The Stud Book (16 page)

There was a red spot on the chair she’d left, like paint. Sarah swiped a hand across the back of her cotton pants. Had she sat in something? Then she felt it, and it was on her hand. Blood. There was blood on her chair and on her clothes. It was her blood, and her baby’s. It was the ache in her gut. How many miscarriages can a body have?

Dale’s neck bloomed in splotches as he got up, too. Was he blushing?

She turned her head away. Quietly, through her teeth, she said, “Not again.” Her eyes felt hot.

He said. “I’m a doctor. I’m trained in taking care of the body.”

“You’re a veterinarian.” She felt her lip tremble, making it hard to talk.

He said, “I grew up with a big sister. It’s okay.”

Like his sister had a bloody miscarriage? Not okay. Not okay, not okay.

Dale said, “Miscarriage is sad, but it’s natural. I see it in animals more than you’d think. It happens.”

Nobody wrote those losses up in the cheerful zoo newsletters. Sarah choked on her own spit, on her tears. “It happens to me,” she said, “four times now.” It came out in a wail more plaintive than she meant it to be. She actually had a fleeting fantasy her words might sound brash.

“I can do this, if you want to go home.” He reached for the clipboard with the chart. She let it go into Dale’s hands. He put it aside and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. The white expanse of his abs flashed in the sickly fluorescents. Sarah blinked eyelashes thick with tears. She kept her gaze on those abs as though they were meditative, a still point in a shaky world.

She’d have to tell Ben about the baby. Round four. She’d been so sure, this time! She wiped her cheek with the back of one hand. The timer sounded. The cats? Motoring. Fucking around. Nothing. Those stupid, selfish cats. They could mate if they chose to.

Sarah wanted to mate. Immediately, even. This had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with loss.

She saw the smile on Dame Anne’s face: Smirking. Mocking. Smug, and no box to check for it. Those withholding, passive-aggressive, aggressive animals with their pseudo-Darwinian line about not breeding, they wouldn’t save the world from anything at all.

What kind of animal doesn’t mate?

Georgie made it look easy! Nyla did this when she was practically a kid. Dulcet taught kids how to fight off pregnancy like it was a raging epidemic.

The whole study of eugenics was founded by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. What kind of private things happened in that family to make those boys obsessed with baby making and survival?

The rabbits were getting it on in their kennel. She could hear the shuffling. Every rabbit was a premade pregnancy test.

Dale reached behind her and so brought her into his cloud of sweat and chemicals, the tick dip. He wrapped his sweatshirt around her waist. She was shaky. He took the arms of the sweatshirt and laced one through the other, and when he did, his hand grazed her stomach. He gave a tug. That sweatshirt was a bandage. Dale’d fix her up the way he fixed up every other hurt animal.

Down below, kids on a field trip laughed then screamed, ecstatic with the echo of their voices, laughing to spite her: obnoxious kids, the children she’d never have! She wanted to bite somebody, that’s how it felt.

Dale said, “Do you need a ride?”

She didn’t want to be anywhere, not even in her own body.

There were 250,000 people born every day, in the time it took McDonald’s to sell four million burgers, both a disgusting production line.

Dulcet was right: Humanity was a disease, maybe a mental illness with physical manifestations, but still Sarah was ready to bring it on. A bleakness ran through her bleeding organs. She was a snow leopard, trapped in that space. Was this Ben’s fault, or the chemicals of eastern Oregon?

Dale waited for her answer.

She shook her head. “Go floss that bear’s teeth.”

“I can take your notes to the office.” When he reached for the door to the stairs, his forearm was a diagram of shifting planes.

He smelled like health.

“Where did you grow up?” she asked.

“Right here,” he said, and guided her out.

Those veins along his legs, working the system in concert with his arteries and capillaries, would circulate blood to his penis and his heart. His vascular health could win an award. This man’s sperm would make, for some woman—some other woman, some other
family
—all the difference in the world.

V
icodin, OxyContin, Tylenol 3. Diazepam and Ambien. Ben let the words tick through his mind in a chain of jagged syllables.

Prescription meds come with three- and four-syllable names; illegal drugs have one: pot, crank, crack, hash, blow, speed, smack, rock, dope, weed, junk.

His own name was one syllable. Ben.

Maybe he was illegal. Contraband. A bad boy. Except he heard his name, in his head, always in his mother’s voice calling him in to dinner. She had a way of dragging his name out until it broke into two pieces—Be-en!—or else she’d use his whole name and make it three. He could still hear her voice, the way it sailed out into the blue sky, the yellow field grass. She was almost forty when he was born. He was almost forty now. She was gone. But for all those years, when she called out over the farmland, he went home to grilled tuna sandwiches, baked fish on Fridays, roast beef on Sunday.

Ben was a good kid, and soft as they came.

He and Sarah had their vials of meds lined up on the coffee table like appetizers. After four miscarriages and a broken nose, they’d amassed a decent collection.

Sarah took Tylenol 3, Ben took oxycodone. They poured whiskey in their coffee and let dishes pile up, making towers of bowls and plates. Georgie’s maternity pillow claimed a corner chair. At night it made a fat shadow, like an intruder. Their good dog sat by their side.

Sometimes a miscarriage is fast. Other times, it takes days. By the third day Sarah said, “One of us needs to hunt and gather.” Grocery-wise, they were depleted.

Ben ran a hand over the bridge of his nose. A hard kernel, like bone, rested under his skin and moved beneath his fingers. He could make it click, there in the radiating pain of a bruise.

He pressed it and it hurt in a way that made his dick shrivel, his spine tighten, his toes clamp down against his shoes. When he caught his reflection he was still surprised to see the deep, plum shadows and a jagged red line that worked its way up toward his forehead. The skin under his eyes had turned from purple to the first sallow lines of healing, a futuristic sunset. His nose, though, man. It was still a mess, with the crack of a bruise across the bridge and a new, flattened, sideways look to the rest of it.

Sarah squinted and her eyes traced a line from his nose to his forehead, then his hairline. He ruffled a hand through his hair and checked for stray hair in his fingers, always monitoring for hair loss.

It’d been a week since he’d “slipped on a wet paper towel” in a public restroom. That’s the story he told: He slipped, fell, and hit a sink. Every time he said it he saw Sarah look him over carefully—with something like love, or concern, but then he’d see, in her squint, something more like flat-out suspicion.

“Dale, at work, thinks you could sue somebody,” she said. “Seriously. A wet paper towel—that’s dangerous.”

Was she testing him?

Like he’d explain on legal documents why he’d been in a bathroom long enough for the automatic lights to turn off. He smiled painfully. “I’ll go to the store.” One of them had to do it.

He found his sunglasses on the mantel. In the winter, even the days were dark in Portland. Now it was evening. He put the glasses on anyway, gave a cavalier tap to the frames, and lurched toward the front door. When he picked up his keys, Shadow rallied, ears up:
Walk?
Ben ignored the animal and slid his cell phone into his front pants pocket.

“Ben? Don’t. Sperm? Please.” The phone.

Sweet Sarah. She believed radiation could be avoided. There was more radiation in that arid land where Ben grew up, where the sun beat down over rippling fields, than there was in that cell phone. His hometown was downwind from the Hanford nuclear site, east of Boardman, a coal-fired plant, complete with toxic spew. It was a golden landscape of big sky, sun, and cancer.

Everyone on the planet was bombarded by cosmic radiation, solar radiation, and radon that seeped up from the ground. Granite countertops off-gassed in rehabbed houses. That cell phone in his pocket? On the scale of things, it wasn’t much of a problem.

But for Sarah, he took the phone out of his pocket again.

He moved through the warbled lights of the grocery like water. His head felt weird. Could a cracked nose cause a clot to form in the brain? Or else it was oxycodone talking to the whiskey in his blood, with an electric current of caffeine laced in. He picked up a carton of powdered sugar doughnuts, the taste of a road trip. Almost ten years earlier, when they were first together, he and Sarah had driven from Oregon to Las Vegas then down through the Southwest, to Tucson and up to Albuquerque. They’d lived on powdered doughnuts. Now when he lifted a pack of the same cheap doughnuts he remembered the way a pale sun rose over a Nevada campground, the air shifting from cool night to early heat, and Sarah’s skin beside him in their joined sleeping bags. Maybe she’d remember, too. In the candy section he stacked three dark chocolate bars in his palm.

He found a fat pack of maxi-pads in the feminine protection aisle. That package was as big as a baby. A woman, teetering in high heels, looked his way. She looked again. Maybe it was the sunglasses, or the purple sunset of a bruise that seeped around the edges, or the way he swayed when he tried to stand, like he was on a boat. Was she taking an interest or appalled?

Ben pushed past her, rolling his narrow, high, modern shopping cart. The cart was so tall it forced his elbows to stick out in a way that seemed girlish. The pack of maxi-pads in his basket caught on the claw of a toothbrush display rack, and the whole thing crashed to the ground. He lifted the cardboard cutout—it was shaped like
a giant toothbrush—but the maxi-pads were tangled in the metal hooks and toothbrushes swung and slapped like muffled wind chimes.

His maxi-pads were torn open. He felt the woman’s eyes on his back.

Then his phone vibrated in his coat pocket. His first thought, his only thought, was:
Sarah!
With one hand still wrestling the cardboard toothbrush and its wind chimes of brushes, he used his other hand to slide the phone from his pocket. It wasn’t Sarah; it was Humble. A text said, “C U @ Clive’s.”

God. Did Humble really use that text-speak? Even on his phone, Ben always wrote in complete sentences. Clive’s was a bar. Clive’s Dive. He’d forgotten their plan to have a drink. Humble had made the plan. Ben had only nodded. That seemed so long ago, before the miscarriage. He turned his head and knocked into the top of the cardboard toothbrush display rack—how was it supposed to stand on its own? The woman, in her heels, reached to help him. She stood the cutout up like it was a giant paper doll, moving with a calm competence.

When he got back with the groceries he told Sarah about his plans with Humble. He said, “I can cancel.”