Free Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt

revelation that will burst the bubble in my wife’s brain. Disgust and love are similar, easily confused; they both burn up the heart and make you weak.
    I lean over and take Anna’s hands. I pull her towards me. She is on her knees between my legs, and I hold her shoulders and bring them tightly towards my belly. Her head rests on my chest.
    “Please don’t,” I whisper.
    “Don’t worry, please,” she whispers back.
    “Let’s go for a walk,” I say and release her shoulders.
    We both stand. I put my shoes back on. Anna heads towards the back field leading to the woods that line the river. I follow her like a man who has never known a single thing about life.

SEVEN
    “You make a sound I’ve never heard before,” Christine said once, having grown bolder with me after the first six months of coyness—her modesty overcome only during sex.
    “What sound? When?” I adjusted my position and propped my head up on my hand.
    “You know, just in that second … at the end.” She turned to face me. We lay naked on her bed, which had a view of Rosedale Valley. She’d brought wine and set out outrageously priced snacks from a Yorkville deli on the sheets. “Do you share genes with, say, a cricket?” she said, giggling, which was infectious.
    Giggling was something we did well. That and sex. And the dreaming—the what-ifs that filled our conversations over dinner.
    “What if we woke up one day to find that there were no vegetables?”
    “We’d be very upset.”
    “Some people would like it.”
    “Those some people would be under the age of five.”
    And we would giggle.
    “What if I went in and quit tomorrow, hitchhiked to California to make it big?” Christine’s parents had been born in Sweden, but the only Scandinavian thing about her was her looks—in other ways she was born to live in California. She was a clerk in a large insurance company, but she had a dream of becoming a singer. She always sang around her apartment, and although at first I had cringed at the thought that she imagined that at thirty-five she still could be discovered, I grew to like the songs, the notes she hit, the lyrics she knew flawlessly. She’d stop what she was doing and ask me to name a song, any song. I’d think hard, trying to make it difficult for her with “So Long, Marianne” or “Like a Hurricane” or anything that came to mind that I thought she wouldn’t know or would never be able to sing. She’d pause for a moment then start, slowly, with an intro beat—I could see her counting in, two three four—and she’d sing, “Once I thought I saw you, in a crowded hazy bar …”
    Things with Christine were in my control. She liked what I did, and was intrigued by my work. I showed hermy drawings, talked about the business. She let me decide everything—the song, where to eat dinner, when to turn up, when to leave—and it was probably this, this simple, acquiescent arrangement, as my abs tightened and the love handles shrank, that kept me going back, until I realized we’d formed a team of some kind. Not exactly a partnership, but a duet. At home I would watch as Anna became more and more immersed in Charlotte’s homework, Fred’s university applications, Sasha’s dance lessons.
    And then, a year and a half in, Christine said, “What if I got pregnant?”
    I was silent.
    “I’ve stopped talking the pill.”
    My panic felt orange in colour.
    “What if?” she said.
    “Why would you?”
    “It’s what women do.” Her answer was tinged with contempt.
    “What about your singing?”
    And I had become wretched now.
    “You’re never going to leave them, are you?”
    I should have ended it in that moment, but the loyal man that I believed myself to be did not want to let her down. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t the man she had fallen for. What if I could manage both lives? I would let things ride. I would keep everyone happy, I told myself.
    “We can see about a baby,” I muttered, and poured