The light in the bathroom has always been too annoying but today the way in reflected over those two pink lines made Elena wants to.screem. To anyone else, it was just an object but to Elena,it was a death sentence for her peace of mind. Two pink lines, was he going to accept it or reject it her entire fate depends on the phone call she was going to make.
The TV was playing the muffled sounds of a cartoon downstairs. Their five-year-old daughter, Maya, was safely occupied, blissfully unaware that her mother's world had just shifted on its axis, somethings are about to change.
Though Maya wanted a baby brother or sister but her father was another thing.
To her the news might be meaningful bit to the family and home things might change.
Elena's hands shook as she pressed the phone to her ear. She waited, counting the rings, her heart thumping against her ribs like a hit drum the vibration of the heart veins if one pays attention could hearit, good thing she was all alone.
When the call was finally received Elena almost fell on the floor her body shook so hard that she didn't even wait for a
"hello."
"I took a test," she whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears.
"I'm pregnant again." A moment of silence that fear came creeping back, she felt like a very thick darkness was about to swallow her.
There was a long, suffocating pause and when Tom finally spoke, there was no joy, no concern, not even a hint of surprise. There was only a sharp breathed edge of irritation followed by a click and she needed not to be told what next or what was his take, she didn't dare listen but she forced herself to hear from him his answers.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah... why?" his voice rasped through the line.
"Why are you people always stressing me out? How did you get pregnant? Weren't you taking care of that? Didn't you take the pills?"
Elena felt the air leave her lungs as if she'd been punched.
"Taking care of it? TOM, we were
together. This isn't just on me."
"I took the pills yes, but it just didn't work, what am i supposed to do!" Elena said, feeling irritation and beginning to question whether she was blind or mentally ill to love a man like Tom.
"I can't deal with this right now," he snapped, his tone
dismissive, as if she were a telemarketer calling at dinner time.
"You need to know what to do. Figure it out."
Before she could scream, before she could even breathe, the line went dead and the phone slipped from her hands into the washroom bowl, good thing it was a samsang waterproof phone and so she scooped it.
Elena stared at the screen in disbelief. 'You people.' She replayed the words in her mind. He had talked to her as if she and their daughter were a collective burden, an external problem he was tired of solving.
"Haha, are we now considered 'you people'? Hehee was this fate playing tricks on me or something? No no no! Somebody wake me up, somebody wake me up! Did he just tell me that? A man who has been sleeping beside me for 6 years. Someone to tell me that I am not watching Chinese dramas because I might go crazy. Or wait, are we on a filming set, but I am not an actor.," Elena said to herself, passing from point to point, praying that everything should be a lie.
"Okay, he is going to call me in a few minutes, let me relax, calm dawn, Elena calm dawn, you are alright and he didnt mean it, nothing has happened," Elana didn't realize how much unstable she has become, the didn't realize she was crying, a mother of now two and discarded? No it was all but a dream.
She slowly walked to the top of the stairs, looking down at Maya. The little girl was the image of her father the same stubborn chin, the same deep-set eyes.
Elena felt a wave of nausea, but it wasn't caused by pregnancy kind, but the 'my- life- is- ending' kind. She came to to the realization that she was bound to a man who could throw away her emotions with a single click.
Little did Elena know, Tom wasn't in a business meeting or stuck in traffic.
At that very moment, he was sliding his phone into his pocket and turning back to a candlelit table at a restaurant across town.
How painful this betrayal is, the woman by the name Sandra, who has been working with Tom has his project manager the very woman that, he has been comparing Elena with was the very woman, he has been seeing.
"Hallo darling, how are you," she hugged him and said in a seductive voice.
"Not good at all," he said.
"Don't tell me it's that woman again, and here I thought you were going to abandon me tonight, " she said with a smile behaving like a snake, what's wrong with this woman.
"Hey, darling when are you going to make us official? Because honestly I am tired of hiding in the shadows, it's been 4 years now, tell me, what else are you waiting for, don't tell me that it's that woman?" Sanndra said. To her she didn't know why Elena was clinging to something that is already broken.
She is not loved and therefore she should create that space for her.
"Soon darling soon, everything is going to be in place, but my daughter, " he said.
"What is it that you are afraid of don't forget that the girl in question is not even yours," she said.
'what the hell is happening did they betray Elena?'
"But she saw me and thinks that I am the father, furthermore I was the one with her that night, drinking with her," he said.
"But you sold her off to that man, and furthermore that man will not come looking for you or something, he gave you money that this girl has been enjoying together with the mother, darling you are not guilty, all I want right now is to do away with her," Sandra said.
Tom offered a charming smile to the woman seated opposite him a woman who wore silk instead of cotton, and
who didn't have the "stress" of a family waiting at home, she was here to enjoy life and money, while Elena could stress out with the wife duties at home, but that was not enough for her, she wanted him for herself.
The betrayal had already begun. Tom hands hung up on his past, hoping to bury it, and to go home to her and hear her say that all were lies, she was just joking.
But Elena, standing at the top of those stairs looking at her daughter felt a new kind of strength creeping inside her heart life must continue.
If he wanted to be free of the "stress," she would make sure he
never had the privilege of calling them his family again, the best gift Elena could give to this man was, space and peace in silence.