The Continuity Girl (38 page)

It had been over a week since her train pulled out of the station in Florence. He warmed, remembering the hanky she’d waved
out the window in an attempt to make light of the European romantic melodrama of the moment. After she’d gone he felt scooped
out, but in a good way, as if he’d been emptied of all distractions and could finally appreciate his life for what it was.
Joe had wandered around Florence for another day, sloping through galleries until his vision blurred and taking his espresso
and panino standing up at the bar the way he noticed Italian men did. In the end he flew home a few days early. He had work
he wanted to finish up before Meredith returned. And he needed time to think.

How did you tell a woman you’d just fallen for that you couldn’t ever hope to make her pregnant? Joe wondered darkly if Meredith
would break up with him immediately or put it off until after dinner (he’d booked a table at a little trattoria near his house,
in honor of their Florentine adventure). Surely there was no way she would stay with him given his biological limitations.
How could he reasonably expect her to, knowing so well the relentless, inexhaustible female drive to reproduce? He could make
all the arguments he wanted about adoption and the joys of stepmotherhood and pet ownership, but in the end, physiology would
triumph over psychology—Meredith’s body would find a way to leave him.

He had to tell her that children were out of the question—and tell her sooner rather than later. Joe couldn’t begin to count
the number of desperate women who had come to him during his career, having frittered away their window of fertility on some
lunkhead who had, in their words, been “wasting their time.” Joe might have less than Olympian sperm motility, but he was
still a gentleman. He wanted Meredith to have what she wanted (and arguably, needed) most, even if it meant being without
her. He would not—much as he longed to—be the guy who wasted her time.

People clustered around the metal barricades, waiting for familiar faces to emerge from behind the frosted glass partition.
Beside him stood a bald man with three small children. They squealed with happiness when they saw their mother swooping around
the corner in a canary-yellow sari. She stooped to kiss them on their heads and then stood and looked at her husband and placed
a hand on his cheek. In some ways, Joe thought, the gesture showed more affection than a kiss.

It took ages for Meredith to appear. A river of people poured past, each one identified in Joe’s eyes only as
not her.
By
the time she materialized his entire body was pricked with anticipation. The sight of her—
his
Meredith. (He had already begun
to think of her, slightly guiltily, in this way.) Hair tucked neatly behind her ears, a blue raincoat he had never seen before
skimming the tops of her pretty bare knees. She lugged an enormous black suitcase that looked as if it must weigh twice what
she did. He wished he could jump the gate and help her, and tried to call out, but although she paused and looked around with
a curious expression (those cute little furrows on her forehead!) she didn’t appear to have seen or heard him.

Joe pushed back into the crowd, determined to meet her when she emerged, but people crammed in front blocking his way. He
kept pausing and scanning for a glimpse of blue raincoat. He should have warned her he was coming instead of making it a surprise.
Surprises were emotionally risky. They only put people off balance, particularly people like Meredith. For all he knew, someone
else was meeting her. Maybe he should just go home and call from there. As he was considering his options Joe felt a tap on
his shoulder and turned to find her standing behind him, cocking her head.

“I came,” he said, the words backfiring out of him, “and then I couldn’t find— I was afraid you’d gone off on your own or
that maybe you’d even seen me and didn’t want—” He stopped himself blathering by reaching down and taking her into his arms.
She pulled away first, just as he was placing a kiss on the hollowed-out part between her collarbone and her shoulder.

“Lovely to see you,” she said in an oddly remote voice.

He felt suddenly self-conscious and wished they could be alone together. “My car’s two levels down.”

“Thanks.”

“What for?”

“Picking me up.”

“My pleasure. How was your flight?”

“Fine. A bit exhausting. How was yours?”

“Mine?”

“When you came back. From Florence.”

“Oh, fine. I guess. I slept most of the way.”

They were silent until they got into his car. When he turned the key in the ignition the stereo blared to life. He’d been
listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” on the drive up and then had forgotten to take it out of the tape deck of the
Jetta. The chorus that had seemed so soulful just a dozen or so minutes ago now embarrassed him. He banged his hand on the
volume knob a little too hard and the whole stereo came loose and hung from its hinges. They both stared at it for a moment.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said, starting the car. “With you?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

He glanced over to meet her eyes but her head was turned toward the window. He signaled to pull into the passing lane. Meredith
inhaled quickly, as if she was about to say something. She turned to him, but as she did he flicked his head the opposite
way to check his blind spot. She exhaled and stared straight ahead.

Joe shifted in his seat, keeping both hands on the wheel. “So what is it?”

“There’s something we need to discuss.”

“I agree.”

“You do?” She swung her head and looked at him.

He wrapped his hands so tightly around the wheel that his fingernails dug into the heels of his palms. “I think so.”

“What is it, then?” A slight challenge in her tone.

“The baby...thing.” Joe glanced over. “Right?” She chewed her thumbnail. Faced forward. He took her silence as a grim invitation.
“Look, maybe we should talk about this later.”

“No. It’s fine. Let’s talk about it now,” she said.

“All right. Okay, well, I’ve been...This is hard. I don’t know if I’ve experienced anything harder.”

“Than what?”

“Than what I’m about to say to you. But the truth...the
fact
is, things are complicated for me.” Joe exhaled and counted to
three. “I could go into the whole story but I’m not sure the reasons even matter and it probably wouldn’t be much of a consolation
to you anyway so I won’t, but the upshot is”—he paused—“babies are not in the picture for me at this point. I’m not going
to have any more kids. I mean, I’m almost completely certain I won’t. I’ve known that for a long time now. I’ve come to terms
with it. I think in some ways, for Livvy and everything, it’s probably actually better.”

A ragged sound from the passenger seat. From the corner of his eye he saw her hands cover her face.

“This is exactly what I was afraid of.”

“I know.
Fuck.
” He banged one hand on the wheel and his foot stamped down on the gas. The car accelerated roughly. “I’m sorry.”

“I hope,” she said, “you don’t mind. But I need to go straight home. I need to not be around you right now.”

“Of course,” Joe answered in his even practitioner’s voice. “Of course you do.”

Meredith cried and she cried, and when she was done crying, she poured herself a bath but the smell of the lavender salts
when they hit the water reminded her of their suite at the Savoy so she slid into the bath and cried some more. After a while
she began to feel like a tragic amphibian. She had wept so much she could not tell the tears from the bathwater. The pads
of her fingers, she noticed, were shriveled up like albino raisins, and it occurred to her that she might just die here, pickled
in her own brine. Eventually the weeping exhausted itself. But she
wanted
to cry. When the current of tears began to slow,
all she had to do was return to the source—the thought of losing him forever—and the floods would begin again, smashing through
all the dikes in her chest and whooshing out over the landscape of her future—without him. It had been years since she had
truly broken down and the force of it overwhelmed her. She had always secretly worried about her inability to cry as an adult
and now it seemed she was making up for years of stoicism. She was secretly proud of herself, and of course she was also miserable.

She badly wanted a drink but knew she shouldn’t.

Getting out of the bath and drying herself off, she sneezed from the dust that had collected in the towels during her absence.
The condo felt even grimmer and emptier than usual, as if it resented her return. The purple terry bathrobe hung limp on the
hook where she had left it and she wrapped herself inside it. She was afraid to put on clothes in case she might have expanded
suddenly somewhere over the ocean. After months of yearning, now that she might have gotten what she wanted Meredith felt
alarmingly ambivalent at the prospect. It wasn’t supposed to have worked out this way. She and Joe had used a condom (at the
crucial moments) and as far as she knew she hadn’t even been ovulating at the time. But as Joe had laughingly pointed out
to her before any of this, that was the bitter irony of biology: the more you tried to control your body the more your body
controlled you.

Meredith dug into her makeup kit and found the rectangular cardboard box: the last of three she had bought in a panic at the
Boots Chemist at Heathrow. The package stated it was 97 percent correct at predicting the outcome. There was always a chance.
She lifted her bathrobe and crouched over the toilet, holding the stick between her legs in what was now an awkwardly familiar
posture.

She’d completed the first two tests on the plane. There was turbulence and a line of people waiting outside, so she’d decided
to economize and do two at once. With one hand she held the sticks under herself and then stood waiting for two minutes for
the result. After an agonizing period, during which Meredith felt as though her stomach was crawling up her windpipe, her
answer emerged: one stick had two blue lines and the other had one. A contradiction. She must have done it wrong—peed too
much on one and not enough on the other. She tried to think which was more common, a false positive or a false negative.

If only she could phone Joe. But no, she couldn’t phone Joe. Not now on this plane and maybe not ever again. If it turned
out she was pregnant, he would think she was a conniving sperm bandit who had tricked him and never want to speak to her again.
Probably he would think she just wanted his DNA, or worse (and this was too horrible even to contemplate), the security of
a husband. Under the circumstances of their first meeting, how could she possibly explain to him that it had just been an
accident, a complete fluke, if that was in fact what it was? He would never want to talk to her again, that much was certain.
She looked in the mirror and made a silent promise to herself. If in fact she was carrying his child, he could never know.
She couldn’t bear the thought of him thinking ill of her, even if it meant never seeing him again.

Just as she was about to do the third test on the plane there was a knock on the door and an attendant’s voice asking her
if she was “all right in there.” People must have been complaining. She wrapped the sticks in toilet paper, shoved them back
into her purse and returned to her seat.

Meredith had spent the rest of the flight trying to decide whether she was feeling nauseated or not and, if she was, whether
that nausea was caused by turbulence, anxiety or a subtle hormonal shift that would mark the beginning of the rest of everything.
She didn’t sleep, clutching her bag on her lap, anxious for the plane to land so she could run to the first airport washroom
she saw and do the last test—find out the deciding vote. She had planned to wait until after she got through customs, but
then Joe had turned up. She hadn’t known what to say or do. How do you tell a man you’ve just fallen for that you’re sort
of pregnant? And then his terrible admission that he didn’t want any more children. So the whole thing was a moot point. She
could have one love or the other, but not both. Meredith felt tricked—the victim of a wicked genie who grants your fondest
wishes but only in a way that leaves you miserable and trapped.

When he dropped her off at her building, he made her promise to call to say good night before she went to sleep—he didn’t
want to run the risk of waking her up when she was jet-lagged. Meredith knew the request was something of a test. A toe in
the water to determine the depth of this strange new chill. She was blinking back the first of her tears as he pulled her
suitcase from her trunk. She didn’t look at him or wait to see his reaction.

“I can’t promise anything,” she said quietly. “I just want to be alone right now.”

Meredith waited for the final results balled up on the sofa in her condo. After a few minutes she reached into the pocket
of her bathrobe. The stick was fuzzy, covered in bits of toilet paper and lavender lint. The light was fading fast, but Meredith
didn’t need glasses to read the result: two lines. Positive.

Days passed. Joe called several times and eventually gave up. Meredith set about tidying her life. She did not think—she merely
functioned, made lists of tasks and methodically set about completing them, one by one, in the order in which they had been
written.

She did her laundry and cleaned the apartment, made an appointment with her hairdresser, her eyebrow waxer, her therapist
and her dermatologist, and finally repainted the kitchen cabinets.

One day she decided to drop off her things at the cleaner’s. She carried a large net bag of soiled party dresses down the
elevator and onto the street—the clothes she’d worn out in London and Florence now a damp burden hanging limply from her shoulder.
It was a blank sort of day. Toronto weather: pallid cloud cover, empty streets, the sidewalks the same vapid noncolor as the
sky. Meredith headed for the closest major intersection to her building. She had always found it a slightly disappointing
corner, perfectly serviceable but devoid of excitement or life in the real sense of the word. Nothing about its angles made
particular sense. On one corner was an upscale sushi restaurant in a redone national bank building, on the other was a divey
old tavern with a wind-whipped patio with tables of off-hour bicycle couriers and aged, leather-faced drunks who never seemed
to mix. Across from that was a McDonald’s and a new wrapped-sandwich franchise she had never seen before. Meredith dropped
off her clothes at her dry cleaner’s, as always amazed at the high-tech efficiency of the place—the young man who took her
dirty laundry wore a tiny wire headset phone and typed her phone number into a thin laptop computer. He counted her garments
with latex-gloved fingers and typed out a receipt with a date for pickup. They exchanged maybe seven words, and Meredith’s
throat felt clogged when she smiled to thank him. She realized it was the first face-to-face conversation she’d had in three
days.