MOMMY ISSUES | Tamber

22

The front door swung open and Tara breezed in, her arms laden with shopping bags overflowing with tiny onesies, stuffed animals, and various baby supplies. She beamed radiantly, the picture of an expectant mother's glow.

"Honey, I'm home! You'll never believe what adorable little outfits I fou—" Tara's cheerful greeting died on her lips as she took in Amber standing rigidly in the living room. Her wife's face was an inscrutable mask, her eyes glinting like shards of emerald ice.

"Amber...? What's wrong?" Tara's voice faltered, the radiant smile slipping away.

Silence stretched between them, tangibly fraught. Tara carefully set down her purchases, her mouth pulling into a hesitant frown.

"It's not mine," Amber said flatly.

Tara froze, feeling the chill of those three clipped words raise gooseflesh along her arms. She laughed nervously to deflect the swiftly encroaching dread.

"What... what isn't yours, babe?" she asked, her voice shaky.

"The baby," Amber replied levelly.

The jarring statement hung in the air with all the oppressive weight of a physical thing, sapping the levity from Tara's features. She stared into Amber's shuttered countenance, her chest leaden.

"How did you—?" Tara began, her throat thick with anxiety.

"Did Sam tell you?" Tara cut in brusquely.

Tara blinked at the non-sequitur, startled until the implication crystallized. Her cheeks paled as she shook her head minutely.

"Of course not," Amber continued, a mirthless approximation of a chuckle escaping her lips. "Because that bitch would never risk ruining her little crusade of poisoning you against me again."

Amber prowled a step closer, her burning viridian gaze searing into Tara, who automatically retreated a pace.

"No, it's worse than that, isn't it? Much worse," Amber's voice dripped with disgust.

"Amber, please—just let me explain—" Tara pleaded.

"I'm not a fool, Tara!" Amber overrode her. "Maybe you've convinced yourself otherwise with whatever deranged justifications, but I can do the bloody math!" She sneered. "The baby was conceived sometime during those weeks I lost you to that sadist."

Tara recoiled as if physically struck, her own features hardening against that all-too-accurate depiction of her ordeal. Amber's beautiful mouth pulled into an ugly rictus sneer.

"So tell me," Amber pressed, her voice laced with venom, "while he was taking you over and over and over again against your will... did he hold some vile fantasy of siring a bastard in you? Did he—"

"Enough! God, just—Please, don't talk about it that way!" Tara exploded, anguished.

"Why, because stating it so plainly is too grotesque for your delicate sensibilities?!" Amber's voice was merciless. "This is the bald truth, Tara—he defiled you in the worst way imaginable and now you're set on rearing his devil's spawn!"

Her words spiraled with scorching vitriol, loathing pulsing with each furious inhalation until her chest heaved like a forged bellows. Tara shrank in on herself, flinching violently as she pressed trembling hands to her belly, shielding the life sheltered there from Amber's wrath with a haunted, animal desperation.

"Stop it..." Tara whispered brokenly.

"We're supposed to celebrate that defilement by pretending it's a precious gift, our miracle?! Well, I won't do it!" Amber declared, her tone unyielding.

"You don't have to!" Tara's eyes blazed. "This has never been about you—"

"Then what exactly have these past months entailed for me?" Amber's cackle was scathing. "Yet another drawn-out masquerade where I pour my whole existence into your lies, resign myself to forever looking at the face of your r—" Her voice cracked on the ultimate obscenity, her features twisting with revulsion. She whirled away abruptly, gripping the kitchen countertop white-knuckled until the stone creaked from the strain.

Tara watched Amber's heaving back in horror-struck silence, tears coursing unheeded down her ashen cheeks. When Amber finally gathered herself to speak again, her tone was one of eerie, embittered calm.

"I deserve better than to serve as guardian to another man's atrocity against the woman I love," Amber said quietly.

"That's not what this—my child is not an atrocity, it's my—" Tara began, her voice hoarse with agony.

"Your one good thing, isn't that what you told Sam?" Amber rounded on her again.

Tara stared at her aghast, comprehension dawning chillingly. Amber laughed bitterly, tasting the rankness of betrayal upon its edge.

"Yes, I heard every sordid detail of your little heart-to-heart over that cafe's baby monitor before intercepting the incriminating footage," Amber sneered. "More lies, more obfuscations from my darling Tara, piled atop the twisted, rank underbelly of your secrets!"

This cauldron of fury radiated from Amber in nearly physical waves, forcing Tara backward until her shoulders met the wall with a dull thud. She searched Amber's glacial features with agonized hope for shreds of the tenderness they'd shared. But all remnants of her wife's once-boundless compassion had evacuated, abandoning them to the sucking void of hatred's gyre.

Amber's eyes bored into her, glittering and unrecognizable as a stranger's.

"Consider this marriage over," Amber said with finality. "I want you out of my home by tonight, before I take more permanent measures to excise this defilement from my life once and for all."

Tara's knees buckled as if the tendons had been severed, a single wail of tormented capitulation dragged from her very marrow. She sank to the floor, utterly collapsing under the weight of her umbral grief as Amber swept from the apartment in a torrent of parting footsteps.

Alone, swallowed in the glaring silence, Tara dissolved into heaving, mourning sobs that wracked her entire body curled protectively around her only salvation. The last dregs of tranquility had abandoned her now, aspirations of serenity scattered like ashes in the vortex of her severed life's ruins.

And so she wept into the hollow cavity of her shattered spirit, begging the gods for the safe harbor that perpetually eluded her, until the bitter forces of this existence tore back their cresting clutch and drew her beneath their merciless draughts once more.