“Thank God,” I responded. “Now maybe I can get some sleep.”
“Okay, smart-ass. Put on your clothes.”
The cop divided himself into two, and the subway morphed into my bedroom. There were strange things stacked along the walls: tires, a radio, bucket seats, and a steering wheel. I did a double take. I blinked hard. I wasn’t dreaming anymore. This was real. “What the hell is going on here?” I asked.
One of the cops said, “You tell me, smart-ass.” He dragged me from the bed. After I had gotten dressed, the other officer, dangling his cuffs on his forefinger, ordered me to turn around and cross my wrists behind my back. Cuffed, I was escorted from my bedroom and into the outer basement, where three more officers, my parents, Linda, and Jimmy were. Jimmy was in cuffs, too.
In the police wagon he grinned and said, “I stole another car.”
I looked through the small window in the door. The sky was just starting to brighten. I figured it to be around five.
“It’s in the garage,” he continued. “And in your room. We were stripping it, and I guess somebody called the law. We must have been making too much noise.”
I faced him. “Who’s we?”
“Me and you.”
“What? I didn’t steal any car!”
“According to the police, you did.”
“Who helped you?” I demanded to know.
“I’m not at liberty to say. But since the stuff’s in your room, I guess the cops assumed you helped me. Obviously, I had to agree. There were eyewitness reports of two people.”
I had stolen my first car while asleep. It was too much. “You have to tell them the truth,” I insisted.
He was outraged. “Are you asking me to snitch?”
“Yes.”
“I’m no snitch.”
“Well, I’m no car thief!”
“That,” Jimmy said, “will be very difficult to prove.”
We were taken to a local precinct and placed in separate cells. It was a brand-new facility, the white walls unmarred by graffiti, unlike others that I had seen. The benches were made of steel instead of wood, and there was a toilet in the corner that I thought I would not use because of the surveillance camera overhead, but all bets were off twenty-four hours later.
Finally we were loaded onto a bus with a dozen other inmates and taken to another precinct. They held us in this one for several more hours, during which the guards laughed when I inquired about phone calls and lawyers. I began to think that somehow we had already been convicted and sentenced, but at last Jimmy and I went for a bail hearing. The courtroom was in the basement where, miraculously, our father and Tim were sitting in the front row. Jimmy and I were led directly to the judge’s bench, which rose high in the air, in case our relationship to him was unclear. “Your bail’s been posted,” he said. After telling us our court date, he added, “Have a nice day.” Just like that, we were free.
But our father arrested us again. No going outside until we went to court. No phone privileges. No allowance. No more living in his house without either a job or school. And no money for a lawyer. We had to use a public defender, a stocky, soft-spoken man who promised we would walk if we pleaded guilty. So that’s what we did. The judge gave us probation, three years in which to screw up and have to face five-to-twenty. He rapped his gavel and said, “See you soon.”
Jimmy had not dropped out of high school yet as I had, so I was the only one who needed to find a job. My father gave me two months. He could probably have given me a year and it wouldn’t have mattered, since no one would hire me, not even Burger King or McDonald’s. With a week left to go before he threw me out, my sister Mary, who’d returned from college and now worked at the medical center, told me she knew someone in human resources who might be able to get me a job.
“Doing what?”
“Cleaning test tubes.”
“What’s in them?” I asked.
She said, “Poop.”
I did not like the direction my life was headed. And yet it felt right somehow, strangely on course, like bad things were supposed to happen to me and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
A PLACE OF REDEMPTION
The author of the story being discussed must remain silent. The work should speak for itself, I tell my students, though they often fail to see the logic of this. “How can I not respond,” they want to know, “while I’m being criticized?” I tell them to bring something to chew. A bullet, perhaps, or a stick. So far no one has followed this advice. I have seen students pull hair, though, as well as bite nails, grimace, crack knuckles, and even smile as it has been reported death row inmates do at the moment of execution. But no one had ever cried. That was about to change, I suspected, when Diane walked into the room wearing sunglasses. She took her usual seat to my right, but she did not engage in the usual chitchat with the students near her, and they were not interested in chitchatting with her. In fact, the whole room was eerily silent. I looked at my watch. Six minutes to go.
Two more students arrived and quietly took their seats. Everyone seemed to have great interest in their hands, something deep in their book bags, or in the manuscripts. There were three to be discussed that day, and at this moment I cannot recall what the other two were about. All I remember is that I discussed those first, not to heighten the sense of drama, but because I did not want Diane to have to sit through another hour of class in emotional distress. This way, after her classmates filed out of the room, we could have the privacy we needed.
Her story was about a woman who could not conceive. Her gynecologist had told her this when she was twenty, which came to her as good news because she had no interest in being a mother. For the next fifteen years, she and her husband lived a blissful, contraception-free life, and then to everyone’s surprise she got pregnant. She was angry with her doctor, her husband, and herself, but mostly she was angry with the baby. She referred to it as a “thing” and dreamed of snatching it unborn from her womb, only to be consumed by guilt when, at five months, nature snatched it for her. The story was well written, emotional, and full of the kind of specific detail that made me suspect that it was true. And then there was the fact that the author was in her thirties, like the main character, and both had been married for fifteen years. They both were nurses, smokers, and lived in the town of Newton. There was no doubt that the author had laid herself bare, led us to a car crash and pointed to her mangled body. She couldn’t have known that mine was in there, too.
Just before I started the class, I reviewed my notes:
1) Never states why character did not want children. Give reason.
Brenda’s was men. She had little faith in them when we met, thanks to living with an abusive father for sixteen years. Before the seventeenth year arrived, she and her mother filled a suitcase and slipped into the night. They were on the run for months, sleeping on the couches of friends. But he found them. “I’ll never do it again,” he promised, “if you just come home.” He was evil and stupid. Trust him and a week later pieces of their limbs would be found mixed in the garden mulch. They did not go home. But they did not expect to live. Brenda had been expecting not to live for five years when I met her.
2) Husband very happy about pregnancy. Unclear whether or not he’d wanted a child all along. Was he depressed at the thought of not being a father? How had he felt when told of wife’s infertility?
It took me two years to get Brenda to fully trust me, two more to get her to marry me, and another year to convince her that we should have a baby. As soon as she agreed, the first thing I did was buy books, three hundred dollars’ worth of Dr. Seuss and Pooh.
“I shouldn’t have bought books,” I said. I was on the phone with my mother. Brenda and I had been trying to get pregnant for six months. “They were a jinx. And the cute outfits. The diapers, rattles, stroller—all of it. Jinxes.”
“You’re trying too hard,” my mother said.
“How does one try too hard,” I asked, “to have a baby?�
��
“Well, for one, those vitamins you told me about.”
“The Mega Men’s?”
“Yes,” she said. “Stop taking those.”
I couldn’t. My sperm needed an edge. I’d watched a documentary about what they had to go through to reach the egg, a triathlon in miniature. I didn’t want them panting as they crossed the finish line, or, God forbid, unable to finish at all. Extra-high doses of tryptophan was definitely the way to go. But even that wasn’t getting it done. A year passed and still no luck. I stopped wearing underwear.
“Bad idea,” Brenda said.
“Why?”
“It just is.”
“The infertility book warned of excessive heat.”
“You’re probably exempt,” she said, “since it’s winter, in Iowa.”
“Then what’s wrong with me?”
“How do you know it’s you? Maybe it’s me.”
“I knew it!” I said. “It’s you!”
“I didn’t say it’s me. I said maybe.”
“Well it sure as hell isn’t me!”
“How do you know?”
“Tryptophan,” I said.
We were quiet for a minute. Finally, Brenda said, “Maybe we should get checked.”
The thought of doing so racked me with fear. What if my sperm weren’t triathletes after all? What if they were fat little golfers, or couch potatoes? “Let’s just keep trying,” I suggested. The next day I bought a book with a title something like Getting Pregnant Is a Cinch! that guaranteed results in one month. All we needed were some charts, graphs, colored pencils, a thermometer, ovulation kits, latex gloves, cinnamon tea, and an hour a day for meditation. Five months later I threw away the book and my Mega Men’s, along with my hopes of ever being a father.
Three weeks after that, Brenda was pregnant.
3) Very realistic how she doesn’t suspect anything wrong when she can’t feel the baby move for several days.
We checked our pregnancy books and read warnings about bleeding and cramping, but Brenda had experienced none of that. Just a small gush of liquid. We were fine. Totally okay. This was just the latest of the peculiar things, we told ourselves, that happen during a pregnancy. I called the hospital so they could agree. “How far along is she?” the nurse asked. I told her five months. She told me not to worry.
“That was odd,” I said when I got off the phone.
“What?”
“She wanted our address.”
“For their records probably.”
A few minutes later we were surprised when two paramedics knocked on the front door. They chatted with us as they took Brenda’s pulse and moved a stethoscope across her belly, inquiring if we were students and what our fields were. When they finished the examination, they casually put away their things and told us to go see her doctor.
My heart sank. “What for?”
“Observation.”
“Are … are you taking us?” I asked.
“Oh, no, no, no. You can drive yourself.”
I exhaled. “Thank God,” I said, as if all hope rested in not riding in an ambulance.
“You had us pretty worried there,” Brenda added. She placed a hand on her stomach.
The paramedics went to the door. Before they left, one of them turned and looked toward the couch, where Brenda and I sat holding hands, and asked if this was our first pregnancy. We told him yes. He wished us good luck.
4) Doctor’s coldness well rendered. Especially liked how he told her baby had no heartbeat, and then said, “That’s what you get for not wanting it.” Liked how she thinks of misdiagnosis of infertility, toys with a lawsuit. All very believable.
I was sitting in the waiting room near a screaming child and beneath a muted TV when an intern appeared, calling my name. “Better go to your wife,” he said as I approached. “She’s pretty upset.”
“Upset? Why?”
“Obviously the miscarriage.”
As if I had known. As if we’d just go home and try again, ignore the three years it had taken to get there. Ignore how close to the due date we were, a stone’s throw from viability. He was cold, very cold, and no stories about vitamins, charts, ovulation kits, and crying would warm him.
The intern said we could leave. Nature, he explained, would complete the act without medical intervention. He asked me to collect the remains for an examination. I asked to speak with him in the hall. Once there I said, “Am I … is it …” I took a deep breath. “What are we going to see?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Just gray matter.”
“Gray matter?”
“Pretty much.”
“We’re so far along, though. Five months.”
“Nothing,” he assured me, “will be recognizable.” He got me a plastic, orange bucket.
Gray matter, I thought. Another peculiar thing.
5) Husband suddenly doesn’t support wife, refuses to go to the surgery for D&C. Hard to believe his reaction. I concede, though, that stress can produce illogical behavior.
It seemed very important to me that Brenda have on her robe. But I could not find it. And I had to find it quickly because the paramedics were on the way. I ran back into the bathroom to ask her again. “Do you have any idea where you put it?” She did not respond, though, because she was unconscious. Her nude body lay in the tub, unmoving on a stream of bright red blood. The orange bucket was on the floor, full of the remains. It was not gray matter. The last two hours had been pretty intense. “I’ve looked everywhere,” I said. I ran back into the bedroom and looked once more. Defeated, I returned to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub next to the thermometer, its mercury frozen at 105. I held my head in my bloody hands as my body quaked with sobs. “I just can’t understand,” I said, “how a bathrobe can vanish into thin air.”
I remembered where it was! In the dryer! I went into the basement and looked, but it wasn’t there, so I returned and resumed standing behind the paramedics, who had arrived a few minutes earlier and were hard at work. One of them was holding an oxygen mask on Brenda’s face. Another was searching her arm for a place to put a very large needle. A third was yelling at her to wake up, to hold on. This was taking place on the bathroom floor. In my absence, they’d covered her naked body with a white sheet, which was okay but not nearly as nice as the robe I was searching for. Where could it be? I wondered. Where the hell could it be?
6) Guilt, rage masterfully captured; nice work.
I felt entirely responsible. In my youth I’d stolen, lied, used drugs, and blasphemed, completely drenched myself with bad karma. This was my fault, clearly. My just due.
For two months I was subject to bouts of guilt so debilitating that I could not bear to be in public. I especially avoided parks and malls, or any other place where I’d be forced to look away from babies. I looked away from the newly pregnant neighbor across the street. Then my sister Linda told me she was pregnant, so I looked away from her. I looked away from everything that should have made me happy. And then I got bitter, so I looked away from God, because, to my thinking, he’d looked away from me.
7) Powerful ending, very sad and intense. Very realistic that the marriage does not survive a trauma such as this. Her all-consuming depression is realistic, too. My only concern is that it may be too hopeless.
I was depressed for a year and a half. I did not even show signs of recovery when Brenda, after nine more months of trying, became pregnant again. I just could not convince myself to be hopeful. Certainly not about a baby being held in the womb by a string. Brenda had been diagnosed with an “incompetent cervix,” meaning that if her cervix wasn’t stitched closed during pregnancy, it would open once the fetus reached roughly twenty weeks of growth. Twenty-five weeks and it could survive with assistance. Thirty weeks and it could survive on its own. We made it to thirty-seven. And even with that, I wheeled her into the delivery room with low expectations. So I wasn’t surprised when after forty minutes of la
bor the baby’s heart rate suddenly started to fall. I knew it would stop completely. When it did, the alarm sounded, sending everyone into a wild panic, except for me. I fatalistically watched as triage carts were shoved into the room and more doctors ran in snapping on rubber gloves as they arrived. A nurse called the OR and screamed at them to get ready, and then the delivery doctor, with unnerving calm, said to Brenda, “We may have to have an emergency C-section. The baby’s in trouble.”
“Okay.”
“But I want you to push one last time.”
Brenda nodded.
“With the next contraction, I need you to push, push, as if the baby’s life depends on it.”
I knew that it did. Later, we would learn from the doctor that Brenda’s had, too. I looked at the machine that monitored her contractions. The needle began to rise, wiggling toward its apex and then, after reaching it, holding steady.
“Push,” the doctor said. “Push!”
Brenda pushed. I glanced at the baby’s heart monitor. It remained blank. I looked at Brenda. Veins rose on her brow. It’s no use, I wanted to tell her. You’re wasting your time. But I knew she wouldn’t believe me. I looked at the doctor. She was standing now, delicately working her forceps around what suddenly popped into view—a tiny little head! It was cone-shaped and covered in tufts of jet-black hair. The doctor praised Brenda, tugged some more, and a face emerged, silent and blue. Someone suctioned his nose and mouth before his limp body tumbled into the doctor’s hands. A nurse grabbed him and ran to the corner of the room and placed him on a small table beneath a heat lamp. A team of medical staff converged on him; another converged on Brenda. “You did a phenomenal job,” they told her. “You did really well.” But there was no mention of the baby. I stood there silently, ignoring the full horror of what was happening, begging him to breathe.
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