Paris Was the Place (38 page)

We go back to the train station. Our compartment is smaller this time. Six brown leather seats and a metal luggage rack above on each
side. An Indian woman with the red bindi on her forehead sits next to the window with her teenage boy beside her. They both fall asleep. I try on the idea that I might be pregnant. We’ve always used condoms, except for the very first time in the dark on the beach. We aren’t kids. We aren’t foolish. I keep the idea of the pregnancy to myself. I don’t want Macon to think I’m crazy. It’s too soon for a baby. I’m still not sure that he trusts me fully. I keep thinking,
Today I’ll get my period. Today I’m sure I’ll get my period
.

Halfway to Agra, I wake up from a dream of Pablo and Luke swimming in a pool in Arizona with my father. They were both young, and acted like brothers. Dad called them his little fish and laughed and threw them up in the air. The dream makes me miss both of them so much. Pablo and the little-boy version of Luke. Where did he go? And how did we get this old? I have to pee, so I hold on to the backs of the seats and open the sliding door to the hall.

Macon’s got the Lonely Planet guidebook out when I come back. “The Taj Mahal is going to be amazing,” he says. “I want to take photos for Pablo. It took twenty-two years and thousands of men to build. The whole thing is a statement of love.” He squeezes my hand. “There are rare gems inlaid in the walkways.”

I put my head on his shoulder and doze again. When we get to Agra, there’s a small fight among some of the rickshaw drivers outside the station over who will take which tourists. A man pushes his bike to the front and yells at us in English to climb in. We sit and put our packs at our feet and he starts pedaling into the city. “Hello, my name is Abkar.”

“Hello, Abkar,” Macon says. “I am Macon, and this is Willie.”

I lean toward Macon. “There’s a small chance I might be pregnant.” I can’t keep it a secret anymore. No lies. That was the agreement when Macon decided to come with me. No lies or half lies. Only the truth.

He’s examining a strap on his backpack that’s begun to unravel. “Right now? Today? Pregnant?”

“Maybe pregnant. Not sure pregnant. Probably not. But maybe.”

Then he laughs. “This is incredible. We’re going to the Taj Mahal and you might be pregnant!” Which is the best thing he could possibly say, and I kiss him.

When we get to the front gates, Abkar stops pedaling and puts his feet on the ground. “I will wait there.” He points to the other rickshaw drivers sitting on their heels in the dirt under an almond tree next to a long, white concrete wall.

Macon takes my hand, and we walk toward the ticket booth. “You can’t write a book about poetry in India and not see the Taj Mahal.”

He gets his camera ready inside the gates, but a man wearing a white turban approaches us. “Sir. Let me help, please.” So I sit on a marble bench with Macon next to me and the man takes many pictures in which we’re both laughing. Then we thank him and follow a long, rectangular pool of water until we get to the tomb. It’s enormous and dome-shaped and built out of creamy white marble and precious stones with intricate paintings of lotus flowers.

Macon reads out loud again: “The false sarcophagi are in the main chamber. The actual graves of Shah Jahan and his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, are at the lower level.”

“This is raising the bar on how to honor the dead,” I say. We spend hours walking through the different chambers of the tomb, and the whole time I feel slightly dizzy.

Then Abkar bikes us to the Hotel Rashmi. We get a small room with a double bed on a metal frame. There’s a blue-tiled bathroom and a wicker chair near the foot of the bed. During the night, I get cramps. I hold my stomach with my hands and try to keep very still so the cramps will stop. But the bleeding starts in the morning.

“What’s going on, Willie?” Macon says when he wakes up. “My God, there’s blood here—where is it coming from?”

“It’s okay,” I whisper.

“We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

“Macon,” I say slowly, “my love. Please promise me right now you won’t take me to a hospital. I must have really been pregnant.”

“But we should go to the doctor, shouldn’t we?”

I lie back on the bed and start crying, and he tries to rub my arm. “If it doesn’t get better in an hour, then maybe we’ll go to the doctor’s.”

“But are you in pain? Are you in too much pain? I can’t let you sleep on this sheet.” He leaves the room for maybe five minutes and comes back with the woman who owns the hotel, who I met when we checked in. She and her husband have a young boy, maybe two years old, who played with a red truck on the floor by the front desk. “Willie,” Macon says, “this is Kaela. She and I are going to help you get to the doctor.”

“Oh, Macon, no,” I say. “Please.”

“We’ve got to make sure. Just let me do this, okay?”

He helps me stand. Then he takes me into the bathroom, and Kaela hands me several maxi pads that are like small hand towels, they’re so big. “Thank you so much,” I say. “I’m so sorry about this.” She just smiles and nods and closes the door. I put on my long skirt and place a pad in a pair of clean underwear. I feel nauseous and heavy and sluggish, like I’m walking in water.

The three of us make it down the stairs and into a car waiting outside the hotel. Kaela gets in the front seat and instructs the driver. Macon sits in the back with me, and I put my head on his lap. We go to an international clinic attached to a big hotel in the new part of Agra. Kaela organizes everything there. She speaks to the office receptionist, and I’m taken into a small, unfinished doctor’s office with a wooden examining table in the corner. Macon helps me up on the table, and I close my eyes and doze until a woman in jeans and running sneakers walks in.

“I’m Dr. Pellman,” she says. “By way of Canada and Nepal. Willie, it’s nice to meet you. Let’s find out what’s going on here.” She takes my temperature with a glass thermometer. “Have you ever miscarried before?”

“I’ve never been pregnant.”

“The thermometer says you have a slight fever. One hundred and one. That’s consistent with a miscarriage. How are the cramps? Are they easing at all?”

“Not yet,” I say, wincing. “They’re the worst cramps I’ve ever had.”

“That sounds about right. I’m very sorry. Unfortunately, miscarriage is the most common type of pregnancy loss. Do you think your bleeding is still as heavy?”

“I don’t think it’s let up.”

“The main goal of treatment is to prevent hemorrhaging and infection. This pregnancy, by all counts, was a very early one. The earlier you are, the more likely that your body will expel all the fetal tissue by itself.”

“So I won’t have to stay here overnight?”

“I am not ruling it out, but I don’t think you’re going to require further medical procedures. If your body doesn’t expel all the tissue, the most common procedure would be to scrape the uterine wall, but I honestly don’t see any need for that yet. We’re going to let you sleep now.”

She leaves, and I have a dream that I’m dying and that Macon’s dying and also Luke. When I wake up I feel so tired I can’t imagine ever standing again, or washing my face, or putting on a shirt, or leaving the clinic. I will live here forever. Where’s my father? My mother? It’s so hot. They would want to be here with me. I fall back asleep, and in this dream the baby’s born on different days, in different hospitals, but it’s always unrecognizable. “I’m having some sort of breakdown,” I say to Macon when I open my eyes again. He’s sitting on a wooden chair by the table. “I dreamt the baby was a monster.”

“You had a nightmare.”

“I can’t ever leave this room.”

“Okay. We can stay here as long as you want. Have I told you that I love you very much?”

I’ve been waiting to hear this almost since the first time I met him on Rue de Metz, and I try to store his words away for later because I wasn’t expecting them today. I can’t take in his kindness fully. Even though it’s what I’m most hoping for. “But I can’t leave the clinic ever.”

“Not even once you are better?”

“Not ever. And please don’t bury me. I don’t want to be down there in a tomb.”

Macon looks at me with such concern on his face. Then I don’t feel so alone. “I will never bury you. We will lie here in this clinic for the rest of our lives together. I’ll rub your back and maybe later, in a few hours, you’ll feel like getting up and having a shower.”

I take one in the afternoon and wrap myself in a blue towel the nurse gives me afterward. Macon says, “I’m going to go back to the Hotel Rashmi with Kaela now and gather up our things.”

“Kaela is still here? She waited all this time?”

“She was very worried about you. She and I have figured out a plan. You and I are going to take the four o’clock train to Chandigarh. Then we’ll go to Shimla and sleep. If you’re feeling strong enough in the morning, we’ll go farther north and take a final bus to Dharmsala. Or we’ll stay put. It all depends on how you feel.”

“I don’t care where we go as long as we go.”

“There’s so much good stuff to come on this trip, Willie. You are going to be okay. We haven’t even gotten to Dharmsala yet.”

We’re the only two people inside the compartment on the train to Shimla. The seats are made of old red vinyl. Dirty, cream-colored vinyl curtains hang in three-inch strips across the windows. I pull them to the side and button them to a matching sash. Then I open
War and Peace
and read for hours. I learn that Napoleon extended too far into Moscow and that the French army had been in good shape when it left Russia, except that the cavalry was starving to death. I learn the Russian peasants burned their hay instead of feeding it to the French horses and that Napoleon should have ordered more boots. This is how so many of his soldiers died—from frozen feet.

The train rocks, and I close my eyes and try to imagine the French horses and if any of Napoleon’s soldiers gave them last rites. What are last rites, really? I start crying. “Luke wants to be cremated,” I say to Macon. “He called me last week, before we left, and made me promise not to bury him. I told him he was crazy and that I wasn’t talking about it. I wish I were in Paris with him. Maybe we shouldn’t have come to India after all.”

“We should have come to India. You have a book to write.”

“Can I call him? How can I call him and find out he’s all right?”

“We’ll find a phone. I promise.”

We get to Shimla and sleep at an old wooden bungalow made into
an inn by a retired military officer and his wife. She gives us strong morning coffee like sludge with watery milk in the back garden, and it tastes so good. There’s a green parakeet stock-still in a steel cage. We eat hardboiled eggs and chapati while the officer tells us about the Shimla military museum and its collection of artillery. Macon makes notes on a little pad out of respect. Then we go to the train station. Our trip feels long now. So much time away from Luke. My cramps have almost stopped, and the bleeding is mild. I want to meet Padmaja and see the poems and go home.

But there are no trains to Dharmsala. The mountain switchbacks are too steep. So Macon gets us tickets on the afternoon bus that will get us there before dawn. The bus is bright green, circa 1968, and decorated like a cupcake, with swirly pink lotus blossoms and blue elephants and curlicues all around the front window. Inside, the driver has covered the dashboard with laminated glossies of Krishna and Vishnu and Buddha like a shrine. The seats are low and narrow and covered in crinkly green plastic.

It never quiets on the bus—everyone talks and smokes and snores. I sit with my cheek against the window and stare at the brambles and the dark shape of the road. Late in the night, soldiers flag us down. Two of them climb on carrying thin automatic rifles—boys in their late teens with shaved hair under camouflage caps. They force us off the bus and make us walk to a clearing behind a concrete shed.

“Passports,” one of them says to Macon. “Passports now.” We fish in our packs. I try to pull the zipper open on my green passport pouch. Little surges of adrenaline spike in my stomach and travel down my arms. I finally hand the booklet to a boy soldier with doe eyes.

“America. You come from America to this place?” He doesn’t open the passport. He’s distracted by its beauty, maybe, and turns it over and over in his hand like it’s a small animal that will soon begin to talk. Then he gives it back and shrugs decisively—done with games now.

An hour passes. Two older men from the bus are escorted to the side of the shed, where they have to stand with their arms above their heads. I can’t see their faces, but their hands start to sway in the air like
the men are postulating. It’s as if they’re deeply moved by the sound of some distant music that none of the rest of us can hear. I’ve read the newspaper articles this week about Kashmiri separatists floating down the Jhelum River through the Punjab to get explosives from the bigger cities. Some of the Kashmiris have been captured as far south as Delhi. Some are caught in Nepal. Many are captured in the middle.

“It’s going to be okay,” Macon says. The neck of his T-shirt is darker blue with sweat. “The most important thing is to not draw attention to ourselves. Let’s stay calm. Soon I bet we’ll be boarding the bus again.”

“But not those men.” I point.

“Willie, stop pointing. Don’t you get it? Keep your eyes down. I won’t be able to live with myself if you get hurt here, so do this for me.”

Another hour passes. Two of the soldiers call us back to the bus. I follow Macon to the middle row. Three in the morning, and I can’t stay awake any longer. I miss my brother. I have to meet the woman named Padmaja the day after tomorrow and persuade her to let me see her mother’s poetry manuscripts. It’s why we’ve come this far. The driver closes the door and the engine rumbles to life. I turn in my seat and watch the soldiers close in on the two men. It’s a small distance between us, maybe five feet. The soldiers put handcuffs on the men.

I bang on the window with my fist. “How can we just leave them? Jesus Christ, people!”