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“You’re absolutely
sure?” Benny asked quietly.
“Yes.” Sophia replied,
keeping her eyes in her coffee rather than looking at his face.
“You’ve seen a doctor?”
“No, not yet, but …”
“But? But women sort of
know, don’t they?”
“I guess so. I can feel it
somehow. My body feels different. My head feels different.”
“You’ve done one of those
home tests?”
“Yeah,” she looked up at
him, finished off her cigarette and butted it out with shaking fingers, “yeah,
I have.”
Benny looked down at the
ashtray. “You’ll have to stop that.”
“I suppose so,” Sophia
answered, as she pushed the ashtray aside.
Benny was silent for a moment
before he ventured his next question. “Have you told your father?”
“Hell no!” Sophia shot
back.
“You’re gonna have to tell
him at some stage. You are keeping …”
“I haven’t decided. I
guess I am.”
“Then you’re going to have
to tell your parents. Sooner or later.”
“I’d prefer later.”
Benny sighed. “They’re
probably going to find out sooner. It’s going to get obvious pretty
quickly.”
Sophia tried to take another
sip of her coffee, but her hand shook too much. Her whole body was a mess—her
brain was working overtime, her gut was churning, and her heart was bleeding. She
shook all over and couldn’t make it stop, no matter how hard she tried to be
lucid and reasonable. She couldn’t sleep for the nightmares, even though they
still haunted her in her waking hours. The worst part was, until moments ago
when she told Benny, she was utterly alone. But even though she had told him,
she still felt like there wasn’t another soul in the world. Not anymore.
“Can I ask who the father
is?”
“There’s no point,”
Sophia shook her head, and a silent tear ran down her cheek.
“Has,” Benny inched closer
and held onto her tremulous hands, “has he run off on you?”
“No, not exactly,” Sophia
sniffed, “I can’t tell you who he was. It wouldn’t matter anyway, you
wouldn’t know his name.”
“Okay,” was all Benny
could think to say, and he leaned back in his chair to take it in.
Sophia closed her eyes and saw
Jonathon’s face, as she always did when the blackness enveloped her.
The first day after the
shooting had been a blur: she didn’t know if her gut feeling was right, and
her mind fought against it. But the longer the time that went by that she
didn’t hear from him, the feeling got worse. By that night it was confirmed, a
short clip on the evening news which named him as a victim of a shooting,
resplendent with a picture of him in uniform.
She didn’t attend the funeral; how could she? Even though he had asked her again and again, she’d
never met any of his friends and family. It was too soon, she had lied to him,
because she had never intended meeting them at all. Now she wished she had. She
could be sharing her grief with someone, even if they never knew her real name.
As it was, she grieved alone.
And despite wanting to lie
down on it and stay there until she died herself, she had resisted the urge to
visit his grave, save for one time to say goodbye. But that was a blur—she
couldn’t see through her tears and was too spaced out for it to have had any
closure for her.
And now this. His baby. Every
time she thought of it, the more her stomach turned.
“So what do you want to
do?” Benny’s voice woke Sophia from her reverie. “What can you do?”
© Cynthia M. Piromalli
©2004 StoriesByEmail.com
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