Still Life with Husband (6 page)

“I just got up and Steve’s already left for work and I…” More sniffling. “I went to the bathroom and there’s blood. I’m bleeding. I just got back into bed and I’m not…I think I’m having a miscarriage.”

As usual, I’m a mess under pressure. My stomach goes tight and my mind lurches to a full stop, and I can’t think of what to say or what to ask her, or what I should do. I close my eyes, try to think, but it’s like someone has pushed the pause button on my brain.

“Emily, are you there?”

“I think we need to get you to the emergency room,” I finally say. Is this the kind of thing you call an ambulance for? I don’t know. I can’t even quite remember my name. “I’ll be right over, okay?”

“Okay.”

When I get to Meg’s, fifteen minutes later, she’s sitting on her front step waiting for me. From the car, she looks fine, normal; it looks like I’m picking her up for a movie, like she’s ready for a fun outing. I park the car and run over to her. She doesn’t move. She’s waiting for me to help her stand up. As I approach, I see that she’s wearing a sweatshirt over her pajamas, and her face is as pale as I’ve ever seen it. She looks bloodless. There are dark, yellowish circles under her eyes, and her skin has an ash gray undertone that scares me. And as I reach my friend, I know that she has lost her baby, or the Sea Monkey–sized bundle of cells that would have become her baby. Now it won’t be. In a flash, I know this, and I also know that I will reassure her, tell her that everything will be okay, that probably lots of women bleed a little during their pregnancies, that it doesn’t even necessarily mean anything. I’ll say this, as I wrap my arm around her and help her to the car; I’ll tell her to be hopeful, as we speed toward St. Joseph’s Hospital. But I know. It’s already gone.

I have fond memories of hospitals. The particular sensory combo platter of glaring fluorescent lights and disinfectant that evokes, for almost everyone else on the planet, sickness and fear and bad memories, for me has a comforting effect. When I was a junior in high school, my grandfather had a stroke. He spent five weeks recuperating in the rehab wing of St. Mary’s Hospital, and I used to visit him after school. I would drive over to the hospital, grab a snack in the cafeteria, and then I’d take the elevator up to the fifth floor to hang out with him. We usually watched reruns of
Little House on the Prairie,
or afternoon game shows.
Wheel of Fortune
was our favorite. They were happy times, and the whoosh-whoosh of soft-soled shoes down hospital corridors reminds me of them. He died when I was in college.

Meg and I are sitting on mushroom-colored plastic chairs in the waiting room, surrounded by people who are either coughing or bleeding. The lady at the admissions desk gave Meg a sympathetic smile and then handed her a thick volume of insurance forms to fill out, and told us that it would be at least an hour before a doctor could see her. Steve is on his way over. In the bustle of everyday life, I never think about the fact that awful things happen to people all the time: teenagers die in car crashes; regular people get cancer; pregnant women have miscarriages. Looking around at this waiting room full of people in the throes of illness and the aftermath of accidents, I want to say this to Meg. But of course I don’t.

I never know whether to touch people who are having emotions that have nothing to do with me. I’m never sure whether to hug friends who are crying about their boyfriends or their breakups. I don’t know if I should hold their hands or keep my distance and let them at least retain the dignity of their personal space while their suffering spills messily out of them. I contemplate this for a while, then drape my arm over Meg’s shoulders. She doesn’t pull away, but seems to relax into me a little bit. We don’t talk, just stare at the television that is mounted high above us and is blaring a big, bad Jerry Springer fight, as if to remind us, the sick and the wretched in the ER waiting room, that there are people sicker and more wretched than we are.

The fact is, I wished this on Meg. From the moment she first told me, radiating happiness, I felt a twinge of disappointment. I hid it, but I did. I wanted my pregnant best friend not to be pregnant. I wanted to keep her for myself, not to share her with a baby, not to lose her to motherhood. I wished for this, in a way—not
this,
but there’s no denying it, I wasn’t entirely joyous about her pregnancy. And although I’m not crazy or narcissistic enough to think that I caused her miscarriage, guilt crawls up my spine and reaches its spindly fingers around into my chest. I can feel it: the uncomfortable pressure of selfishness, the realization that my own personal ugliness extends its tentacles and connects to the world, to my best friend.

“Can I get you a cup of hot chocolate?” I ask. “Or tea?”

She shakes her head. “This is bad, Emily. I know it.”

“You don’t,” I say. “You don’t know anything, and all we can do right now is wait for the doctor.” A woman two seats away from us begins to cough, hard. Even after she stops, her thin body seems to vibrate from the effort of it.

“I’m starting to have cramps,” Meg whispers, hunching over a little bit. I just squeeze my arm around her more tightly. “I thought I’d be coming to this hospital to have my baby, not to lose it,” she says, staring straight ahead. I don’t know how to answer that. And anyway, it’s not a question.

When Steve arrives, Meg has just gone into an examining room with a stern young doctor. She hadn’t wanted me to come with her. She’d asked me to wait outside for Steve, but I think that she needed to hear the bad news on her own, to let it sink in before anyone else found out, to mourn in private, even if only for a few moments.

Steve and I spot each other at the same instant. He plows through the sliding doors and races toward me. Steve is a pediatric dentist and a slob. He’s still wearing his white coat, which is wrinkled and flapping open behind him as he walks. His child-friendly purple tie, decorated with laughing bananas, has a big grease spot in the middle of it, and his shoelaces are not only untied, but shredded. He looks like he slept in his entire outfit, a gray oxford shirt and black pants, and in fact he may have. But Steve somehow makes it work. One look at him and you know that he’s not only handsome, which is something that can’t be squelched by sloppiness, but sexy, which is something that can be, and would be if he were someone else. But Steve is just adorable, messy because he lives large and uses a lot of ketchup, clumsy except when he’s gently tending to the tiny teeth of children. Women want to mother him. Meg does, which is both irritating to watch and perfectly apt. She’ll reach over and pluck bits of dirt off his clothes, wipe his face with a napkin. They probably don’t even realize they do it. Kevin and I make fun of them behind their backs: “Should Mommy tie your shoes?” “Do you need me to wipe your bottom, snookums?” Right now Steve is in a barely controlled panic, and I actually do want to reach over to him and smooth his hair down. But I just stand up and take his elbow, lead him down the corridor. “Meg’s in exam room four,” I tell him. “She’s been in there for about fifteen minutes.”

Steve looks like he’s about to cry. Like me, Steve is a wreck under pressure; Meg and Kevin are the calm ones. “Is she having a miscarriage?” he asks me.

“I don’t know. She thinks she is.”

“But she’s going to be okay, right?”

“Of course.” I feel like I could easily say something stupid or wrong, so I’m trying to say as little as possible.

Just then, the doctor emerges from the examination room, scribbling something on a chart just outside the door. Fair and blond, he looks like he’s about sixteen years old. Doogie Howser takes long strides down the corridor toward us.

Steve introduces himself, and the doctor unceremoniously tells us that Meg is in the process of undergoing a spontaneous abortion. The phrase feels like a knife, cold and sharp and unaccountably mean. This process, he tells us without noticeable kindness, will take anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, after which Meg should stop bleeding. And if she doesn’t, he adds, she’ll need to come back for a surgical abortion. The word—he says it again—makes me cringe, implying choice; but here we are, with no choice in the matter. The information that took this doctor eleven seconds to impart will take Meg and Steve weeks, months to recover from.

“Early miscarriages are extremely common,” the doctor continues, backing away from us slightly. “They’re usually the body’s healthy response to a nonviable pregnancy,” he says, his words starting to jam together. “Very common. Most women go ontohavesuccessfulpregnancies.” He’s halfway down the hall; he’s gone.

“I’m so sorry, Steve.” I say. “Do you want me to stay?”

He looks at me as if he’s forgotten I’m there. He nods and shakes his head at the same time, so I let him go into Meg’s room on his own, and I lean against the cement wall, waiting. I close my eyes and try to think about what I had planned to do today. It feels like nothing else exists, like there is no other world outside this hospital, this hallway. The heavy door clicks shut behind Steve.

After a few minutes, they come out, arm in arm. Meg blinks as if she is emerging into bright sunlight. Steve looks stricken, but Meg seems resigned.

“Thank you for everything,” she whispers, hugging me.

“Oh,” I say. “I’m so, so sorry….” I stop talking. I’m about to cry, but I don’t want Meg to have to comfort me, so I swallow hard and try to contain it.

“Steve’s going to take me home now. I’ll call you later.”

“Emily, thanks,” Steve says dully. He and Meg are leaning against each other, facing me, forming their own tiny constellation. Before I can say anything else, they turn and head off toward the exit, and I’m standing by myself in the middle of the hospital corridor.

I’M SITTING HERE AT WHITE’S, FEIGNING CALM
. There is only one outward sign: I have bitten my fingernails down to jagged little nubs, and I’ve gnawed my cuticles into ripped edges of skin—and all in the last ten minutes. It’s disgusting, and as I sit here with my cup of coffee and my book, trying to look as if I am just sitting here waiting for an old pal, trying even to look a tiny bit bored, I resolve to keep my hands hidden from David Keller as much as I possibly can. This will serve a dual purpose, since I’m wearing my wedding ring, and I don’t want him to see it right away. I realized yesterday, on my way home from the hospital, that I obviously do need to tell him that I’m married. Meg’s miscarriage threw my situation into sharp relief. Life is hard and painful and full of losses we can’t prevent. I’ve been a silly, ridiculous girl. This daydream I’ve been sucking on like a lollipop has been
poison.
A poison lollipop! Kevin is a loving, kind man, and I have been fantasizing about ruining his life, breaking his heart. I need to confess to David, but in my own time. Because telling him that I have a husband—“husband!,” what a strange word!—will nip this in the bud, exactly where it should be nipped; I just need some time to ease my way into this reality. I have to give up my stupid little fantasy, but slowly, because after it’s gone, I imagine I’ll be a little bit bereft. When I woke up this morning, I resolutely slipped the gold band onto my finger.

Besides, I haven’t even seen the guy, haven’t talked to him for more than five minutes. It’s a little premature of me to conceive of this as an affair, even a gestating affair. How am I going to keep my hands hidden, though? I need at least one hand to drink my coffee. I could drink coffee only with my right hand, I suppose. But I might also want to gesture, perhaps to emphasize a point: the bathroom is
over there.
It will look strange and suspicious if I spend the next hour, thirty minutes, two hours?—how long do two people spend together when they’re on a date that is not a date and one of them is married?—sitting on my hands.

My entire body is clammy and sweaty; I feel like I’ve had six cups of coffee, but I’ve barely even had two sips of one. Maybe I should just put my ring into my pocket for a while. I know that I would rather tell him, would rather speak the words than let this silly symbol clue him in before I’m ready. I glance up as the door swishes open, and my heart jumps up into my throat, but it’s a woman wearing a coat that looks like a cape and pushing a baby carriage. It’s 9:50, prime women-in-capes-pushing-baby-carriages time.

Is it going to be all about rationalization from here? Am I preparing to think my way clear to doing something heinous? I decided yesterday: absolutely not. But now, today, as the doors swoosh open every few moments and I surreptitiously look up from my book every time, turning back to it and reading and rereading the same paragraph, as I watch a steady stream of coffee drinkers and scone eaters walk up to the counter and unzip their children’s jackets and find their tables and sip their coffees and nibble on their scones and chat with their friends
as if this were any ordinary morning,
I’m not so sure.

But if I tell David I’m married, what will he say? Will he be shocked, indignant? Or will he whisper,
I don’t care,
in a voice so sexy and soft that I’ll have to move my face mere inches from his just to hear? Or will he nod, unfazed, never having considered me anything more than a potential colleague, a possible friend?

I could barely look at Kevin this morning. He didn’t notice, just went about his business, muttering to himself about the hot water situation in the shower. The faucet with an
H
produces cold water, and the one with a
C
provides hot, a glitch that never would have happened if Kevin had written the pipe-installing instructions, and one that periodically sends him into fits of frustration. I spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom, as opposed to my usual five, applying a light coat of mascara and then wiping it off and then reapplying it, and then wiping it off again until there were dark, raccoony circles under my eyes and I had to wash my face and start all over.

Sometimes I think that Kevin and I just wander around the rooms of our apartment. There is something unfixed about our marriage. We’re like two planets come loose from their magnetic pull.
Is this it? Is this what the rest of my life will feel like?