Free House of Wonder by Sarah Healy Page B

trouble accepting reality. And that’s just what happened. I had stopped taking my birth control pills and hadn’t seen Duncan in five weeks when the doorbell to my apartment sounded. Then the man who knew exactly the sorts of words I wanted to hear came in and said them.
    The day I missed my period—before I even took the test—I understood that I was pregnant. And the knowledge felt like a cold, deep spring inside me. Once and only once did I have sex without protection. But sometimes fortune favors the reckless. Because in the end, I got Rose.
    Three days later, finally ready to confirm what I already knew, I sat in the bathroom staring at two pink lines for a very long time—until my roommate pounded on the door.
Jenna, are you okay?
I told her that I was and I picked myself up and I opened the door and squeezed past her on my way to the kitchen, where I drank one glass of milk, and then another. The next day I went to my mother’s house for our birthday and Warren looked at me as I was picking up bunches of discarded wrapping paper, his head tilted, his eyes searching. My mother was bringing the leftover cake to the spare refrigerator in the garage.
    â€œWhat?” I asked impatiently.
    Warren seemed to read my face and then his eyes widened almost infinitesimally. Something unspoken was exchanged between us, and I looked away, ashamed. What sort of woman would let this happen? I felt like a stupid teenager, accidently getting pregnant. Squatting down, I reached under the table for a shiny blue gift-wrap bow and I felt Warren crouch next to me. “Don’t worry, Jenna,” he said, his face as serious and grave as it ever got. “Warren will help you.” He reached for a scrap of wrapping paper and put it in the garbage bag that hung from the back of one of the kitchen chairs. I felt him hesitate before lightly resting his hand on my back.
    I folded forward as tears sprang from my eyes. Then, hearing our mother’s voice call for someone to bring out the lasagna, I began wiping my face furiously, blotting it with the sleeve of my shirt. “Don’t tell Mom, okay?” I asked, standing quickly as I grabbed the tray of lasagna and brought it to the garage.
    In no small way, Warren was why I had Rose. For nine months, Warren and I had formed next to each other, cells dividing to become hearts and eyes and fingers. We had breathed each other in and out, more alike than different.
    And then we were born.
    As I grew, I developed a knowledge of the customs and norms and taboos that govern us, that tell us what to say and how to act and who to be. Knowledge that was added in layers, in strata, until I became a fully formed adult. And the further away from childhood I moved, the more I realized how poorly equipped Warren was, how naked. So when I became pregnant, I felt as if some cosmic die had been cast, and it was time to find out if what made Warren Warren was inside of me as well. Itwas time to find out if some penalty was to be exacted for my getting to be the normal one. I didn’t think most people would understand that. In retrospect, I’m not sure I did.
    Duncan, for his part, took the news stoically. We made one last attempt to become the couple we never could quite figure out how to be. For me, the effort was as compulsive and impossible as forcing together two magnets with like charges. I moved into his apartment; we talked about baby names; he went with me to doctors’ appointments. When he wasn’t in the restaurant and I wasn’t at the agency, we’d take walks around the city. Through it all, he seemed like a barely domesticated animal whose true nature hadn’t been entirely bred out of him. He’d sit silently, his mind miles and miles away.
    Then one Saturday morning as I sat on the floor folding laundry, my belly spilling out over my lap, he came out of the tiny bedroom and settled on the coffee table next to me.
    â€œShep says