Chapter 11: Faithless Woman, To Deceive Me
It is the moment I stop anticipating it that it finally happens.
I'm fashioning some arrows on the living room floor, my materials spread out around me, and Gale is skinning a couple squirrels in the kitchen. There's a knock on the front door, and I look up, surprised.
"Can you get that?" my husband calls from the kitchen. "My hands are dirty."
"Sure," I say, climbing to my feet. I can't imagine who would be visiting us at this hour, but maybe it's one of Gale's coalminer friends. Opening the front door, I'm not prepared for who I see.
Analise.
My heart leaps into my throat as I stare at the person on our front step. Although the woman wears a scarf to conceal her blonde locks, I recognize that face anywhere; it haunts my dreams most nights. Analise glowers at me, her blue eyes flashing. "I knew it was you," she sneers, and I blink, my mouth going dry.
"Wh-what?" I squeak, my grip tightening on the doorknob.
Analise pulls something out of her pocket—a piece of paper—and she unfolds it, shoving it into my chest. Shaking, I grab it to look at it. My stomach drops to my feet. It's the drawing Peeta had sketched of me in the Meadow. "You're a filthy fucking whore, you know that, right?" Analise hisses at me, and I blanch.
I sense Gale behind me before he even speaks. "What's going on?" he asks, a hint of an edge to his voice, and Analise's glare shifts to him.
"I'd appreciate it if you kept your Seam slut away from my husband from now on," she snaps before she spins around and stomps away into the night.
I'm too afraid to turn around. Gale snatches the drawing from my hands, and when I finally look at him, the glint in his eyes is murderous.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
"I fucking knew it," he mutters, crushing the paper in his fist, and I hastily shut the door.
"Gale..."
"So, you are fucking him," he accuses. I can't answer him, but my silence is confirmation enough. His jaw clenches and unclenches. "Fucking the baker's son. I can't believe you, and then you lied to me about it—"
"I didn't!" I interject. "I mean, I-I wasn't, then." I cringe, and his lip curls.
"So—what? You figured you'd just go ahead and fuck him then? Figured you might as well because I already accused you of it?"
"N-no, it wasn't like that," I say, my voice trembling, and his nostrils flare.
"No? Then tell me what it was like," he demands, but when I don't respond, he seizes my wrist, yanking me toward him. "Tell me, damn it! How long have you been fucking him?" he yells.
I flinch, tears welling in her eyes. "Just—just a month, or so, I guess," I whisper fearfully, not sure if he is going to hit me. He's never been violent with me in the past—but then again, I've never cheated on him before.
"Oh, just a month or so, huh?" Gale sneers, throwing my arm aside, and I rub my wrist. He turns away from me, his hands tugging at his hair.
"Gale," I try. "I'm sorry—"
He punches the wall abruptly then, making me jump in shock. He punches it again before whirling back to look at me. "I can't believe you! You cheat on me with some Townie asshole, and you're sorry?"
"I am!" I cry, but he laughs, a harsh, cruel kind of laugh.
"Not as sorry as you're both gonna be," he hisses, pushing around me to fling the door open. My eyes widen as I realize what Gale is going to do.
"Gale, please, don't!" I shriek after him as he bounds down the front steps. "It's my fault! I'm the one you're mad at!"
He stops, hesitating a few feet from our front porch before he bolts back inside. "Tell me where he lives," he demands, and a strange relief actually fills me when I realize he doesn't know. Gale has fallen off hunting ever since we got married, and even when we were making trades together, he made a point of going into Town to make barters with our few Merchant clients as little as possible. I shake my head desperately. "Tell me, god damn it!"
"No! If you're gonna yell at someone, then yell at me!" I cry.
"You want me to yell at you? Fine!" He slams the door shut and advances on me, and I back up. "You're a lying, selfish, miserable bitch, and you only care about yourself and what you want!" I wince, biting down on my lip, hard, as tears slip down my cheeks. He snorts derisively, glaring at me. "Do you even know how many opportunities I had to sleep with someone else? Do you even know how many women throw themselves at me? But you know what I didn't do? I didn't fuck them behind your back!"
I'm sure that's true; Gale is a desirable partner, at least in the Seam. I don't have to wonder why he didn't take advantage of those opportunities—because he's a decent person.
"I'm sorry, Gale, I'm so sorry," I whimper, stepping toward him, but he jerks away from me.
"Get out."
My eyes widen. "What? Gale—"
"Get the fuck out of my house!" he yells. I shrink back, the heat of his glare knocking the air from my lungs, and then I flee into the night. I hear the door slam behind me as I run. I don't even realize where I'm heading until I find herself at my mother's house. The door's locked, so I knock frantically. When Mother answers the door, I burst into tears.
"Katniss, what's wrong?" she asks, leading me inside, and I swipe at my tears.
"G-Gale and I had a fight. Can I stay here?" I stammer, and Mother's face softens as she pulls me into a hug.
"Of course," she murmurs, and she just strokes my hair as I cry on her shoulder.
I stay at Mother's for a while. Gale refuses to talk to me when I come back to our house, brushing past me with a tight "I can't look at you right now" on his way out the door to the Hob. Defeated, I pack up some of my clothes and a few of my personal items and take it back to Mother's. I don't tell her what we are fighting about—I'm too ashamed—and she doesn't push for a reason; Mother's rarely pried into my business, probably because of our strained relationship when I was a teenager.
"It's a bad one," is all I tell her. "I really hurt him this time, Mom."
I don't see Peeta while I'm at Mother's; I have no idea what happened between him and Analise, if he knew his wife had confronted me, if he has even sought me out to talk or knows where I am at this point. School starts up again while I'm living with Mother, so I know he's busy again. I can't deny that it hurts, though; I had anticipated ending our affair at the end of summer, but I'd wanted at least one last day with him, a chance to say goodbye.
Maybe it's for the best this way. I spend a couple days in hiding before I force myself to set up my booth in the Hob again. This time, the patrons throw me knowing glances, whispering with each other as they pass me. I grit my teeth and try to hold my head up. At least, Sae and Ripper don't let on that they know what happened. I also hunt, but I don't trade in Town, not yet.
Not once on my hunting trips do I encounter Peeta in the Meadow.
The stress of the situation is still making me sick. I feel nauseated most days, my stomach tight with anxiety. Often, I suffer a pounding headache, which makes trying to do business in the Hob unpleasant for me and, I'm sure, for others. I try to refrain from snapping at patrons who throw me nasty looks, but I don't hesitate to glare back at them.
I've never claimed to be a nice person. Now, everyone else knows it. Well, good.
Getting out of bed is hard most days. All I really want to do is sleep and shut out the rest of the world, but I don't want to worry Mother any more than necessary; I don't want to have to admit to her out loud what I've done, though I imagine the gossip has to have reached her by now. If Mother knows, she doesn't let on.
It isn't until I'm hunched over the toilet, puking up my lunch, that it crosses my mind that something else might be making me sick. I'd been skinning a rabbit at Mother's kitchen table when the smell made my stomach roil—an unprecedented development in my 19 years of hunting.
As I rinse my mouth out in the bathroom sink, I stare at my pasty, haggard reflection and freeze. I try to recall my last period; I bled some a few weeks ago, a couple days after I'd taken the wild carrot seeds. It hadn't lasted long at all, but I'd assumed I was menstruating and the seeds had done their job.
But maybe they hadn't, after all.
Shit.
I find Mother in the living room re-stitching a seam in a ratty shirt. "Mom," I say, my voice strained. Mother looks up, her brow creased. "I—I think I, I think I might be pregnant." The word tastes awful in my mouth.
Her eyes widen, and she carefully sets her shirt down. "Are you sure?"
"I don't know. I haven't been feeling well, but I just thought...I just threw up. For no reason. I don't think the seeds worked."
Mother stands up and crosses to a hutch in the living room where she stores her medical supplies. She rifles through a drawer and pulls out an immunoassay test strip, then she moves into the kitchen and grabs a glass, holding it out to me. "Go into the bathroom and get me a urine sample."
After I return the cup to my mother, who sticks the test strip into the urine, I pace the kitchen until she forces me to sit down in a chair at the table. I'm too scared to watch the strip, so I bury my face in my folded arms on the table. All I can hear is my own quick, heavy breathing as Mother slowly strokes my head.
"Katty," Mother says quietly a few minutes later, and I tense. "It's positive."
My arms muffle my agonized moan, and I squeeze my eyes tightly. But I jerk my head up, looking at Mother wildly. "I can't—I can't be. You have to give me something else."
She sighs, settling down in a chair beside me. "Katniss, honey, are you sure you want to do this? I know you and Gale are going through a rough patch right now, but maybe...maybe this is a good thing."
I just stare at her, a new wave of terror gripping my heart. I have to tell her. "Mom...it's not Gale's."
She blinks, the corners of her mouth turning down slightly. "What?"
I try to swallow the cotton ball that has sprouted in my mouth. "It's not...his. I slept with someone else." Tears spring to my eyes before the words have even left my mouth.
Mother's lips part in shock, and she doesn't speak for a moment. "Oh...oh, dear," she murmurs, and I look away, furiously blinking against my tears, but a couple slip down my cheeks anyway. Mother sighs again and covers my hand with her own, squeezing gently. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No. I don't know," I mutter, swiping at my tears angrily. Then I sigh. "Gale and I..." It wasn't his fault, I have to tell myself. He hadn't made me do anything. "I just haven't been happy for a while, Mom. We fight all the time, and I can't—won't—give him what he wants. And I just—instead of doing the decent thing and ending things with him, I...I had sex with someone else."
Mother furrows her brow. "Just once? Sometimes, people make mistakes—"
"No," I interrupt. Mother might think a single shag - a lapse in judgment – is excusable, but I don't. I remember the guilt I felt when Peeta and I were still redressing after we shagged on my couch. "Many times. I—I had an affair with another man. For a month...longer, really." Because even though we didn't have sex right away, I realize now what we'd been doing all those weeks prior to.
Mother opens and closes her mouth a few times. "Who—can I ask who it was with?"
I shift uncomfortably, chewing on my lip. "Peeta Mellark," I mumble, and Mother's eyes widen.
"Peeta Mellark?" she repeats, and I nod, dropping my gaze to the table.
Mother is silent for a while, too long, and I can't take it anymore. "I know, I'm a horrible person! You don't have to say it!" I bemoan, a new wave of tears welling in my eyes.
"No, you're not—"
"Yes, I am! Who does that? What kind of person does that to her husband?"
Mother sighs again, squeezing my hand. "Katty...did I ever tell you how your father and I got together?" she asks, her voice tight, and I look at her, sniffling.
"You said that you heard him singing in Town one day and that he had the most beautiful voice you'd ever heard."
She smiles wistfully. "He did, though I think you could've given him a run for his money." I roll my eyes at this, but she continues, "Did I ever tell you that I was dating someone else at the time I met your father?"
I narrow my eyes. Well, this is news. Though I can't say I'm entirely surprised. People say Mother was the prettiest girl raised in Town, back in her day. "No..."
Mother leans back in her chair. "I was. We were—well, we weren't engaged, but it was pretty serious. Everyone thought we were going to get married, and I did, too, honestly. I loved him, but...when I met your father, it was different—it was fire. I fell in love with him so hard and so fast. It was scary, and—well, I wasn't married yet, but I didn't break it off with my boyfriend right away. I...I did some things that I regret, and I know I hurt him when I finally told him about your father." Her face looks pained, and she has a faraway look in her eyes. She shakes her head. "I'm not sure how he ever managed to forgive me for it, but somehow he did. It took me a lot longer to forgive myself. He never said a word against me, though, in all this time, even when everyone else I knew turned their backs on me."
I stare at my mother, mystified. I always knew my uncle and maternal grandparents disowned her when she married Daddy, but I always thought it was for just that reason. Come to find out, she jettisoned a more socially favorable relationship for my father. "Who was he?"
She purses her lips, which spread into a sad smile. "Faren Mellark."
I gape at her. "What? Peeta's father?" She nods. "Wha—how come you never told me this?"
Mother sighs, fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "I didn't think you needed to know. I had no idea it would ever be relevant," she replies quietly, and I slump in my chair as I digest the information. Mother and Peeta's father used to...and now Peeta and I...I don't know what to think, what to say.
Mother stands up then, crossing to the hutch to grab more supplies. "The point I was trying to make, Katniss, is that—sometimes, things happen. Things you're not prepared for, things you might not be equipped to deal with. And sometimes, you hurt people with your thoughtless actions, even if you don't mean to." Crossing back to the kitchen, she sets down two vials of dried herbs and a mortar and pestle.
Sitting in the chair across from me, she continues, "What you did was horrible, but I still don't think you're a horrible person. You hurt Gale, and you feel bad about that—good, don't forget that feeling. Learn from it. If you can remember this, you'll do better at dealing with others' feelings in the future. I didn't avoid hurting Faren altogether, but I did end things between us before someone could get really hurt."
She reaches out to wipe away some of my tears when they start to fall harder. I tremulously flash her a bitter smile. "Guess you handled it better than I did."
Her face knots in consternation. "I grew up differently, I think. I'm sorry that... I failed you, after your father died. I'm sorry if what happened to me changed the way you connect with other people, how you love. I wish I could go back and change what happened," she says sadly, and I look away in discomfort. "There's a lot of things I should have handled differently. You're not the only person who makes mistakes."
I swallow, desperately wiping at my tears, but I'm unsure how to respond to that. No doubt Daddy's death and my mother's crippling depression and emotional abandonment affected me, but I tried to forgive her years ago.
With a final sigh, Mother opens the vials in front of her and dumps some into the mortar. "Do you think you know when conception occurred?" she asks, her tone stern and business-like, the way she gets with her other patients.
I wrack my brain, fidgeting with my braid. "About four, five weeks ago," I say quietly, my cheeks flushing with shame. It was when the condom ripped. It had to have been.
She nods. "I need you to put a pot of water on the stove," she instructs. "I'm going to make a tea of blue and black cohosh for you to drink."
"Will it work better than the seeds?" I ask in a small voice, getting up to fill the kettle with water. She shoots me a look, her face bleak.
"It should. It's going to make you a little sick, though."
