Free Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

hope to afford a nurse and a nanny and whatever other help you want. But that can’t happen until I’ve got more things written, more things sold. You understand.”
    “There’s still seven or eight months before the baby’d come,” I said, “and then when they’re first born, they pretty much sleep all the time. So that’s at least a year.”
    Scott was shaking his head. “If I can’t write, I don’t make more money, and if I don’t make more money, none of our plans will work out—and any money I’ve made already would go for the baby. I’ve paid in blood to get where I am, Zelda. You’ve got to take care of this. This isn’t what we want right now.”
    “You have paid, I know. But a whole year should be—”
    “Zelda.” He shifted to face me. His eyes were stern, but fearful, too. “I’m so close. Everything I ever wanted, it’s right there .” He stretched out his arm as if literary success dangled like an apple on a tree.
    “My father was a failure,” he went on, getting out of bed to pull on his undershorts, then pour drinks for us both. “When he lost his job in Buffalo and we had to go back to St. Paul, only the charity of Mother’s family kept us afloat. There we were, living in this grand house, acting as if we were as well-off as our rich neighbors, and it was all a farce.”
    He handed me my drink. “I can’t be almost successful. I can’t get this close to the life I’ve been witnessing, my face against the window like the Little Match Girl, and then see it dissolve like a mirage. When I get back to New York, I’ll see about some options, and we’ll get the matter taken care of. You understand, don’t you?”
    “I guess I do.”
    The solution to my still-missing monthly arrived a week later wrapped in a paper packet tucked inside an envelope. The small, pale yellow pills looked innocent as aspirin. It would be easy enough to swallow them fast and then just not think about it anymore—until the effects came, at which time it’d be too late for anything but regret. I held them in my palm for a moment, then slid them back into the packet, tucked it underneath my mattress, and went downstairs.
    At the piano, I paged through the pile of sheet music, rejecting the jazz piece I’d been working on, rejecting my father’s favored tunes like “Dixie” and “On to the Battle,” which I’d often played to get his attention and coax a smile. Then I saw “Dance of the Hours.” I put it on the stand and began to play.
    How simple everything had been that night I’d danced to this song. How easy. Nothing but laughter and the enchantment of a charming officer in his crisp dress uniform. Now everything was a tangle of hope and circumstance and connected fates.
    Scott’s happiness is my happiness, I thought . ’Til the end of time, amen .
    But … if I took the pills, if I ended a pregnancy just because it wasn’t convenient, wasn’t that the same as declaring that what we’d done was dirty and wrong? That I was no better than a whore?
    On the other hand, if I had this possible baby and our life afterward proved to be nothing but misery, he’d be resentful forever, and what kind of life would that be?
    But it wouldn’t be misery, I was sure. He was overdramatizing—
    “Zelda, for heaven’s sake,” Mama called from the library. “You needn’t pound the keys!”
    “Sorry, Mama!”
    I’d never compromised on anything important, damn it. Leaving the piano for a minute, I ran upstairs for the pills, then returned to the parlor and put the packet into the fire.
    As luck would have it, a few days later the matter resolved itself. I wrote to Scott, Things have a way of working out for us, and this is just one more sign .
    I believed it, too. Who wouldn’t have when, from about this time onward, nearly everything Scott had written in the previous year began to turn to gold?
    *   *   *
    “So his novel will be out soon,” Daddy said. We were in the parlor, where Mama