She shook her head. “There is no one else. You’re delusional.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.” All the fight had gone out of me. My stomach slewed with nausea and I couldn’t stand the way she looked at me. “Did you find out what we’re having?” I asked, hating the weakness in my voice.
“No. The baby’s healthy,” she said, then paused. “I think you should sleep down here tonight.” She placed one hand over her belly and hesitated for only a heartbeat before leaving me on the veranda. I fell back into my chair and listened to the sounds of her preparing for bed. Sounds I should’ve been making right beside her in our small bathroom. Soon there was only silence, except for the steady beat of the waves on the shore. I stretched out on the davenport below the window and stared up at the whitewashed ceiling. Something was slipping away from between us. Inexplicably and surely, my wife was changing. A part of my mind tried to take on a reassuring stance by telling me it was a phase. The second half of the pregnancy might be this way and it might become something else very soon. I needed to be patient and kind, and maybe give her some distance.
A little hope flared briefly for me in the dark as I slipped into sleep, the house creaking around me like a lullaby played by the wind.
~
The next two weeks flowed by in an uneasy truce of sorts. We would pass one another in the hall or rooms, say the necessary things for a couple to co-exist, and go about our days with the wedge of unspoken frost between us. I was patient, something she always mentioned she admired about me, keeping all of my replies and questions to her short and polite. She did the same, and the time passed.
The barrier broke in the afternoon on a day so clear and bright, it was tempting to keep your sunglasses on even while inside. The wind was coming from the west, something I realized only years later as to what may have caused the change, and the air was redolent of fall. I’d quit early that day, hoping to send in a job application for a managerial position at a local bank via email before their offices closed. It was the last day they were accepting submissions and I’d learned of the opening only the day before. When I entered the house, Del was waiting in the kitchen and immediately I could tell something was different.
“Hi,” she said as I set my gear down inside the front entry.
“Hi.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’ve been wanting to say that for the last week but couldn’t find the right time or way to do it.”
I stepped forward into the kitchen and she rose, pushing herself up with one hand on the table. Her stomach looked so large in the dress she wore.
“I’m sorry too,” I began, but she shook her head and smiled but I could see tears in her eyes, almost ready to drop free onto her face.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I don’t know what came over me in the last few months. I’ve been really cold and distant. But I was telling the truth that night on the porch. There’s no one else, there could never be.”
I tried to say something, but there were no words that could convey the relief I felt. I stepped forward and held her, kissing her with everything I’d been holding back over the months. The worry, the heartache, the longing, the jealousy, everything poured out in that single moment, and I was refilled with the love for her that hadn’t ever truly departed. She kissed me back and seconds later we were on the floor, groping at one another’s clothing, peeling it away like the barriers that had fallen from the gap between us.
We made love there on the hardwood, our caresses long and gentle, and when it was through, we held each other until evening crept in with placid shadows.
I cooked her lobster that night. I’d brought two home thinking that I’d be eating alone again on the back porch. Del devoured the entire meal with a gusto I hadn’t witnessed in weeks. When she began to playfully pick at the last few bites of my lobster tail, I slid the plate to her.