by Heidi Pitlor
“How could anyone hate you?”
“I could. Sometimes I do these dumb, spontaneous things just because I can.”
Joe worried a corner of the blanket between his fingers, and Hilary could almost see his heart sink a little in his chest.
“Sometimes I’m not so bad, though,” she added. “Sometimes I think I’m all right.”
“You’re better than all right,” he said. “To me, you’re wonderful. You’re smart and honest, you’re true to who you are.”
Hilary smiled and thought that her father might be the only man to ever say such things so guilelessly, so plainly and lovingly to her.
6
Good, Happy Lives
Daniel found a pay phone at the end of the hallway and reached up to call Jake’s. His mother answered, thankfully, for the thought of telling his brother or Liz what had happened before telling his parents would have seemed wrong. The words sounded wooden coming out of his mouth, “We lost the baby,” as if he were reading from a script.
“What?” Ellen gasped.
“Brenda started to bleed a lot and they had to do emergency surgery,” he said, and she asked him what exactly had happened and when and why, as if he might know more than he did and as if perhaps he could have stopped it.
“What happened was that we lost the baby, Mom. I don’t understand much more than that right now.”
“Of course not. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Dan.” She swallowed. “I love you.”
“I know,” he said. “I love you too.”
“Tell Brenda I love her. Is she there? Is she beside you?”
“No,” he said, and explained that he was using a pay phone in the hallway.
Ellen told him again that she loved him, that she loved Brenda too—she clearly had no idea what she should be saying to him, so he finally interrupted with, “I’m going to go sit with her now. I’ll call you again once I know when visiting hours are tomorrow and when she’ll be released.”
She said something else about Hilary and Jake and the rain as if to keep him on the phone just a little while longer. “Daniel?” she finally said after it seemed she’d run out of small talk. “We’ll see you soon, honey.”
He tried to imagine what her face might look like right then—intensely worried, probably, her eyebrows knit together. And then he tried to picture the room in Jake’s house in which she was sitting—enormous, undoubtedly, with brand-new everything. Were the others right there beside her?
“Daniel?”
“All right. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He squeezed his wheel rims and headed back through the bright hallway, past the old man who now picked at his fingers, past a couple of nurses laughing and on to Brenda’s room. The fluorescent lights in the room buzzed and he reached up to switch them off. Brenda slept soundly, though she stirred as he drew near. Her hands were laced across her stomach, now notably shrunken. He straightened the sheet that had tugged free to reveal her thigh, and he pulled it back beneath the mattress.
Her eyes fluttered open, then closed. “Dan?”
He brushed her hair from her eyes and for some reason thought of their friends Ruth and Dimitri, who’d had a baby a few years ago. Ruth still carried the boy everywhere, though he was more than able to walk. At the drop of a hat she’d unbutton her shirt and release one of her enormous, marbled breasts into his mouth. He was a boy now, no longer a baby but a full-grown boy who wore boy pants and boy shirts and could clearly say his own name, Max. “Mama boo, Mama boo,” he’d say, and that would be the cue for Daniel to turn his head. Dimitri, once as prudish as a monk, was oblivious to his wife’s naked breasts. Brenda thought it was lovely, how comfortable Ruth and Dimitri were. “It’s nothing to hide. It’s a natural thing, a beautiful thing—people should accept it.” Daniel didn’t want to be the uncomfortable one. He wished Ruth and her breasts and her son didn’t irritate him so much. He wished, in the end, it had been a lovely sight for him too.
He imagined the dark curtain lowering over Max and Ruth and Dimitri, and soon he tilted his head to the side and fell asleep for a few minutes.
“You’re on my blanket,” a voice said.
Daniel blinked himself awake. Brenda was leaning out of bed, yanking a thin white blanket from beneath his left wheel. He pulled backward.
“You awake now?” he asked tentatively.
She nodded and they looked at each other. He tried to remember what she’d said to him just after his accident, when he woke to a cool rush of liquid from an IV bag and a roomful of nurses. What had happened was that she’d stood stiffly, nervously next to his doctor and barely said a thing. Daniel had hoped she would come to him, kiss him and say something, anything, really, but she’d hung back and let his doctor do the talking first.
Now he moved closer to her and bent forward to hug her legs.
“Careful! I’m a mess down there.”
He recoiled. “I love you,” he said in British. “Do you know that?”
She glanced around the room as if she hadn’t heard him.
“I just called Jake’s,” he said. “And talked to my mother. I told her what happened.” He looked at his lap. “It made this whole thing seem much more real.”
“I should call my mum,” she said, and he moved the phone on the bedside table closer to her.
Brenda whispered, “Thanks,” and lifted the receiver. Her fingers danced over the many numbers and she gazed at her feet as she waited for her mother to pick up. When she did, Brenda practically burst. “Mum, good, I’m so glad you’re there,” she began, and her eyes welled up as she went on to explain all that had happened. “I know, I know,” she sniffed, and looked at Daniel. “Yes, exactly, precisely,” and he wondered what the woman had just said. “It’s an island in Maine, yes, not so far from the coast here. You get here by ferry, and—” Her mother apparently interjected. “No, it’s not like that at all. It’s smaller, not so many people, I suppose.” The two went on and on, and then Brenda spoke to her father and then her mother again, and as she did, she looked out the window.
Finally she said a tearful goodbye, hung up and rested her head on the pillow. “I just knew something was wrong.” She sighed. “Didn’t they say the placenta was too low at my last appointment? I knew something wasn’t right. Remember I felt it earlier—remember when I said the baby wasn’t moving?” She sounded almost irritated with him.
“You did say that.”
They sat quietly and he waited for her face to soften, and for her to cry again. But she didn’t—she just fiddled with the sheets for a moment and then mumbled, “I should’ve done something sooner. We shouldn’t have gotten on that ferry.”
“Bren, there’s no point in that kind of thinking now.”
She hoisted herself upright on the bed and turned to him. “But I knew something wasn’t right. I could sense it. I know myself and my body very well.”
“Oh, stop this, would you? It’s over. It’s done, and it can’t exactly be undone.”
She looked at him, then at the floor.
“I’m sorry this happened. I’m incredibly sorry.” He tried to sound as earnest as he could, true to what he was feeling. “But there’s no point playing the what-if game right now.”
“I don’t care,” she hissed. She awkwardly flipped onto her side.
“I lost something here too, you know.”
“I just don’t want to hear your voice right now.” Her shoulders rose slowly and fell.
“Bren, I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t flinch.
“Would you please acknowledge me, for Christ’s sake?” He punched the side of the bed and she jumped. “I am your goddamned husband. I am right here beside you and I love you and you need to listen to me. You need to stop fucking ignoring me.”
She turned onto her back, her eyes squeezed shut, and said, “I need to think. I just need some time and I need my mum and dad,” as if he were nothing but air beside her.
A hideous, deafening roar shot out of his mouth.
The terrible noise echoed in his head and his shoulders and arms, and afterward he felt completely emptied and bare. Brenda and the room and the entire world disappeared for a moment and he grew dizzy and lighter, foggier. He listened to his quick breath —it was still there after all, his pulse too, and his tongue and his teeth in his mouth. “I am here,” he managed calmly. “And you are here and it’s just us now. And I want you to allow me to be your husband and help you feel a little better.”
She looked at him, her eyes wide. He tried to imagine what she would want to see right now: strength, fortification, comfort? He straightened his posture as best he could and steadied his breath. “This day will end soon and I’m guessing that a better day will come tomorrow, and then a better one after that. You are sitting in the darkest part of the darkest time of the darkest day right now and it will improve.” He didn’t know where these words came from, but he was glad he’d said them.
She pulled the sheet to her face and held it over her eyes.
He reached forward and placed a hand on her head. “Shh,” he whispered, and gently stroked her hair as a mother might do. “Try to give your heart a little rest.” It was something his own mother used to say.
Brenda nodded again and let go of the sheet. Her eyes had filled and she pressed her mouth into something that resembled both a smile and a frown. “I want to go back home,” she said. “I want to get out of this place.”
“Okay,” he said. “But I don’t think the doctor will let you leave just yet.”
“Your family will understand, though, won’t they, if we just go straight home from here without seeing them?”
He’d forgotten all about his father’s birthday. “I guess,” he said, though he wasn’t so sure. The idea of just heading back to the ferry, back to the car, back to their empty house in the suburbs, just the two of them—the idea suddenly weighed on him. “Let’s go one step at a time here. Let’s wait and see what the doctor has to say.”
Brenda agreed and reached for the plastic cup of water on the bedside table. She seemed calmer now. “It’s strange, my being the one in this bed and your sitting by my side.”
“Wasn’t so long ago you were on duty, huh?”
She took a long sip. “It was hard for me, you know. I never knew quite what to say to you. Or even what to think.”
“I had the same problems at the time.”
“Of course.”
“It was like sitting in the eye of a storm,” he said. “And you were on the other side of it all, watching the whole thing unfold.”
“I wasn’t, though. I was with you in the stormy part. Everyone was, you know—your family, even little Meredith Ringley. We all still are, in a way.”
About six months ago, Meredith called their loft in Brooklyn and asked him if she could come by. They’d never met her. She’d rushed away from the accident scene just as soon as the ambulance came, and she communicated with them only by phone afterward. Daniel didn’t know what to think as he hung up after impulsively agreeing to meet her. Would she expect him to assuage her guilt? He couldn’t imagine she’d feel any better when she got a look at him in his wheelchair. She showed up a few minutes before she’d said she would. Daniel had been watching for her and saw the blue hatchback pull into a parking space across the street. The car’s dents had been banged out, its windshield replaced and its hood fixed. The small car looked like any other on the street. Meredith herself was younger than he’d expected, probably in her early twenties. Daniel pushed open his door and she stood directly before him in his doorway, tall and bony, with a mottled complexion and long, fine brown hair that fell to her chest. There she stood, chewing on her thumbnail and looking at her feet. She wore thick glasses that made her head appear narrower and her eyes bulbous. She slunk into the loft and joined them for coffee at the kitchen table. She spoke in a hushed monotone about the degree she was getting at NYU in—at this he smiled—graphic design. She answered their questions but asked none, as if she had come simply to present herself, to show them that she was merely a thin, shy, slightly awkward person, no villain. And in a way, it worked. As they watched her leave their building and walk toward her car, Daniel said, “It’s amazing. She’s just a kid. How is it possible for someone who seems that innocent to ruin another person’s life?”
Now Brenda grew teary again, and Daniel cast around for something mundane to say. “I’ve been thinking of ideas for the cover of that novel I’m doing. I’m thinking of a boat sailing up a building.”
“I thought that was just a small part of the plot.”
“Small but important,” he said. “The author wants something that shows motion and contrast. It’s set in Havana, in this little office building, and the guy, the protagonist, is saving up for a boat.”
She wiped her eyes. “I thought the book was about politics, Castro and whatever.” Tears began streaming down her face at this point, and she covered her cheeks with her hands.
He leaned forward and hugged her legs, then tried to take her hands but she kept them pressed against her face. “I really did want that baby,” Daniel said, and it was true. At least it had been true after her fateful flight back from Africa, and after that, well, he didn’t need to think about it right now. He looked up at her. “I really wanted you and me to have good, happy lives together.”
She nodded, sniffing fiercely. “I did too,” she said.
—
At first came a wave of relief—Daniel and Brenda were fine—but then Ellen grew faint as she hung up the phone in the kitchen. She made her way into the living room, where the rest of them sat looking up at her with round eyes, and she explained in a somewhat mechanical voice what had happened.
“My God,” said Hilary.
Liz, sitting on a leather easy chair in the corner, rested her head in her hands. Jake stood behind her and squeezed her shoulders. “Do they know what caused it?”
“I don’t think so,” Ellen said. She heard the rain continue to fall outside. “I didn’t really press Daniel about it. Maybe I should have. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Liz, whose face was turning a feverish pink.
“Maybe it was the donor,” Ellen said. “I worried that this sort of thing would be trouble.”
“I doubt it,” Hilary snapped.
Joe said, “Liz is right—what does it matter?” He stood, went to Ellen and sandwiched one of her hands between his.
“We shouldn’t focus on the cause,” Liz said, and went on to tell some story of her friend who’d had a later-term miscarriage, but Ellen found herself unable to hear what she was saying. Daniel, her son who would live the rest of his life in a wheelchair, had now lost his baby. She moved away from Joe. Someone said something, someone else replied and she turned and headed down the hallway and into the green bedroom. Babe had moved a step forward in his cage and looked up at her. She stood frozen above him. She had no idea what to do with herself.
“Mom?” Jake suddenly appeared behind her in the doorway.
She sat down on one of the beds and felt her spine curl.
“It’s awful,” he said, and she nodded and looked away. He came into the room, sat down beside her, and as he did the bed sank toward him. He breathed deeply beside her, and Ellen wondered whether he now worried for his own babies. She reached for the thin curtains and rubbed them between her fingers, trying to think of something comforting to say to him.
But he spoke first. “Remember when Dan punched me out for telling on him when he broke Dad’s calculator? I think I was in fourth grade, maybe?”
Of all the things Jake could say right now. “Yes, I remember.” She gazed down at the curtains in her hands. Daniel was awful to Jake as a child. She probably should have intervened more, but the two always wore her down with their constant bickering and fighting, and eventually she just started ignoring them.
“He gave me a fat lip and a black eye, remember?”
She nodded.
“That was th
e last straw for me. He’d beaten on me so many times I completely lost my mind. I ended up telling his friends that he’d said all these terrible things about them.” Jake looked at the floor as he spoke. “I told Rick Bernard that Dan had told me about the huge, ugly birthmark on his butt—which of course I’d seen before in the bathroom. And then I told Mark Sullivan that Dan said he slept with his parents because he was too scared to sleep alone.” Jake smiled. “I told Jeff Myers that Dan had told me he was the worst player on their baseball team. That he only played because Dan did, and he was jealous of Dan.”
“Those three were his best friends,” she said.
“I know.”
She thought about Daniel back then. “Those boys completely dropped him as a friend after that. He didn’t have friends again until he was in junior high the next year. And he started getting bad grades, and having so much trouble sleeping.”
Jake nodded.
“Well, it was a long time ago,” she said, trying not to betray a rush of anger.
“It was, I guess, but still. It was a cruel thing for me to do, both to Dan and to those guys.” He moved onto the floor and looked up at her. “I just remember being so completely mad at him for treating me like hell and still having all these friends and people around him who thought he was so great.”
Jake sounded almost like a child again. He had only wanted friends of his own. She let go of the curtain and forced herself to reach down and run a hand through her son’s hair. After a moment, the gesture came more naturally. He’d done what he had out of jealousy, and anyway, Daniel was resilient. He’d made new friends, begun sleeping better, improved his grades. It was Jake who hadn’t, even now, fully recovered from not being liked enough as a child.
Babe nestled beside a pile of wood chips. Jake leaned all his weight against her legs, and they stayed like this for a moment, her hand still on his head, her eyes pressed shut.
After a while he stood, said he should get back to the others and left the room.
She heard muffled conversation in the living room and tucked her shirt beneath her lap. Babe lay perfectly still now. Outside, rain pounded the roof and the sky had finally grown black. She thought of Brenda and Daniel, alone in some cold room in some clinic on this island, surrounded by night. Ellen stood, marched into the living room and told the others she wanted to go to the clinic.