Breach, p.13
Breach, page 13
He tugged her past the hocked musical instruments and radio equipment to the jewelry cases. The eyes of the guy behind the case went straight to Marleigh’s belly. There was nothing to see, and Marleigh knew Jace had proposed before they knew about the baby. That’s all that mattered. Jace tightened his grip on her hand.
“This dick better not ruin this,” he muttered. “You know this is only for now. I’m going to give you the world.”
“How can I help you two?”
Marleigh didn’t say anything. She just looked at Jace.
“We’re shopping for an engagement ring and wedding bands.” Jace lifted their interlocked hands.
Marleigh wiggled her fingers for emphasis and smiled.
“Congratulations are in order, then!” the man behind the counter said. “And doing it all at once,” he said. “I can make you a good deal that way. When are you getting married?”
“Next week,” Jace said. “I ship out a couple weeks after.” Marleigh touched her belly then dropped her free hand.
“A Navy man, eh? Thanks for your service.” He turned to Marleigh. “What’s your ring size, sweetheart?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Let’s start there,” the man said. “He’s the sailor, but you’re the important one.” He winked at her. “This is just to get an idea. We can resize almost anything.”
He reached below the counter and held out a loop of brass circles. “My name’s Al,” he said, gesturing to Marleigh to hold out her ring finger. He slid a ring on. Too big. Her hand trembled.
“I’m Marleigh.” He went smaller with the rings. Still too big.
“Marleigh, you’re a delicate size five,” Al said.
“Size five,” Jace repeated “I’ll remember that for when I can afford a real ring.”
“What kind of engagement ring have you been dreaming of since you were a little girl?”
Marleigh laughed. “My childhood was more taped up wrists and bloody knuckles than Disney movies.”
“Something else I love about her,” Jace said.
“I don’t think I ever really thought about it,” she said. “Just something simple.”
“Come over here and browse. Let me know what sparkler catches your eye. And, big guy—”
“Jace.”
“Jace, come over and look, too. If you were gonna surprise her and it had to be perfect, which one would you choose?”
“Mar, turn around,” Jace said, and with his hands on her shoulders, he gently turned her away from the jewelry case.
“Don’t pick anything crazy,” she said. She blushed. He kissed the line of heat creeping from her neck to her jaw. He saw a brilliant round diamond in a gold setting and pointed to it.
“Can I see that one?” he said to the store clerk.
“Princess cut, very nice,” the man said. “I have all the appraisal documents on this.”
Marleigh stood still, her eyes closed. The tinkle of keys, and the slide of a plexiglass drawer. She pressed her thumb against the band that Jace had used to propose.
“That’s the one,” Jace said.
Something tickled the back of her knee. Marleigh opened her eyes and found Jace kneeling before her. She opened her eyes and gawked at the ring in his hand.
“Take off that trashy piece of tin,” he said. “This is the ring that belongs on your finger.”
The diamond looked bigger on her small finger. She kept opening her mouth, trying to find something to say, but closed it each time. She’d never imagined a diamond like that on her hand. It was so brilliant, so bright.
“You already said yes to that little piece of crap,” Jace said, showing the clerk for emphasis.
“I don’t need—” Marleigh began. She fanned her fingers out and turned her hand side to side, mesmerized by the sparkle. “Jace. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Marleigh splurged on a short, white dress to show off her legs and flat-ironed her hair for their July 21 courthouse wedding. Jace took her breath away in his dress whites. The Norfolk City courthouse provided a witness. She wished the baby counted. They didn’t need anyone else in the world. A stranger who was walking by offered to take their picture on the courthouse steps, Marleigh still holding her bright bouquet. Jace scooped her up into his arms. Flags whipped in the wind. She was blissfully dizzy from it all.
The first wedding gift Jace bought her was a pack of five pads of good drawing paper and two sets of pencils. “I like watching you sketch. You always curl your knees up and get all scrunched.” He tried as hard as he could not to talk to her while she was drawing, but couldn’t help himself. Most days she used the bright primary color spiral notebooks you could find anywhere. “You deserve better.” She practiced her new name, Marleigh Holt, in cursive, print, calligraphy, the H shaped like an embrace.
Every couple of years she had splurged on those items for herself, she’d told him once when he caught her doodling in the gym. The thick paper beneath her fingers, the pencil that would erase without smearing or leave unwanted shadows behind.
“I don’t know shit about art,” he said. “But you’re good.”
She’d felt the urge to draw always, but recently she’d been almost compelled to draw every day, like the baby inside of her fed her creativity as it fed off her. “Thank you. These are so expensive. You didn’t have to.” But as she said it, she held them close. They felt too good to give up.
“Think of them as coming from our rich uncle,” he said and winked at her.
“Wouldn’t that be nice? A rich uncle!”
“We’ve got one,” he said. “Rich Uncle Sam. He’s going to take good care of us, and I’m going to take good care of you and this little guy.” He pressed his hand against her stomach that gave no indication of the baby growing inside. “Seriously, you can relax.”
Could she, finally?
With Jace back on base each day, prepping for his upcoming deployment, Marleigh told the restaurant she was giving up her shifts so she could focus on school. “You’re always welcome here,” the manager told her. She was never going back. Her days of having to kiss ass in the hopes of the smallest tip were over. Having to laugh at stupid jokes and pretending to ignore a hairy hand on her ass. Folding pizza boxes until her knuckles ached. No more restaurant work for her.
“Thanks so much,” she said. “Call me if you’re ever short staffed.” That happened always, but she’d never answer that call. A husband, a baby, school. The route to an actual career. It was everything Marleigh had ever wanted all at once.
She called her mother and left a message. “You’re wrong about me. I’m married and we’re starting a family. You’re not part of it.” As she spoke, she had the sense of her mother sitting there, a cigarette between her fingers, listening without picking up. Laughing.
···
It was less than a month after they returned from Nebraska and six days before he deployed when Jace came with her to Portsmouth Naval Hospital to hear the baby’s heartbeat again. When Marleigh’d called the OB-GYN covered by Jace’s insurance, she was told, “If you peed on a stick and it says you’re pregnant, congratulations! We don’t need to see you until at least nine or ten weeks.” She knew that most miscarriages happened early, so that must have been why.
To her core, Marleigh knew she was pregnant. Her body told her, and yet it still seemed impossible. For her entire life, Jackie warned Marleigh that she’d probably never get pregnant. Her mother had gone all the way cold after an emergency hysterectomy when Marleigh was eight. “Thought I’d started the change,” Jackie said, when Marleigh asked how she didn’t realize she was pregnant when she was missing periods. “Not like it happens all that often,” her mother said, Marleigh fake retching at the thought of her parents having sex. “He still slumps down heavy on me sometimes,” she’d said before Marleigh left the room. Maybe it was better that she always heard fighting instead.
Marleigh almost had a sibling, but you were supposed to stop drinking when you got pregnant. Her mother cut back. “You coulda helped take care of it, too,” her mother said. She had a feeling that much of the caretaking would have fallen to her for whatever was refusing to grow and refusing to bleed away. It began rotting inside of Jackie, giving her an infection that made her sweat and seize, eyeballs rolling blankly in their sockets, foamy spittle gurgling from her throat and out her mouth. From the ambulance to the ER and then to the OR, all her mother’s reproductive organs were found strangled by this wouldn’t-be life.
Some days Marleigh thought the dead baby had it easier. All her mother said she remembered was feeling a tremor and then falling to the kitchen floor. Next, she awoke in a gray room feeling hollow as a jack-o’-lantern and so, so cold. Likely a reaction to anesthesia and antibiotics, the doctors said, her body trying to play catchup with the rapid decrease in febrile temperature to normal body temperature. They also said the word “withdrawal.” Her mother couldn’t stop shivering. But that didn’t change when she left the hospital and could drive herself to the liquor store. She wore sweatshirts inside the fetid heat of the boxing gym, wool socks in Virginia August.
Jackie cooled every other way, too, hardening like wax. She had never been cheery Holly Homemaker, but she’d at least had fire and wit. Jackie’d always cried when medal winners at the Olympics became teary atop podiums, thanking their mothers, certain, Marleigh thought, that one of her “adopted sons” from the gym would be up there, one eye distended, lip bloody, but still victorious. When he thanked Mama, he’d be thanking her. After the surgery, it was all gone. Jackie was brittle calm at best. She could sit so still at the check-in desk that she could be asleep. Marleigh wondered what else they had scooped out along with dead alien baby and her uterus and ovaries. Or maybe they’d put something in her IV. When she’d come to, her mother was muttering something about not being a woman anymore.
But in that dark room at the obstetrician’s office, nothing mattered but Jace, Marleigh and the life they’d created. The swooshing sound of their baby’s heart echoed around them, Jace looking at Marleigh like she was a miracle. “That’s a strong, healthy heartbeat right there,” the doctor said.
Jace wiped the goo from Marleigh’s belly. He had a six-month deployment coming up, so he would miss the ultrasound and seeing her get big, but he would be back to meet his child. “We’ll see you in a few weeks for your ultrasound, Marleigh. She can send you pictures, Dad.” Marleigh could feel how badly he wanted to stay right where he was.
···
Marleigh upped her course load, bought some new clothes, and started picking out items for the baby’s nursery. One of her regular customers asked for her at the tattoo shop. She went in and gave the guy his piece. He only wanted some Roman numerals and shading to add to her previous work on his shoulder. The work only took her an hour and a half and she left with two hundred in cash.
She wanted to surprise Jace with something. He’d been spoiling her since Nebraska. She wanted to send him off to the desert with a hot reminder of her. A photographer had tried to rope her into posing for a pinup for charity once; plenty of the girls she worked with participated, and he was known for his boudoir photo shoots. She wanted Jace to remember this body, the one he fell in love with. Marleigh had planned to use the money for books, but another custom tattoo would more than cover those. And wasn’t Jace always telling her to relax about money? He’d flip looking at the pics. She had enough to book the session. She needed some sexy lingerie, and let Jameson know that she had some open time the next few days if the shop could use her.
Jace was getting edgy. He had ten days left until his deployment. He was packed, restless and ready. Anticipating the desert was worse than the desert itself, he’d told her. “You’re magical. I forgot all about war and duty and everything but you this summer, Mar.”
She went straight from her sexy photo shoot to the tattoo parlor. The photos and prints were already paid for, and now her books would be, too. A little something for both Jace and her. She was washing some splotches of iodine off her forearms when Jace walked in. The alcohol-soaked cotton balls were cold and left her skin pink, but they got the job done.
“Hi, baby,” she said, wondering why he’d come looking for her here. Jace leaned in to kiss her but stopped and looked down at her hand holding the cotton swab.
“What the fuck?” He grabbed her hands and turned the palm-side up.
“I’m scrubbing off iodine. No big deal.” Marleigh pulled away.
“I thought you were done with that shit. What about the baby?”
“I wasn’t giving myself a tattoo. And everything is clean and sterile. You know that.”
“Why are you sneaking around? You said you were done with that. All the jobs, hiding cash.”
“You said I was done with that. I like tattooing. Art, drawing—you know that. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Is that how it’s going to be when I’m gone? You being all sneaky.” He squeezed the container of rubbing alcohol. Any tighter he would smash it.
“What are you talking about? I haven’t been sneaking around.”
He poured the rubbing alcohol down the drain.
“What the fuck? Does that make you feel better?” She cupped his face in her hands. He looked more scared than anything. “What’s wrong?”
He pushed her hands from his face. “My wife telling me the truth. That’s what makes me feel better.” Each day had wound him tighter. He wanted to know where she was all day, how was she feeling, had she felt the baby yet? She’d heard pre-deployment paranoia was common, but this was ridiculous.
She stomped away from him and refused his ride home. When Marleigh walked back into their apartment, she yelled, “You know what? I have been sneaking around.” She slapped the folder with the photos on the counter and walked back to the bedroom. The top pictures were the surprise lingerie photo shoot Marleigh took for him. Her face was tilted sideways, but her stare was dead-on straight. Her eyes were lined thick, lashes dark and heavy. Her legs looked a mile long in stilettos and fishnets. “I wanted to surprise you, you ass.”
“Baby,” Jace called from the kitchen. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’d better be,” she said from the doorway.
It only took him three large strides to reach her from the kitchen. “Oh my God, baby, you’re so beautiful. And you did this for me. In this one, somehow you’re staring right into me.” He picked her up and set her gently on the bed. “And this one, all you need is a lasso. You’re my sexy superhero. I’ll look at them every goddamn day I’m gone.” She leaned back against a pillow and he rested his shoulder on her thigh. “I know you wouldn’t sneak around.”
“Of course not.”
“I’ve never had anyone to leave behind before. I’ve always been so ready to go.” She dusted her fingers across his scalp, buzzed again just this week.
“And after you come home, there will be two of us to love on you.”
Jace held the bottom photo, the smallest, gently between his thumb and index finger. The image was black and white and blurry, the oval inside of Marleigh that was becoming their baby.
After putting the photo back into the folder with the rest, Jace pressed against Marleigh from behind and wrapped his arms around her. His hands were warm against the firm mound of her belly. “Godfuckingdamn, I hate leaving you!”
She tipped her head back and rested it against his clavicle. She knew he was telling the truth; she also knew he was restless and ready to get back to work.
“I’m going to miss you so much, but it’s okay that you feel ready to go. This is what you’ve trained for.”
“It feels like what I was built for and I’ve never been home so long before. But that was before you, Mar, and this little guy.”
“We’ll do our things, and you’ll do yours. And we’ll all make it through.”
“Roger that, Mar.”
···
Jace watched her that night as she dressed. Marleigh had no idea what to wear to meet the wife of Jace’s CO and the other wives and girlfriends of the unit, or what to expect. Only wives were invited, none of the men.
The house was beautiful and in an old and tony off-base neighborhood. It sat on perfectly mowed grass that reminded Marleigh of Jace’s buzz cut. She knew the couple had children, but there were no plastic toys, no bikes, just a small basketball hoop above the garage.
Join me for sunset on the creek, the invitation said, a subtle announcement that they lived on the water. In Norfolk, property was worth a mint if it had water access, even if that property were right across the street from public housing projects. Growing up, her mother went on and on about how they had water access. At the end of the street and through two families’ yards there was a marsh. She certainly wasn’t hosting sunset cocktail parties there. Actually, maybe her mother did. But just her regular cocktails for one in a plastic bottle of Burnett’s vodka. Start time, as early as you want. End time, never. She cringed, imagining her mother in this home, smelling of smoke and sizing up one valuable object to another. She saw her mother’s hunger, that same awe, in the eyes of the other young wives and girlfriends. Except for the CO’s wife, who probably wasn’t forty, all the women were exceptionally young. “Oh, your house is soooo beautiful,” they all said.
“Thank you for having us in your beautiful home.” The young women lined up to greet her. Marleigh had learned to act like she’d been here before, like wealth and power didn’t impress her, even if she planned to study the woman and figure out how she had built this life. Jace would likely never be an officer, but he could still do very well, especially with the right kind of support at home.
“It is scary when we first think of our men preparing to leave us,” the CO’s wife said.
