Chapter Text
“What?”
The word hung in the air between them, a crystallized ornament of disbelief.
“I’m sorry, Anna, but I don’t want to try anymore.” He stared at his feet, unable to meet the pain in her eyes.
She had been doing the dishes after dinner when Tom had appeared guiltily in the doorway. He had leaned his long frame against the doorway and said, “I don’t think we should try to get pregnant again.” She had almost dropped the wine glass she had been drying.
She carefully placed the glass on the counter and turned to face him. “I don’t understand! You were so happy when we found out I was pregnant, and then when I miscarried…” Waking to a sheet stained red, cramped tight in a ball, the taste of her tears a steady diet for days. “You were so excited before. You kept talking about if it would have your curls or my eyes. You read Shakespeare to my belly every night.”
“I know, but you have to understand. Guinea changed me. I saw so many children who didn’t have anything, dying from lack of food, lack of water.” His voice was earnest, but his eyes were haunted with images of starving children, visible rib cages, and unmoving babies.
“Our baby wouldn’t be like that.” Her voice held a note of pleading in it.
“I know, but I think it would be so much better if we adopted some of those babies instead,” he responded quietly.
“I don’t want to adopt a baby. I want your baby. I want our baby!”
“I can’t give you that. Not anymore,” he answered regretfully.
“You can, you just won’t.” She turned her back to him, bitterness as evident in her stance as her voice.
“I can’t just forget what I saw there, what I had experienced.” He sighed with exasperation. “Maybe if you had come with me…” he pushed off the door frame and walked towards her.
She whirled towards him. “Are we back to this again? I can’t just take off whenever you want me to. I have a job. A real job. People depend on me!
His spine stiffened, and he stopped in the middle of the kitchen, his legs spread in a wide stance like he was expecting to be attacked. “Are you saying what I do isn’t a real job? I work longer hours than you do almost every day.”
“Dressing up in costumes and pretending to be from another world. Such a hard life you have. If you stopped working, what would we have? One less pretentious art house film that nobody wants to watch. If I stop working, people die.”
He rolled his eyes at her grandiosity. “Of course, because there isn’t another pediatric surgeon in all of England! Don’t you realize what you could have done in Guinea? How valuable your skills would have been?”
She snorted. “Those children don’t need me. They need food. They need water. They need vaccines. They need another dilettante celebrity to post heartbreaking pictures to guilt the rest of the world into donating money so a bunch of bureaucrats can keep their job.”
“Is that what you think of me? That I’m a dilettante?” He actually looked hurt. She would have expected offended, but lately she didn’t think she had the power to hurt him anymore.
Frustration boiled up in her. “You’ve never been interested in politics. Ever! You never advocate for anything controversial. You honestly think that those mothers would be happy giving up their children to you? They don’t need the white man to come in and take their children, and if you had any sort of experience in the real world, rather than your rarefied Etonian egotism that makes you think you are God’s gift to the world, you would understand how incredibly stupid it is to think that you can just step in like this and take their children as a solution to what you saw. African misery isn’t a tourist attraction, and their babies are not souvenirs!”
He stepped back, her words having the force of a physical blow.
“Oh yes, because we all know that you growing up in a middle class family and having signed petitions for Amnesty International gives you the moral high ground here.” Sarcasm dripped from his award-winning tongue. She hated how susceptible she was to the tone of his voice.
“I spent every summer for a decade volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Do you remember that? Do you remember me scheduling my volunteer trips around your shooting schedules so that I would be here when you came home? Do you? I’ve been to Guinea, Tom, if you would pull your head out of your arse long enough to remember that I have a life while you’re on set. I’m the one who got arrested protesting our involvement in Iraq, I’m the one who spends those pro-bono shifts at the neighborhood clinics seeing immigrant children who don’t have health care. So excuse me if I don’t give your “look at me and how I am an example of charity and liberal guilt” routine a lot of weight, because I have been living that life since before you ever met me and it has never mattered to you before because there wasn’t a photo-op attached.” Her voice dripped venom, and she clenched the counter with both hands to keep herself from throwing something at him.
“So I’m just a media whore, is that you’re saying? That I don’t care what I do as long it gets my face out there? That I’ll just shill for anyone with the cash to put down?” She could tell he was furious. His voice always went quiet when he was angry, and the low tone combined with the perfectly clipped enunciation spoke louder than any rock concert of how incensed he was by her attack.
“You have this perfectly cultivated air of genteel perfection combined with just enough God of Evil to make the schoolgirls cream themselves over your perfect eyes and your beautiful hair, but I’m done with you spending more time thinking about how to get your fans to fall in love with you than your wife!” She tried to match his tone, to keep her voice low and steady, but by the end she knew she had lost control, her voice cracking over the words “your wife.”
“So this is all my fault? Do you think I like knowing that you never pick me over your damn job? That you think that you are so much better than any other surgeon that you can’t possibly let anyone cover for your shifts at the hospital? It’s probably for the best that you miscarried; you never would have been able to care for my child anyway because you would be off saving someone else’s!”
The blood drained from her face. His words broke her heart, making her feel like she was losing the baby all over again. He realized the magnitude of what he had said as tears filled her eyes. He felt like he had been stabbed; like he had stabbed himself.
“Get out.” Her voice was soft.
“Oh, god, Anna, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it.” He tried to take her in his arms but she pushed him away.
“Get. Out.” The words fought their way through gritted teeth as tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Please, love, please, forgive me, I’m so sorry.” He stood helplessly in front of her, his body slumping repentantly.
She walked past him, making sure to stay out of his reach.
She stopped in the doorway. Without looking at him, she quietly said. “You can come back and get some clothes tomorrow while I’m at work. I don’t want you here when I get home. And I don’t want to see you again.”
He heard her feet on the stairs, and then their bedroom door closing and locking. He heard her start sobbing, a sound he hadn’t heard since the doctor had confirmed the loss of their baby at 12 weeks.
He slumped to the floor as his sobs echoed hers.