Misunderstood Miracles

Of Tears & Tragedy

Kennan had grown increasingly unstable. Mairi had been refusing his hints, pushing the visit to the abortion clinic back hours, days, weeks. He wanted it gone, he told her. He didn’t want to be father and he didn’t want to be responsible, at eighteen, for someone else’s life.

That was the first time since the initial argument – about the pregnancy itself – that he had taken a firm stance on getting rid of the baby. He was used to getting his way, and this should have been no different. The problem was, Mairi had spent her entire life – not just high school, but a lifetime – getting her own way. And she wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she didn’t want to decide now.

Two weeks before Christmas, Kennan used force to make her mind. He gave her an early present: seven years of bad luck.

It had been a long day. The threat of a child, bills, a real job, a serious relationship – marriage! – had driven him to sleepless nights and a failed final. Simmering, he had come home from a disastrous class at night school to find Mairi trashing the bulletins advertising the clinic. Enraged by this development and all that it entailed, he had taken her hands and pulled the paper free, set it upon the counter.

Mairi, bracing herself, relaxed at his sudden softness, and so the hit blinded her. It sent her tumbling over the lip of the sofa and onto the floor, where an upturned staple buried itself in her spine.

“What are you thinking?!” Kennan was screaming. “I don’t have to do this, Mairi. I don’t have to make this decision. This is my life.”

He jerked her up, pushed her into the bedroom. When he hit her it almost felt like a relief, the tension going out of his shoulders and into her jawline.

The caffeine was making his arms crazy, Mairi kept telling herself, hands cupped over her stomach. And then he had hooked his arm around her waist, twisted her, sent her tumbling into the vanity mirror. Her forehead had collided first. A spider’s web of cracks, edged with crimson, bracketed her absence as she slid to the floor. Her body was screaming. The baby inside of her – Kennan had kept calling it a fetus, useless – was turning about, and Mairi lost her breath when she realized that it wasn’t caffeine, and wasn’t true love, and the one truly dangerous thing was the person she had traded her future, her soul, for.