Aphasiac

Chapter One

Nelson Residence
Crestwater Court
West Columbia, South Carolina
October 29, 1996

The room was spotless. The linoleum floor sparkled. It was what she did to fill her time. Clean the house. Every day the same as if she liked the routine. She didn't. Everything had its place in her world. Everything had its purpose. Everything except herself. She wasn't sure she belonged anywhere.

She stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, searching the eyes of the sallow stranger who gazed back at her. She looked thin—eyes sunken so they almost disappeared into the hollows of her face—skin pale and pasty.

Her slim fingers drummed the stark vanity. The tap dripped, an incessant soundtrack that mocked her impatience. David was supposed to fix that weeks ago. Drops like thunder. It made her want to scream.

She watched as the second hand crawled along its course on that gold watch her mother had given her for her twentieth birthday. Too big for her slender wrist; too gold against the white counter.

One minute. It was counting. Fifty-eight. Regimented. Fifty-seven. Like a soldier. Fifty-six. One minute and she'd know. Fifty-five. One minute. Fifty-four.

It was so many hours away.

***

Paula and David Nelson had been trying to have a baby for almost two years. Their friends said it was probably because she had been on the pill for so long. A specialist recommended fertility drugs but they decided against it. They had read too much unlikely small print and were terrified by the potential difficulties that came with multiple births or, worse yet, mutations.

She stood there against the sink, arms tense, brow furrowed, breathing deep deliberate breaths to maintain some measure of control over her emotions. Her inner struggle was obvious. This was it. This was the last time. It had to be.

She couldn't keep hating herself each time she got her period. She couldn't keep trying to stifle the daily feelings of inadequacy. She couldn't keep popping all those anti-depressants her shrink had prescribed. She just couldn't. She couldn't survive any more of it and she wasn't sure her marriage could either.

David had brought home a lot of literature about adoption. Let a child grow in your heart rather than under it. They said it was just as easy to love a child from another woman's womb as from your own. There were beautiful stories and testimonials designed to bring the reader to tears. A loving option. It always seemed like propaganda to her—aggressive pro-life advertising. But that's where they would turn if they had to.

She would be a mother. And in one minute she would know how.

Paula brushed a piece of hair off her face that had fallen out of her dark ponytail. Tiny, twenty-seven, and still looking like a high-school student. She frowned at her face, void of make-up. She looked exhausted. Dark bags had formed underneath her eyes. Her once vibrant face was pallid. She had woken at five a.m. to vomit in the toilet. Again.

David had been against Paula going to get the test. He said it was too early to tell. She would only be setting herself up for more disappointment. Paula didn't care. She bought the test.

She picked the box out of the garbage and stared at the smiling baby on the front. She let her fingers trace the delicate outline of his two-dimensional innocence—his fresh-faced, wide-eyed beauty. For a moment she almost let herself believe he was hers—her own to love and hold.

Forever.

But he wasn't. She felt a bubble of hatred for the stranger he called mommy.

She had found the test at the back of the drug store on a shelf near the ovulation testing kits. The beautiful infant had smiled at her from the pink box. $9.99. A bit farther down the aisle, near the condoms, she found another test. This package featured no smiling baby, just brick red lettering against a mauve background. $6.99. Both were products of San Diego-based Quidel Corporation and the contents were identical except for the packaging. Paula bought the $9.99 one. She was buying hope.