Confessions #3...

"Is it really mine??"

She was curled up in the fetal position on her bed, a mattress on the floor, hiding her head under her pillow.  This tiny, terrified little girl, trying to hide from me the way a child might.

"Is it MINE?!" I screamed, again, as though the volume of my voice could somehow force her to answer me.

We'd been together for four years, since my sophomore year of high school; an eternity at that age.  She had recently moved out of her parents' house and into this tiny, barely furnished basement apartment across the street from our old high school.  Her roommate, a mutual male friend of ours, had just told me they'd been "screwing for the past month."

"Fucking TELL ME, goddammit!"  She curled up tighter and pulled the pillow closer around her head.  I could hear her muffled sobbing.  I have to admit, it made me feel a little better.

She'd told me she was pregnant a couple of weeks earlier, as we'd sat parked in her car, waiting out a rainstorm.  Even though we'd only had sex once in the month leading up to that, I still just naturally assumed it was mine.  After all, she wasn't having sex with anyone else.  And why else would she bother telling me if it wasn't mine?

She told me she was going to "get rid of it."  I could feel a part of me break when she said that.  At the same time, we weren't married, weren't ready to marry, weren't living together, didn't have jobs, and I had just failed my freshman year of college; we were hardly ready to be parents.  And I didn't really feel like I had much say in the matter, either.

"How are you going to do it?" I asked, as the rain beat down on the car all around us.  "Do you need my help?"

"No, I know what to do.  I looked it up in my book of remedies.  There's an herb, and I have to make a tea out of it and drink a bunch of it, and that'll make me bleed it out."

That sounded horrific to me.  "Wouldn't you rather just go to a doctor?"

"I can't afford a doctor.  And I don't want my parents to find out.  Plus, this method is supposed to be safer, and less painful."

"TELL ME, YOU FUCKING BITCH!!  IS THAT MY BABY YOU'RE KILLING OR NOT?!!"

The next day she bought a vial of Oil of Pennyroyal from our local Wiccan shop.  The concentrated oil was incredibly pungent.  As she infused a dropper full into a cup of hot water, the sickly-sweet aroma filled every corner of the tiny apartment.  It smelled like mildew and peppermint.  It was enough to make you gag, and there was nowhere to go to get away from it.

She drank two cups of the "tea" every day for the next two weeks.  Within a day, the smell began to ooze from her pores, mixing with the smell of her sweat.  If anything, that smell was even worse, like moldy garlic, with an astringent note mixed in, something halfway between nail-polish remover and hairspray.  It was nauseating.  I couldn't even stand to be in the same room with her.

Even if it hadn't smelled so strong, and so horribly, I don't know if I'd have been able to stand it.  Because that smell was the smell of my first child being murdered.  It was the bloody death of my son or daughter violently assaulting my senses.  And I guess in that way, it was almost fitting.  It would've seemed wrong somehow if it had smelled pleasant.  No, of course it had to smell like boiled death.

For the record, I was, and am, pro-choice.  I believe everyone has a right to make up their own mind on this issue, and I do not judge anyone for the choice they make.  If a woman has an abortion, at any point, and for any reason, I do not consider it the murder of a baby.  But I found it was easy to accept these things in the abstract, when they were about other people, and other babies.  I soon discovered I felt very differently when it was suddenly about my baby.

The tincture of pennyroyal made her horribly sick.  She bled constantly, and was bent double with vicious cramps for days.  She had trouble keeping food down.  She would get sudden fevers.  She couldn't sleep.  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would hallucinate.

I felt just as sorry for her as I did for myself, and for our unborn child.  It just seemed to go on and on and on.  I felt like this had to be worse than just going to a doctor and getting it over with.  But now it was too late for that.  I alternately tried to comfort her, and ignore her.  I stayed away from the apartment for days at a time, going out to get high with my friends, trying to forget what was going on in that tiny, damp little basement room.  I couldn't even begin to figure out how to deal with what I was feeling.  And while part of me wanted to take care of her and try to help her, another part of me hated her for what she was doing.

But then, after she'd been drinking the pennyroyal tea for almost two weeks, the oil almost gone, her roommate had casually confessed their affair to me, and all the nebulous, sickening things I was feeling crystallized into a razor-edged rage.  First, there was the sense of betrayal - they'd both been lying to me for at least a month now.  They'd been fucking behind my back.  And how could I be so stupid as to not see it!  But then came the realization:  we'd only had sex the one time over a month ago (her recent and sudden lack of sexual interest in me suddenly making sense).  But she'd been having sex with him repeatedly during that same month.  So how could she possibly think the baby was mine??  But, of course, she didn't think it was mine.  She knew it was his; they both knew it was his.  They just let me believe it was mine.  They just let me suffer through all of that, for nothing.

Because it was easier to just let me believe she was killing my child, than it was to admit that they were fucking behind my back.

I kicked open the door to her bedroom and screamed at her, "You've been fucking HIM?!"

"Oh, God, no!" she screamed, and curled up fetal, hiding her head under her pillow.  I continued to scream at her, getting louder and more angry, demanding to know if it was my child.  She wouldn't even acknowledge me, which only infuriated me more.  She just kept hiding in that ridiculously childish way, as if she could make me disappear simply by hiding her head long enough.

Finally, I'd had enough, and I grabbed her pillow and blanket and flung them across the room.  She covered her head with her hands, but I grabbed her arms and pinned them down on her bed.  Straddling her, holding her down, I screamed into her face, "IS IT FUCKING MINE?!!"

"NO!  IT'S NOT FUCKING YOURS!!  OK?!!"

...

I don't know what I expected her to say.  I guess it was more about forcing her to tell me the truth.  But, the thing is, to this day, I still don't know if she really was telling me the truth or not.  I don't know if she even knew the truth.  She'd lied to me about so many things by that point; she'd been lying to me for almost our entire relationship.  I can do the math, and I know that, statistically speaking, it almost certainly wasn't mine.  But, she said they'd used condoms.

And we hadn't.

So I still can't help but wonder.

And I know that I'll never know the answer - no one will ever know the answer - and that the numbers are on his side, so there's really no point in speculating.

But, if that's true, then why am I still thinking about it, all these years later?