The Obituary Writer (20 page)

“Do you know what your name is?” the man asked her.

“Claire,” she said, her voice sounding like someone else’s. The fingers that had touched her head were covered in blood.

“Do you know what year it is?” he asked.

His face was very close to hers, so close that she could see the stubble on his cheeks and chin and smell the cocoa on his breath.

“Do you know who the president is?” the man asked as if her life depended on getting these right.

“Kennedy,” Claire said.

“Whoa,” someone towering above her said. “That’s a lot of blood.”

She could feel it, pooling around her head and neck.

“Has anyone called an ambulance?” someone else shouted.

The man peering at her said his wife was doing that very thing.

“Ma’am?” Another man kneeled at her side, his face creased with worry. “Are you pregnant?”

Claire’s hands went to her belly.

“She is,” the new man said. “She’s pregnant.”

In the distance Claire could hear a siren.

“What kind of fool would go sledding when she was pregnant?” a woman in the crowd said.

Claire thought about Kathy at the bottom of the hill in that red snowsuit that was too big for her.

“I needed to find my daughter,” she said.

She tried to sit up, but as soon as she lifted her head everything around her started to spin.

“Whoa,” the first man said, pushing her back down lightly. “Hold on, Claire.”

The siren grew nearer.

Peter’s voice rose above the others. “Let me through,” he was saying. “That’s my wife there.”

He appeared before her, Kathy tucked under one arm and Little Jimmy under the other. Carefully he set the children down. They stared at her, wide-eyed. Little Jimmy sucked his thumb.

“Jesus, Claire,” Peter muttered.

“You have Kathy,” Claire managed to say, relief washing over her. “Thank God.”

“The ambulance is here!” someone called.

“My head,” Claire said, touching it again and feeling fresh blood.

Peter took her bloody hand and held it lightly. Two emergency technicians arrived with a stretcher.

“Do you know your name?” one of them asked.

They both looked about twelve years old. One of them had acne and glasses and skinny arms.

“Claire.”

He looked at Peter, who nodded.

“Okay, Claire,” the one with acne said, slapping a blood pressure cuff on her, “what day is today?”

“Inauguration day,” Claire said.

“BP is sky-high,” he said.

“She’s pregnant,” Peter told him.

Something passed across the technician’s eyes. “How’s that baby?” he asked Claire.

She closed her eyes, willing the baby to move.

“Still,” she said finally.

One of them lifted her head gently and let out a low whistle. “You’ll be getting some stitches,” he said.

Claire kept her eyes closed.

“On my three,” one of them said. He counted to three, then Claire was lifted from the cold snow and onto the stretcher.

“Make way now,” the one with acne ordered the crowd.

Like Moses and the Red Sea, the crowd parted. Claire smiled to herself. She might not remember who Sisyphus was, but she knew her Bible stories. Every Sunday as a girl she’d gone to Sunday school in the church basement. They used to draw pictures of Moses as a baby in the basket among the bulrushes, and Noah loading all of the animals two by two onto the ark. Her drawings always had lots of details, rain pelting Noah and the animals, a frog guarding baby Moses.

“Does anything besides your head hurt?” the technician asked her.

“My back,” Claire said.

“Do you have a bad back anyway?”

“No.”

But she had felt back pain like this. When she went into labor with Kathy, she’d had these same low sharp pains. She remembered being surprised labor hurt there instead of in the front.

The ambulance waited for them, doors opened wide, at the bottom of the hill. The technicians smoothly slid the stretcher into it, and Claire watched as the doors closed, blocking out the faces of her husband and daughter and Little Jimmy. Although Jimmy wore an excited expression, Kathy looked stunned. She hadn’t made a sound the entire time. She stared at her mother as if Claire had become someone new. And Peter, Claire thought. Peter’s jaw was set hard, his mouth turned down, and his eyes filled with disappointment.

With the doors closed on all of that, Claire finally managed to ask the question that she could not say out loud in front of her family.

“Is my baby all right?”

The technician didn’t meet her eyes. He lifted her head gently and placed fresh gauze beneath it.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The ambulance lurched forward, its siren wailing. To Claire, it sounded like the cries of a newborn, sharp and insistent, demanding your attention.

In the Emergency Room, a doctor stood over Claire frowning.

“How many weeks?” he asked.

“Is my husband here?” Claire asked.

The doctor raised one eyebrow, a talent Claire’s lover also had. It was charming, Claire used to think. But now she found it disarming.

“How many weeks?” the doctor repeated.

Claire tried to see over his shoulder, where people were milling about. She couldn’t locate Peter there.

“Twenty-six, I think,” she said.

That eyebrow again. “Not sure?”

She shook her head.

“How many live births have you had?”

The word
live
made her shiver.

“One,” she answered.

Were there un-live births? But she immediately realized that of course there were. She remembered reading that Jackie Kennedy had had a stillborn baby girl before Caroline. But surely this baby,
her
baby would be all right. She willed the baby to move. Claire closed her eyes and thought as hard as she could:
Move.
She pressed on her stomach, trying to initiate a little game she’d played with the baby: she pressed against its foot or elbow until it pressed back. But she couldn’t even feel any part of the baby when she pressed now.

“What in the world inspired you to go sledding?” the doctor asked. No eyebrow-raising this time, just a steely stare. “In your condition?”

“I lost sight of my daughter and I was afraid of getting knocked over by all the sleds,” Claire said. The words sounded ridiculous, and she stopped talking.

A nurse came in with a tray of equipment.

“We have to sew up your head,” the nurse said cheerfully.

“Sew it up?” Claire said, her hand shooting to her head and landing on warm, bloody gauze.

“You’ve cracked it good,” the doctor said.

For some reason, he reminded Claire of Connie, the way they both seemed to see right through her, to know everything she’d done.

“I think I’ll give you a little something to relax you,” the doctor said.

Within minutes of the shot the nurse gave her, Claire grew woozy and thick-headed. She listened as the doctor explained that he was giving her an injection to numb her wound, and then that he was going to start stitching it. His voice sounded like he was at the opposite end of a tunnel. Claire closed her eyes, giving in to the way her body seemed to float, the way her mind drifted from one thought to another effortlessly. She could feel the tug of the needle and thread on her head, but nothing hurt her. Instead, she felt light and almost happy.

She wondered where Peter had gone to. Probably brought the children back to his mother’s house. Then she thought of his mother, upstairs in this very hospital. Was she still alive? Claire wondered, but as soon as she wondered that her mind veered off to a night with her lover. For the first time in a long time, she let herself linger there, remembering his face. He had blue eyes and black hair. Black Irish, he’d called it. Although he wasn’t as handsome as her husband, there was something about his face that was more inviting. When he listened to her, he had a way of cocking his head, as if he needed to catch every word.

Claire drifted again, to the afternoon they’d escaped the city heat and gone to the beach in Delaware. It had been a feat, that excursion. To find someone who could take Kathy all day without appearing suspicious. To invent a believable story to tell Peter; she’d landed on telling him she was going on a women’s-only full-day tour of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He liked when she took an interest in things like that. He’d even said, “Bravo, Clairezy,” when she’d told him her lie. The truth was, as a girl she’d been the best artist in her class. She’d painted the scenery for all the school plays, and always helped paint the front windows for Christmas. Claire enjoyed wandering that gallery. She especially liked Mary Cassatt’s
Young Girl at a Window
. The girl’s blue- and lavender-tinged white dress and hat really did look like changing natural light to Claire. And the girl looked so thoughtful Claire couldn’t help but wonder what she might be thinking.

But wait. Claire’s mind had settled on that painting by Mary Cassatt, but she wanted to remember that day at the beach in Delaware. How they rode waves together and fell heavily onto the blanket, breathing hard. How his wet hand had found hers and held on to it as they lay in the sun. Later, when she’d licked his skin, it tasted salty. His hair was stiff with salt, and his shoulders were bronzed by the sun. They had eaten fried clams and drunk cold beers on the boardwalk.

“Tell him you liked the Remington
,”
he’d said.

“The cowboys?” she’d asked.

“I get the impression he’d like that
.
”

By then they had left the beach and checked into a little motel. The room smelled musty and the sheets were damp, but they hadn’t cared. Through the slats of the venetian blinds, Claire could tell that it was getting late. Too soon, they would be in the car heading back to their lives.

“Off the Range,”
he said. “That’s what it’s called
.
”

“But I like the Cassatt
,
” Claire said.

“He’ll say that of course you do. You’re a woman and so you like that painting. The Remington will surprise him
.
”

“Cowboys with pistols,” she said dismissively.

“Remington pushed the structural limits of the bronze medium with that one
.
Apparently he bragged, ‘I have six horses’ feet on the ground and ten in the air.’”

He had kissed her then, and she had not wanted him to stop.

“Oh, Claire,” he whispered, sounding almost desperate.

Later he told her that he loved the Cassatt painting too. “What is she thinking?” he’d said.

Back at home, Claire made pork chops in the oven, and Rice-A-Roni and string beans.

“Did you know the Corcoran was the first public museum to acquire Remington’s work
?
” she said as they ate dinner. “They acquired
Off the Range
in 1905
.
”

Peter looked up, surprised.

“So it was a good day?” he said.

Claire nodded. “A very good day.”

He didn’t notice her sunburned nose. Or if he did, he didn’t bother to mention it, or to wonder how she could have gotten a sunburn inside the Corcoran.

“I guess you really did love that sculpture,” Peter said, chuckling.

Claire forced her heavy eyelids open.

“You’ve been talking about Remington,” he said.

She jolted upright, still light-headed.

“Whoa, girl,” Peter said gently, pressing her back down onto the bed.

Claire looked around. “I’m not in the ER?” she said.

“They admitted you,” he said. “But there’s good news. You’re right down the hall from my mother. Makes my life easy anyway.”

“Peter?” Claire asked tentatively.

He waited.

“Have they said anything about the baby?”

“No one is saying much of anything,” Peter said, sighing. He stretched his long legs out.

Outside, the sky had turned dark. Claire wondered how much time had passed. She put her hands on her stomach and pressed, searching for a foot or knee or elbow. Hoping for some response. But all she felt was her tight hard stomach, unyielding.

When a doctor came into her room a while later, Claire was relieved that it wasn’t the smarmy one from the ER, with his eyebrow lifting and steely gaze. This doctor had movie-star good looks. To Claire, he bore an uncanny resemblance to that new actor, George Peppard. Just last summer she’d seen George Peppard playing Robert Mitchum’s illegitimate son in the movie
Home from the Hill
. Peter had teased her that she had a crush on the character he played, Rafe. Hadn’t Dot told her he was starring in some new movie with Audrey Hepburn?

The doctor was frowning beneath his short bangs.

“I’m Dr. Brown,” he said to Peter, extending his hand.

The two men shook hands. Dr. Brown had a tan, Claire noticed, even though it was January.

“It looks like we have a bit of a problem here,” he told Peter.

Peter was frowning now too. Neither of them paid attention to Claire.

“Have we lost the baby?” Peter said, lowering his voice as if Claire wouldn’t be able to hear him if he spoke softer.

“I’m afraid that’s how it looks,” Dr. Brown said.

Ridiculously, Kathy’s birthday party came to her mind. They’d had Stan the Animal Man come with his menagerie of snakes and turtles and bunnies. Stan the Animal Man had produced a hedgehog from one of the cages. He’d held out the small animal and demonstrated how when a hedgehog got frightened it rolled into a perfect anonymous ball for protection. Maybe babies did something similar, keeping still until they knew they were safe again.

“I think she’ll come around anytime now,” Claire said.

Dr. Brown and Peter both looked over at her, surprised.

“She probably got scared,” Claire said. For a moment, she could feel the impact of hitting that tree, the sickening sound her body had made when it thudded to the cold hard snow.

Dr. Brown patted the blanket, somewhere around her knee.

The doctor patted again. “Now, now,” he said, “you’re young. You can have a dozen more babies if you want.”

How many live births have you had?
that other doctor had asked her.