The Man Who Can't Be Moved

“Max?” Emma-Leigh’s voice quivers with a mixture of apprehension and fear; there’s a terrified and nervous little girl where a confident and feisty grown woman once stood. And as she chews nervously on her bottom lip, her hands visibly tremble as she reaches up and lays them on the sides of my unshaven face. “Maxime…say something…anything…” she pleads. “I need you to say something.”

I’m unsure of how long we’ve actually been standing motionless and silent in the middle of the kitchen. It feels like a lifetime has passed since she’d dropped the mother of all bombs; time seems to have stood still as my brain struggle to make sense of the words that had come spewing out of her mouth. The pounding of my heart is nearly painful; my chest feels impossibly tight and my lungs burn with each breath I attempt to take. The blood coursing through my brain is nearly deafening; it’s a miracle that anything she’s saying is getting through the haze of shock that has descended heavily upon me.

“What the hell did you just say?” I inquire, jaw aching from having my teeth clenched so firmly together and my knuckles cracking noisily and then turning white as my fingers curl into painfully tight fists.

I need to be absolutely sure that I’d heard her right; I can’t let my notoriously bad French Canadian temper get the better of me and lash out before I know for a fact that that she’s telling the honest to God truth. Part of me is silently begging for this all to be a simple misunderstanding; some kind of sick and twisted joke that she’s cooked up in order to see just how serious I am about not wanting a family so soon into our marriage. Another part of me is telling me that this is legit; those are real tears she’s shedding and genuine fear that’s written all over her face. And all I can think is that this can’t be happening. She can’t possibly be pregnant. Not when we’ve finally come to an agreement about waiting a few years and she’s finally decided to go back to school. And especially when there’s so much risk and uncertainty when it comes to both her mental and physical health. The doctors have already said that she’ll never carry to term and that she’ll be lucky to get past the first trimester; the operation has already been bumped ahead and scheduled for the end of March.

And maybe it’s the fear and the anxiety about surrounding her ‘issues’ that have made me so reluctant about wanting a family; I’m worried that something terrible will go wrong and I’ll lose both her and the baby. I also know for a fact that she’d never be able to cope if she was to lose another child; she’d be devastated beyond all hope of repair and she’ll become a prisoner to both her mental illness and overwhelming grief, despair and guilt.

It’s my overwhelming desire to protect her and to keep her in my life that has me lashing out; the fear of the unknown and of my own suffering and misery that I’d experience if anything ever happened to her that causes me to lash out.

“Please don’t be mad,” Em begs, and digging the pads of her fingers into my cheeks, forces me to look at her. “I know that this isn’t exactly the best news in the world and that we didn’t exactly want this. But…”

“This is exactly what you wanted,” I interject, and curling my fingers around her slender, dainty wrists, grip them tight enough to cause her to wince as I forcibly yank her hands away from my face. “Don’t you even dare fucking use the word we! This is what you wanted! It’s all you’ve been talking about since you got home! All you’ve been going on and fucking on about! You’ve been fucking obsessed with wanting a baby and you’ve…”

“But I agreed with you in the end that it wasn’t the best time for us to have a baby,” she points out, and attempts to wriggle out of my vice like grip. “I agreed that we needed time for just us. I even decided to go back to school just like you wanted me to! Do you really think I would have gotten applications and course books if I didn’t have every intention on following through? I didn’t know that I was pregnant. I didn’t know that…”

“You fucking planned this!” I hiss. “You fucking went behind my back and did this! You never were going to go back to school. You were never going to hold up to your end of the agreement! All you did was say everything you knew I wanted to hear ‘cause you knew it would shut me up. ‘Cause you figured when you finally told me about being pregnant, I’d fucking bow to you! You figured you’d…”

“I didn’t figure anything!” Em argues as she continues to struggle to slip her hands out of the restraints my fingers have formed around her wrists. “I didn’t figure anything, I didn’t plan anything, I didn’t…”

“You fucking knew this wasn’t what I wanted!” I bellow; my voice not only bounces off the walls and the twelve foot ceiling and echoes throughout the house, but causes her nearly jump clear out of her skin. Her fear intensifies; her eyes widen and her breathing becomes erratic as she frantically attempts to escape my clutches. My own fear has taken over the entire situation; the worry and the uncertainty and the anger are in complete control. “You knew I didn’t want a baby right now! You knew I didn’t want to start a family for a while!”

“You’re hurting me…” she whimpers. “…you’re hurting me and you’re scaring me and…”

“You knew I didn’t want this and you fucking went behind my back and…”

“No…” she shakes her head vigorously. “I didn’t go behind your back, Max. I didn’t trick you and I didn’t lie to you and I didn’t have any kind of plans or schemes and I didn’t…”

“Don’t fucking lie to me! Of all the fucking times to tell the truth, this is it!”

“I am not lying!” she insists. “I swear to you I’m not! I didn’t know that I was pregnant until an hour ago! I wasn’t being sneaky; I wasn’t holding anything back from you and I didn’t just agree with you to shut you up! I didn’t know about the baby! I honestly didn’t know!”

“I’m just supposed to believe you? I’m supposed to just believe someone that lies about everything? You lied to Sid the entire time you were with him, you cheated on him with me. And I’m supposed to just believe someone that’s done all that?”

“I’m not lying about any of this! I know that I wasn’t exactly truthful in the past and I didn’t handle things the way I should have with Sidney, but I wouldn’t lie about this! I wouldn’t lie to you! Please be rational about this, Max. Please just let me go and calm down. If you’d just think about this for a second you’d realize that there’s no way I could have planned this! There’s no way I could have tricked you! I’ve only been home for two and half weeks, right? I’ve been here less than a month! That isn’t enough time for me trick you into something like this and manage to get pregnant! It would have had to have happened in November or December. It either happened when you came to your brother’s when the Pens were in town or it happened during Christmas break after we got married! This wasn’t a trick and I’ve never lied to you and I never planned anything. It’s something that just happened!”

“I can’t believe you’d do this…” I shake my head in dismay. “…I can’t believe you’d go behind my back and…”

“November or December!” she repeats. “What is so hard to understand about that?! The last time we were together before I came back to Pittsburgh was two days after Christmas! This isn’t something that just happened! And I didn’t do anything on my own! It takes two, you know! It takes my egg and your fucking sperm to make a baby so don’t you even try and pin the blame all on me! You could have made sure that things were safe! You could have…”

“You said the fucking patch was safe! You said that…!”

“And you’re the one always stressing out about my meds screwing with how effective it is! If you were that worried about it why the hell didn’t you use a condom? Or do you think you’re somehow above using them all of a sudden? I’m sure you practically had stock in the Trojan company when you were running around fucking everything that batted it’s long, cow eyelashes at you!”

“You’re my wife! I shouldn’t have to use fucking condoms when I’m with you! I should be able to trust you! I should be able to believe you when you tell me that things are working properly!”

“And if you were that goddamn concerned about safety you would have used something! Are you listening to yourself? Do you hear how irrational and crazy you’re being? This isn’t you! You don’t act like this, Maxime! You don’t fly off the handle like this! I know you’re upset, okay? I know you’re pissed off and that this isn’t what you wanted. That a baby isn’t exactly what you want right now. But I am pregnant and you’re going to have to deal with it. You’re going to have to either man up and accept it or…”

“Or? Or what, Emma-Leigh? Is this where you give me some sort of fucking ultimatum? Is there where you try and make me up to be the bad guy in all of this? Where you try and…?”

“No one is a bad guy in this. No one did anything wrong. It’s a baby, Max! It’s a human being! It’s not a fucking bargaining tool for us to use against each other! We created a life together! Don’t you understand that? Don’t you understand that this is our baby? No one is to blame and no one did anything wrong! And when you calm down enough to realize that this isn’t the end of the world…”

“You sounded like you were going to give me a warning. I want to hear what you were going to say, Em. I want to hear what you were going to threaten me with.”

“Why are you being like this?” tears glitter in her eyes once more. “Why are you being such a bastard about this? This isn’t you, Max. I know you! I know that you don’t have a single mean, nasty bone in your body! I’ve always been able to trust that you wouldn’t hurt me! So why are you doing this to me? To us? Why…?”

“What were you going to say?” I press. “I want to hear what it was. I want…”

“If you can’t accept the fact that I’m pregnant with your baby than…” she swallows noisily, stops her frantic struggle against my powerful grip and tilts her face up towards me in an act of confidence and defiance. “…than you can leave. I’ll take care of the baby myself. I’ll have it and I won’t ever ask you for anything. You can just walk out now.”

“Is that what you want? You want me to leave? You want me to…”

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” she says. “But not this you. I don’t even know this side of you. I don’t want to know it. I want to spend always and forever with the guy that I married two months ago; the guy that would walk to the ends of the earth for me and who would never, ever hurt me. That’s the Max I want to be with. Not this Max. And I understand you’re hurt; I can even understand why you think I tricked you. But I didn’t do anything wrong. And neither did the baby.”

Issuing a heavy sigh, I close my eyes briefly and shake my head.

“I know you’re upset. I know you’re mad and you’re freaked out. But I’m freaked out too. I need you to be the strong one; I need you to keep everything together. And right now…well right now all you’re doing is scaring me, Max. And I don’t want to be scared of you.”

“I don’t want that either,” I say, and finally release my grip on her wrists.

The last thing in the world I ever want to do is hurt her; I’m not the type of guy that smacks women around or bullies them into making do things they don’t want to or into making decisions that are only in my best interest. I’m embarrassed at how I’d reacted; humiliated that I’d allowed my temper to get the best of me. And it makes me physically ill when I think of how, because of my inability to keep control over my own emotions, I’d witnessed her rapid transformation from strong, independent woman to meek, mild and terrified little girl.

*******

“I’m not getting rid of the baby,” Emma-Leigh breaks the heavy, tension filled silence that had descended over us several minutes before. She’s retreated to the other side of the kitchen; arms crossed over chest and her hands massaging her undoubtedly bruised wrists as she leans back against the ledge of the sink. “I know that you don’t want one right now, but there’s no way I’m getting rid of it.”

“I’d never ask you to,” I say, my stomach pressed against the edge of the island, elbows propped on the granite and my voice slightly muffled by my hands as my fingers rub at the throbbing in my forehead and temples. “I would never even think something like that. And it’s not that I don’t want the baby, Em. It might not be the best time for this to happening, but I’d never want you to get rid of it. Like you said, it’s my kid too. It took both of us to make it.”

“What was that all about than?” she inquires. “Why did you freak out like that? Why’d you…”

“I’m scared, okay?” There, I finally admit it. I’ve finally come clean about my own and only weakness. I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to her. Whether it’s losing her to something physical or something mental. “You heard what the doctor said after this first time around…” running my hands over my weary face, I rake my fingers through my hair and then turn around to lean back against the island. “…you were there when they told you that the miscarriage was inevitable. That it would have happened sooner or later because of your problems.”

“It doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen again,” she points out. “It doesn’t mean that just because I miscarried once that I’ll lose this baby too. Lots of women lose babies and have successful pregnancies afterwards”

“But do they all have the same problems you do? Or do they just lose then ‘cause that’s just the way things are sometimes?” I challenge. “It wasn’t something random that happened to you. There’s something medically wrong with you that caused it. And the doctor said that you probably would never be able to carry successfully unless you had the operation. And that even then it wasn’t a guarantee that…”

“He also said that it would be a miracle if I even managed to get pregnant,” she reminds me. “And I did. Twice now. So if the doctor was wrong about that, he could be wrong about other things too.”

“Or he could just be wrong about the one thing and right about all the others. Doesn’t it seem a little…I don’t know…selfish to you? Doesn’t it seem a little selfish wanting a baby so bad that you’ll put yourself through all the worry? That you’re willing to risk a baby’s life just because you want to be a mother so bad?”

“I never planned on getting pregnant, Max. It just happened. It’s not like we had sex with the intention of trying to get pregnant. And the only way we can prevent anything bad from happening is if we don’t go through with the pregnancy. If we just decide that it’s too risky and that we need to terminate because…”

“No…” I shake my head adamantly. “…no. We’re not terminating anything. We’re both Catholic, Emma-Leigh. And we may be pretty messed up, lapsed Catholics, but neither of us believe in abortion. And the only way you could convince me to change my mind is if a doctor told me that it was a life or death situation. That I’d lose you if we went ahead with it.”

“I hardly doubt things are that serious,” she says. “I highly doubt that I’m in any serious danger if I try and carry. The worst thing that could happen is…”

“The worst thing that could happen is that you’d lose the baby,” I finish for her. “I know what you were like the first time it happened. I was there with you at the hospital that night, remember? And I know what you went through for months afterwards. What you’re still going through. And if it did happen again, you’d never survive that Em. Mentally you’d never get over it and you’d never be the same again. I can’t lose you to the bipolar. I just can’t.”

“We don’t know that it will happen again,” she gently argues. “We don’t know for sure that I’ll miscarry a second time. What should we do? Just assume it’s going to happen and terminate before it can? If we do that we’ll never know if it would have been possible to go to term. And if something happens during the operation and I can’t have children afterwards, it will always be on our minds that the baby we got rid of just may have survived and been our one and only.”

“I already told you that I’d never tell you to get rid of it. I’m just worried, alright? I’m worried about what will happen to you…to us…if something bad does happen. I don’t want to get rid of the baby anymore than I want to lose it. I’m just scared, babe. And when people are scared…”

“They react,” she finishes for me. “Badly in most cases.”

I nod in agreement.

“What are we going to do, Max? Tell me what it is you think we should do and I’ll do it. No questions asked. Tell me what I can do to make this all better. Because I love you and I don’t want to lose you either. And if having a baby right now is going to push you away…”

“It’s not going to push me away,” I assure her. “Nothing could push me away.”

“Tell me…” she insists, as she cautiously approaches me. “Tell me what I can do make this better for us.”

“I don’t know,” I admit, as she lays her hands on my hips. “I honestly don’t know. All I do know is that I’m terrified. Legit terrified. But there’s no way you’re going through any of this by yourself. I never meant to hurt you, Em. I never meant to grab you and I never meant to…”

She stands on her tiptoes and presses a kiss to my lips in order to silence me. “Tell me what to do,” she whispers, and curls her arms around my neck. “Tell me what we can do to make this better. Tell me what we can do to give the baby…our baby…the best possible chance.”

“We need to find a different doctor,” I conclude, as I wrap my arms around her waist and rest my forehead against hers. “Someone that specializes in high risk pregnancies, I guess. Someone that can at give us even the slightest bit of hope.”

“And what about us?” she asks. “What can we do to fix us? Because we need to be fixed, Max. Before it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“We’ll figure something out,” I promise, and pressing a kiss to her temple, tighten my hold on her and bury my face in the space between her neck and shoulder. “You believe me, right?” I ask. “You trust me?”

“With my life,” she confidently replies. “With our baby’s life.”

Baby. Our baby.

It’s amazing how something so innocent and tiny can terrify the living shit out of you.