And Again (34 page)

“Hey,” I say, approaching her bed and taking her hand. There’s an odd sense of déjà vu in it, when I consider that not too long ago, I was the person in the hospital bed. The room is actually lovely, decorated more in the vein of a high-end spa than a hospital. “Nice digs.”

“I know. Just a step down from getting a hotel for this right?”

I perch on the edge of the bed. Lucy and I haven’t spoken since Sam left, and now I have no idea what to say. I motion to her stomach. “How is it so far?”

“Like the others. I keep forgetting how awful it really is, for some reason the memories never really measure up. I swear, this is it. After this, Roger is getting snipped.”

“I don’t think you should tell him that just now,” I say, taking the cup of ice chips by the bed and feeding Lucy some. “I don’t think you want Penny to have to scrape him off the floor. Or me in here during the delivery.”

“You’d be able to step up,” Lucy replies. “I think we’ve proven your toughness by now.”

“Right.” I help myself to a few ice chips from her cup and crunch them with my molars, hoping it will keep me from having to talk about anything that matters. Lucy, however, is not so easily dissuaded.

“I’m so sorry about everything that happened, Hannah.”

I nod, though I don’t look at her. I showed up because that’s
what I do when Lucy needs me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still stinging from her secrets.

“Want me to stay for a while? Give Roger a break?” I ask, praying she says no.

“Go on and help Penny. I’m sure she’ll need it,” she says, and then her face crumples into a red, wet agony, and her hand squeezes my fingers with enough force that I’m afraid of the damage she might do. Even now my fingers are slender and delicate, their muscles under-developed. I worry she’ll pull them from their sockets, like a parent who grabs his child’s arm too quickly and dislocates it. My fingertips are colorless by the time she lets go. I move them gingerly, testing all the connections.

“You okay?” she asks me, and it’s a silly question, considering she’s the one in labor. I wonder if I look a little pale, a little panicky, maybe a little like her shell-shocked husband.

“Yeah,” I reply, getting up from the bed. “Aren’t I always?”

The baby is born at 2:15 p.m. I’d spent the morning silently hoping that she’d be born quickly, like her older brother, out in three hours or so from the time we all arrived. But no, not the third child. The girl, who comes into the world dark-haired, like a wet, worn beanbag. Emma Christine. We all huddle around Lucy, a chorus of cooing faces, and I try not to watch as Roger kisses Lucy’s hair, the way he looks at his daughter. Lucy is drained and wrung out, but still glorious with the triumph of motherhood, and the envy I hold for her is finally whole, complete; a perfect sphere I can barely choke back as it rises inside me.

I stick around when Penny heads home, and Roger takes the boys to the cafeteria for snacks. I know it is the wrong time for this, for any of it. I’m exhausted, so Lucy must be half-dead. But I’m worried, in a way that I’ve never been before, that this might be the last chance for honesty between my sister and me. She must know it too, because all I have to do is sit on her bed before she starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, wiping at her eyes, making them even puffier. “I didn’t want to lie to you.”

“I know,” I reply. “Sam was always the one person you never could say no to.”

“It wasn’t that,” she replies. “I was there, Hannah. Both times. I watched him lose his dad, and then nearly lose you. And I kept his secret, I lied to you, because he deserves to be forgiven after everything he’s been through. And I knew you wouldn’t be able to.” We’re both silent for a moment. Is this what they think of me, the people who love me? Am I this vicious? I must be, because while it hurts to think of Sam, sometimes I relish in the pain because it allows me to hate him. It lets me ignore the damage I’ve done.

“I wish I could,” I reply. I think of our parents, half a world away from both of us, saving other people when their daughters need so badly to be saved. “Anyway, he’s probably better off.” The knowledge lingers, how David and I never even considered using condoms in all of our time together. How I will never be a perfect wife, a wife like Lucy. Maybe that is why I let Sam go, in the end.

Lucy brushes a hand down the side of my face. “What is it, Hannah?” she asks.

“I don’t think any of us can have children,” I reply.

“What?” She sits up a little straighter in bed, propping herself up with her arms. “What are you talking about?”

“The SUBs, all of us in the pilot program. And I think we all know it, too.”

“What makes you say that? Have the doctors said something?”

“No,” I reply. “I don’t think they know. It’s this feeling . . .” I trail off, try to find a way to explain. “You know I got pregnant once, right?”

Lucy nods. “Freshman year.”

“Yeah. It was like walking into a house and forgetting to lock the front door. You know? You’re walking around, hours later, doing something else and you just realize. The front door is unlocked. That’s how being pregnant was for me. All of a sudden, I knew, it
was a fact. I didn’t even take a test before I made the appointment.” I glance over at the little bassinet next to the bed, at the gurgling, soft little girl inside. “That’s sort of how this feels. I know it, without having to be told.”

“Jesus,” Lucy says. “That’s awful.” I laugh a little.

“It’s karma,” I reply, reveling in the dark irony of it. “I think it’s Mother Nature being a rotten, vindictive bitch because we finally beat her at her own game.”

There’s a puddle of hot blood in my underwear. I can feel that something is wrong right away, there’s a tight burn right between my hips, and the rest of me feels sweaty and tense. I find the blood in the bathroom, with my jeans bunched around my knees. I blink. No. One blink. Again and again, because I can’t even form the word, can’t even whisper it. No, no, no.

It happens fast, all in a gush of pain, a river of it, doubling me over. I grip the edge of the sink, my hand clammy and sliding against the smooth marble. I can hear the small sound of something falling into the water beneath me. At first I think it can be saved, like a bird’s egg fallen from a nest, that if it is kept warm and safe it might still become the thing that it’s meant to be. I rummage around under the sink and there’s nothing to catch it with, nothing I can use to rescue it. Instead I peer into the rusty water in the toilet bowl and it’s there, that little clot of tissue. It’s a mass of pulp, an alien thing produced from an alien body, a body that was never meant to create anything because it itself was not created by any natural means. It’s a feeling like falling down; everything in me has fallen, every bit of me.

Tom knocks on the door. I’ve been in here for a while. I wonder what someone does with a thing like this, a thing that is something and nothing at once. All potential, unrealized. I could tell Tom. I could go to the hospital. I could lie on the floor and pretend to be paralyzed. All of it seems futile. There’s nothing left to do but to get rid of it, like a dead goldfish, to staunch the bleeding with a maxi pad and open the door to face Tom. I tell him it’s the flu. A stomach
bug. Something vague that will keep him at a distance, lest he catch it from me.

I drift, in those next few days. I find an old bottle of sleeping pills in Tom’s cabinet and take two at a time, until he has to shake me awake in the evenings when he gets home from work. It frightens the kids, to see their father frightened. Even Jack keeps his distance now. Tom is worried, always worried, wants me to see Dr. Shah, or my ob-gyn. I know what he thinks, that I’m defective, that there’s something wrong with my SUB. I can’t bear to tell him that he’s right.

When I don’t want to sleep anymore, I curl up on the couch and watch
Stratford Pines
, or go into the yard and lie on my back in the grass and listen to the trees. I want to cry, but I’m not sure this body knows how. It’s difficult to conjure that pressure, that physical insistence. I think of the phantom tears I used to cry, the ones Cora would dab from my face with those embroidered handkerchiefs of hers. My body, always a betrayer, always giving me the opposite of what I need.

The next few days are worse, because once the shock of it wears off, once my new body bounces right back into humming and clicking in its normal, well-oiled efficiency, I begin to feel it. Somewhere deep inside me, there is the tiniest kernel of relief. And I hate it, and love it, that feeling. Hate it because it is selfish and cruel, it puts me in league with all the women who wish their children away, who leave their infants locked in cars on hot summer days, or feed them too much cough syrup to quiet them, or abandon them in front of fire stations. And I love it too, that feeling, because it’s proof I’m still alive. That there is still something for me to want in this world, even if it’s to want all the wrong things.

I climb the stairs to the attic, pulling out my artifacts and pressing each between the skin of my palms. There is no thrill of electricity, as if something has waved a magic wand and rendered them inert. It feels like loss, surely, as if the little embryo took the keys to
my secret world when it left my body, as if it pulled all the dreams out of me as it left. But another thought occurs to me, as I sit there. Perhaps the dream world has receded because this world has begun to unlock itself. I think of all sorts of possibilities that could exist for a woman risen from the dead, all of the ideas that occurred to me in that jail cell, when I realized I could disappear. I think of open water and mountain tops. Things I’ve never allowed myself to dream, after that night in college when the stick turned pink, when the choices weren’t mine alone anymore. All of this, the accident, the transfer, even my miscarriage, have all conspired to give me the chance to do what I’ve wanted to do since I can remember. How could anyone fault me now, after I have been so torn from my life and it has healed itself with me on the outside? I have been given the world now. How could anyone fault me for leaving?

David Jr.’s arm is in a navy blue cast that reaches from his palm to his elbow. It’s a completely helpless feeling, for my son to be injured every time I see him. To be so far away, avoiding my district and all of those unanswerable questions and probably subpoenas, unable to protect him because I can’t even protect myself.

“I’ll be home in a month, buddy. Mom says you’ll have your cast off by then,” I say, imagining the time we can spend before I return to Washington to face the Ethics Committee. Everything hinges on the FDA vote. If SUBlife passes, I might avoid charges for tampering with the study.

Maybe I’ll take David Jr. fishing. Maybe I’ll start him out hunting, even. I started younger than him, and maybe handling a gun will give him the sense of patient confidence that it instilled in me when I first went out with a rifle over my shoulder. But David Jr. looks confused by the sentiment.

“I thought Mom said you weren’t coming home,” he says, brow furrowed.

“Of course I’m coming home, buddy,” I say.

But again, he shakes his head, adamant.

“What exactly did your mother tell you?” I ask, apprehension squaring my shoulders.

“She said you were going to stay in Chicago with your girlfriend.”

“My girlfriend.” There it is, I think. Beth, showing her cards through our son. A winning play, if I ever saw one. “David, go get
your mother and put her on the phone,” I say, trying to keep my tone even.

“She said she doesn’t want to talk to you,” he says.

“Tell her she should call me in the next five minutes or I’m driving out there right now so we can talk in person, okay?” I say. David Jr. nods. “Okay, you keep your chin up son, you hear?” He nods again, and then my screen goes dark.

Four minutes later, my phone goes off. It’s Beth. “At least I know now what it takes to get you to drive up here,” she says as soon as I answer.

“What have you been saying to our son? You told him I’m not coming home?”

“I figured it might be better for you to stay in Chicago for a while,” she replies, her tone controlled, dispassionate even.