Six rolls her head and eyes me. “I’m thinking about how much I hate the holidays,” she says.
“Why? They’re the best. No classes, lots of food, we get to sit around and be fat and lazy.”
She doesn’t laugh. She just looks sad. And then it hits me why she hates holidays, and I feel like an idiot, and I want to apologize but I don’t know how. So instead, I slip my fingers through hers and squeeze her hand. “Do holidays make you think about him?”
She nods. “Always.”
I don’t know what to say to that. While I’m trying to think of a way to make her feel better, she rolls onto her side and faces me.
I let go of her hand and reach up to her cheek, stroking it with my thumb. Her eyes are so sad and I want to kiss her eyelids, as if that’ll make that look go away. It won’t. It’s always there, hidden behind fake smiles.
“Do you ever think about him?” she asks.
“Yes,” I admit. “Not in the way you do, I’m sure. You carried him for nine months. Loved him. Held him. I didn’t know about him until I already knew the outcome, so I don’t think it left as big of a hole in me as it did you.”
A single tear rolls down her cheek and I’m glad we’re talking about this, but also very, very sad for her. I think this has affected her a lot more than I realized.
“I wish I could make it better for you,” I say, pulling her against my chest. I always try to use humor to fix the sad things, but humor can’t fix this and it’s all I know. “It scares me because I don’t know how to make you happy.”
“I’m scared I’ll always be sad.”
I’m scared she’ll always be sad, too. And of course I would take whatever version of Six I can get, whether that’s happy or sad or mad, but for her sake, I want her to be happy. I want her to forgive herself. I want her to stop worrying.
It’s a while before she starts talking again. And when she does, her voice is shaking. “It feels like…” She sighs heavily before she continues. “It’s like someone took a huge chunk out of my chest. And there are two parts of me now that don’t connect. I feel so disconnected, Daniel.”
Her painful admission makes me wince. I kiss the top of her head and just hold her. I don’t know what to say that’ll make her feel better. I never know what to say. Maybe that’s why I don’t ask her about him, because I feel like she carries all the burden and I don’t know how to lift it off of her.
“Does it help you to talk about it?” I ask her. “Because you never do.”
“I didn’t think you wanted to know.”
“I do. I just didn’t think you wanted to talk about it. But I do want to know. I want to know everything if you feel like telling me.”
“I don’t know. It might make me feel worse, but I do sometimes want to tell you about it all.”
“Then tell me. What was it like? The pregnancy?”
“Scary. I hardly left my host family's house. I think I was depressed, now that I look back on it. I didn’t want anyone to know, not even Sky, because I had already made up my mind that I would put him up for adoption before I came back. So I kept it all to myself and didn’t tell anyone back home because I thought it would make the decision more bearable if no one else knew about it. I thought it was a brave choice at the time, but now I wonder if it was a scared choice.”
I pull back and look her in the eyes. “It was both. You were scared and you were brave. But most of all, you were selfless.”
That makes her smile. Maybe I’m actually doing something right, here. I think of more questions to ask her. “How did you find out you were pregnant? Who was the first person you told?”
“I was late for my period, but I thought it might have been the travel and being in an entirely foreign situation. But when I didn’t get it the second time, I bought a test. I took it and it wasn’t one of those plus- or minus-sign tests. It was the kind that said, “pregnant” or “not pregnant,” but it was in Italian. It said “Incinta.” I had no idea what that meant, and I had taken the test at school, so I couldn’t use my phone to Google it because it was in my locker. So after my last class, I asked the American teacher at my school what incinta meant, and when she said, “Pregnant,” I started crying. So...I guess Ava was technically the first person I told.”