Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
JUNE 26, 2012
– Diary entry –
I
have never felt more alive in my life. It is a bright blue sky
day, the birds are lunatic with the warmth, the river outside
is gushing past, and I am utterly alive. Scared, thrilled, but
alive
.
This morning when I woke up, Nick was gone. I sat in
bed staring at the ceiling, watching the sun golden it a foot
at a time, the bluebirds singing right outside our window,
and I wanted to vomit. My throat was clenching and
unclenching like a heart. I told myself I would not throw up,
then I ran to the bathroom and threw up: bile and warm
water and one small bobbing pea. As my stomach was
seizing and my eyes were tearing and I was gasping for
breath, I started doing the only kind of math a woman does,
huddled over a toilet. I’m on the pill, but I’d also forgotten a
day or two – what does it matter, I’m thirty-eight, I’ve been
on the pill for almost two decades. I’m not going to
accidentally get pregnant.
I found the tests behind a locked sheet of glass. I had
to track down a harried, mustached woman to unlock the
case, and point out one I wanted while she waited
impatiently. She handed it to me with a clinical stare and

---

said, ‘Good luck.’
I didn’t know what would be good luck: plus sign or
minus sign. I drove home and read the directions three
times, and I held the stick at the right angle for the right
number of seconds, and then I set it on the edge of the sink
and ran away like it was a bomb. Three minutes, so I turned
on the radio and of course it was a Tom Petty song – is
there ever a time you turn on the radio and don’t hear a
Tom Petty song? – so I sang every word to ‘American Girl’
and then I crept back into the bathroom like the test was
something I had to sneak up on, my heart beating more
frantically than it should, and I was pregnant.
I was suddenly running across the summer lawn and
down the street, banging on Noelle’s door, and when she
opened it, I burst into tears and showed her the stick and
yelled, ‘I’m pregnant!’
And then someone else besides me knew, and so I
was scared.
Once I got back home, I had two thoughts.
One: Our anniversary is coming next week. I will use
the clues as love letters, a beautiful antique wooden cradle
waiting at the end. I will convince him we belong together.
As a family.
Two: I wish I’d been able to get that gun.
I get frightened now, sometimes, when my husband
gets home. A few weeks ago, Nick asked me to go out on
the raft with him, float along in the current under a blue sky. I
actually wrapped my hands around our newel post when he
asked me this, I clung to it. Because I had an image of him
wobbling the raft – teasing at first, laughing at my panic,
and then his face going tight, determined, and me falling

---

into the water, that muddy brown water, scratchy with sticks
and sand, and him on top of me, holding me under with one
strong arm, until I stopped struggling.
I can’t help it. Nick married me when I was a young,
rich, beautiful woman, and now I am poor, jobless, closer to
forty than thirty; I’m not just pretty anymore, I am 
pretty for
my age
. It is the truth: My value has decreased. I can tell by
the way Nick looks at me. But it’s not the look of a guy who
took a tumble on an honest bet. It’s the look of a man who
feels swindled. Soon it may be the look of a man who is
trapped. He might have been able to divorce me before the
baby. But he would never do that now, not Good Guy Nick.
He couldn’t bear to have everyone in this family-values town
believe he’s the kind of guy who’d abandon his wife and
child. He’d rather stay and suffer with me. Suffer and resent
and rage.
I won’t have an abortion. The baby is six weeks in my
belly today, the size of a lentil, and is growing eyes and
lungs and ears. A few hours ago, I went into the kitchen and
found a snap-top container of dried beans Maureen had
given me for Nick’s favorite soup, and I pulled out a lentil
and laid it on the counter. It was smaller than my pinkie nail,
tiny. I couldn’t bear to leave it on the cold countertop, so I
picked it up and held it in my palm and petted it with the tip-
tip-tip of a finger. Now it’s in the pocket of my T-shirt, so I
can keep it close.
I won’t get an abortion and I won’t divorce Nick, not yet,
because I can still remember how he’d dive into the ocean
on a summer day and stand on his hands, his legs flailing
out of the water, and leap back up with the best seashell
just for me, and I’d let my eyes get dazzled by the sun, and

---

I’d shut them and see the colors blinking like raindrops on
the inside of my eyelids as Nick kissed me with salty lips
and I’d think, 
I am so lucky, this is my husband, this man
will be the father of my children. We’ll all be so happy
.
But I may be wrong, I may be very wrong. Because
sometimes, the way he looks at me? That sweet boy from
the beach, man of my dreams, father of my child? I catch
him looking at me with those watchful eyes, the eyes of an
insect, pure calculation, and I think: 
This man might kill me
.
So if you find this and I’m dead, well …
Sorry, that’s not funny.

---