by Ethan Joella
“You want me to try?”
“I think something’s wrong.”
“Nah.” Melinda comes and stands by her. She puts her arm around Iris and lays her head on her shoulder. “Don’t panic.”
Iris puts her hand on her stomach. She cannot breathe. Her belly feels so still. “My sugar dropped really low this morning.”
“Because you’re eating so well!” Melinda huffs. “Maybe you should have a sticky bun. Bring it up a little.”
Iris slips away from her. She grabs her purse. She is going to vomit. She is going to fall over. She feels like her head is in a vise, like her fingers could fall off. There is a painting next to the door that says “Just That Sort of a Day” from the Tribeca Film Festival. It is black with white letters. “We have to go.” She grabs her phone. Dave. She has to call Dave, who will have a brand-new stroller in the back of the car, the price tag hanging from the handle, the car seat bright and new with instructions. He will start joking with her when he picks up the phone. I’m not getting the swing today, he’ll say.
Melinda stands in front of her. “Now just calm down, honey. You’re all worked up. Look how pale you are.” She holds her shoulders. “Breathe, baby. Breathe.” She smells like cinnamon.
There has to be an explanation, Iris thinks. Maybe babies move less as they get bigger. Maybe she felt her move an hour ago but just can’t remember. Phoebe has been growing inside her all this time. Her heartbeat has been boisterous and urgent at every appointment. Why is Iris jumping to this conclusion?
When she found out about the baby in the fall, she felt the way she does now: sick, unable to breathe, paralyzed. She told Dave maybe they should consider an abortion. It was too soon. She’d known him for only a few months. She had school, the graduate degree in occupational therapy. She wanted to go to Europe. She wanted to enjoy her twenties and not have a baby yet. She loved Dave, but she wanted to be sure this was permanent. Look at Melinda. She didn’t want to be Melinda; Phoebe to be her. Damn it, she thought. Damn it. For the first few weeks, she wanted to wake up and not be pregnant anymore.
And now what if she isn’t? No movement. The lower blood sugar. What if she failed because she didn’t love Phoebe enough, because she was ashamed to be pregnant? What would her professors say? she thought. What would Melinda say? What would New Dad say? But Alex had been superb. He chuckled. “How wonderful, Sunshine!” he said. It was his acceptance of the baby that made her okay with it. His approval, and then later his wife Kay’s warmth, the gift of finally meeting her. Kay so encouraging and nonjudgmental made Iris feel like she could do anything. Alex had always been her best adviser, her barometer. And Kay was another feather in her cap. Even Melinda had been excited. “You little devils,” she said, wagging a finger at her and Dave. Now Iris loves Phoebe. She dreams about her tiny face, her future voice. She wants her so badly.
She leaves the apartment with her mother, and notices every detail: the jingle of the car keys, the noise of her teeth chattering as she walks, slowly, down each step of the stairwell, the whistle of the oblivious mailman who nods at her as he opens and closes all those tiny mailbox doors.
* * *
A month later, after her final exams are over, after she stands in front of everyone and meekly accepts the master’s degree, after she starts her job, mostly doing occupational therapy in nursing homes and treatment centers, after it gets too warm to sleep without air-conditioning—so soon, it seems—Iris is up in the middle of the night looking out at the quiet streets. She sees the dark storefronts with dim lights glowing from inside, the still sidewalks, the row of parking meters, the spots mostly vacant.
The stroller sits in the corner of the apartment. The stupid monitor is in a drawer, never sent back to Amazon. Iris is up, thinking about Phoebe. The image of Phoebe so still and purplish as they handed her to Iris—for just minutes, it seemed—and then took her away.
Phoebe, whom she had to deliver anyway. So tiny and shocked, it seemed. As if she could have never made it in the world.
Iris is thinking about Melinda, who said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and proceeded to declutter her drawers and throw out the box of sticky buns.
She is thinking about Dave, who held her for hours. She heard him weeping in the bathroom that first night. He wouldn’t look at Phoebe, but instead shook his head like a sad child and asked them to take her away.
She is awake the way she would have been. She would have been up all the time, tiptoeing around the quiet apartment, the light above the stove glowing, the shadows on the furniture. She waits for the teapot to boil, sits in the big chair and bites her thumbnail as she looks at the black outside the window, and doesn’t know what the heck she’ll do. She has her job, but it only eats up eight hours a day. Until now she could busy herself with school, with all those final items: the clinical fieldwork evaluations, the extended project for her advanced research seminar that still needed to get done whether she delivered a dead baby or not.
She thinks of Doug for a second. Whatever became of Doug? Melinda said he had a job in Florida, but also that they were just too different to make it work. “He needed to go—for both our sakes,” Melinda said, and Iris never asked more questions. She just remembers the way he kissed her cheek before he left, his shy wave as he walked away that day, his head down as if he didn’t want to go. His clothes like casualties in the closet. Doug loved Iris—she always knew he did. She wonders if Doug felt the way she does now—if he, too, was lost like this. If loving and losing a child hit Doug the same: the ache, the constant reminders, the part of you broken you know you’ll never get back. She feels like she can only limp, like she can’t hear anything clearly. She feels pulled down by the ocean’s undertow. At some point, she thinks now, in the quiet living room, she will track Doug down. She always promised herself she would. Alex was so good that he made her mostly forget Doug, but she knows this is important. She will say thank you for those years. For the hugs he gave her, for the way he held her hand and they ran outside when they heard the music of the ice cream truck, for the pieces of him he left behind in the closet that comforted her in some way. She stands up and pours her tea over the chamomile tea bag in the thick ceramic mug.
She sips it slowly and whispers Phoebe the way she always does when she’s alone. Once in a while she absently touches her belly.
Now her phone dings, and she holds the thin throw blanket around her shoulders as she walks to check it. A text from Alex. Can’t sleep. Just thinking of you. Whenever you get this, know I am.
I got this, she replies. She puts a heart emoji beside her words.
It’ll be okay, he writes.
She nods as if he can see her. Thanks. There is a long pause. Then a thumbs-up emoji from him.
She smiles. She loves him. She is grateful he came into her life when he did. She sips her tea again, and feels a swelling loss. She can’t get Phoebe out of her head. Or Doug either. Why does she miss Doug so much tonight? She feels something unexplainable: a pull toward the man who loved her and had to leave. He knew she wasn’t his. He had no rights once Melinda was done with him, and this breaks her heart.
Was he ever up at night thinking of her like this? Did he ever wish he could text her the way Alex just did? She thinks about the difficulty of love, how love isn’t enough. Not enough to have kept Doug in her life. Not enough to keep Phoebe’s tiny heart beating.
She stares at Alex’s words and sits alone in the dark, thinking about how random and alarming the world is. One day her dad left, one day she got a new one. One day she was pregnant, one day she wasn’t. She wishes Dave would wake up the way he sometimes does, and they would sit together and say nothing. She wishes she could turn on the radio and hear a sad song. She sees headlights in the distance of a lonely car out on the road.
She feels, some days, she hasn’t learned anything yet. She is still that girl looking at abandoned clothes in a cramped closet. She is still, no matter what, that curious girl, rolling a small white wand, l
ooking, always looking, for life.
18. Life Is Like This
Suzette Savio is pumping gas at Henny Penny on Route 23 on a hot July afternoon when the girls approach her.
It is almost 5 p.m., and Suzette’s sleeveless navy blue linen shirt is uncomfortable and stuck to her back, and her feet hurt in these shoes, and her skirt feels tight for some reason, and she just wants to get back to the house and turn the central air as low as it will go and put her hair up and change into a loose T-shirt and pajama pants and ask Damon if pizza in bed with an ice-cold beer sounds okay.
Just one of those days where things didn’t fall into place easily, where she had to watch a social worker take a screaming three-year-old named Owen from his mother, who keeps leaving him alone to go score, and all Suzette wanted to do was hold Owen with his messy black hair and red cheeks. He bawled when his mother bawled; even their dog was walking in circles upset. And then Nicole, a client Suzette’s been working with for months, met her at Dunkin’ Donuts wearing a cotton scarf, trying to hide a new bruise around her neck. “Jesus,” Suzette said to her. “What’s it gonna take?” And then she felt bad for saying that because she knows about the cycle of abuse, and who is she to judge poor Nicole, whose life has been unfair in so many ways? And to make matters worse, Andy, a nine-year-old for whom she has been advocating, hugged a fourth-grade classmate in the coat closet too tightly, so tight that the girl couldn’t get away, and now they want to suspend him and possibly send him to the juvenile detention center, and the poor kid is so sensitive, so beaten down, that she doesn’t want to think of what would happen to him there.
So right now she considers taking her sandal straps off because they are pinching her feet so badly and imagines standing there barefoot in the dirty parking lot while the gas gurgles into her car. But all of a sudden these teenage girls walk up to her (Damon always says, What the hell, do they have radar for you?).
“Would you buy us a pack of cigarettes?” the taller girl, maybe fifteen at the most, asks, stringy brown hair and freckles around her brown eyes that pull at Suzette.
“What?” Suzette says. She can’t digest what the girl is asking. Suzette is lost in her own thoughts, trying to mentally hold Owen in her arms, trying to argue a good case for Andy, trying to drive Nicole a thousand miles away so that guy can’t find her.
Both girls’ faces are sunburned, and the friend with the light blond hair wears a pink tank top. The brunette girl puts her hands in her jean shorts pockets and tilts her leg to the side. She looks at her flip-flop. “We were just, uh, wondering if you could buy us some cigarettes.”
“ ’Cause we’re not old enough,” her friend says.
Suzette smiles politely. She has learned to never talk down to teenagers, never make what they say seem foolish. “Thanks for trusting me,” she finally says after searching for the words. She hugs her purse around her shoulder. She glances at the friend, tiny in her tank top. Then at the freckled girl. Suzette breathes. A rhythm to her breathing like she will hypnotize them. Breathes like she’s breathing out smoke. “But I can’t do that, you know?”
She wants to tell them not to get started, that that’s what the tobacco fat cats want. She wants to tell them she smoked, too, that she’s certainly not judging them, but but but. She wants to give them a number they can call if things are bad at home, her own number even. Her feet hurt, and the sun is still so damn hot even though she’s under the metal canopy at the gas pump. “What are your names?” she asks.
“Felicia,” says the blonde right away. Her eyes are a permanent squint. Her hair is frizzy. She is one of those girls who gets lost in a classroom. Who the teacher forgets has been out with the hall pass for fifteen minutes.
“And you?” Suzette nods toward the brunette.
The girl bites her finger. Felicia nudges her. “I heard her,” she snaps. She twists her fingers together. “Nancy,” she says, looking away.
Suzette shakes her head. The gas nozzle thumps that it’s full. Other cars back out of their spaces. “That didn’t sound natural.”
“It wasn’t.” The girl twists her lip in a pout.
“Then?”
“Natalie.” She turns back to Suzette. Suzette notices now she’s holding a wrinkled ten-dollar bill for the cigarettes. She thinks of all the dangerous people who could get ahold of two girls like this. She wonders if she should take them to Bobbie at the shelter, or have Carol at Children and Youth look up their situations. But she could be jumping to conclusions. They could be bored kids from Bedford Estates, they could be sunburned from swimming at Oak Gate Country Club.
But their nails are bitten. Their feet look tired. They just have that worn-out look of kids in trouble. “Are you two okay?”
Natalie snorts. “Come on.”
Suzette screws her gas cap back on and returns the nozzle to its cradle. In seconds, she hears her receipt printing. Her sweat and her feet and the bad world irritate her. “I asked a question, Natalie.” Her voice is firm. Sometimes tough love works.
“We’re okay,” Felicia says quietly.
“Fuck you,” Natalie says. She starts to walk away and turns around and looks Suzette up and down. “Bitch.”
“Nat.” Felicia glances back and forth between them as though she’s a little sister caught in the middle.
Suzette shakes her head. She has been called worse. She remembers being twenty-five, a couple of years after Finland. She remembers the first time she was spit at, the first time someone called her a word her mother said was the worst word you could call a woman. But this hurts. It hurts because she’s hot and tired and she thinks Felicia will go along with whatever Natalie wants to do and get herself in trouble. She should count to ten, she should disengage, she is trained to do better. “You think you have it all figured out.”
Natalie rushes toward her, and Suzette winces. “Yeah, I do.” She is inches from Suzette’s face.
“Natalie,” Felicia says. She goes to take Natalie’s arm, but Natalie swats her hand away.
Suzette locks eyes with her. She feels like she is in high school again when she stood up to a senior girl whom everyone else was afraid of. “Stare her down,” her sister Lisa had told her. “Look like you’re a mountain she can’t climb over.” This is going nowhere. “Back off,” she says right into Natalie’s face.
Natalie swings at her, knocking her hard in the jaw. She is no mountain. She wants to tell Lisa she was wrong.
Felicia screams, and Natalie is scratching at Suzette’s face now, her strength ten times greater than what Suzette would have imagined. Suzette pushes back. She feels the burning of her jaw, the burning where this girl’s nails are in her arms. She is trying to restrain Natalie, but she can barely breathe. Suzette is unsteady in these damn wedge sandals, and feels herself fall over, bumping her head on the car. She feels blood. She feels Natalie jumping down on her, not giving up. She raises her elbow and thumps it into Natalie’s mouth. Her other hand grabs Natalie’s dirty hair, and they are face-to-face like two wild wolves. She realizes she’s never been attacked like this in all her years. Felicia is pulling at Natalie weakly, and Natalie bites Suzette’s arm so hard that she screams. She feels like this girl could kill her right here. The irony, everyone would say. She reaches a point where all the pain feels the same, and now Natalie gets to her feet and starts kicking her in the side.
“Stop,” Suzette says. “Stop.”
Suzette hears a car horn, a man’s voice calling out. “Hey!” he yells, and his shadow eclipses them for a second. “Hey, stop or I’ll call the cops!”
When Natalie looks toward him, she freezes. Her wild face drains. Suzette sees some fear, some horror in her eyes, and Suzette, bloody and hurt, face throbbing, head aching, body feeling bruised, turns to see who is coming to her aid. A thin man stands over them. His hair is gone, and his hazel eyes look hollow.
He looks like it’s his last day on earth.
Natalie backs away. Felicia picks up Natalie’s phone that fell out
of her pocket. “Let’s go.” They scuttle toward the Shake Superior strip mall.
Suzette has had the wind knocked out of her. She doesn’t know if she should scream or cry or just moan. She squints and recognizes the man. The seamstress’s husband, Greg, who works for Alex Lionel. She and Damon saw him at a fundraiser event the Lionels hosted a year ago. He looked like a young George Clooney then. Such smoothness, charisma. He wore a black suit that night. He was smiling, shaking hands. Thick hair, dark and gray. Eyes that sparkled. Now she is speechless. She hurts so bad, but she forgets every injury when she stares into his eyes.
“Greg?” she whispers.
He smiles halfheartedly. “You okay? Let me call an ambulance… and the cops, too.”
“No,” she says.
“No?”
She shakes her head. “I think I’m okay.” She holds her side where it hurts the most.
He wears Adidas shorts and a workout shirt. His legs and arms are bare, and she sees a bruise above his wrist. Behind him, a Mercedes is running in the parking lot with the driver-side door open. “What the hell was that all about?” His voice sounds quiet.
He holds his hand out to her, but she feels his frailty, and worries she might pull him down with her. She uses her arm, the one the girl didn’t bite, to help herself to her feet. Her side aches where she was kicked. The pain is so bad she can hardly breathe. One of her sandal heels is broken. Her skirt is filthy. She must look like a zombie with the blood on her face.
Greg brushes some pebbles from her arm, and his hands are cold. Suzette wants to weep because he looks so terrible. She wonders if she will soon read about his death, and her heart breaks that on this hot day, he is helping her, and his face and body, so pale, look genuine and calm, as though he is presenting himself to heaven in some way. He holds her elbow and looks at the wound from the bite. “You need a tetanus shot.” He studies her face. “And maybe stitches.”