Page 9 of The Devil Gets His Due

Myrock-bottom moment, waking up married to the odious Graham Tate four months ago was a little seedier and a lot less blameless. I’ve tried to come up with a way that it isn’t entirely my fault, but I haven’t, just yet.

When a movie is eventually made about my life (Keeley Connolly: The Doctor in Dior), we’ll have to finesse this whole situation so I come across a little more sympathetic. And why not? The movie will bear little resemblance to reality anyway. I will be played by a sixteen-year-old, for instance, which is twenty-nine for women in Hollywood years, and Graham will be played by an actor in his late fifties, which is a Hollywood thirty-four for men. The National Institutes of Health—where I just completed my three-month observership—will be ivy-covered and idyllic rather than a soulless concrete jungle in the middle of DC’s blandest suburb.

I’m sure they can find a way to make my rock-bottom moment sympathetic to the masses in much the same manner.

I still can’t believe it happened, but the one silver lining to this mess is that it provided me the kick in the ass I clearly needed; I haven’t had a single drink since that night. Initially, this was because I was horrified I’d married Graham. Then it was because I was exhausted— something about the long hours and DC’s endless gray winter have sapped my will to live. Thank God I’m finally back in LA.

I drag my bags to the curb at LAX where Gemma now stands, waving.

Her smile fades as I approach. “My God, Keeley, you’re skin and bones.”

Yet my jeans wouldn’t button this morning. I don’t want to think about that now.

I sling my suitcase into her trunk. “DC sucked. The weather was miserable, the food made me sick, even the smell of theairmade me sick.”

She raises a brow. “I grew up in DC and I’ve never once noticed a difference in the food or the smell of the air.”

She’s wrong. The smell is revolting. And the smell of the damp paper towels in the hospital bathroom will haunt me the rest of my days. I nearly passed out every time I peed, trying to hold my breath.

“I was busy,” I tell her. “Too busy to eat. And now I need tacos. The Tex-Mex there left much to be desired.”

We go to my favorite restaurant, where I want one of everything on the menu but don’t have the stomach for more than a few bites.

I push the plate away. “I guess DC is still in my blood.” I yawn. All I want in the whole damn world is to sleep.

“Keeley, you look green right now. Has this been going on a while?”

It’s the precise conversation my mother had with her best friend, at our kitchen table. I was fourteen at the time, and I can still recall the way my stomach began to sink, how I went from thinking everything was okay to realizing I could lose my mom, too, just like my cousins lost theirs the winter before.

“I’m just tired. It’s been a long few months.”

Gemma stares at me. “You’re not pregnant, right?”

I roll my eyes…she should know me better thanthat. “My IUD is ninety-nine percent effective, and condoms are ninety-eight percent effective…which leaves me a hundred and ninety-seven percent unable to get pregnant. I’m pretty sure that means it could reverse anexistingpregnancy.”

Gemma’s laugh is muted. “I don’t think that’s what it means. If you’re not pregnant…I mean, given your family history, don’t you think you should get checked out?”

I wince. I’ve tried very hard not to put it all together—the unexplained fatigue, the nausea—but when my pants wouldn’t button this morning, my first thought was of my mom. She’d barely gotten her diagnosis before the build-up of fluid in her stomach began, a sign her cancer was far more advanced than we knew.

“I’m too busy to worry about this now,” I insist, willfully ignoring that I once heard my mom say the exact same thing. “My job starts Monday, and once I get settled here, I’ll be fine.”

But even if I can lie to her, I can’t lie to myself; I’m really dying, or I’m pregnant—and I don’t want to be either of those things.

Knowingyour time on this planet will be brief is kind of like taking a trip: you’re not going to house hunt or attempt to make anythingmeaningful, but you’ll splurge on good restaurants and have a lot more pina coladas at noon.

Honestly, dying young is not all bad. People will still talk about how pretty I was at the funeral, for instance, and I will never have to worry about outliving my retirement savings, not that I’d ever have put money away in the first place.

Okay, I guess the silver linings are limited, but I can deal with that as long as I’m not leaving someone behind. I don’t want to subject anyone to what I went through when my mom died, what my cousins went through whentheirmom died.

And that’s why I finally take a pregnancy test—many hours after Gemma dropped me off—and burst into tears at the sight of two identical pink lines; because I’m okay with dying, but I can never be okay with saddling a kid with the grief that follows.

“You appear to be about sixteen weeks along,” says Julie, my ob/gyn, the next day.

Sixteen weeks. It’s somehow worse than I was expecting to hear, though I know it’s dated back to the last period, not conception. I’m just a lot further into the stupidest mistake of my life than I imagined.

She continues sliding the transducer over my stomach. I make a point of looking at her, not the screen, because I don’t want to get attached to the sight of something I might not choose to keep. “Due October eighth. I assume you haven’t had a period for a while.”

I shake my head, stunned. I thought it was stress. I just…I don’t understand. “IUDs are foolproof.”

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