The Chosen One

The Chosen One

When the pregnancy test came back positive, Kate bought three more.  With each result, she sat on the wooden toilet seat in their bathroom, staring at the plus sign until her eyes blurred.  Her birth control pills lay on the counter by the basin next to her.  She'd taken one that morning, trying to ignore the difference between the day on her calendar and the day on the wheel half-filled with green and pink tablets, trying to ignore her nausea. 

"Do what you think is best," Matt said, after Kate told him she was pregnant.  Her husband stared down at the kitchen tile.  Kate could see a patch of thinning brown hair on the top of his head.  She hated the smugness in his voice, as if he already knew the answer, and she should, too.  He was thirty-five and trying to build up his practice, seeing patients at odd hours. She was twenty-five and had a year left in school. There’d been no more discussion about the pregnancy. There was really nothing left to say.  Kate made an appointment, but somehow neglected to mention it to her husband, who began staying even later at the office, so that she only felt his presence under the covers, pressed up against her while she  pretended to sleep.

Two days after the abortion, Kate's husband brought home a puppy.  “It’s some sort of terrier mix,” he said, standing in the doorway of their bedroom, holding a tiny mass of dark gray fur.  The dog kept trying to bite his hands, lick his face. “They were giving them away in the Safeway parking lot. I stopped to pet them, and this little guy really took a liking to me.” He let the animal lick him on the ear. “I’ve already thought of a name for him,” he added, “Trevor.” 

He brought the squirming puppy over to Kate.  She put the wool sweater she’d been folding down on the bed and stared at her husband as he continued to fend off the dog’s mouth.  The puppy looked tiny in her husband's hands. It had one ear that flopped over to its side while the other one stood straight up.  Its coat was a medium length and looked almost wiry. Its tail curled up. She could feel her husband waiting for her to say something.  Briefly, she considered taking the animal and chucking it out their bedroom window. “That’s a stupid name for a dog," she said,  before picking up the sweater and beginning to refold it.

Her husband spent the evening following the puppy from room to room, picking up shoes and keeping it away from anything remotely chewable. He took it out a dozen times, only to be confronted with a pile or a puddle as soon as they were back inside.  Finally, he gave up and resorted to placing newspaper down on the kitchen tile, where he played with the dog.  Kate sat in the living room staring blankly at the TV.  He decided to put the puppy in the laundry room for the night.  Kate helped him spread newspaper over the linoleum floor while the puppy dashed excitedly between the two of them, tearing at newspaper with its teeth.  They didn’t have dog bowls, so she got some plastic ones from the kitchen.  The puppy tipped them over. Matt mopped the mess up with a towel.  “We’ll have to make another trip to Pet Smart tomorrow, won’t we, Trevor?”  He looked weary.

"Well, at least you remembered dog food."  Kate went to bed, leaving her husband in the laundry room to deal with Trevor.

That night, the puppy wouldn’t stop barking.  Kate's husband lay on his side snoring.  He had not woken once, Kate thought sourly.  Not once. She stared at the ceiling. Moonlight, shining in from their bedroom window, made intricate patterns along the crack running from the light fixture to the corner of the ceiling above her.  Briefly, she wondered if the house would cave in on them while they slept. Correction, while Matt slept.  Kate would simply lie here while the ceiling came crashing down on them. She glanced at the clock on their bed stand, 2:40.  Shut up, shut up, shut up.  She tried to will the puppy to silence, but the barking continued.  Sighing, she got out of bed.

The puppy, its tail wagging furiously, rushed frantically around Kate's bare feet, almost tripping her as she opened the laundry room door.  It had managed to tear the sheets of newspaper she and Matt had laid out on the floor to shreds.  The water bowl had been knocked over again, and pieces of soggy puppy chow were strewn across the linoleum.  A small pile of poop lay next to the washer.  Kate knelt down and picked up the dog, holding it close to her chest. Its fur was soft, not wiry as she'd expected, and she rubbed her face against it.

She closed her eyes, and tried not to think about the ultrasound photos her pregnant neighbor, Sharon, had shown her several years ago. At the time, Kate had not paid much attention to the ghost-like image swimming in darkness, which Sharon, sitting on the couch next to her, held between them for Kate to see.  "See, right there. That's her foot," Sharon pointed out excitedly. Kate nodded and demurred that, yes; indeed, it did look like a foot. And it did, somewhat. Her neighbor lost the baby fetus at twenty-seven weeks.  Kate took a card and a coffee cake over to Sharon and her husband when she heard the news. “So sorry for your loss...” the card had read on the front. Life, Kate thought bitterly, really is in the eye of the beholder.

Kate thought of her mother, a careful woman, who had spent a lifetime making sure that her two children would not repeat her mistakes---had viewed each moment as an opportunity to remind them of life's perils, as though their lives were a tightrope, where one wrong decision could send them tumbling helplessly into an abyss. An unmade bed would send Kate down a path to slothfulness and poverty.  A donut for breakfast could make her obese by puberty.  One misstep could cripple Kate for life.

Although neither of her parents ever labeled her a mistake – Kate had come to think of herself as one.  Her mother did not finish high school. Her had father worked as a grocer all of his adult life. Kate did not know her grandparents. Neither of her parents spoke of them, and she’d grown up with the distinct feeling that they’d never existed at all. Once she was old enough, Kate realized that her arrival into the world had been a mere seven months after her parents' wedding day, and having found a reason for the path her mother and father took, she placed the blame squarely upon herself for their unrealized dreams and failed aspirations.  When her mother, skimming through a National Geographic in the dentist’s office, mentioned a long abandoned desire to travel, Kate felt guilty.  When her father came home with a sore back from bending down to stock grocery shelves, Kate felt guilty.  Kate felt their disappointments more deeply than she felt her own, a suffocating condemnation of her own existence, the burden of her life upon those around her. 

At fifteen Kate skipped school to go to the beach with friends.  Arriving home late afternoon, she found her mother sitting next to an algebra book on the worn plaid sofa in their living room, waiting for her.  One side of her mother’s blouse had come untucked from the waistband of her cotton shorts, and strands of light brown hair fell haphazardly out of the tortoise shell barrettes she always wore.

“Empty your book bag,” Her mother’s tone was even and controlled, but Kate heard the anger simmering just beneath.  Kate looked at her, uncomprehending.  “I said empty your book bag.”  Her mother's voice grew sharper.  Kate's face reddened.

Kate shrugged the bag off her shoulder and slowly unzipped it.  Her mother rose from the sofa and came toward Kate , wrenching the bag from her fingers and dumping the offending articles - a damp towel, Kate’s black swimsuit, a bottle of Tropicana coconut oil - onto the carpet. 

“Where have you been?  As if I even need to ask.” The dishevelled woman gestured to the pile on the carpet.  “Do you think this is the reason your father works sixteen hours a day– so that you can skip school to go to the beach? Do you have any idea the kind of embarrassment you put me through? I drove to the high school to deliver one of your books--- “at this, she grabbed the algebra book from the sofa and threw it onto the floor.  It landed by the swimsuit.  “---so you would have it for class, which, apparently, you don't give a damn about, because you weren’t there.” 

As her mother's accusations rose in number and volume, Kate started to piece together what had happened. Her mother had been hanging up one of Kate’s skirts when she’d tripped over an algebra book, shoved into the darkness at the back of Kate's closet.  She had dutifully delivered it to the high school, only to learn after several intercom pages and a note delivered to Kate's class, that Kate had not set foot on campus. 

The yelling continued, its content a drone - a fly buzzing around Kate's ear.  It dawned on Kate that her mother's dissapointments had finally found their voice, and Kate's sense of shame, fine-tuned from years of feeling her parents’ unhappiness as an extension of herself, burned hot within her, turning from guilt to a bitterness that boiled over into a stomach churning rage.  It rose up like vomit in her throat. “If school is so important!” she screamed, “then why could you not even be bothered to finish? Or is it because you couldn't keep your legs closed!”   

Her mother looked pointedly at Kate with an expression that reminded Kate of the German Sheppard chained up in the yard across the street. It would growl at Kate whenever it saw her, and she half expected her mother to do so now.  “Well, since you seem to have figured it out, I guess I don't need to explain it to you.  Other things took priority.”

Kate’s eyes burned with tears, “You should have done us both a favor and never had me in the first place!"  It was retribution to watch her mother reel, stricken, from the force of Kate’s words. Kate wanted to make her mother hurt, to tear at her insides, to wound her as deeply as she herself had been wounded.

"You ungrateful bitch," but all the fight had gone out of her mother. Her face had grown pale, her shoulders slumped, and the words came out a whisper.  Kate, wiping the wetness from her cheeks with the back of one hand, left her mother standing defeated between an algebra book and a swimsuit, looking helplessly around their shabby living room.

Kate graduated second in her class. Her mother was not there to watch her walk down the commencement aisle.  She had died at the beginning of the summer before Kate’s senior year.  Her mother, who had never touched a cigarette and made those who did feel like lepers, had been diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer.  By the end, she had not been able to recognize Kate or her own husband, and had only lit up at the sight of Daniel, Kate’s younger brother.  Her father told her not to take it personal. The drugs for the pain were eating away at her mother’s mind, destroying what little she had left before she was gone. Deep down, Kate knew better, she’d been the one her mother had been trying to forget all along.

Kate leaned back against the laundry room door. Her mother was wrong.  She was grateful - grateful that she had been chosen, even if it meant the slow and agonizing death of her mother's dreams and expectations.  Kate thought of the ultrasound. She would always wonder, just as her mother had wondered. What might have been? Perhaps her mother had been right all along, one wrong move could maim you for life - fill you with the bitter aftertaste of longing and regret.

The puppy had gone to sleep.  Its body rose and fell rhythmically in her arms.  She stroked its small ears.  Who would look after the animal during the day?  Who would see to it that it was housebroken? Take it for walks? To the vet?  Of course, Kate already knew the answer.  This would be her job.  Matt would play with the puppy after work for a few minutes before falling into bed.

The small mound of fur she held in her arms would grow to be her dog.  She would shape its behaviors with her own; teach it to obey.  It would follow her faithfully through the house; wag its tail at the sight of her; lay its head on her lap; comfort her when she was alone. She would come to love it.  They would age together. She would mourn its passing.  Kate stroked the puppy’s ears.  She turned the laundry room light off, opened the door, and carried the animal with her back to bed.