Home Another Way (27 page)
“
When
I have a miscarriage?”
Maggie’s face sagged. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yes, you did,” Beth said, her eyes darkening in a way I never thought possible for her. “You’d love to be right on this one, wouldn’t you?”
“Beth—”
“No, Mother. I don’t want to hear anymore.” She dropped the napkins she’d been folding, stomped down the hallway, and I heard a door slam.
I stood there in stunned disbelief. The Watsons—fighting? It had to be some twisted mistake, a
Twilight Zone
episode where the universe split in two, and life turned inside out.
Maggie picked up the cutting board and threw it in the sink, knife clattering against the porcelain, celery tops and pepper stems bouncing onto the counter, the floor. She slumped into a chair, hiding her face in her hand. She wore no rings, her joints like walnuts. Beth had told me Maggie had to have her wedding band cut off six years ago.
“I just want to protect her,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“That’s what mothers do.”
Yes, it was what mothers were supposed to do, hungry lionesses ready to rip apart any threat to their young. But it wasn’t what I did. Not me.
Not me.
For nearly seven months I’d carried my baby inside me—indifferent on the best days, loathe-filled on the worst. I never rested a protective hand on my belly, never pulled up my shirt to watch a foot poke against my expanding flesh. I didn’t keep my first and only clinic appointment for a prenatal checkup, and never returned the phone calls asking me to reschedule.
David had loved the baby. We would lie in bed, and he’d press his ear to my stomach, listening for gurgles or hiccups, for the sloshing of amniotic fluid. He bought a home monitor, so he could listen for the heartbeat, and strapped it on me night after night, the
woosha-woosha-woosha
filling our bedroom before he kissed my navel and fell asleep. If he could have married my torso and carted it around in a stroller until the baby was born, I think he would have.
The cramps began at twenty-seven weeks, blunt and easily ignored. Four days later, it felt as if rats were gnawing on my uterus. But I had the rehearsal for an important performance—a chamber ensemble with an intimate and renowned guest list—so I downed eight Advil and hopped the number 1 train to practice. I never made it there, fainting instead in a puddle of blood on the 66th Street platform.
I woke hours later, in a post-operation recovery room after an emergency cesarean section. I’d had a placental abruption. My baby was dead. She. A little girl. They kept her warm while I slept, and a grief counselor who looked no older than me said I should hold her; it would help me heal. So I kicked David out of the room and cradled the blanketed bundle against my chest. She weighed two pounds, had shiny pink fingernails, and a subway system map of veins beneath her skin. And red hair.
I loved her.
Now I wanted her, when it was too late. When I’d spent the last six months thinking of her as some maggoty parasite, an unwanted intruder in my life. Now I’d give anything to have used my cigarette money—I didn’t think two or three secret smokes a day could affect the pregnancy—to pay for a cab to the hospital when the discomfort first began, and David told me he thought she was moving less.
She was a real baby. We had to choose a name for the birth certificate, for the headstone. David and I still hadn’t decided on one. He wanted Zoë or Chloë, or Daisy, after his childhood
Dukes of Hazard
fantasy, but spelled with the umlaut. Daisë. I told him to pick something for the paperwork, and he went with Brenda Susan, in honor of his grandmothers, not wanting to waste one of his precious other names on a corpse.
But in my mind she was Allegra—the name I’d chosen when I first found out I was pregnant; the name I hadn’t told a soul about.
I quit smoking the day she was buried. I dropped out of Juilliard the next week.
Three months later, David wanted to try again. I snubbed him, first by sleeping on the couch, then moving to other men’s beds. And did anything, everything I could, to forget that, like my father, I was a taker of life.
I left Maggie in the kitchen—she’d finally gotten up from the table to take her pecan pie from the oven—telling her I’d call Beth to eat, and knocked on the bedroom door. Beth didn’t answer, so I went in and saw her lying on the bed, headphones on her ears and shirt pulled up to the bottom of her rib cage. She stroked her stomach softly, distractedly, like someone petting a cat while reading. I knocked louder, and she looked up, clicked off her cassette player.
“Dinner,” I said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re eating for two.”
“Did Mom send you down here?”
“If there’s one thing you should know about me by now, it’s that I’m no diplomat.” I made some ridiculous fencing motion, waggling my invisible épée toward her, quoting some fragment of Bible verse dredged up from Sunday school classes long ago. “I come not to bring peace, but the sword.”
She sat up, chuckled a little. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
I leaned against the armoire. I did my best talking while standing—conditioning, I think, from all my years on my feet with violin in hand. “Listen, Beth. Maggie—”
“Uh-huh.”
“—is really trying to look out for you.”
“Mmm.”
“And, no, she didn’t tell me to say this.” I took a guarded breath, pressure building between my ears. I hadn’t mentioned this, aloud, in more than five years. “I’m speaking from experience.”
Beth squinted, shook her head a little. “What do you mean?”
“I lost a baby once.”
“Sarah, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, sh—garbage happens, right? Anyway, my point is, for months, whenever I ran into someone who knew I’d been pregnant, they’d ask me where the baby was, how she was doing. Just like Maggie said. And I had to relive the whole thing all over again. Whether or not you agree with your mother, and whether or not she’s speaking from fear, so what? She just wants to save you some of the pain she went through.”
“I know,” Beth said, pulling the headphones off her neck and, with a flick of her wrist, pitching them across the bed. “It’s just harder than I thought. Being married and here, at the inn, still living with Mom. There’s no . . . break. From her, I mean. I still feel like a kid, not a woman with a husband to care for, and a baby on the way. I think I’m trying too hard to flaunt my independence.”
“A little late for the teenage rebellion thing.”
“I won’t be twenty until September.”
“Then I guess you have five months to get it out of your system. You’ve got the door slamming down. And the back talk. Try a couple midnight joyrides with a twelve-pack.”
She smiled wistfully, with only one side of her mouth. “Sarah, I’m really going to miss you.”
“Shut up,” I said, “and go hug your mother.”
Beth stood, naked, in front of the full-length mirror on her closet door, watching her reflection rub oil over her hips, waist, tummy, a blend of sweet almond and vitamin E, with calendula and carrot extract. Aggie Standing mixed it especially for her. Most of the pregnant women in town used Aggie as their midwife, but the scars concerned Beth. She worried there’d be problems with her skin stretching properly and planned to see an obstetrician as soon as the weather broke. Until then, she’d try to keep her stomach supple and elastic with the oil.
“Need any help?” Dominic asked from the bed.
“No, I’m done.”
She scrunched her nightgown so she could pull it over her head, but Dominic said, “Why don’t you leave that off?” and folded down the quilt on her side of the bed. She slid beneath the chilly sheets and scooted against him, the ardor in his skin still unexpected, and they made love quietly. Beth knew her mother wore earplugs at night now—she’d seen them on her nightstand, the gummy, neon foam kind—but even if Maggie couldn’t hear them, two doors away was still too close for privacy. Dominic suggested moving their bedroom upstairs, as if fifty paces instead of five would make a difference.
She doubted it.
Beth didn’t consider herself a ponderer, shucking the husk off each thought that roamed through her mind. Lately, however, as the disquiet grew between her and Maggie, she had been examining their relationship more closely. She partly blamed hormones for her sudden oversensitivity to her mother’s hovering, but it was more than that. In those early months after the fire, Beth depended on Maggie for everything from pureeing her meals to emptying her catheter bag. As time progressed and Beth’s wounds healed, her mother continued to shelter her, to straighten her bedroom and pack her schoolbooks each night. To do all those things she could now do for herself. She knew her mother found purpose in helping her, and Beth, under the weight of the debt she felt she owed Maggie for all she’d done, never figured out a way to say she didn’t need that help anymore.
She kept telling herself the awkwardness between them, while they tried to figure out their new roles, their new relationships to each other, would settle eventually. Until then, she prayed she didn’t say something she’d regret.
Dominic snored in his sleep, one arm under her neck, stretching across the bed, the other leaden on her rib cage. She wriggled out from beneath it and put on her nightgown. She got cold sleeping without clothes. Then she settled back into bed, tucking herself under her husband’s arm again. He stirred, snorted, and pulled her close.
Her hands roamed over her stomach, to the plateau between her hipbones. She couldn’t keep from imagining the tiny life inside her. A miracle. She knew her baby wasn’t any different, any more special, than any other six-week-old fetus—bean-sized with its own heartbeat now. The miracle was that she was alive to have this baby. She remembered times when she wished Luke had left her to die in the flames, those painful days of bandages and surgeries, and physical therapy. And yet the Lord had carried her out of Egypt and through the desert, to a Promised Land more glorious than she imagined.
Beth didn’t worry about being a good mother. Not too much, anyway. Maggie wouldn’t be timid about giving advice, and any mistakes she made—many, she was certain—would be covered by God’s grace. His plans couldn’t be thwarted by an imperfect, bumbling, first-time mommy.
But her face—
She touched her reconstructed cheek, pinched it. It felt like Silly Putty, rubbery and too smooth. She wondered how long it would be before her baby understood that Beth didn’t look like other parents. Certainly by grade school, when children sang taunts about anything peculiar, about the outcasts. She’d heard them, even made up some of her own.
Greg, Greg, smells like rotten eggs, and he doesn’t wash his
legs. Boogerhead Michele picks her nose and eats it, cooks her snot
in a pot, and pours it on her biscuits.
She could easily imagine what might be said about her own face.
Her worst fear, however, was that her baby would be afraid of her.
Not at first, of course. But later, when little ones learned to fear monsters under the bed and the noises of creaky old houses. Then, perhaps, it would be Beth’s face her child saw in his nightmares, chasing him through the darkness.
Dominic told her she was being ridiculous, and Beth prayed he was right.
I noticed the air first, warmer than it had been since I arrived in Jonah, and with a spicy, green scent. A spring smell, though Maggie had warned not to be too optimistic; it wasn’t uncommon to have snowstorms in June.
Then I noticed the birds. Crows. Huge, black, and dead still on the fallen tree.
Aunt Ruth had dabbled in augury—she’d dabbled in just about anything that would make my grandmother drop to her knees in fervent prayer for her last living child’s soul—divining omens using eggs and stars and onion sprouts. Her favorite, though, was auspice, and when I was in grade school we’d recite an old counting-crows rhyme together every time we saw the ink-eyed birds preening on telephone wires or rooftops: “One for sadness, two for mirth; Three for marriage, four for birth; Five for laughing, six for crying; Seven for sickness, eight for dying; Nine for silver, ten for gold; Eleven a secret that will never be told.”
I didn’t believe that bunk, but I tallied the birds anyway.
Eight.
Picking a stone up from the driveway, I chucked it toward them, hitting one. It cawed, and they all scattered, shiny black confetti falling up into the sky. I pushed my sleeve away from my watch; Memory would be late to church again, because of me. Still, I drove slowly, just in case those crows decided to turn around and fly through my windshield to exact a bit of revenge. I’d watched
The Birds
enough times that images of a screaming, bloody Tippi Hedren spontaneously entered my head anytime I saw several feathered beasts flocking together.
At Memory’s, I parked the truck and took the terraced steps in twos, surprised she wasn’t standing on the porch waiting for me. I banged at the door. Nothing. I knocked again, glancing through the dirty front window. I saw Robert in bed, uncovered, his sheet and blankets in a heap on the floor.
A heap with toes poking out of it.
“Memory,” I shouted, barging inside and falling to my knees beside the bed. Pawing through the blankets, I found her, face pressed against the hard floor. I grabbed her and rolled her onto her back. Shook her. Her eyes were open.
“Memory. Memory, come on. Get up.”
She didn’t move.
I stood, flapping my arms as I turned this way and that, looking for a phone until I remembered she didn’t have one.
“What’s wrong with you?” I shouted. “How can you not have a phone? How can you not—” and I kicked her.
“—have—” Another kick.
“—a phone?”
I sprinted to the truck and sped to Doc’s office. It was Sunday. Closed. I drove to his house and pounded with both palms on his door.
“Sarah, what’s wrong?” he asked, coming to the door dressed but wearing slippers.
“It’s Memory. She’s . . . she’s not moving. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”
“You drive,” he said. He didn’t put on shoes, just grabbed his old-fashioned black medical bag near the coatrack and followed me. I fumbled with the keys, dropped them under the truck, in a slushy puddle. Doc fished them out, wiped them on his corduroy pants, the wide wale worn flat at the knees. “Never mind, I’ll drive.”
