“You’re sure that you’re okay?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m sure.”
“Good. Then get some sleep. Relax,” Eddie says. “I’ll call you tomorrow and see how you’re feeling.”
That’s it, I think? That’s all I get. Eddie’s words feel like another pat on the head. “Fine,” I say and hang up abruptly.
Should I call someone else? Who would take my fears seriously? My grandmother? One of my aunts? Franny or Makiko? But maybe the problem isn’t everyone else. Maybe it’s me. If my doctor and my boyfriend aren’t worried, then I shouldn’t be either. If I’d listen to them, trust them, relax, go to sleep, stop all this nonsense, then perhaps everything truly would be all right.
I push the books aside and fluff my pillows, smooth the sheets. I’m just fine, I tell myself, taking on the same conciliatory tone with myself that Dr. Shin and Eddie have taken. A little achy. A little nauseous. But so what? That’s pregnancy, right? Why get all freaked out by what’s probably normal? I resolve to sleep. To rest. To build up my energy for tomorrow, when everything will be different. I close my eyes, and I breathe slowly and carefully. With each inhale, I tell my baby girl that we will be okay.
I must’ve slept, because at some point in the night, I wake up with a low deep cramp, as if I need the toilet. Dr. Shin said it could be food poisoning, but I’ve hardly eaten anything today. Maybe that’s the problem. Eddie’s right. I’d feel better if I took better care of myself. I could get up and eat, but we have nothing here. I roll over, and the cramp goes away.
Again I doze. This time I dream of a farm and people dancing while I sit in the background on a large, round egg. I’m happy, but I worry that the egg will crack from all the noise of the party. The egg begins to rumble, shimmy, shake, vibrate beneath me. Those vibrations turn to pounding, then to throbbing between my legs. I wake up and blink around the room. The light of a full moon pours into the window, but I’m not sure where I am. Where’s the party and the egg that I was sitting on?
As I slowly come back into myself, I forget about everything that’s happened recently. I forget that my restaurant worries me. That I live with Eddie, but he’s gone. That I’m pregnant and afraid my baby is in trouble. I remember me, but only me. The me of months ago, with no second heartbeat inside. The person with limitless possibilities in my life and everything wide open in front of me.
I remember this feeling from another time in my life. A child’s version of this same optimism about the world. I was looking forward to my small six-year-old day. My aunts had promised to take my cousins and me to see Herbie the Love Bug in the theater, and when we got home, they promised, my parents would be back.
When I came downstairs that morning, my aunts were all there, sitting around the kitchen table. Their eyes were red and swollen. Mounds of wadded tissues covered the countertops. The radio was on, but someone quickly flicked it off. Aunt Mary pulled me into her lap.
“Your mom and dad might be late,” she told me simply as she stroked my hair.
I hated for my hair to be touched, so I squirmed away. “Why?” I asked.
Everyone was quiet. I thought maybe they hadn’t heard me. I started to ask again, but Aunt Joy cut me off. “There was an accident, honey,” she said.
It’s not that I was a particularly savvy six-year-old, but I knew something else was up. There are no Mata Haris in my family. Subtlety is not our strong suit. Something in the moaning and averted eyes and constant crossing of themselves led me to believe my aunts weren’t telling me the whole story that morning.
Later, while I was supposed to be napping in my grandmother’s bed, I slipped down the hall and slithered beneath the dining room table, where I could see my aunts and grandmother watching television in the living room. On the screen was a river that looked like chocolate milk right after you stir it up, with white frothy bubbles around the edges. I thought of my mother’s chocolate milk. She didn’t skimp on the Quik powder like every other grown-up I knew. She’d let the excess chocolate sink to the bottom of the glass so that at the end of drinking there would be the most delectable sludge to slurp up. I imagined the river, sweet and chocolatey like that.
I don’t remember what the newscasters were saying. Probably things like “rescue efforts continue” and “tragedy” and “worst train accident in New Jersey history.” I remember a crane lifting bent and twisted train cars out of the murky water as if they were toys fished from a muddy stream. I didn’t put together my parents’ “accident” with the mess on the screen. An accident was a small thing. Spilling milk. Bumping my cousins with my bike. Oops, sorry, accident.
Then divers brought up a body wrapped in a black rubber sheet. As the crane lifted it, an arm slipped out, and my grandmother stood up abruptly and turned off the TV.
“Enough,” she said. “They should let her be. Norma always did love the water.”
I wondered what she meant by that. Who was this Norma that supposedly loved the water? Couldn’t have been my mother. I had no fond memories of building sand castles and running in the frothy waves with her. And the only water I’d ever seen in Brooklyn was a stinking canal where my cousin Teddy claimed dead bodies surfaced every once in a while. So the Norma my grandmother must have been talking about was some other Norma that I never knew. One that was somewhere inside that awful picture on TV, while my mother was on her way home to me.
But it was my mother who was left at the bottom of the river after my father’s body was fished out. Grandfather Manelli was a World War II veteran who believed deeply in dead heroes and recovery missions, so he approved when my father was brought up from the depths. When the state called off the search without finding Norma, I think Grandma Calabria was relieved. Grandmother Manelli thought it a sin to leave my mother down in the river, and she made no secret of it. At the funeral, she sat on her perch, the martyred mother with her four daughters circling her. “No body for the priest to bless,” she muttered. “No eternal resting place next to her husband,” she moaned and spat while eyeing my Grandmother Calabria on the other side of the church, as if it were her fault.
Now from my bed, in a cloudy, half-delirious vision, I see my mother beside me. She’s in her red dress, coming in from a late-night gig. She reaches out her hand to stroke the hair away from my face. Then a sudden strong ache deep in my belly hits me, and I curl onto my side. My mother’s gone, long gone, I remember, so I call out for my grandmother. I ask her to come and help me because I’m sick. My voice echoes back to me, and I realize that I’m not at her house either. I’m home alone, and something horrible is happening. Another flash of pain, and I push myself out of bed.
In the bathroom, when I lower my panties, I see the bright red stain of blood. Not the small dark spots or slow trickle of before, but the mark of something worse. Something far more profound. Then I feel a slip inside of me. A glob. A blob. What’s falling from my body? Some kind of clot, a clump. Is this what the books mean by tissue? A torrent of blood and bright pink liquid as thin and powerful as pee comes out of me, and I moan.
When it stops, I rummage in the drawers for a pad. I put it in and stand up. I have to get to the phone. Call Eddie. Call Dr. Shin. Ask someone for help. As I walk, I break into a shivering sweat. A dark cloud covers my eyes, and I know I’m going down. I fall, gently crumple, everything dark and shadowy. I catch myself on all fours, lower myself, and roll into a ball. I think I’m dying. The baby and I are dying. Here. Alone.
But I don’t die. Of course not. This is not my death tonight. My vision clears, and I haul myself onto the bed. The phone is beside the pillow. I dial Eddie’s number. It takes several seconds of scratchy white noise before the call goes through, then I hear his familiar voice telling me to leave a message.
“Goddammit!” I yell into the phone and hang up. Where could he be? What the hell time is it in Italy? Why didn’t he answer? He’s still at that wedding while I writhe on our bed. I dial his number again. Again his voice mail. I try to say something. Try t
o form a sentence, but I don’t know what to say. How to say it. After several seconds I growl into the phone, “Where the fuck are you when I need you?”
Why am I calling him anyway? He can’t do anything. I hang up and call Dr. Shin. I don’t care what time it is. A sleepy man at her answering service picks up. He asks me if this is an emergency, and I tell him that it is. He takes my number and assures me that Dr. Shin will call me back. I hang up and fear that I’ll never hear from her. But seconds later, the phone rings. It’s her.
I try to explain exactly what’s happening, but I can’t talk right. “Something’s very wrong,” I say in some strange slurry language, my tongue thick with unwanted words. I can barely talk or breathe because I’m crying.
“Ellie!” Dr. Shin says sharply. “You must calm down.” I hear the tiredness in her voice. The slow draw of her annoyed words. “I already told you, some women bleed during pregnancy. There’s a heartbeat. Most likely you’re fine. I want you to go back to bed. Put your feet up and get some sleep.”
“I can’t,” I tell her. “I’m afraid.”
“Is your husband there with you?” she asks. “Let me talk to him.”
“I’m alone,” I say, and then I think, Why? Why am I alone?
“You must stop panicking,” she says sternly.
“Please make it stop?” I beg.
“I can’t,” she says softly. “And you don’t want me to. If you’re going to lose it, it’s because it’s no good. It means something is wrong with that fetus. All you can do right now is go back to bed. Put your feet up. Try to sleep.”
I snap into a moment of lucidity when she tells me this. All my fear and concern morphs into outrage. I spew at her, “Are you fucking serious? This is your advice? I’m bleeding and cramping, maybe losing this baby in the middle of the fucking night, and you tell me to put my fucking feet up? What the hell kind of doctor are you?” I’m pissed. Livid. If she were here, I’d whack her with my pregnancy books.
She sighs wearily. “Ellie,” she says full of pity. I hate to hear my name, especially in that scolding tone. As quickly as I was angry and ready to fight with her, I am chastised. I’ve become her nightmare patient. Who am I to tell her that her advice is bad? She’s the doctor. Seen it all a thousand times before. I’m just some lousy sniveling woman who has no idea what the hell my body is doing.
“If I send you to the hospital,” Dr. shin explains to me, “they won’t be able to do anything for you. Sometimes women bleed, heavily, and we don’t always know why. Sometimes everything is fine. It’s too early to tell, and it’s too early in the pregnancy to try to save it if something’s wrong. So the best thing for you to do is wait and see. I’ll call you in a few hours to check on you. Do you understand?”
I tell her that I understand, but I don’t understand how this could be happening to me. I’ve read the books. Followed the directions. Consulted with my doctor. Spoken to the father of my child. I did what they told me. Put my feet up and tried to relax. None of this has helped. I think of calling Eddie again or my grandmother, maybe Franny, but I’m tired of explaining a situation that no one can do anything about. So I tell myself that I will be okay, and I close my eyes.
I know I’ve done everything I can do, yet nothing could prepare me for this full-moon night, when gravity loosens the fetus slowly dying in my body. I feel it let go from deep inside of me. I bolt upright and scramble from the bed, thinking I can save it if I move quickly enough. If I’m in the bathroom. If I can make it to the phone. But it plummets in a sickening slide from between my soft labia to land between my legs in a quivering mess. I gasp and call out to God, but I know that this is the end.
I take tiny mincing steps, doubled over, my body racked with huge aching sobs. I walk like an elderly woman with slow unsure steps toward the bathroom. I feel ancient because at this moment there’s more death in me than there is life. In the soft moonlight filtering through the bathroom windows, I slowly lower my pajama bottoms with my eyes half closed because I do not want to see what has come loose from my body. It feels gigantic, and I’m afraid.
I sit on the toilet, squinting in the half dark, and carefully remove what’s fallen. I hold it up with both hands, cradled in my underwear, as if I’m offering it to an angry God. And I keen, a sound so desperate and sad that it surprises even me.
In my hands is death. A tiny orb has fallen out of me, like a gelatinous comet trailing its own life support system. The books said the fetus was two inches. My thumb. The pictures made it seem as if the baby floated happily around inside of me like an alien astronaut (with its outsized noggin and paddle arms) attached to me by a long thin cord. But no. That isn’t it at all. All kinds of extraneous material held everything in place. What I see lying bloody in my hands would have been my child, and it is huge.
Nowhere in that mess do I see the body of my baby, because she is packed inside a yellow orb. A spaceship built for one. Time traveling through a wormhole between my legs. Part of me wants to touch the quivering glob. Break it open with my fingernail like a soft egg and expose my daughter to the world. I want to see her, just once. Hold her minuscule hand and look into her eyes. But it seems profane to disturb her cocoon, so I don’t touch it.
I want to create some sort of shroud from gauzy fabric and carve a box from fragrant wood. Carry her out to the woods. Alone. Just the two of us, to bury what I’ve lost. Or slide her tiny form into the sea to join my mother. This can’t be the way it will end for us. Me wracked and wailing on the toilet. Her wrapped in wads of toilet paper. I have no fabric or a box. I have nothing to offer her. What else can I do? I lay her remains gently in the trashcan and close my eyes to spare myself the sight of my failure.
Chapter
Nineteen
W hen I’m clean, when I’m empty, when some sort of rationality kicks back in and I’ve taken care of myself, I crawl into bed. The first call I make is to Dr. Shin.
“The worst is over,” she tells me after I explain what happened.
“What now?” I ask, and I’m surprised by how calm and reasonable my voice is.
“You’ll bleed for a while. Like a bad period. Some cramping. You can take painkillers if you need to. Any over-the-counter thing is fine. Doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t I at least deserve Vicodin or OxyContin?” I ask, trying in vain to find some humor. Then again, maybe I’m not kidding.
“You shouldn’t need something that strong,” she says.
“Should I come in to see you?”
“Call me when the bleeding tapers off. About a week or so, and we’ll take a look inside. Make sure everything passed. But you’re young and healthy. You’ll do fine.”
“Do I need to stay in bed or anything?” I sound desperate as I seek some kind of guidance about how to act and what to do because I feel so lost.
“You can do whatever you feel up to, really,” she says and I want to ask, waterskiing, equestrian sports? “But,” she adds quickly, “nothing vaginal until I see you.”
Nothing vaginal! What’s she think I’m going to do? Stick a banana up there? Shoot Ping-Pong balls across the room? I just lost my baby, for Christ’s sake.
“So, are you okay?” Her voice is all tenderness and caring now. Too little too late, I think, but I tell her that I’m all right and that I understand what to do, even though I still can’t comprehend why or how this has happened.
The next call I make is to Eddie. “You have to be there,” I say aloud to the ringing phone.
“Lem?” he answers sleepily. “That you?”
I sit, confused. I don’t know what to say.
“Lem? Darling? You there?”
“Eddie,” I whisper.
“I can barely hear you, honey. Can you speak up?”
“Eddie, I lost it.” My voice sounds tiny. Vanquished across the miles in the sky.
“Lost what?” he says with a little laugh. “Are you dreaming?”
“The baby,” I tell him. “I lost the baby. It’s gone
.”
He’s silent except for his breathing. In and out, a little ragged and uncertain. “What’d you mean, it’s gone?”
I can’t answer him. I can’t talk anymore. I lie with the phone beside my head, and I cry, quietly.
“I don’t understand, Lemon. You have to explain this to me. Where’d it go?” His voice grows frantic, creeping up and up. “Where are you? What the hell happened?” His words hit me like little slaps, and I cry harder.
“It died,” I choke. “It came out.” Those words. So simple. So tiny and small. What I thought the thing alive inside of me was once, but I was wrong. It was huge and complicated in death. These little words can’t convey.
“No. Wait,” he says. Demands. “This can’t be right. You must be wrong. The doctor said you were fine. You just told me that you were fine an hour ago. Are you at the hospital? Are you with the doctor? Put the doctor on the phone. Put the doctor on the phone now, Lemon.”
“Stop,” I say. “Stop yelling at me.”
He takes a breath. Regroups himself and says more calmly, “Tell me where you are.”
“I’m at home. I’m alone.”
“What do you mean, you’re alone?” he explodes. “Why aren’t you at the hospital? Call nine-one-one. Do something!”
I’m exhausted now. I want everything to be done. I want to close my eyes and sleep. “There’s nothing else I can do,” I tell him simply.
He’s quiet. I imagine him in some old hotel, his room overlooking a quiet piazza where the same moon is high in the sky. I want to touch him. Feel him beside me. Have his arms around my poor sad body.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to him.
“Why did this happen?” Eddie asks. “What did you do?”
His voice breaks, and he cries. Rough whimpers crackle on the line. But I can’t tell him what I did. Can’t explain how I crawled beneath the moon as I felt our child fall from inside of me. Can’t tell him what I saw in my hands and how I wrapped her up and threw her away.
Luscious Lemon Page 17