Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  After the last laminaria rod is inserted, Andrew asks, “That wasn’t so bad, right?” and I soften my grip. It was so bad. You wouldn’t know, I think. So shut up. The nurse explains to him where I have to be tomorrow and at what time; when to stop eating, and when I can have my last glass of water (nine o’clock tonight). And then we are left alone.

  I roll over onto my side and just stay there for a second. The sun is pulsating from behind the shades, and when I think about going back outside, my heart begins to harden. Then, using my arms, I push myself up like my yoga instructor always told us to do after corpse pose, one vertebra at a time up into the sitting position. Then I drop and dangle my legs down from the table and slide onto the floor.

  I’m naked from my waist down except for my socks, and now my back is hunched over because I’m afraid to stand up all the way. I don’t want to shift or jab anything around in there that’s not supposed to be moved, and I’m afraid of what I might feel.

  Andrew helps me put my underpants on, one foot through each loop at a time. As he pulls up my underwear, I hold onto his neck for balance and look into the garbage can. A bunch of yesterday’s sticks have stuck to the top of the clear, plastic garbage bag. Swollen rods, red and slimy like a bouquet of metacarpals.

  Day Three. It’s the time of the day when the past and the future mingle, the morning of Day Three of the procedure, and this is what I think about as I roll out of bed: the mess I have made. I try to push the thought down, but I can’t. After all I have done, how could anyone love me? The accidents, the calamities, the casualties. I am a human tornado. A natural disaster. Cursed. What if the flames from the fire had spread to the closet and the walls and the ceiling, eventually engulfing the whole building in flames? I could’ve burned down our apartment and ruined every single life in our building. How could I be deserving of trust? And to be honest, the moment I saw that the fire was catching, I didn’t really care about the building burning down as much as I cared about saving Maybe. When the fire started, Andrew was in the hallway, close to the exit. He would’ve gotten out easily and I knew it. And I didn’t care about whether or not I was in harm’s way. All I cared about was my dog. My Maybe, my little Baby Maybe. She was completely vulnerable. All I cared about was keeping my Baby Maybe safe. Is this twisted and wrong? Do I even know how to love right?

  It is the last day of the procedure. Nothing makes sense. I am numb. I throw on a summer dress, slip into flip-flops, and walk up the stairs. This morning, Kerri will be escorting me to the hospital where the surgery will be happening. Andrew is already at work. Maybe he is afraid to rock the boat, maybe he feels it is responsible, but Andrew doesn’t want to take any more time off from his job. He has already gone over his limit in sick days and vacation days and has decided to work at his desk until the very last possible minute. Then he will leave and meet us at the entrance to Beth Israel.

  “I’d like to walk the whole way there,” I tell Kerri after she asks how we get to the hospital. I don’t know why I choose this—maybe because I have to move. It hurts too much to sit still, but it hurts to do anything. I just want to get there on my own two feet; I need to feel each moment I get further from this one and closer to the last. Kerri and I pack our purses and set out for the twenty-minute walk down First Avenue to the hospital. The Vicodin isn’t much help, so if I slow down, I will feel pain. If I am to stop moving, I may confront the reality of the situation—realize what is about to happen—and I may just lose my mind. We—my fiancé’s sister and I—don’t confront the situation; we don’t talk. We walk. Just move.

  Under the hard, hot sun, the cobbled sidewalk feels like jelly. We pass identical delis and bodegas vending bananas, apples, and cigarettes and newspapers from the US and the Middle East; we pass pharmacies with bedpans and sad wheelchairs in the display windows; we pass sleeping pubs that reek of dead beer. When we are about a block away from Beth Israel, I see Andrew leaning against the wall of the entryway to the hospital, left leg propped against a sallow pillar, face turned down, looking older and paler than he did that first night I met him, waiting for things to begin or end, I don’t know.

  The check-in room for surgery is full of the injured and their chaperones, bruised patients mummified in casts and bandages. Perfectly healthy children crawl over their mothers who couldn’t find babysitters and the chorus of coughing, sneezing, and groaning accompanies the muffled noises of others shifting in their seats with ache and irritation. This room is bland and ugly, and smells of lozenges and bleach. A waiting room, room of waiting. Like purgatory.

  The three of us—Andrew, Kerri, and I—survey the space for a place to sit. An old man with raisin skin nods off in a wheelchair next to three open chairs and we hustle over to them. I slowly lower myself down next to Kerri as Andrew walks over to the check-in desk. He has been irritable and angry all week, but when I see him flirting with the elderly receptionist, I take it as a good sign.

  “I’d like to have the surgery performed on myself today, if you will,” he tells her, and she snickers but still motions for me to come over instead and sign in. Then she hands me a white, plastic bracelet with my name and birthday on it and I go back to my seat.

  The nurse from yesterday enters the room, walking toward me. She reaches out and gives me two small, white tablets and says, “You will need to slip these between your teeth and your gums.” She folds my fingers over the chalky pills and squeezes my hand. “Do not chew or swallow them. And good luck.”

  “What is this for?” I ask Andrew, and I’m not sure if I want to know.

  “I’m pretty sure they detach the fetus from the uterine wall,” he says timidly and I open my mouth and set the pills in, right in the back between the gum of my cheeks and my incisors, and wait for them to dissolve.

  Time passes. Andrew and Kerri skim through magazines. I reach over and pull one off the rack next to me. The magazine’s publication date is more than three weeks old and it has been flipped through so many times that the edges to its pages are tattered and the staples holding it together are coming undone. I put the magazine in my lap and it makes me think of the magazines at my father’s office, how several years ago Dad got rid of all the cheap literature, as he called it, and brought in healthier periodicals instead. Discovery, and Highlights for kids. National Geographic and The Economist—ones like that, ones that are good for you.

  I open up the glossy to a two-page spread of a celebrity shopping at a grocery store. In the picture, the store is a regular one, and the woman is wearing enormous, dark sunglasses and glamorous clothing while she pushes the shopping cart down the aisle. At her side is a flock of toddlers. The cart is carelessly piled with plastic-wrapped food with primary-colored lettering, food heavy in corn syrup, salt, and starches. The celebrity has maybe five or six kids, and I suspect she adopted most of them to suit her own amusement, satisfy her own publicity cravings, or suppress some kind of guilty superstar feelings. Bake a humble pie. Above the photo, a caption declares, They’re Just Like Us! and I roll my eyes. Fuck you, I tell it. No. They’re not.

  I remember the big fish aquarium in my dad’s office. He still has it. I remember how when he worked late, Mom would pile the kids into her minivan and bring Dad a Tupperware container filled with food. Lukewarm pork chops and mashed potatoes. Leftover sausage and sauerkraut. When we arrived, Sabina, Jules, and I would run around the hallways, chirping and scavenging the exam rooms for colorful Band-Aids and “I Got a Shot!” stickers to stuff into our jeans pockets. And while Mom was watching Dad eat, I’d drag a vinyl-covered chair from the lobby over to the aquarium and stand on top with a container of fish food and drop pieces of dried shrimp into the water. I remember that I’d watch the food fall to the bottom and always wait for the hermit crab to eat it. I always thought he looked sad and lonely, and I think I felt bad for him because he was the only creature in the aquarium that wasn’t a fish.

  Sitting in the chair in the waiting room
at Beth Israel, I start to sense that, over the years, my understanding of the world has changed. My place in it has changed, too. Since moving to New York, I have become a different person. Nothing is just that simple anymore, nothing is cut and dried. Sitting in the waiting room at Beth Israel, the only thing I understand about life is that life has become much more complex and convoluted and confusing. Life has grown more tentacles. Life needs more care. And I need more care. This is my life.

  I think about Nicole Carpenter. What if I had done what she had, taken her route, because I thought that was right? What if I did what I thought was best, even if it didn’t feel right? Even if I mimicked Nicole, even then, the decision still wouldn’t be the same. That was hers. Not mine. She had the moments and experiences that came before her loss, and the moments and experiences before the baby, and the moments and experiences before those. I’m not her, just like she isn’t me. Do I think she was crazy for fawning over a dead baby? No. Yes. Both. Do I think she was a better person for delivering? Yes. No. It doesn’t matter. She had her reasons. After these years, I see that Nicole and I are the same woman and we are not.

  Now, during this moment, sitting in this room, as I think about Nicole, I yawn and press my hand over my mouth and realize that what I do feel about everything else is this: indifference.

  xyx

  In the end, everything starts happening at once. I rub my stomach because it begins to cramp a little. Then a little more and a little more. Then it feels like I ate a whole lot of something, then drank coffee and smoked a hundred cigarettes, and now I feel like I have to go to the bathroom, like really bad, like now. Then the temperature drops. The waiting room gets cold and colder, and suddenly it’s like I’m hanging from a hook in a meat freezer. The seat of my chair grows spikes and the floor turns to ice, then a dark figure steps out from behind a door and calls my name. I rise, and she escorts me through the set of swinging double doors and into a back corner room. The woman asks me to take off my jewelry and put it in a bag, and all I can give her is my engagement ring; it’s all I have on. While she continues to request and record my information—my first name, my middle name, my mother’s maiden name, my address, phone number, date of birth—and write it all down in boxes on a piece of paper, I start to shiver big shivers, uncontrollably. It’s summertime in Manhattan and I’m colder than I’ve ever been in my whole life. And I’m from Michigan. My teeth are chattering hysterically and I try to stop them, to keep them steady as she asks who is my emergency contact.

  “I’m so cold, please. I can’t stop shaking,” I tell her desperately.

  “It’s an effect of the medicine, dear,” she says, “we’re almost done in here,” and continues to scribble down my information. “Who do I call?”

  Next, a man leads me down a hallway lined with lockers. He hands me a plastic bag to put my clothing and my shoes in, and a cotton gown, slippers, and a hairnet to put on.

  “Ouch,” I say. “I feel sick. I feel terrible. I am so cold. Can I please see my husband?” I’ve been calling Andrew that—my husband. I suspect that if Andrew is my husband, he will be allowed to come back here and help me.

  “Where is the bathroom? I have to use the bathroom,” I plead, and he points, directing me down the hall. I rush in and close the door behind me, sit down on the toilet, and wait, but nothing comes out. I wait. The cramps are getting worse and worse. And I’m so cold, I can barely move. Nothing comes but the throbbing continues. Quickly, still sitting, I pull my sundress over my head and slip into the cotton gown and paper slippers.

  I stand in the locker room hallway holding my stomach. It burns. It feels like my stomach is going to drop right out of me like a meteorite.

  “Where do I go?” I ask the first staff person I see, and she loosely directs me to an open space further down. In it, a few chairs are lined up and facing a television. The synchronized swimming competition. I slide into a chair and try to breathe. Beijing, 2008. A 423-million-dollar stadium. Sitting next to me is a young man, roughly my age, maybe a year or two younger, with a gray cast on his leg. He shoots a difficult glance in my direction, then quickly looks away, and I can’t take it. I get up and tell a woman behind a nearby desk that I can’t take it. I need to see my fiancé. This hurts too much.

  “Okay, dear. We have someone coming for you in just a minute. Just wait over there just a few more minutes,” she says, motioning with her hand.

  “I can’t.”

  A set of wooden doors swings open and a glossy-faced man in blue scrubs enters pushing a wheelchair in front of him. The man tells me to climb in, and I do, then he veers me back through the set of double doors and through the waiting room.

  “Andrew,” I call as I’m steered past him and Kerri.

  Andrew jolts up, rushes over. “What’s going on here?” he asks, looking alarmed.

  Next, the three of us get into an elevator. Inside, it is silent. My brain feels fuzzy and I’m shaking harder, great big chunks of shivers. A ding and the attendant rolls me out of the elevator and into the surgery prep room.

  The prep room is a shiny, buzzing room full of patients and their escorts. Some people are in beds, some are waiting in chairs, and other than the curtain hanging around the beds, there is little privacy.

  I’m struggling to get comfortable and take in air. I lean on my back, bend my knees, open and close my legs, fidget, roll, and moan. Through an opening in the curtain surrounding my bed, I see a young boy sitting next to his mother, looking back at me.

  “I need medicine,” I tell Andrew, quivering, and soon a nurse inserts an IV into my arm. Andrew holds my hand.

  “What can I do for you?” he asks.

  “Just stay here. Or get Dr. Reich. I need a painkiller. Get a doctor. No, stay here.” I can’t decide what I need. I can’t think straight. I can’t breathe. “Just stay here and help me find my breath,” I say, and he does.

  An hour passes. The pain in my belly increases. Andrew rubs my toes, my forehead, my fingers. I listen to the sound of his breath whistling through his nostrils. The sound of it is beautiful. He is my guardian angel right now. His face is glowing. I absorb two, three, four IV bags of fluids and keep having to go to the bathroom. Andrew helps me out of the bed and escorts me through the crowded room and into the bathroom. There and back, there and back; he lifts my IV bag on the way to the toilet, and on the way back, he holds together the flaps of my hospital gown, covering my rear end.

  When we ask how much longer, a nurse tells us that something has gone wrong in the surgery room. The patient who has gone before us is having complications; the surgeons are running fifty minutes behind. Soon it will be an hour and a half, two hours, two and a half hours more, and the burning in my pelvis is getting worse and worse.

  “Screw it,” I say, just before I flip over onto all fours. I need to make the painful throbbing become less, and Dr. Reich arrives. I’m relieved to see her. When she pulls open the drape, I’m on my hands and knees like a dog and I don’t care. I moan a little bit.

  “This is the position that got Mira here in the first place,” Andrew jokes, and Danya rolls her eyes.

  “Hello, my dear,” my doctor says to me and begins drawing soft circles along my back with her nails. “How are you holding up?” Her touch is comforting.

  “Just give me something to take away the pain,” I mutter. “Let this be over, for God’s sake.”

  When I’m finally given pain medication, the surgeons are ready for me. After the pain meds comes a sedative, something inserted into my IV that slows me down and spaces me out. The juice makes me woozy, makes me lose my grip and my awareness, and the room spins.

  Now two dark shadows appear at the front of my bed, wavy cowboy silhouettes from a Wild West showdown. My bed sprouts wheels, then wings, and Andrew flies with me and the two dark cowboys as long as he can, all the way up until the last set of doors. Then Andrew says he can’t go any furthe
r, he’s not allowed, and I look up at his face. It looks like a painting, a painting that is soaked in water. The lights behind him spin around Andrew’s face and now his eyes and nose and lips look funny, like a clown’s, and I start to giggle. I reach out and touch his face. He is a jellyfish. “You are silly, jellyfish,” I tell him, and it is ever more funny when Andrew’s head shrinks as I fly away.

  In the surgery room, the silhouettes maneuver and move feverishly about. I look up from my bed and what I see is a round sun, shining in my face. It is blinding until the moon face of a woman eclipses the glare. The moon leans down, asks me my birthday, and before I can answer her, everything evaporates, then stops.

  I am in our bedroom when I finally wake from the surgery. I feel empty. The head of the electric fan surveys the surroundings impassively, lulling everything within the room into a heavy, hypnotic state. I look for Andrew. There he is, right next to me, lying by my side.

  “How did we get here?” I ask.

  “You wanted to walk. So we walked until we were two blocks away. Then we took a cab.”

  I have no response, nor do I struggle to comprehend. There is nothing. Just the hum of the fan, a sound shaped like a chanting monk, blowing on my face and pulling me deeper into the drug of sleep.

  thirteen

  When a child dies, there is an elemental shift in everyone. First, a monsoon of sympathy cards, warm, noodly foods, and flowers that bring the funeral parlor smell right into your home. A boy dies and, after the funeral, one bears witness to the miraculous generosity of a small town. There’s not just an overload of Stargazer lilies and pastrami and Kaiser rolls; there’s a surge of companionship. Constant companionship. One man down, one hundred step in. People reach out to you, step into your life, followed by more people—some family, many strangers. A boy dies and his family is given instant fame. They’re the talk of the town. There are heartfelt condolences (“I’m sorry.” “My deepest regrets.” “I’m so sorry for your loss.”), followed by the awkward response the bereaved can never figure out how to say (“It’s okay” or “thanks”). A boy dies and a new dialect is employed—a robotic, cautious tongue—and all conversations are restricted to simple topics that are easy to understand. All things neutral. Topics that everyone can agree on, subjects that will ruffle no feathers or remind us that we cannot beat death. Lasagna. Fruit salad. They offend no one.