other hand, after four years of trying to get pregnant with David, wouldn't it, in fact, make more sense that the isolated incident must have resulted in pregnancy, given that David's efforts had thus far failed?

No, the baby was not David's. Emilie could not say why but she knew it. She tried to convince herself that once she rid herself of it, she and David could return to the way they were. In the meantime, she would just have to make more of an effort to hide her present feelings and go through the motions of married life as if everything were normal. Clearly she would have to try harder.

Her talk with David seemed to act like a cathartic. The realization of what she had to do next was there all along, but until now it had seemed to exist in her subconscious exclusively, lingering as if from quite a far distance off…so far that she had not felt compelled to act on it as yet. Everything was happening so quickly. But now, suddenly, she felt an incredible urgency to act.

Surprisingly, there was no hesitation or regret. Everything that Emilie had believed and held dear up to that point instantly disappeared. Things like choice and guilt were luxuries that no longer existed for her. That little voice inside her—the one that had always held her to standards based on a life of longing for a child of her own—had been silenced in a single moment. Her terror, pure and solid and more real than anything she had ever known before, was growing as rapidly as the creature inside her seemed to be. It obliterated every other emotion.

First thing the next morning, with the episode with David still fresh in her mind, Emilie opened the phone book. She was unsure who to call. She could hardly contact her regular doctor, who had spent the last few years trying to help her and David conceive. Flipping through the pages, she was surprised to find that there was a category for abortion. She dialed the first number listed.

"You have options," the woman at the other end of the phone told her in a gentle, understanding tone. Emilie had made several botched attempts to articulate her situation. The woman, however, appeared to need no explanations or excuses. She seemed satisfied to simply provide the information in a kindly, indifferent manner and allow the nervous callers, of which she clearly had many, to choose the course best for them. "We have both the pill and the procedure available at this clinic."

"There's a pill?" asked Emilie, surprised. She had not kept up with what was happening in the world of women's rights, being so committed to her life as wife and prospective mother.

"Indeed there is," the woman informed her brightly. "Shall I schedule you an appointment for a consultation?"

Emilie felt a sudden wave of panic. In that instant, her morning sickness kicked in and a ripple of intense heat flooded her insides, followed by an upsurge of nausea. She swallowed the taste of metal. "What happens during the consultation?" she asked.

"Nothing too traumatic," the woman assured her cheerfully, perhaps sensing her discomfort or maybe just accustomed to these questions from women riddled with unwanted emotions and distracted from fighting down their nausea. "We will, of course, do a pregnancy test and if there's any confusion about how far along you are we may do an ultrasound. Other than that, the consultation is pretty much just to inform you of your choices and offer any other support you may need."

That might not seem traumatic for most women, thought Emilie, but the idea of a pregnancy test—and especially an ultrasound—terrified her. What might they discover if they prodded too closely? "I already had a pregnancy test," she told the woman. "And I know the day of conception."

"Of course," the woman replied smoothly. "We have to do our own pregnancy test on our patients, but it's possible we may not need to do an ultrasound on you. But those are the things we can discuss when you come in. Which day is best for you?"

After a long pause, Emilie finally said, "Any day, the sooner the better."

And in spite of her fears, the pregnancy test did not reveal anything except that Emilie was pregnant. The doctor's expression held nothing but simple courtesy as she confirmed Emilie's condition. Emilie sat stiffly on a table, shivering in her examination gown. The doctor asked her to lie back and began pressing on her lower stomach. "Tell me if you have pain anywhere," she said. Then she lifted Emilie's feet into stirrups that had fuzzy socks attached to the ends. Emilie tried to think of an appropriate objection to being examined.

The doctor slipped two gloved fingers into Emilie's vagina and pressed a little more. Her eyebrows rose. Emilie held her breath when she saw the change in the doctor's expression.

"I think you may be wrong about the time of conception," the doctor told her. "You seem farther along than one to two weeks."

Emilie's heart seemed to stop for an instant, then it resumed beating with heavy, racking thuds. She tried to breathe normally but was only able to take in very small, unsatisfactory breaths. There seemed to be a blockage about midway into her lungs, preventing her from taking in enough air. She felt dizzy, but fought the urge to faint. Terror was ripping through her.

"Not to worry," the doctor continued, slipping the gloves off her hands and throwing them into a nearby trash bin marked Hazardous Materials. "We can do an ultrasound."

"No!" Emilie exclaimed.

The doctor looked at her with mild surprise. A strange sense of events spiraling out of her control enveloped Emilie. She felt that she positively could not risk the doctor actually seeing whatever it was growing inside her uterus. She berated herself inwardly. She believed all along that it was growing at an abnormally rapid pace, and she realized now that she could have averted this by giving the doctor an earlier conception date. She felt more desperate than ever that she should not allow the doctor to perform the ultrasound. "Please…" she began, trying to speak calmly. "It cannot be much farther along than what I told you," she pleaded. "I swear that I had my last period."

"That could have been spotting," said the doctor. "An ultrasound is not painful or—"

"But I know I can't be that much farther along," Emilie protested. "I know I couldn't be nine weeks anyway, and you said they give women the abortion pill up to nine weeks!"

"Yes, that's correct," said the doctor. "And I do agree that you are not yet nine weeks." She paused a moment, examining Emilie's face. "Are you certain that you want to terminate this pregnancy?"

"Yes." Emilie nodded her head vigorously. "I am absolutely certain."

"Well—" the doctor sighed, picking up Emilie's file "—your blood work came back okay, so in that case we can begin your treatment today."

Emilie hadn't realized that she had stopped breathing until she heard these words from the doctor. Her breath came out in an explosive rush. She didn't dare speak. The relief temporarily overwhelmed her.

But three days later, after having taken her first pill in the doctor's office that day, and then following up with the rest of the pills at home exactly as she had been instructed to do, Emilie was devastated to find that she was still pregnant. Not only had the pregnancy not been terminated, it seemed to her that whatever was inside her was still growing at an accelerated pace.

She was afraid to call the doctor and tell her the news. Surely now they would insist that she have the ultrasound.

Emilie sat down miserably in front of her computer. Opening the Internet, she typed in the search box the words
pregnant by an alien.
More than four million results came up.