Coda (Songs of Submission #9) (17 page)

Then I heard knives clack and his footsteps coming back toward me. I calmed. Barely. He came back a bread knife and leaned over my hands.

“Stay still,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to cut you.” He put the knife to the scarf.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” His concentration stayed on my bound wrists.

“I don’t want to lose it.”

“Me neither.”

“It’s from spanking me. That’s all. You hurt me worse than I thought. Let’s not do that again, okay?”

“Sure.” He laid his hands on my wrists, pressing them apart and making the fabric between them taut. He sliced the scarf open with a
snap.

I got my arms under me and started to get up, but Jonathan pushed me down. I resisted. He pushed harder.

“Hold on. Gravity,” he said.

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“I know, I know.”

He put his arms under my shoulders and my knees and carried me to the couch. I was sore where he’d hit me. That was the reason for the blood, but he seemed worried, and I wanted to respect that. I didn’t want to be dismissive or call him silly, but his knotted brow and the taut line of his jaw made me want to stroke away his fear.

He leaned over me and caressed my cheeks. “Can you wait here while I get dressed and get you some clothes?”

“Why?”

He got up and plucked his clothes off the floor. “We’re going to the hospital.”

I got my elbows under me to sit up, and with only one arm in his shirt, he rushed to push me down.

“It’s nothing, Jonathan. I’m sure of it.” I said it to calm him, but I wasn’t sure if I believed it out of anything but necessity.

“Then humor me. Lie back.”

I did, and when he saw I’d obeyed, he trotted upstairs. I looked down at his name inside my thighs. I was drawn on like a cinderblock wall in gangland. Jonathan’s dominion over me was written in black Sharpie, his territory marked in permanent ink.

Was I losing the baby? And so what if I was? What was the big deal? I didn’t even want to have children right now. I wanted nothing to do with it. Jonathan was going to die after a tortuous wait for a second heart before the kid was in high school. What kind of selfish bitch creates a child to go through that?

All I had to do was go back to the me of a few days ago. Nothing had changed.

Except everything. Having carried that baby knowingly for two days, I’d had a cellular alchemy. The shape of my brain and my heart had shifted, grown. I wasn’t the same person. I wanted that baby. I wanted it so badly, and I didn’t even know it.

I wanted this to be nothing, an embarrassing symptom of rough sex play, but the twitch in my abdomen, the tightness told me otherwise.

Jonathan came down the stairs dressed, with a dress over his arm.

“Do you think they can save it?” I asked, my voice breaking on “save.”

“I don’t know.” He sat on the edge of the couch. “Arms up.”

I raised my arms, and he put the long, modest dress over me. He snapped out a pair of simple cotton underwear and slipped them over my ankles then drew them up my legs and over me.

“I was supposed to get rid of all that underwear,” I said.

“Sometimes you need it.” He stood beside the couch.

I heard the crunch of tires on pebbles outside. “Is it Lil?”

“Yes. I texted her.” He put his arms under me and picked me up, carrying me toward the door. “I don’t think I can drive.”

“Thank God for her.” I looped my arms around his neck, and he carried me out.

“Sir,” Lil said as she opened the back door. “Mrs. Drazen, I hope you’re all right.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.” I didn’t know why I said that. As the minutes passed, I started to think that was some whitewash of hope on a steaming pile of tragedy.

Jonathan held me tight and somehow got me in the car without putting me down. I shifted down and put my head on his lap.

Lil looked into the back. “Sequoia?”

“Yes.”

“No!” I said, rigid. I looked up at Jonathan. “No. Anywhere but there. Please. I can’t.”

“It’s the best obstetrics unit in the world, Monica.”

“I don’t care. I can’t go back there. I can’t. Let’s go to Hollywood Methodist.”

“It’s a different ward entirely.”

“Do you know how far out of my way I go to not drive past it? And it’s on Beverly, so yeah, I’d rather be late than see it. I’d rather go to the urgent care clinic on Sunset. I’d rather see the witch doctor in Silver Lake than go anywhere near that hospital. It smells like death. It’s hell. Nine stories of fucking hell, and I won’t go.”

Jonathan looked at me for a second then back at Lil. “Drive.”

“Jonathan!” I said as Lil closed the door. I tried to get up, but he pulled me down.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I know how you feel. Believe me, I get it. But that was enough blood to scare the hell out of me, and it wasn’t enough to convince me this is completely over. If we lose this baby because we went to a second-rate hospital or nowhere at all, because we were scared… well, I’d like to know how you’re going to forgive yourself. Because you’re going to have to teach me.”

I looked away from him. His gaze was going to break me. It was a wall of resolve. He was doing what he wanted to do, and I had to go along. From my angle on his lap, all I could see was the grey-blue glass of the sky, streetlights, and telephone poles zipping by. A speck of bird or plane.

He was right.

Fear was fungible, and death was forever. Overcome one to face the other. Blah blah. I didn’t want him to be right. I wanted to fall down a hole of despair or climb a pillar of hope, and reason and rationality were distractions from the choice.

Reaching for the hope, I touched his face. “I’m sure it’s fine. We’re just overreacting.”

“I hope so.”

“Didn’t Jessica miscarry? What happened?”

He turned toward the window. “We were throwing an event at the house. Some fundraiser for the artist co-op she was in. She just takes my hand and brings me into the house. Doesn’t break a beat. I’m following her, and I can see the blood inside her stockings. I picked her up and carried her to the car, but it was too late. It was a mess before we even got there. So much blood. I never saw her cry except in the front seat of my car. The pain was so bad, and you know, I asked her how long it had hurt before she told me.”

“Could they have saved it?”

“The doctor wouldn’t guarantee anything, but just said that next time we should come right away.”

I relaxed into that, watching the fancy streetlights of Santa Monica turn into the more urban, less fussy designs of the west side of LA. “I had pain yesterday, but I thought I had the flu.”

“Let’s see what happens.”

“If we lose it, do we try again?”

“I don’t know.”

That didn’t help. If he pulled back from getting what he wanted most, what he’d
always
wanted most, then I didn’t know who he was anymore.

“Did you try again with Jessica?” I flinched from my own question. It sounded petty and mean. Our situations couldn’t have been more different. But I wanted to know what to expect from him. Did he give up or truck on?

If he heard the question as cutting, he didn’t show it. “We both got checked out. I was fine, but her uterus had a shape that made it hard for her to go to term. We were fine, but it never took again. In a way, it improved things between us for a while.”

I cupped his face in my hands, and he looked down at me then leaned over and kissed me.

“This won’t end us,” he said. “I swear, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m keeping you.”

The car stopped.

“I’m ready,” I said. “If you stay by me. I’m ready.”

Lil opened the door, and Jonathan carried me through the sliding glass doors into Sequoia Hospital. Hell on earth. I closed my eyes, but the smell was still there, and the ambient noise. When something somewhere beeped, I clung to him.

JONATHAN

I
’d called ahead while gathering our clothes, and I was able to carry her right up to the second floor. We were offered a gurney outside the elevator, and I put her on it, insisting even when she clutched me. She weighed nothing to me. I could have carried her ten more miles, but I knew hospitals better than I wanted to, and she needed to be on the gurney.

We exited onto the maternity ward. The first thing I heard was people laughing, and I looked down at Monica to see if she heard it. I thought it would relax her. Maternity wards were gentle places with better results than the parts of the hospital she’d been stuck in for weeks.

Her eyes were clamped shut, as if she were a child who didn’t want to see anything scary. I was about to make some wisecrack about ocean views and a full buffet. Describe the dancing girls and rare art she was missing. Anything to calm her down. A chuckle. Even if she slapped me and told me to shut up, it would have been preferable to seeing her coiled in dread.

“Mister Drazen,” a young woman in blue scrubs said.

“Are you Dr. Blakely?” I asked. It had taken Dr. Solis seconds to recommend this young woman with the flat brown ponytail above all others.

“Yes. Dr. Solis told me you’d be coming.” She looked at Monica. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” my wife lied.

“This way, then.”

The nurse, a muscular woman in her forties with a military cut, asked a battery of stupid questions. Monica answered them with her eyes closed.

“Mister Drazen,” Blakely said as she stepped into the exam room in front of the gurney, “Dr. Solis says you’re immunosuppressed?”

“Yes?”

“You shouldn’t be in a hospital.”

Monica opened her eyes. “Go.”

“I’ll text you our findings,” Blakely said as they moved Monica from the gurney to the table.

Monica seemed so helpless, so separate from her mind and will, so corporeal as she stretched across the table. Her dress hitched above her knees, and I saw the Sharpie script of
Jo
and
erty
.

I wasn’t abdicating responsibility. Not the medical part. I knew my limitations, but I wasn’t turning my back on her. I wouldn’t let her sit, alone and hurt, while I protected my immune system. “I’ll stay, thank you.”

“Jonathan, please,” Monica said. “She’s right. I’ll be okay if you keep your phone on. Really, I’m not freaked out. You need to go.”

But she was freaked out. From the ends of her hair, through the writing on her thighs, to the tips of her toenails, she was terrified. I hadn’t known her that long and I had plenty to learn about her, but I knew goddamn well when she was lying about her comfort to protect me. We’d both done that enough to get PhDs in it.

“I’m not going,” I said then turned to Dr. Blakely. “This is my wife, and she needs me. I don’t want to hear, from either of you, that I should go home and live in a bubble and wait for a fucking text telling me what’s happening with my family.” I sat in the seat next to the table and held Monica’s hand.

“He can wear a mask outside maternity,” the nurse suggested as she tapped on a computer keyboard.

“Will you?” asked Monica.

“Fine.”

Dr. Blakely sat on a stool at the end of the table. “You’re not my patient. Dr. Solis will chew you out if you get sick. Let’s get these underpants off.”

Monica picked up her butt, and the doctor helped her slide out of them. The nurse started to pick up Monica’s dress but glanced at me once she saw the words
Jonathan’s Property.
I wanted to mention it or make a tension-splitting joke, but I didn’t want to embarrass Monica. The nurse put crinkled paper over Monica’s abdomen. The doctor spread Monica’s legs, and I thanked God Solis had recommended a woman.

“Well, no question of paternity,” she said, looking over the paper. “The baby has to work on his handwriting though.”

The joke wasn’t that good, but I was glad she’d made it. The tension fell off my wife as she laughed.

“All right.” The doctor smiled behind her mask. “Let’s see what we have here.”

Monica cringed, and I heard a squishing noise. I squeezed her hand.

“Plug is in place.”

More tension dropped off Monica. Maybe she was right. Maybe the book had been the wrong tool. Maybe I would have to start getting proper toys. I had to stop using whatever was on hand if it made her bleed.

The doctor put the sheet back and put her Monica’s legs down. The nurse wheeled a cart over.

“I’m supposed to tell you jokes,” I said to Monica. “Something clever and funny to take the edge off.”

Blakely and the nurse said things I didn’t understand, and they exposed Monica’s abdomen. So much like my own experience as a patient. Experts talking about me as if I wasn’t there, huddling together before approaching me with an approved line of bullshit.

Blakely squeezed clear gel on Monica’s abdomen as if every patient had the baby’s ownership scrawled backward on the mother.

“I’m waiting,” Monica said. “I know you have a few thousand jokes in there.”

“Knock, knock.”

She laughed as if that were the entire joke, which it was. I didn’t know any knock, knock jokes.

The ultrasound screen went live as if it had been fingerpainted in shades of grey. We watched as if it were the seventh game of the world series, but we had no idea of what we were seeing.

Silence. Too long. Shouldn’t we be hearing a heartbeat? I’d had sonograms when I was in the hospital, and I always heard whooshing. I squeezed her hand. The doctor slid the wand over Monica’s abdomen while tapping keys.

“Okay,” Blakely said. “Well, that explains it.” She pointed at a black oval. “This is the ovum, and typically we have a little peanut-shaped blur in there, and there isn’t. It’s empty.”

“What does that mean?” Monica asked.

“Well, it’s a blighted ovum. Meaning the egg was fertilized and made it to the uterus, but the cells stopped dividing. Either the cells were reproducing incorrectly or there was some other technical malfunction. Your body kept doing its job though, so you have an ovum and the beginnings of a placenta.” Blakely shut off the machine.

Monica went white, and something in me did too. I wanted to throttle this young doctor. I wanted to choke her until she admitted she was wrong, that she’d misread the images. It was all a big mistake. There was a baby in there, right as rain and thriving.