An archaic and brutal word

Katie wasn’t showing, but she had always been skinny, and her lie was only in its first trimester. 

He’d leave her. She knew it. Clocks were ticking, a surname was dying, and the world was filled with twenty-somethings who could give her husband what she couldn’t.

Barren. Such an archaic and brutal word. 

The doctors preferred a nicer term, one that masked tragedy with pleasantry, but it didn’t capture the loneliness she felt, or the lingering suspicion of divine punishment. 

She couldn’t share the news with Charles. Not yet. She wanted him to love her, at least for a few more months. So, she told him something else. She told him what he wanted to hear.

The guest bedroom became a permanent one, as Charles covered the walls with a neutral pastel, though she found the hopeful cans of blue paint hidden in the garage. He won his battle with the bassinet and tested his handiwork with a bowling ball swaddled in muslin. His careful hands decorated the changing table with a tiny pair of booties that once christened his feet, and his father’s before him.

Katie didn’t show him the sonograms she never took, nor the bloodwork that was never drawn, but she spun tales of unseen fatigue and laughed with him for hours as they narrowed their list of first and middle names. Dormant happiness reared its half-forgotten head, and excitement rained on her like a first kiss. And for a moment, she believed it would be like this forever.

Katie was the opposite of prompt when her mother-in-law invited her to tea. She swapped maternity books for The Art of Lying, and though her poker face wasn’t glowing, she had no tells.

Miracle. Such an archaic and brutal word.

Charles’ mother offered it slyly, as it fell somewhere between ‘fluke’ and ‘impossible’ and hovered around ‘fraudulent.’ The son may have been blinded by hope, but the mother’s optimism required something tangible. Women her age needed science or God—as her inquisitor reminded her—or at least formidable hips. But all Katie had were her lies and a botched procedure from her adolescence; it was her body and her choice, and now she had no choice at all.

“I’m coming with you to your next appointment,” her antagonist insisted. So, she offered a fake date and cherished the time she had left.

Charles rubbed her feet and made ‘dinner for three,’ a phrase he couldn’t say without a cheeky little smile. He knelt in the kitchen, sang to her stomach, and kissed the son who wasn’t there. Joyfully saying hello, unknowingly saying goodbye.

Katie didn’t answer the text from the obstetrician’s office, apologizing for any scheduling confusion; nor the calls from her mother-in-law, which were relentless and vibrating angrily; nor the banging on the bathroom door when her husband demanded a reason.

She stared at the broken bassinet after Charles loudly abandoned their home. She clung to the ring he left behind.

Divorce. Such an archaic and brutal word.