This excerpt is from Chapter 15 of The Third Law of Motion by Meg Files, published by Anaphora Literary Press, 2011, reprinted here by permission of the author.

Lonnie had already started work as an inventory clerk in a new discount store just outside town, and we’d used the Christmas money from Dad for rent and groceries, so I didn’t think he was only venting his frustration the next time he hit me. He had his reason-this time I couldn’t say what had become of thirty-five cents from the ashtray where he kept change — and he ripped my red jumper and bruised my shoulder and arm. He stopped when I fell backwards into the wall, scared he’d hurt the baby, I supposed, and I thought I could use that move to stop him next time, at least until the baby was born.

If I didn’t go into labor soon, the doctor was going to induce it. I cried after Lonnie tore my jumper, and I caught myself against the wall before I went down, as if my whole body were a fleshy sponge around the baby. But I was hardly inside my body, and he could barely hurt me. I was an angel of myself outside in the snow looking through the Venetian blinds. I was not really alive anymore. Women died during childbirth. There was Hemingway’s Cat and afterwards her Tenente walking into the rain. Right now I was fading into my own angel, who felt a little cold but that was about all, retaining my porous skeleton to support and feed the baby.

After Lonnie left, I wrote a letter to Katie, before I faded completely.

I played the Beethoven Ninth, trying to stay awake long enough to ask her to make sure the baby was saved. She could take care of it or give it to my parents to raise or even find a good childless couple to adopt it, but Lonnie couldn’t have it or his parents either. Whatever she had to do,  take the Saxbes to court and get an order for psychiatric examinations of them all, or steal the baby, she had to promise.

I hid the letter under my sweaters on the closet shelf; and put on a big old summer blouse of my mother’s. I hung the torn jumper on the back of a kitchen chair. I wanted him to see it when he came back. Then I thought maybe he wasn’t going to come back. Maybe he’d driven back to his parents and was already asleep under his old plaid bedspread. Once he’d told me he wanted to make a lot of money and buy his parents a double wide. Once when I mentioned that my mother always picked up the house before the cleaning lady came on Thursdays, he looked dark and said I’d never be allowed to have a cleaning woman, no matter how rich we got to be.

I was Mrs. Saxbe and so was his mother. That was very strange.

I lay down on the unopened sofa, with a blanket over me. I didn’t need the whole bed, without Lonnie, and besides, I could only sleep on my back now.

Lonnie was just driving around, no doubt. If he didn’t go home, where would he go? He didn’t have any friends around here. Neither of us did. Sometimes I wanted only to be all alone inside the three rooms with the snow outside. Sometimes I was such a tiny fat molecule inside a bubble that I believed my parents and Katie had never known me, or maybe that they didn’t even exist, and I was desperate to sit them down beside me on the ugly green sofa.

The other Mrs. Saxbe might be pulling a blanket over Lonnie right now, I thought. I was numb and almost asleep, and for a moment, it was pleasant and even a bit interesting to see him in his bed at home, as I might have pictured him when we were still in high school and everything was still mysterious. But when I closed my eyes, I was ashamed. It had been terrible, flushing her food down the toilet in that trailer. I was glad she hadn’t caught us at it, but now that collusion was between me and Lonnie. What were the Saxbes thinking of me, who couldn’t take care of Lonnie and hold him with me? Maybe they were glad, as I, huge as I was, winked out and released their son.

When I woke at two-thirty, the windows were full of the silver-gray light of snow and Lonnie was still gone. I’d been sleeping in my mother’s old sleeveless blouse and underpants with the waistband low under my stomach. I put on knee socks and shoe boots and my raccoon-collared coat, and went outside to see if maybe Lonnie was asleep in the car — and simply to be out in the snow. The night sky was murky white, and the snow was falling neatly on bushes and driveways and roofs and empty cartons beside trash cans. It was warm on my face and hands and knees. It fell carefully, rounding edges and covering gravel, lowering branches to the ground. Once I had been my mother’s and my father’s little white-haired girl, curtsying in a pinafore my mother had made, and sitting on my father’s arm as if it were a ledge, laughing coyly at the photographer, and dressing a big doll in real baby sunsuits, and rising on my father’s shoulders and diving into Lake Michigan. I must have been their living doll. My father made me a sandbox beneath a grape arbor. I remembered the dusty smell of purple grapes. My mother made me a blue dress with smocking and a white collar. Lonnie had taken that daughter and rubbed his dark-haired body all over her.

Something must have happened to Lonnie. The snow was waking me, and when I started shivering I went back inside. The baby jumped when the door slammed behind me. I’m sorry, baby,” I said and rubbed my stomach. “Baby, what’s happened to your daddy?” Now that he had left me or been killed in a car wreck, I was sick. I sat shivering in my coat and looked in the phone book. I thought I might throw up. Waterton had no hospital. If he was dead, where would he have been taken? Maybe to the Benton Harbor hospital, where I would go to have the baby. I called information for the number and then tried the hospital. No Benjamin Lon Saxbe had been brought in, dead or alive. Helmholtz’s Funeral Parlor was the only listing under “mortuaries.” I dialed and immediately put down the receiver before even the first ring. What would I say? Herr Helmholtz, is my husband in your parlor? A parlor would have shaded light, a smell of old roses, a basket for visitors’ cards, and doilies on the furniture. A-tisket, a-tasket, Lonnie’s in a casket.

I went into the bathroom and knelt before the toilet for a long time but nothing happened. Maybe this sick tightening and turning in my stomach was labor. How dare he leave me alone with that? The baby struggled as if trying to turn. The baby knew what was happening. Lonnie was in a ditch somewhere. My mother used to wait up, angry, when I was late getting home. For all I knew, she always said, you were lying in a ditch somewhere. The warm snow was covering his body, smoothing all his edges. Herr Helmholtz was draining the blood and Lonnie’s body was collapsing on a stainless steel table.

I retrieved my letter to Katie from under the stack of sweaters on the closet shelf. I read it again and added a PS. Katie, you’re the best friend in life. You know I love you, Please forgive me. Then I put the letter in an envelope and wrote across the seal: For Katie Leeview only. Anybody else who opens this I curse as crazy forevermore. Maybe Lonnie would believe I had the power. I knew he was afraid of being called crazy, or of being crazy. I hid the letter in the pocket of my spring jacket stored in my suitcase.

Beyond sleep, I tried to read and paced the three rooms and drank the rest of the milk and turned out the lights and watched out the window. By four the snow had stopped. I hoped the drifts were high enough to trap me. Girl gives birth in snowstorm. Widow delivers own baby. I couldn’t call my parents in the middle of the night, in the middle of my own craziness. Girl bleeds to death but snowstorm baby lives. No one was at the dorm switchboard and Katie could do nothing anyway.

At six-thirty the phone rang. “Hey, wife,” Lonnie said.

I gave him a few seconds of silence. I hated the tears that shot to my

eyes. “What happened?” I said then. “Where were you all night?”

“I’m in the slammer. You’ll have to come get me out.”

“What? Where are you?”

“The police station.” His cocky voice shrank. “Come get me. Bring that grocery money.”

“Well, but you have the car. What happened to the car?”

“I can’t talk,” he said. “Just come.”

So I washed my face and dressed in the good blue dress my mother had made and brushed my hair back over my shoulders. I wouldn’t be a barefoot slut.

I called a taxicab and said, briskly, “To the police station.” The driver looked as weak and drained as I felt. I sat straight in the back seat. “Quite some snow last night,” I said, just like a grown-up, though the roads were already salted and in the daylight the snow looked limp.

The policeman at the desk looked at my pregnant stomach first. “You Mrs. Saxbe?”

“What happened?”

“Picked up for DWI. Around one-thirty.”

“So, he’s been sleeping it off?” That was the television phrase, and I thought he might laugh at me.

Another policeman led Lonnie through a set of doors, past me. He looked like a guilty little boy, in oversized white coveralls.

Then he came back, in his own brown corduroys and V-neck sweater and yellow shirt, and he paid some money and agreed to appear, and the policeman at the desk shook his head and handed me the car keys, and we walked out into the salted snow. Lonnie’s face was stubbled and he smelled not like stale beer this time but like pure clear alcohol. This must be what they mean, I thought, when they say someone smells like a distillery.

He didn’t make me call in for him this time. I heard him say, “Looks like it’s time to start pacing that old waiting room. Yeah, cigars. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that.” His voice was quiet and sober.

I’m not ready to go to the hospital, you know,” I said. “Although I thought maybe I was in labor. About four in the morning I thought so.”

“Rag on me later,” Lonnie said. He pulled open the bed and dropped the blinds. “I don’t have the strength for it now.

Once he was asleep, I lay down beside him. His skin smelled like alcohol and salt. I didn’t have the strength for anything, either.

 

Early Sunday morning, I woke to the whoosh of water in the percolator.

“I can’t believe you’re up,” I said. “What’s going on? It’s only nine.”

I’m feeling holy,” he said. “We should go to church.”

“What, did the prison priest convert you?”

“It wasn’t prison.”

He hadn’t said much about the night in jail, and I was afraid to ask and set him off. I pictured a cell with bunks chained to the wall and a lidless toilet, and Lonnie in the prison coveralls holding onto the bars and watching for me to come to save him.

“Okay, let’s go to church,” I said.

Lonnie made fried egg sandwiches with mustard, his father’s favorite breakfast, and we dressed and walked down the block to the Methodist church. In front, the sign this week said A little child shall lead you to the Kingdom.

“I hope that doesn’t mean I’m going to give birth during the sermon,” I said.

My husband held my arm and we entered the steamy vestibule.