Turn 13 of 226

Tell Diane the truth — I feel amazing and I don't know why

Lena looks at Diane and sees the tremor in her hands, the rigid set of her shoulders, the way her jaw is clenched so tight the muscles in her neck stand out like cables. Diane is a woman who has spent her entire career being the person who handles things, and right now she is not handling this. Lena recognizes the expression because she used to wear it herself — the look of someone trying to hold a shape that their body no longer fits.

"Diane," Lena says, and her voice is quiet. Not soothing. Not defensive. Just quiet, the way a person speaks when they have nothing to perform.

"I know you were sent by Marcus. I know this isn't just a friendly check-in. And I know you need something to take back to him. But I'm not going to give you a version of the truth that fits in a report, because there isn't one."

She shifts in her chair and her belly presses forward, the warm weight of it settling against the desk edge with a soft sound. A belch rises through her chest — deep, resonant, entirely unforced — and she lets it roll out into the room without breaking eye contact. Diane's left eye twitches again. The smell of four days of unwashed skin and old food and Lena's body sits between them like a third person in the room.

"I made a wish," Lena says.

The word hangs in the fluorescent light. Diane blinks.

"A wish. Like — a birthday candle? A fountain?"

"Like standing in my bathroom and saying I wish I could feel comfortable in my body for once." Lena spreads her hands on her belly, palms flat, fingers wide. The warmth pulses beneath them, steady and approving.

"And something heard me. I don't know what. I don't know how. But my body started changing and my mind started changing and I have spent every day since then feeling better than I have ever felt in my life. I ate until my fridge was empty and I liked it. I exercised until my muscles gave out and I liked it. I sat here today and burped and farted in my own office and did the best work I've done in months and I liked all of it. Every single part."

Diane has not moved. She is standing with her arms at her sides now, the cardigan hanging loose, and her face has gone through confusion and out the other side into something blank and open — a person standing in a room where the rules have been removed and finding that she does not know how to stand without them. Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out. She closes it. She looks at the door, then back at Lena, then at the quarterly summary glowing on the screen, then at Lena's bare feet on the carpet, and the circuit of her gaze is the circuit of a woman trying to find one thing in this room that she can file.

"You're telling me," Diane says, and her voice is very careful, each word placed like a stone across a river, "that you made a wish. And it came true."

"I'm telling you that I feel amazing and I don't know why," Lena says. "That's the only part I actually understand. The rest is — I don't know. I don't know what it is. But I know it's real. I can feel it right now."

She presses her hands deeper into her belly and the warmth responds, a pulse that runs through her entire body like a low note on a cello, and she watches Diane watch her and knows that she has just given her coworker a story that cannot be carried anywhere. Not to Marcus. Not to HR. Not to anyone. It is too strange to repeat and too sincere to dismiss, and Diane is standing in the exact center of that impossibility with her sensible flats and her reading glasses and her shaking hands, looking at Lena the way a person looks at a door they cannot open and cannot walk away from.