by Kyra Davis
But my ears did perk up whenever Cherise added something. She was completely in touch with the needs and wants of Sassy’s target market. Plus, she was so animated in the way she communicated her suggestions that it was impossible to tune her out. I avoided making eye contact with her. It wasn’t my fault that Blakely was evil. Evil. The word made me think of my grandmother and everything she had gone through. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, twisting slightly away from Gigi, who was in the middle of questioning the need to wear boots with boot-cut pants. I had no doubt that if Blakely had lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign she would have aligned herself with the Nazis in order to secure her financial success. And this was the woman I aspired to share an office with. What did that say about me?
“So are we all clear on this?” Blakely’s voice brought me out of my private deliberations. I took in her dark-gray Vertigo suit showcasing a body that had never been introduced to the pleasures of fatty cuisine. I nodded at her, although I had no idea what I was supposed to be clear on. I would have to get the information from Gigi later.
Upon exiting into the hallway I literally bumped into Allie, who had been hurrying in the direction of the break room. She steadied herself and gave me a quick once-over. “What are you doing here? I thought you had the day off.”
“I had to be at a meeting this morning,” I said, stepping away from the door and gesturing with my thumb to the managers pouring out of the room I had just vacated. Gigi was still inside asking questions.
Allie groaned empathetically. “I’m working a closing shift today but I got here early for a floor move. Do you want to chill in the break room for a few minutes?”
I glanced at my watch to verify that I still had hours before the prenatal visit. “Yeah, I could use a sparkling water.”
“Ugh, you’re so good. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to be seen with someone who makes me look like a gluttonous pig.”
I rolled my eyes up toward the ceiling. “This from the woman who isn’t big enough to fit into the Gap’s smallest size.”
“That’s not true! I usually fit into their size two.”
I groaned and swung my purse at her playfully. Unfortunately I had neglected to close my purse and everything from my wallet to my lipstick went flying. I pressed my hand to my forehead in an act of self-disgust. “Well, this is pretty much in keeping with my week.” I knelt down and reached to replace the Twinkie first.
“Hey, don’t sweat it. Women in your condition are often a little clumsy,” Allie whispered as she got on her knees to help me.
“Ohmygawd, April, is this your stuff? Let me help.” I looked up just in time to see Gigi pick up my small bottle of prenatal vitamins.
I froze in my crouching position as I watched Gigi’s eyes widen with a new suspicion. From the corner of my eye I could see Allie staring at her own hand, hovering above my purse where she was about to drop my wallet. There was no way she was going to be able to reasonably claim that the pills were hers.
I straightened and flashed Gigi what I hoped was a casual smile. “Can you believe those are cheaper than regular multivitamins? Pretty much contain the same things, too.” I quickly took the bottle from her and handed it to Allie who had resumed the act of stuffing my things back into my bag.
“So you get those instead of multis?” Gigi asked. Her voice lacked the note of peppiness that was her trademark.
“Yeah, when they’re available.”
Allie stood up and handed me my now securely closed purse. “Let’s go get that coffee now.” She smiled sweetly at Gigi. “Sorry to take her away from you, G, but we were out late last night boozing it up, and if we’re going to get through the day we’re going to have to get some caffeine in our bloodstreams.”
I loved Allie. She was so much faster on her feet than I was. I offered Gigi one last sheepish grin and followed Allie to the break room. “Do you think she bought it?” I whispered after I was sure Gigi was out of earshot.
“Haven’t a clue, but we’d better hope so. The only way you can trust that girl with a secret is if she stands to personally gain by keeping it.”
“You barely know her,” I pointed out. We stepped into a brightly lit room filled with well-used tables and made a beeline for the vending machines.
“I don’t have to know her.” Allie smoothed out a dollar bill and tried unsuccessfully to get one of the machines to accept it. “Two of my three buyers are cut from the same cloth. They act like they’re your best friend and all the while they’re sizing you up, trying to figure out if you’re an asset or a threat, and if you’re a threat…” Allie shook her head as the machine finally took her money and spit out a bag of Doritos. “All I can say is watch out. She has that whole Nicole Kidman To Die For thing going on.”
I nodded and extricated a mineral water from the soda machine. “I basically said as much to Tad when he first told me to hire her.”
“Tad told you to hire her?” she asked as she selected a table for us by the window with a view of a billboard advertising the lack of virtues of Howard Stern. “Why? Did you show him a photo or something?”
“No, of course not.” I rolled my eyes as I struggled to untwist the top of my Calistoga. As angry as I was, I still knew that Tad wasn’t the kind of guy who would make eyes at his wife’s assistant, particularly if the assistant had the personality of Gigi. “He just thought that if I had ambitious help I could avoid driving myself nuts with work. Apparently there’s only room for one dysfunctional lunatic in my marriage.”
“Uh-oh.” Allie crunched down on a Dorito. “I told you the honeymoon period doesn’t last, what’s the problem?”
“Just a little argument about money.”
“Don’t tell me, he wants you to cut back on the shoe shopping.”
I squared my shoulders and prepared to unburden myself during a therapeutic bitch session, but something about the expectant look in Allie’s eyes stopped me. “Yeah, you know how men can be about shopping,” I muttered lamely. “We’ll work it out.” It wasn’t that I didn’t think Allie would understand, it was that she might understand too well. Tad was the man I would be spending the rest of my life with. I didn’t want her to have a low opinion of him.
I stretched my legs under the table and tapped my nails against my water bottle. “We have our first OB appointment today.”
Allie tilted her head questioningly. “I thought you had one appointment already.”
“That was just to get my blood work done. We spoke to a nurse who told me to stop drinking alcohol and cut back on the caffeine, but I didn’t actually have an exam or see a doctor.”
“So this is the one where the guy wearing the plastic gloves feels up your ovaries?”
“I guess. It’s not like I’ve done this before.” My anxiety over the upcoming prenatal visit, combined with my lingering anger with Tad, compelled me to pull the Twinkie from my purse. “I want to eat this.”
Allie shrugged and started to flip through a W magazine that had been left on the table. “So eat it.”
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting says that whenever I bring anything to my mouth I should think about what nutritional value the food will bring to my baby, and if I can’t think of anything I should put down the morsel in question.”
Allie took the Twinkie from me and read the label. “Ten percent calcium—there’s your nutrition.” She put it on the table and flipped to another page in the magazine.
“The nurse did say it’s important for me to get lots of calcium.” I gently rotated the treat around on the table. Suddenly the realization of what I was about to do hit me. “Listen to me. I’m trying to justify eating this lard stick as if the only things at stake are a few pounds! I’m a horrible person, Allie!”
Allie grabbed the Twinkie and held it in front of me. “It’s a Twinkie—not a joint, not a vodka tonic—a Twinkie.”
“So you think I should eat it?”
“I think you have bigger problems,” Allie whisper
ed as she tried to discreetly point to what was behind me. I turned, pretending to straighten the coat draped over my chair. Blakely was sitting four tables behind us sipping a coffee, and Gigi was with her. Their heads were bent together, and while neither of them was looking at us, I got the unsettling feeling that I was being talked about.
I turned back to Allie and mouthed the words Oh shit.
I met Tad in the lobby of Kaiser’s ob-gyn department. He was busy working away on his laptop and barely acknowledged my presence. Unlike the times he had ignored me in Barcelona, this time I was able to read the blatant hostility in the maneuver. I followed suit and tried to become engrossed in a magazine, which was hard to do since the best reading material available to me was an eight-month-old copy of Reader’s Digest.
I stared blankly at an article on cutting one’s cholesterol. Something about this moment reminded me of my wedding day. Of course on that day Tad had been looking at me with adoration and now he wasn’t looking at me at all. But like those moments proceeding the signing of the ketubah, I was now acutely aware that my thoughts and emotions were inappropriate considering my current circumstances.
Here I was about to go into my first prenatal visit and instead of fantasizing about nurseries I was stressing out about work. Had Gigi told Blakely about the prenatal vitamins? Maybe she had just been using the time to pry more product information out of her. Even if she hadn’t told her, how long could I really expect to hide this?
Suddenly I recalled a fantasy I used to entertain myself with as a teenager. I had used it to pass the time while I sat at home waiting to see if my mother was pulling another all-nighter. In the fantasy I was standing in a large museum after hours. All the visitors had left and on one arm I had my handsome, intellectual-looking husband and in my other arm was a beautiful baby girl that I had named Hanna, after Bobe. In this fantasy I am in my midthirties—even as a teenager I knew I wanted to have kids late. I could see myself holding up my child so she could have a better view of the Degas sculpture that stood in the middle of the room. “This is where I work,” I could hear myself whisper to my daughter. “You’re going to be surrounded by beauty every day, and when you grow up, Daddy and I will make sure that your dreams come true, too.”
I sneaked a peak at Tad who was still busy ignoring me. I tried to change the fantasy to fit my reality. Who’s to say that the “me” in my picture couldn’t be in her midtwenties. And was there really any reason that the fantasy couldn’t take place in Dawson’s shoe department instead of some marble-floored museum? There wouldn’t be any art by Degas but we could always gaze upon a particularly attractive pair of Stuart Weitzmans.
Nonetheless, the drivel about making dreams come true would have to be nixed. I wouldn’t want to lie to my child.
“April Silver…Silverperson? Is that right?”
I could see Tad’s mouth twitch. He always found the embarrassment I suffered because of my name to be infinitely amusing. Normally I just responded to his snickers by sticking my tongue out at him, but now I wanted to rip his head off.
We followed a heavyset young woman through a swinging door and I reluctantly stepped on the scale at her instruction.
Tad’s brow furrowed when he saw the number. “You’ve lost weight.” He looked at me with concern, and I felt the first twinge of tenderness toward him since the rent fiasco. Of course a twinge wasn’t enough to erase an ocean of anger, but it was a start.
“It’s not uncommon for women to lose a few pounds during their first trimester, especially if they’ve been experiencing severe morning sickness. Nothing to worry about.”
My morning sickness had been moderate at worst, but neither Tad nor I felt the need to share this. She led us to a little sterile room with a chair, a stool and a patient table. She took my pulse and blood pressure and after assuring me that all my numbers were good gave me a flimsy little paper gown. “I need you to change into this with the ties in front. Dr. Griffin will be with you in a moment.”
She beamed at Tad before exiting the room. “It’s always so nice to see fathers come to these appointments. So many don’t, you know.” Tad threw me a triumphant look, but I refused to meet his eyes. I didn’t want to be reminded of his attributes.
When the nurse left us alone Tad examined the gown as I made work of my shoes and pants. “You have to tie this in front?” he asked, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Won’t that make you uncomfortable?”
“Well, my womb is a lot closer to my stomach than my backbone.” I pulled off my top but hesitated before removing my bra and panties.
Tad started to hum the tune of “Sexual Healing.”
“Shut up, I’m still pissed at you and you don’t get to watch me strip while I’m angry. Turn around.”
Tad sighed and did as he was told. “In half a minute a stranger is going to come in here and massage your breasts, but you want your husband to turn around.”
“The stranger who will be checking my breasts has never lied to me.” I grabbed the gown from him as he dangled it over his shoulder and tied the ribbons as tightly as I could, although I was still left perversely exposed.
Tad turned around and was about to reply to my last point when Dr. Griffin walked in. She was a woman who looked to be in her early fifties. She wore her silver hair in a neat bob that she had tucked behind her ears. After introducing herself she flipped open my chart and read through the information. “All your blood tests look good,” she said and smiled at me. “Of course, you would have been notified if we found anything unusual. How have you been feeling?”
I looked at Tad and considered telling her that I had recently found myself suppressing murderous impulses. “I’ve been a little queasy but other than that I’m fine.”
“Queasy’s good. It’s a sign things are going normally.” She glanced at Tad and then back to me. “I’m going to do a pelvic exam. Do you feel comfortable with him being here?”
“He’ll wait outside,” I said quickly. Tad shot me a withering look. I knew he thought my demand stemmed from the same anger that prevented me from getting undressed in front of him, but he was wrong. Even if last night had never happened and instead he had managed to convince me that he was the new Messiah, I still wouldn’t have allowed him to watch Dr. Griffin probe me with a set of stainless-steel prongs. I mean, that would be right up there with allowing him to watch my beautician give me an upper-lip wax.
Tad reluctantly agreed to wait in the hallway until that part of the exam was over. Dr. Griffin did her thing and then stepped out long enough to give him a heads-up that he was being allowed reentry.
“Everything seems normal,” Dr. Griffin informed us as she checked my breasts for unwanted lumps.
Tad had cast his eyes downward, although I had a feeling the gesture was to prevent my discomfort rather than a response to any personal embarrassment of his own. “I still can’t believe I’m going to be a dad,” I heard him whisper. I closed my eyes and tried to absorb some of his joyful anticipation. But I couldn’t get myself there. What I needed to do was call Bobe and break the news to her. Surely she could raise my enthusiasm. Not so my mother, who had been buying me condoms since I was old enough to menstruate. For Bobe the continuation of the family bloodline was a victory over the genocide that had killed her family. I immediately resolved to call her right after the appointment. I owed this child to Bobe. My doubts about wanting it were not only unnatural, they were selfish.
“Now, let’s see if we can get a heartbeat.”
My eyes flew open. “You can do that already?” Tad and I asked in unison.
“We should be able to. Looking at your chart, you should be about eight weeks along.” She pulled out a flat instrument, attached to a curled-up cord, placed it on my belly and began to slowly move it around. Tad crept closer and I strained my neck to see what was going on. For the first time in almost twenty-four hours our eyes met. He smiled at me with so much love and excitement, for a minute I forgot to be mad and extended my hand to
him instead. He instantly grabbed it, moving closer to my side.
It’s going to be all right, my little voice told me. How could it not be? Obviously Tad wanted this child enough for both of us. That kind of parental devotion had to be contagious, right?
Together we watched Dr. Griffin move the machine around my belly button. And then something horrible happened—Dr. Griffin frowned.
“What, what is it?” Tad straightened his posture, never letting go of my hand.
Dr. Griffin coughed into her free hand before answering. “I think we should do a quick ultrasound.”
The color drained from Tad’s face. “Why, what’s wrong?”
Dr. Griffin turned to us, her eyes relaying her unease. “I’m not picking up a heartbeat.”
FIFTEEN
After that, there was a flurry of activity. I was rushed into a room for an ultrasound, and was poked and prodded with frightening-looking instruments. My doctor examined one murky image after another on a large screen, frowning all the while. Tad never left my side. There must have been a moment or two in which he wasn’t holding my hand but those moments were so fleeting that I didn’t notice them. I just held on to him and tried to draw comfort from his presence even while the whole world seemed to be crashing around me. Finally we were brought back to the room where all the chaos had started. Now both Tad and I were sitting on the patient table, our feet dangling over the side as we waited for Dr. Griffin to tell us what was going on.
She sat on her metal stool with her hands folded in her lap. It struck me that her pose was a little too practiced, as if she had delivered this kind of news before. “Based on the ultrasound, you have what we call a blighted ovum.”
Tad shook his head and stood up. “Tell us in English, please, why couldn’t you find a heartbeat?”
Dr. Griffin nodded and took a deep breath. “Something went wrong very early in the development of the pregnancy. Your placenta is developing as it should and the conditions of your body are right for supporting a fetus, but the problem is that the fetus itself doesn’t exist. It never developed. That is what a blighted ovum is. You are pregnant but you’re not carrying a child.”