by Kyra Davis
There was a hissing sound as I sucked air in through my gritted teeth. Surely this was some kind of dream, or some weird sci-fi movie that I had been unknowingly cast in. Things like this didn’t happen. At least not to me.
I looked to Tad as if he could somehow make sense of everything. He let go of my hand and used his arm to draw me to him protectively. “I don’t understand. Is there any chance that this is a mistake?”
“No, the ultrasound was conclusive.” Dr. Griffin crossed her legs and straightened her posture. “It’s not all that uncommon.” She tilted her head in my direction. “You will most likely experience a natural miscarriage within the next two weeks, but if you like we can schedule a D and C just in case.”
“A D and C?” Tad’s irritation, brought on by yet another foreign medical term, was evident in his tone.
“Dilation and curettage. A relatively simple procedure in which we remove the placenta and any other tissue that has developed during the pregnancy.”
“An abortion?” I whispered. None of this was happening, none of this was real.
“No, there’s no fetus to abort,” Dr. Griffin explained. “The procedure would just hurry along what your body would most likely do anyway. There is a three percent chance that there will be complications, in which case future conception may become more difficult, but for most women there’s about a day’s recovery time and then everything goes back to normal.”
I bit my lip and looked away. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around this. I wasn’t pregnant. Or I was, but I wasn’t with child. For the last two weeks I had been trying to prepare myself for the role of mother, when in actuality I should have been preparing for the role of freak. I put my hand on my stomach and I remembered the moment Allie and I had found out that I was pregnant. I remembered crying and later praying that it was some kind of mistake. I put my hand over my mouth and stifled a gag.
Tad tightened his grip around me. “It’s up to you, April.” His voice trembled as he said my name.
I shook my head. I couldn’t make a decision. I didn’t deserve to make a decision.
Tad raised his hand as if to scratch his cheek, but I had already seen the tears that he was trying to hide. He turned to Dr. Griffin. “We need a moment.”
She looked at the clock on the wall and made a face. “Why don’t you go home and talk about it. There’s no hurry. Call when you’re ready.”
“I think we’re going to make a decision now but we need a minute alone beforehand.”
She looked at the clock again, but Tad interrupted before she could voice an objection.
“You just told my wife that the child she had begun to bond with basically died before it had a chance to live. I’m sure your other patients will understand if you give us a few minutes to talk about our options.”
Dr. Griffin only hesitated a second before leaving the room to give us space.
“I feel like an idiot,” I said to the floor.
Tad stood in front of me and put a hand on either side of my face. “You’re not an idiot.” He leaned forward and rested his forehead against mine. I could hear the jaggedness of his breathing as he struggled to rein in his emotions. “What do you want to do, April?”
I clutched the table beneath me as if I was in danger of losing my balance. “I don’t think I’m strong enough to wait for a miscarriage, Tad.”
Tad pulled back and lifted my chin so that I was looking into his eyes once again. “You won’t have to go through that. I’ll make sure of it.”
Tad spent the next forty-five minutes arguing with Dr. Griffin and the receptionists at the front desk. They wanted to schedule the D and C in four days but Tad wanted it done immediately. I sat in a chair in the lobby the whole time, barely speaking. He was so wonderful to look out for me like this. He didn’t know that I wasn’t worthy of his help.
Tad finally settled on an appointment for the following day. He helped me to my feet and guided me out to the parking lot and to his car. I put my hand on his before he had a chance to pull on the handle of the passenger door. “I have my car here,” I reminded him.
“I know—” he carefully removed my hand from his and opened the door “—I’ll drive you home. Later I’ll take a cab back here and pick up your car.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Please, April.” His voice cracked. “Let me help you.”
I hesitated only a moment before lowering myself into the seat. We didn’t say a word on the ride home. At one point the car hit a pothole and I was struck by a wave of morning sickness. I couldn’t help but think about what that was supposed to mean and what it didn’t mean after all.
When we got home I walked into the middle of the living room and just stood there. Tad came up behind me and removed my coat. “Sit down, April.”
I didn’t comply. “Do you know what I did when the pregnancy test came back positive?” I asked, staring into our darkened fireplace. “I sat down on Allie’s toilet and cried.” Now I turned and faced Tad, who was still standing there holding my coat. “I cried my eyes out.” I marched past him and grabbed one of the pregnancy books that rested on top of our low bookcase and held it up for Tad’s view. “I told Caleb that I bought all these books so that I could do everything right, but that was a lie. The truth was that I thought by reading a whole bunch of ‘how to be the perfect pregnant woman’ books I would be able to get excited about the whole thing, but it didn’t work. All I could think of was how this was going to affect my future, my career, my relationship with you. I never thought about the needs of our baby, and now the baby’s gone and I’m relieved. That’s how cold I am, Tad…I’m fucking relieved.” I collapsed into the cushions of the couch. I wanted to cry but the tears didn’t come. The only thing tangible for me was an overpowering feeling of self-loathing.
Tad folded my coat over his arm. “Are you finished?”
“Almost,” I said in a barely audible whisper. “You were right about me. I fucked up on the birth control pill. I didn’t always remember to take it at the right time and I didn’t read the warning label on the minocycline. I’m a screwup, and I am…” I searched for some word that would aptly describe the kind of monster I was, but my vocabulary failed me. “I’m not a good person.” I drew my knees up to my chest. “You must hate me.”
“I have never loved a woman more in my life.” I looked up at him and he crossed the room and slowly lowered himself to my side. “April, you’ve known you were pregnant for just over two weeks now. It wasn’t planned and it was going to make some things difficult. If we had been given time we would have adjusted and we would have loved our kid, but no one in their right mind would question your maternal instincts just because you didn’t bond with an embryo.” He took both my hands in his and gently caressed them with his thumbs. “I won’t lie, I wanted this baby. I wanted to bring a life into this world that was half you and half me.”
Once again a tear rolled down his cheek and I freed my right hand in order to wipe it away, but then stopped myself feeling like the gesture would seem false, considering the recent revelations into my character.
Tad sighed and pressed my hand against his face. “It will happen, April. You are going to be a wonderful mom.” He looked me in the eye. “When you’re ready. Until then you’ll just be…wonderful.”
I fell into his arms. I loved him so much it literally hurt. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” I murmured as I clung to him.
“We have each other,” he said in a voice so low that I wondered if he was talking to me or himself. “That’s what’s important, everything else will come.”
We held each other for what seemed like hours. Finally Tad pulled back from me. He smoothed my hair and then stood up. “I’m going to call a cab so I can go get your car.” He cocked his head to the side. “Are you going to be all right? Is there anything I can get you?”
I quickly looked away. There was something I wanted and the pettiness of my desire disturbed me.
“You promise not to judge?”
“I won’t judge. What can I get you?”
“Well, if you have time, I mean you don’t have to or anything…”
“Whatever it is I’ll do it, but you have to tell me.”
I shifted uncomfortably. “If you’re sure you don’t mind…could you possibly stop by 7-Eleven and pick up a box of Twinkies?”
I did eventually cry. In the middle of the night, snuggled into the crook of Tad’s arm while he slept, I let the tears spill. But I wasn’t crying over my loss as much as I was crying out of gratitude. How could I ever have been angry at Tad for something as trivial as being late on the rent? Yeah, he had lied to me, but it was so obvious that his faults were nothing compared to his strengths. And now that I was thinking clearly I could see that his arguments made sense. Tad obviously knew me well enough to know that I could be incredibly irresponsible. Perhaps it was predictable that I would mess up on my birth control, in which case it was understandable that he felt he needed to do what was necessary in order to secure a house for us. Really, it was amazing that someone like him would want to be with someone like me. It was like that movie City of Angels with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. Tad was playing Nicolas’s role of the angel that fell for the well-intentioned but flawed human. I propped myself up on my elbow and gazed at his sleeping face. He even looked like an angel.
“I’m going to draw you,” I whispered. Tad didn’t stir. Tad needed less shut eye than anyone I knew, but when he did sleep he was dead to the world. I quietly slipped out of bed and pulled a small sketchbook and pencil out of the night stand. I sat by the window where the streetlamp provided me with just enough light, and began to draw. I was at it for a good hour before I stopped and actually saw what I had created. It was Tad, no doubt about that. But he didn’t look nearly as peaceful as he did lying before me, wrapped in our teal sheets. The man on my sketch pad looked anguished, and just a little bit frightening. I glided my hand across the picture before tearing out the page and ripping it up.
First thing the next morning I called Liz. I used the five minutes I was on hold to think up and then discard possible excuses as to why I couldn’t come in. Telling her I was sick was useless. I could lose a leg in a car accident and Liz would expect me to put on a tube skirt and hop on in. I could tell her that I had a miscarriage but then she would assume I had been trying to get pregnant and that could only be bad for me. Plus, I didn’t want to share what had happened with Liz. Today a doctor would stick some cold instrument inside me and scrape away all remnants of my pregnancy. It wasn’t the type of thing that I wanted Liz to cheer me through.
“I’m sorry, she’s not answering her page, can I put you through to her voice mail.”
“No, no, put me through to Sassy instead.”
A few clicks and a lot of elevator music later I was on the line with Gigi. “Hi, April! What’s up?”
“Hey, Gigi, I know you’re probably wondering why I’m not there since we were going to open together…”
“Oh no, it’s only seven and I know you usually get here later. No biggie.”
That stopped me for a moment. I never got a lot of enjoyment from my exchanges with Gigi, but that was the first veiled insult that she had ever thrown at me. “I scheduled us to get there at seven-thirty,” I said slowly, “but I won’t be able to come in today.”
“No problem,” she said a little too brightly. “I have everything covered. We got the most awesome shipment in today—totally to die for.”
“I’m sure.” I wasn’t even able to fake enthusiasm. It was clear that Gigi wasn’t going to ask why I wasn’t coming but I felt obligated to give her an excuse anyway, especially since there was a good chance that I wouldn’t be there the next day, either. “Gigi, I’m unable to come to work today because…because my father’s taken ill.”
“Ohmygawd, how awful!” Gigi’s voice dripped with false concern. “Is it serious?”
“Um, he needs emergency surgery but I’m sure he’ll be okay. I just need to be there for…for support.”
“Of course, of course. Is Tad with you?”
“Um, yeah, he’s here.” I shifted in my seat. For some reason Gigi’s use of my husband’s name seemed too familiar. But then again what was she supposed to call him? Mr. Showers? “Listen, my dad’s in—” my eyes fell to the San Jose Mercury News that Tad had left on the table “—the South Bay, so I won’t be able to run back and forth to work or anything.”
“April, you just take all the time you need. I am totally in control of everything.”
I sat up a little straighter. “Excuse me?”
“I said I totally have everything under control,” Gigi said quickly, catching her Freudian slip. “You just take care of your family and I’ll take care of the work stuff.”
“I’ll only be gone for two days.” I was not stupid enough to give Gigi a whole week to mess up my career.
“No need to rush. Oh, and don’t worry about calling Liz, I’ll tell her what’s going on. Oh look, there she is! Call you later, ’kay?”
And she was gone. I knew that a career-savvy woman would immediately call back and try to talk to Liz first, but I just didn’t have the energy. I had lost my baby and no crisis at Dawson’s could compete with that.
I got up and turned the volume of the radio up so I could hear Natalie Imbruglia sing about some man who turned out to be a completely different person than he had presented himself to be. I sat down on the love seat and flipped through the paper while singing the lyrics.
I looked up to see Tad watching me from the doorway of the kitchen. “April, if…if I’m ever like the guy in that song, if I ever change, or stop being the man you fell in love with, you’ll tell me, right?”
For a moment I was completely speechless. Tad never questioned himself or invited others to do so. “Of course I will,” I said. “Not that it’ll ever be necessary.”
He stood there silently for a moment. Eventually he nodded toward the wall clock. “We should go soon.”
I felt my shoulders tense and I dug my nails into my skirt. “I’m scared.”
“You don’t have to be scared.” He walked over to me and bent down to kiss my hair. “I’ll take care of you.”
SIXTEEN
It’s funny how a person can be hit with what seems to be a series of life-altering events only to find that their life hasn’t changed at all. It had been six weeks since I had the D and C and it had been less than three months since I had gotten the positive results on the pregnancy test. After each of those happenings I had thought my life was over, and yet here I was standing in the middle of my sales floor with throbbing feet stuffed into uncomfortable but very cute shoes.
I sighed and looked at my watch: 9:30 p.m. The store was supposed to close at nine but Liz had apparently given the order that we were not to make the closing announcements until we had met last year’s figures. We were twenty thousand dollars away from that goal, but it was rumored that two teenagers were milling around the lingerie department, so we had at least a snowball’s chance in hell of making it happen. My department hadn’t fared much better than the store overall so I had sent the other sales staff home early in order to save on labor. I fluffed an already perfect display and rubbed my eyes with the vain hope that doing so would make it easier to keep them open. Tad had been running me ragged lately, but in a good way. On my nights off, we dined at five-star restaurants, saw the best shows and attended concerts. I honestly had never seen anyone with so much energy. Every night he seemed to knock another hour off the time he needed for sleep.
It was great that Tad was so keen on keeping the romance alive, but every now and again I longed for a night of old movies and pizza. I mean, why did romantic dinners always have to involve duck?
Then again, maybe his attentiveness had less to do with romance and more to do with distraction. We hadn’t talked mu
ch about the miscarriage since the day of my final procedure. That was more my fault than his. I had told Allie and Caleb about it and then promptly sworn them to secrecy and refused to allow them to comfort or counsel me. My mother and Bobe never even knew I had been pregnant. I still wasn’t talking to my mother, but I had passed up lots of opportunities to tell Bobe. I knew that if given the chance these people would have agreed with Tad and told me I was a good person and that my feelings had been natural, but what they didn’t understand was that I wanted to feel guilty. I couldn’t help but think that my remorse was payback for the horrible thoughts I’d had during my pregnancy.
As for Tad’s sins regarding the rent, I had dealt with that problem by insisting that going forward he would give me the rent payment to mail off every month. I had expected Tad to argue with me over that but he didn’t offer a single protest. I had decided that was a good sign. If he was willing to allow me to be the one to put our housing payments in the mail every month then obviously he wasn’t planning any other surprises in that area. So if I didn’t die of sleep deprivation everything would be fine.
I took another look at my watch and then glared up at the lights that should have been dimmed a half hour earlier. Remorse aside, I didn’t feel that I deserved to be held at Dawson’s against my will. Things had been relatively normal here. Gigi was acting like herself, there had been no more slips of the tongue that would have threatened to expose her as a power-hungry bitch. After all, that was Blakely’s job. Blakely hadn’t talked to me about Cherise or the promotion for a while, which had me a little concerned, but she had also been away on two buying trips in the last three weeks.
I wandered around my empty floor completely aware that there was nothing out of place. When the phone rang, it took everything in me to answer with a standard greeting instead of a curse word.