Through The Storm We Reach The Shore, You Give It All But I Want More, And I'm Waiting For You, With Or Without You

--"With or Without You", U2

When I found out Breanne might be pregnant it wasn’t from a phone call or from her visiting. I found out when I checked my answering machine between helping customers in line at Crown Books. Immediately, my heart stiffened in my chest. The exact type of panic that set upon me proved difficult to describe. The closest I could liken it to is the sense of surprise and sustained sensitivity I had for a few days after my Jennifer said she was dying. The only difference was in the first instance, there was a chance I had created life, and in the second, one was going to be taken away. I know I wasn’t happy about the possibility. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t upset. I was definitely nervous, mostly because the message had been brief and because it’d been an over since she had left it and I had bothered to check my machine. She was probably anxious that I hadn’t called her back sooner or, worse yet, that I was too chicken shit to call her back without prompting.

After checking the message once again to insure I had heard her correctly, I dialed her number. Mr. Holins answered instead of her. Gone was his usual light-hearted tone and gone was the usual response of him automatically calling for “that silly child of his.” I can’t say that he sounded upset, even though he probably was. What I think I was hearing from him was the concern of a parent who had recently received upsetting news. He wasn’t to the point of blame yet. Blame would come later. I was just glad he hadn’t hung up the phone on me instantly. He’s always been the one who took things in stride of the two of her parents. Woe betide me if it had been her mother who had answered.

“She’s speaking with her mother right now, Patrick,” I heard him say.

“Should I call back then?”

“I’d give it some time. Let her call you. I think that would be best.”

I had just about spat out asking, “is she alright?” when I heard the steady drone of the dial tone. I hung up the phone to resume my place behind the register. That was that then, I thought. The only thing I can do now is wait for a call that hopefully comes soon. People who claim that they have all the patience in the world, that they can remain calm in any circumstance, probably have never been forced to extend customer service to perfect strangers when all they really want to do is drive until they land on the doorstep of the girl they may or may not have knocked up. And it’s not like I could tell anyone at work. That would involve explaining the whole situation, which would mean explaining that what I said had never happened (in order to be chivalrous or somesuch quality) had actually happened. That would trace back to my parents who I had assured the two of us were just friends as well. Not only would they know I had lied, but they would bring up the fact that had specifically warned me about the consequences of being irresponsible. They would want to talk to her parents, who would already have all the ammunition they needed against me, and everything would be fucked up beyond belief… all in the span of a day.

The bottom line I was worried about what would happen to us. Could they actually keep me away from her? Would she actually want me to stay away? All these questions were traipsing across my head while I had to wear that stupid grin on my face and say stuff like, “did you find everything you were looking for?” and “that’s a great book there… you’re going to enjoy it, I guarantee.” I didn’t think that that’s what would happen. It was the mystery of how she was taking it that was killing me.

I had known almost two years by then. I thought they might be enough time to predict her behavior, but, as much as you know a person—their likes and dislikes, their proclivities, their tendencies—they can always surprise you. They will always surprise you. She was no different. Given her disposition, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if she had already made the decision to exclude from all knowledge of what she planned to do. She had earned that reputation as a person who didn’t change tracks once a course had been charted. My one hope was that I was able to get in touch with her early enough to have some influence as to how we were both going to handle it. If that wasn’t the case, I could have been receiving a call from her during which I would be instructed how the next few weeks (months?) would proceed with no choice as to my participation or lack thereof. She’d done it to me before with smaller issues. I wouldn’t have put it past her with this particular one.

“You okay there?” Heidi, the girl next to me on register asked.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Well, you’re kind of freaking the customers out. Stop being so animated. You work in a bookstore, not Disneyland.”

“I’ll dial it down a bit, I guess. Thanks for the heads-up, Heidi.”

She nodded.

The fact of the matter was neither one of us were ready for it, neither one of us had penciled it into our dayplanners. Hell, we hadn’t even talked about it with each other. It was a discussion I, at least, hadn’t planned on having until a few years into the future. We were both teen-agers. Neither one of us were done with school. Neither one of us were planning on something this serious until we were graduated. Maybe even settled in a career somewhere, in a place somewhere. It was all supposed to happen when everything had been taken care of perfectly so that there would be no hassles and no questions about our capability to handle anything thrown our way. It wasn’t all supposed to happen like this, I thought. Not like this at all. In those days I had a sense of being impervious to everything. I didn’t think I was invincible because god knows I had been hurt before, but I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t walk away from. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to walk away from this without losing something, some small part of my innocence, some small part of my hope, some small part of my understanding of the way my life was going to work out for me. I didn’t want to lose that. I didn’t want to lose her either. One way or another, I was going to lose something big, I just knew it.

I was like the person whose boat had capsized, worried about just making it through the day. I wasn’t even thinking about the bigger picture. I didn’t understand all that having a kid when you’re young and unmarried entailed—not like I do now. I was approaching the problem that day in terms of solvable and unsolvable, problems and solutions. I wasn’t envisioning the stress, the time, or the wealth of concerns that would need to be fleshed out and decided on every day for the rest of our lives. I wasn’t seeing that. I was seeing how the person I was that day could conceivably handle a problem as huge as that with as little trouble as possible.

When my line died down again, I tried calling her. Her father might have been right in saying she needed some time, but, in all honesty, I really just wanted to hear her voice. Even if she said she was scared or sad or lost, it would have been nice to have some indication as to her state of mind. That’s what I needed to calm down the most. I knew how to handle scared. I knew how to handle lost. I wasn’t good with handling the unknown. This time nobody answered the phone. I didn’t feel like talking to their answering machine so I hung up quickly.

I remember when we were fooling around that night. I was thinking that was everything I wanted. I remember remarking to her in the tent, no one around for miles, that all of it was perfect. She was perfect. That night was going to be perfect. If I had been worried about her getting pregnant I sure as hell didn’t let it stop me and, if she’d been troubled by the thought, she never let me know. I remember her asking if I’d pulled out in time. I remember telling her I was sure I did, but thinking I’m pretty sure I did. We left it at that. It wasn’t like the movies where I misheard her saying it was okay to stay inside of her or it wasn’t like I had to be talked out of it. I thought we were safe. We both had the same idea of everything being kosher. After all, a perfect night like that wasn’t going to be ruined by something as unsettling as a baby scare? What was the logic in that? There was no use in everything coming together the way it did only to end with that as the logical conclusion. Fate wasn’t that cruel. We led charmed lives, don’t you know? That’s exactly what I remember puzzling through my head. Life wouldn’t lead us to each other, across so many improbabilities, so many obstacles, over so many objections, if we weren’t intended for some type of happy ending. That was the logicial conclusion to our night together. Yet the more I thought about while I was at the bookstore, the more I thought it might have been that it’d been so perfect because we didn’t want to see anything wrong. We weren’t as careful as we thought we were only because neither one of us wanted to cast dispersions on the evening. Neither one of us wanted to bring up any unpleasantness only because everything had been going along so pleasantly. It was a careful non-verbal agreement not to ruin the evening for anything at all. Perhaps it was only that day everything we had taken a blind eye to had finally caught up to us.

Then again, I was always good at turning a blind eye to the harsher realities.

If the next customer line were to have asked me if she was worth all this worrying, I would have told him definitely. If Heidi had peeked her head over to me after figuring what was going on and asked me if I loved Breanne, I would have told her definitely. If Breanne had called me right then and asked me if I was willing to tough it out with her, I would have been unsure. Of course, I loved her. I still do. Yet there’s something about being put on the spot that’s a little unsettling. I wanted to know what she was thinking. I wanted to be supportive of her decision. But that was just it, I wanted her to make the tough choices. I didn’t want to be responsible for whose lives were ruined or the possibility that we might not to end a life. That was another topic we had failed to discourse about in our dealings with one another. With any luck I wouldn’t have to. She’d have already talked it over with her parents and they would have settled upon a course. I would play my role, whatever that might be, and everything could go back to being some semblance of normal. I didn’t want to be the decision maker; I just wanted to be involved.

It was interminable every time I heard the work phone ring. She had my number there even though she was loath to call it. In the current situation I was thinking she might just push past her ban on calling work. Every time I heard someone pick up from my vantage point of the register I was sure it was her. Every time I’d been ready to excuse myself to the back room to take the call. Every time it wasn’t her.

Then two hours later, when I had all but given up, she finally called.

“What do you want to do?” was the first thing she said to me. No “sugar,” no apologies for calling me at work, just straight to business.

“What do you want to do?” I asked her back, genius that I was.

I heard her sigh on the other end of the line.

“Look, I can’t talk long. Mother’s been at me all day, darling, but I wanted to let you know I was okay and that there isn’t going to be me blaming you or any of that. We’re in a fix, but we’re in it and we’ll both get through it. It’s only a little fall of rain, you know?”

“And a little fall of rain can’t hurt us,” I said, utilizing the appropriate response.

“I’ll call later tonight when we can talk more.”

I hung up the phone somewhat sure of myself. At least I could see she wasn’t falling apart at home. I don’t know what I would’ve done if she was coming apart at the seams. Like I said, I could predict her behavior all day long, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred I’d be wrong somehow. There are days when I’m sure she’s stronger in character than I am. Other days I’m just as sure she’s immature and wicked to the core. There have been days where I feel stupid and insignificant next to her accomplishments and her choices. Other days I think she’s the laziest woman to have ever worked the Earth. There are a few things I can count on. She’s always going to be stubborn and think she’s right, that’s a given. She’s always going to bust my balls about something that I swear she’d forgotten years ago. She’s always going to be beautiful. And, I guess, she’s going to find some reason to care about me even when I can’t see that reason myself. Everything else is a coin toss.

I shrugged my shoulders at the inconsequentiality of it all. Nothing had been decided. No plan was set in motion. I still didn’t know what I should be preparing myself for. All I knew was I’d be getting a phone call later from her and that we’d “talk.” It wasn’t an ominous pronouncement nor was it a festive one. It was what it was, a postponement of the inevitable, and an invitation for more impatience.

It was funny. I had woken up that morning not missing her one bit. I couldn’t even tell you if I had one thought of her all that day up until I checked the messages. I’d talked to her the afternoon before and it was really getting to that point where some time away from her was a welcome idea. I never feel smothered by her—if anything, I don’t see enough of her—but the time we spend in each other’s company or listening to each other can get rather overwhelming at times. I could have seen myself going the whole day not even mentioning her in my thoughts. However, there I was, doing nothing but fretting about her. There I was, trying to imagine what she was doing at home, what she was saying to her mother, what she was plotting out in her head. It was like I’d given her point on this detail and was now only awaiting my orders.

It was her lead for me to follow, not the other way around. I could have possibly gone the whole day without her, but, now that we were in the thick of things, there was no way I was losing sight of where she was going.

That was also funny. Before her, I didn’t really think about relationships in terms of leaders and followers. It was always what I wanted to do and what the person I was dating wanted to do. Sometimes they met up in the middle or one person altered their plans to accomadate the other, but, when the plans started to be altered too much, I went my way and she went hers. I’d spent too many years trying to mold myself every girl I saw wanted me to be. That’s when I started trying to force them to accept me “as is” with no revisions on my part. I didn’t want to be the person that changed with every passing whim. I wanted to be accepted without conditions and without acquiescing.

I was the person who waited for no one. Fifteen minutes of standing me up and I walked, that was the rule.

Now all I was doing that day was waiting for a call about a topic I wasn’t in any great hurry to hear about. I was possibly plotting out a future that wasn’t the one I woke up with that morning. I was consigning myself to a life with one person that I’d only known for two years. And why?

Because we’d fucked? Or because there was something substantial there? I tended to drift towards the latter explanation, but it also had a lot to do with the former one too. To be honest, the way I was thinking about it was in terms of acceptable risk and reward. Yes, I wanted to be with her again for as many times as possible, but I’d also thought about the idea of trying to go too many days not talking to her, not visiting her, not helping me out and being helped out in return. That would be an unacceptable loss to me. It wouldn’t be total and it wouldn’t have been something I couldn’t have walked away from. But it would have been unacceptable. Even thinking about trying to make being unwed teenage parents wasn’t as scary as it would have been with anyone else I dated. I knew that much. She was the first person to make it some slightly less than impossible, which was saying a lot about her.

I waited for her call that second time because I’d begun a process of trusting her that I couldn’t scale back. She’d hurt me. She’d been mean to me. She’d even caused me to hate her more than once. But she’d never given cause for me to distrust her or to think she didn’t have my best interests at heart. Did I want a kid? No. Did I want a kid with her? Slightly less no. That’s about as eloquent as I can put it.

She turned out not to be pregnant. It took two more weeks of being tortured by her mother asking what I planned to do to make sure. It took two more weeks of hiding it from my parents to make sure. It took a couple of nights of her and I taking turns speaking aloud some troublesome what-if scenarios to make sure.

Not once did I cancel out talking it out or cut a phone call short because I didn’t want to deal with it. I waited the entire time just as anxiously as she did.

I waited for her like I wait for her now because I have that sense that some great reward is headed my way if I stick it out. I also think that even if that great reward never comes, they’ll be reward enough in the waiting around because at the very least it will be with her… and that’s more than I had before I met her.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers