Nines

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The ingredients emulsified — olive oil, balsamic, a pinch each of salt, pepper and sugar — and Jenna poured them over the lettuce she’d torn, adding a few sprigs of rosemary on top. She set the mixing cup in the sink and watched it flood with water, the oil refusing to blend, its spots pooled on the surface. She watched for only a moment, then grabbed a box of Triscuits from the cabinet, setting a handful on her plate.

She’d almost put the box back when she counted them — nine crackers — and added one more, an even ten. As she put the box back on its shelf, she knew, in the way people make small concessions and move on, that the choice was purposeful, and that for her — today — there would be no nines.

As Jenna walked back to work, a short trip from a home she’d deliberately chosen to avoid long commutes and unnecessary lunch costs, she felt it again, something not-quite-right in the center of her abdomen. It was not an ache, or even a tangible nausea, so much as a subtle fullness, the presence of some substance where before there had been none. She strode along faster, wondering if she could walk it off the way some people walk off burgers and beers, their legs scurrying along a treadmill. But the heaviness stayed. And as she noted the changing maples along her path, their star-shaped leaves shooting banners of color across the sky, she thought that maybe something else was changing as well, something that she still had no language for, its plausibility still too new.

Brendan brought home a pizza that night, thick-crust with mushrooms and black olives, because he knew that’s what she liked. They ate in front of the television, and the sound of their Coke tabs popping simultaneously somehow comforted Jenna, the slow fizz of carbonation settling. She sank into the couch cushions with her plate balanced on her knees.

Brendan channel-surfed between the Pirates game and Jeopardy!, shouting answers at the television in an absent way that made Jenna feel at ease, awash in calm. But then the game show ended, the Channel 9 News at 9 appeared, and Jenna felt the pizza settle in her stomach like a block of lead. She slid off the couch and dropped her plate in the sink, and she was already upstairs before Brendan thought to ask what was wrong.

It wasn’t until the third day, and just beyond the second restless night, that Jenna stopped at a drugstore on her way home. As she walked the six blocks from work to the nearest CVS — the fullness subdued but still there, like a shadow lurking in shade — she scanned her brain for the moments when this might have come. They had not been as frequent lately, with Brendan’s new job and her recurring migraines, but there had been the usual few times on Sunday afternoons, after they’d made lunch or had started watching a movie, and that one time in her parents’ house, when she’d cupped her hand over his mouth so her mother wouldn’t hear.

She was not a teenager; there was no shame. But even still, in a way she couldn’t fully understand, she felt herself obscuring the box from the view of others, hiding it beneath her arms on the way to the register, her face pumping blood before the cashier. He looked on absently, dragged the item across the scanner. Jenna felt her clenched chest loosen alongside his indifference, then tighten again when he announced the total — nine dollars, fifty-nine cents.

In the quiet of her empty bathroom, as the late afternoon sun slanted through the blinds, Jenna slid to the floor against the cabinets of her sink and watched the indicator slowly change. One line appeared, the blue ink spreading a slow stain across the window like a brushstroke, and Jenna felt that her lungs might collapse, the air too thick to breathe. She waited for the second line to appear, her chest an enclave of all the moments she had not lived, and in that terrible silence pictured strangely, for just an instant, her father’s face. She thought of how it might shift, his eyes turning downward and his throat swallowing back something hard, when she told him what was to be, on the other side of a second blue line, the other side of a life no longer hers.

But it never came, that second blue line. When it failed to appear, Jenna thought she felt her lungs empty, her heart relax, and her hand go limp, the indicator no longer necessary. But she did not let go, or throw it into the trashcan, or hide the box so Brendan would never have to know. Instead she waited there and watched, rechecking the box’s directions, making sure again and again that enough time had passed. And as she stared down at the single blue line, its hue a stoic pillar on a colorless plain, she heard Brendan come in the front door and call to her up the stairs. She did not move — she knew he would find her — but she listened to his voice coming closer, and suddenly it seemed like the only sound in the world.