Tim Murphy - Christodora

“Oh my God,” Drew said. “You are not even bipolar. And your mother has been on meds and more or less fine for years now.”

“No, you’re wrong, I’m on antidepressants now. I think the whole bipolar cycle thing is starting in me and it’s starting with depression, not the manias, just like it did with my mother.”

Drew was silent for several moments. Milly pictured her in front of her computer with the dog on her lap, cold coffee at her elbow. Milly could hear Radiohead in the background.

“Oh, hon,” Drew finally said. “Can I ask you one thing? Can I ask you to just sit with this for a few days? You have time. Just sit with it.”

“Just sit with it while it gets bigger in there and more human and this becomes harder and harder to do?”

“Listen to me: you have plenty of time. And I seriously think you should tell Jared. You live together.”

“Can I sit with it just until tomorrow and we’ll talk then?”

“Yes, sweetheart. I’m here working all week so call me any time you like. But. . this could be a wonderful thing, you know.”

Milly sighed, crestfallen. “Thank you, Drew-pea,” she said, and hung up.

Later that night, she went home. But she did not tell Jared. In fact, she consciously put on a sort of mask before she went into the apartment so he wouldn’t even suspect something was wrong. She just blocked it out. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day, she called Drew, telling not another soul. Drew put her in touch with a big psych researcher at Columbia, who told her, in effect, there were no diagnostic tools extant to predict if her child would be mentally ill, or what the chances were. The researcher said instead that by the time the child came of age, treatment would have been fine-tuned to the point where it really wasn’t a problem. But Milly kept picturing years of watching a child in fear of the first terrifying signs of morbidity or mania, or both.

Finally, she called Drew and said, in a steely voice, “If I flew you out here, would you go with me to the abortion?”

Milly waited quite a few moments before Drew spoke. “Let me ask you one thing,” Drew finally said. “If you were to set aside this fear you have, would you want to have this child?”

Milly tried to consider the question honestly. She liked her new job. She liked teaching art to the boys on Saturday. She liked working on her own stuff in the studio on Sunday. She liked having just a bit of money for her and Jared to travel with. “At this point?” she asked Drew. “Not now. No.”

Another long pause from Drew. “Okay then, I will fly out, and you don’t have to pay my way. I’ll schedule some meetings and write off the trip. But one thing: I can’t stay with you unless you tell Jared. That is just too weird for me to be spending a few days with the two of you so we can go off and secretly have an abortion and try to keep that from him and be all, like, la-di-da.”

“It won’t be so hard if we’re doing it together,” Milly reasoned.

“I don’t think it’s right that you’re not telling your boyfriend of, what, five years now?”

“Six years, technically.”

“Six years, then,” Drew said. “You are putting up a wall between the two of you and I think you are going to regret it.”

Milly respected Drew’s opinion, so this gave her pause. But in her head, she didn’t see any reason why she needed to tell Jared. So she went ahead and scheduled the procedure, informing Drew. In doing so, she put up a wall that even she was a bit stunned by. She didn’t tell Jared, and in not telling him, she started to resent him in his ignorance of the situation — couldn’t he intuit she was pregnant and in distress? She didn’t tell her mother — that would go to the heart of the whole painful matter. But what surprised her the most was that she didn’t tell her shrink. She couldn’t stand one more person after Drew telling her this was something she might regret. She had to stay strong and keep her resolve and just get this over with. Deep down, she had no intention of ever having her own baby — ever. She would not watch her own genetic curse unfold before her eyes in the form of her own child.

Drew came and stayed in the West Village apartment of an editor friend who was out of town. Milly told Jared that much, and that she and Drew were going to meet after work for dinner and have a girls’ sleepover. But actually Drew met Milly in the morning at a SoHo doctor’s office with a lovely, massive ceramic vase of freesia in the center of the room, real art on the walls, and comfortable nubby earth-toned sofas in the waiting room. Finally, seeing Drew, Milly allowed herself to cry, and Drew held her.

“Honestly?” Drew looked Milly in the eye and asked. “The thing is, Millipede, you think you know what the future holds, and you don’t.”

“No,” Milly protested quietly, scribbling her way through the paperwork, “it’s that I don’t know. That’s what I can’t stand. It’d be like wondering if you’re raising a time bomb.”

Drew sighed. “Oh, Milly,” she said, leading Milly to the sofa. A nurse finally came out and summoned Milly.

“I’ll be right here,” Drew said as the nurse led Milly away.

Milly steeled herself and went into the doctor’s office and willed her mind out of her body through the procedure. The Valium helped, which was good because, now that it was actually happening, she was distressed over the fact she was aborting Jared’s baby (that he’d wanted!) without telling him. What if she could never get pregnant again? Well, wasn’t that what she wanted?

I really need to remove my mind from this situation, she told herself. So she thought about art supplies, which always gave her a good feeling; she thought about the decent budget she had for that this year in her new job and how she’d bring in a nice supply, and how she could discreetly siphon a bit of that away from school and bring it to the boys’ home on Saturdays. She’d introduce Mateo to watercolors and a paintbrush — she’d put his fingers around a paintbrush for the first time! — if Sister Ellen would let her. That would be a joyous afternoon.

See, she thought, she was able to remove herself from this situation. And this certainly didn’t mean she didn’t love children. It certainly didn’t mean she couldn’t be a good mother. She could be a loving mother, an attentive one, a mother who nurtures her child, not one who merely treats her like an afterthought. This was all still possible. She couldn’t even let herself think about what was going on down there, on the other side of her johnny, and she did her best to tune out the gentle, supportive murmurings of the nurse whose hand she gripped through the procedure. It was best just not to be there.

When it was over, they drew a comfy old-style quilt over her and told her to rest for a while. She turned on her side, tucked her hands under the pillow, and lay there. She certainly was relieved that was over with. And she certainly would not be forgetting her Pills again any time soon. She felt vaguely crampy but otherwise fine, a bit floaty from the Valium. Drew came in and sat down beside her and stroked her hair back behind her ear and smiled at her. She loved Drew, that much was certain. She was feeling bizarre alternating pangs of remorse and resentment toward Jared, but she sure loved Drew.

“How are you, sweetie?” Drew asked.

“I’m fine, it’s over,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming.”

“We’ll get in a cab and go back to the West Village and rent a bunch of movies and watch them all day and night,” Drew said.

“No movies with children,” Milly said.

“No movies with children.”

She called Jared from Drew’s friend’s apartment that night. He was making himself pasta and then going to Green Day with Asa and some of his other friends.