Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  “Good luck,” one woman said. “We collapsed. You’ll be too exhausted to even think about it.”

  “How many times did you do it on your wedding night?” Valerie asked the host.

  “Nada.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Are you counting night or night and the next morning?”

  “Wedding night,” someone piped.

  “Both,” another protested. “If your wedding goes late, you don’t have much of a window of time. Morning should count as part of the wedding night.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “All who vote to keep the morning after as part of the wedding night, lift your punch.”

  I escaped to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the toilet to wait out the conversation. The yard outside the window to my right was too nice, square allotments of sod clumped together like patches of a quilt. A single sapling stood in the lawn, supported by wires knotted round its trunk and plugged into the ground. The wires were so taut you could imagine things the other way around: the wires held the tree down, not up, and if you clipped the strings, the sapling might escape.

  By the time I returned to the party, Jake and another husband had returned from the gym, and on their arrival the subject of wedding nights had been temporarily suspended. Everyone moved to the table to admire the bassinet cake that said Congratulations, it’s a girl! in sweating curls of hot pink icing. We stood in the kitchen eating slices off paper plates. Valerie raised her shirt to show off her rounded belly. Jake gazed at her with a doting adoration I had only seen in teenage boys and in grooms.

  At home, I stuffed a pillow in my shirt and considered my newly rounded figure in the bedroom mirror. Too light. Babies weighed seven to eight pounds and that wasn’t counting the fluids and whatnot. I would probably need a bowling ball.

  “You’ve been busy.”

  Zoë stood in the doorway. I held my cupped hands an inch from my chest. “My breasts would have to be bigger.”

  “Your everything would have to be bigger.”

  I pulled the pillow out from my shirt and tossed it at her.

  “How was the shower?” She sat on my bed.

  “It was all right. Valerie seems happy; she was quite literally glowing.”

  “Michael told me that he finds pregnant woman incredibly sexy,” she said.

  I sat beside her on the bed. “Do you ever think about having children?”

  “Occasionally, but it never seems real to me that I could be a mother. I guess I imagine myself with older children—teenagers. Five boys, all football players. But I can’t see myself with a baby. Can you?”

  I didn’t say anything. I lay down on my back and ran my hand over my stomach, wondering at its latent power.

  Mom called at six thirty Monday morning to say there had been a kidnapping at Harvard and I should be on my guard.

  “Mom, it’s not even light out yet.”

  “Turn on channel nine.”

  “It’s Harvard. In Boston.” I pressed my face into my pillow.

  “You can’t be too careful these days. Apathy killed the cat.”

  I sat up, propping my elbow on my knee and my forehead in my hand while Mom relayed everything the Channel 9 News anchor said: “… Police canvassing the neighborhoods … no news from the campus … woman at the supermarket says she saw a man who fits the suspect’s description …” She turned the television down. “I should call Brian.”

  “Mom,” I sighed. “Why do you keep calling?”

  “I don’t want to waste my minutes,” she said.

  “You don’t have any minutes. They’re all free,” I said. “Anytime you call me it’s free.”

  “Precisely!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to waste free minutes!”

  “I’m going now.”

  I felt more than saw Zoë listening at the open door.

  “That Mom?” she asked.

  “Yes. Someone should have performed an intervention when Brian decided to buy her that phone.”

  “I told you it was a bad idea.”

  “You said no such thing.”

  “Get up. We can argue about it on the way to campus.”

  I squinted at the clock, then at Zoë. She was carrying a pair of running shoes.

  “Your morning run,” she stated.

  I’d forgotten: today was trail day. I pulled the blanket back over my head. “I would prefer not to.”

  “Come on, Bartleby.” She threw my shoes on the bed. “Michael’s meeting us in ten minutes. He hates it when people are late.”

  “Us?”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  Michael was outside the student union checking his watch when we pulled into the parking lot.

  “Ready to go?” He stood with his legs spread wide, his arms extended. Swiveling his hips, he stretched this way, then that.

  “I don’t think I’m up for it today,” I said.

  “You’ll feel better once your blood gets flowing.” He pecked Zoë on the cheek, then gave her a spank. “Let’s go, baby.”

  It was a long, hard run. When Michael and Zoë got ahead of me I didn’t try to keep up. Michael had taught me how to pace myself, how to breathe correctly and how to keep my mind focused. When I ran I tried to visualize the work my body was doing, the pumping of the heart and the oxidation of cells, the contraction of muscle, puppeteer of bone. When a sharp jab of pain stabbed my side I pretended I was carrying a baby that felt the need to announce itself with a swift kick to the ribs.

  Only a month without cable and I’d fallen off the wagon. After Valerie’s shower I’d spent five hours watching a marathon of A Baby Story: Xena Princess Warrior meets Alien. It made me want to scream and push, to be a part of a miracle. It provoked cravings for the sweet powder smell of a baby’s hair. I told myself this was a biological phase on par with the hormonal revolution that made prepubescent boys ache at the sight of breasts and bucks chase doe tails right into oncoming semis. But still.

  I’d tried praying about these feelings, but had a bad habit of praying tangentially so as not to appear too shallow in my desires. (As ministers were fond of reminding me, God is not concerned with your happiness but your character.) All the years I’d wanted a husband, I prayed God would make me content as a celibate, confident that if He saw my willingness to remain forever His chaste servant, He would see fit to send me an unexpected blessing of a very handsome man who would make love to me the way Daniel Day-Lewis made love to Madeleine Stowe in The Last of the Mohicans. And now whenever the desire for a family of my own began to gnaw at my heart, I prayed for my students and thanked God for the brood He’d already given me.

  Meanwhile,Valerie, who had never waited on God for a blessing in her life, was in the third trimester of her pregnancy and looked positively Rubenesque. Her rounded figure made me hate my flat stomach and my empty breasts, parts of my body I’d mistaken for ornaments.

  Zoë’s shriek broke my train of thought. She’d baited Michael. He was chasing her into the forest. I hurried to catch up with them. At the tree line, the trail narrowed to a thin, meandering path of dust mottled with stones and roots. For fifty feet it ran parallel to a steep drop-off before winding down the hill, turning sharply to realign itself with the creek, and heading back up to the forest in the opposite direction. Zoë and Michael were just to my left yet some twenty feet down and running the other way. They stopped when they saw me.

  “What are you doing way up there?” Michael called.

  “Get your boo-tay down here,” Zoë commanded.

  I raced to join them. Some strange freedom had come over us. They whooped and cheered, uncivilized and dirt-splattered as kids at summer camp, and halfway down the hill I threw my hands out and hollered along with them. I shouted in frustration and hope and desire. For two and a half seconds I felt entirely alive.

  Then my foot stopped and my body kept going. There was a loud pop and a searing heat shot up my right leg to my eyes in a quick flash of white. I think I c
ried out but it didn’t much matter, Zoë and Michael were raising such a ruckus. I fell to my knees, rolled, and landed on my side.

  Zoë was dancing with her knees locked so she wouldn’t pee her pants. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she gasped. “Oh, it’s not funny.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut as a wave of pain overwhelmed me. Somewhere Michael was talking: “Zoë, stop. I think she’s really hurt.”

  “Michael, I swear, don’t mess with me. Are you messing with me?”

  I opened my eyes and saw Michael’s face. He said, “Let me look at it.”

  I shook my head.

  “Amy, let me see it,” he demanded. “We have to make sure it’s not broken.”

  Zoë knelt beside him, sobered by the word broken. “Amy, are you okay?”

  I straightened my leg hesitantly.

  “Can you turn it?” Michael asked.

  He took my ankle in his hands. With his help I turned my foot ever so slightly to the right, then the left, wincing as I did so.

  “It’s not broken. I think she just sprained it,” he said to Zoë. “But we need to get her on ice.”

  “Can you walk if we help you?” she asked.

  “I think so,” I managed.

  Together they lifted me up from the ground.

  “Don’t put weight on it,” Michael said. “Use us as a crutch.”

  With one arm around Zoë’s shoulders and another around Michael’s back, I hobbled slowly up the trail. It took us fifteen minutes just to get back to Leonard Field, and by that point I was sweating and close to tears from the pain.

  “Wait,” I said. “I need a second.”

  I hobbled to the bench that sat half sunk in the mud just outside the trail.

  Zoë gaped at the size of my foot. “Come on, Amy, we have to get back,” she said. “It’s freezing, and your foot is getting huge.”

  “I know, just give me a few minutes,” I pleaded.

  “There’s a bus stop ten minutes away.”

  “She’s too hurt, Zoë,” Michael said. “She can’t do it.”

  “I can so do it,” I muttered. I stood back up to prove it, balancing my body against a nearby tree and willing myself to stare directly into his eyes, though the pain blurred my vision. “I’m fine.”

  “Get on my back,” Michael said as if he hadn’t been listening.

  “What?”

  “I’ll carry you.”

  I said no, but he knelt down on the ground and waited. Humiliated, I climbed onto his back and wrapped my arms around his neck. He sometimes carried Zoë this way, but I was a good five inches taller and more than a few pounds heavier. I pressed my face against his shoulder, praying desperately that none of my students would see us.

  At home, he untied the laces of my shoes and delicately peeled my sock from my swollen ankle. I was sporting a carpet of blond leg hair fit for a Viking, but he didn’t seem to notice. He sandwiched my bare ankle between two bags of ice, setting a pillow on the coffee table on which I was to keep my leg suspended. Zoë watched the operation from her reading chair.

  “Keep your foot on ice until the swelling goes down,” he told me. “And don’t put any weight on it.”

  “I have class at ten o’clock.”

  “You’re going to have to cancel.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Swear you won’t walk on it.”

  “I swear,” I said.

  I smiled at him reassuringly despite the pain. The scent of his cologne lingered on my clothes.

  When the swelling did not go down by the next afternoon, I told Zoë to call Eli—I needed to go to the emergency room. I gingerly tugged on a pair of jeans and hobbled down the stairs, leaning on Zoë to get to the car.

  “What are you doing?” I asked when she sat down in the driver’s seat.

  “I can’t get ahold of Eli and Michael’s at work. I’m driving you.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Look at your foot!” she said in exasperation.

  She held the key aloft, searching the dashboard, staring down at the pedals, the gearshift.

  I pointed to the right underside of the steering wheel. “The ignition’s there.”

  “I’ve got it,” she said.

  “You can drive, can’t you?” I asked.

  “Of course I can drive.” She pressed on the gas so that the engine revved. “Oops. Not the brake.”

  I reached for my door handle. “I want out.”

  “Here we go.” The car lurched two feet and stopped. The sudden change in motion forced the passenger door I’d just opened to slam shut.

  “Stop, Zoë. We’re not doing this.”

  “Would you chill out?” She started laughing. When we hit and dragged one of Katherine’s rubber Hefty trash cans, she whooped out loud. “Oh, she is going to kill us!”

  “If you don’t.”

  We crawled out of the neighborhood but hit Main Street like it was the Indy 500. She full-stopped at the first four-way for a complete five seconds, then proceeded to run a red light in town. The hospital was only ten minutes off campus; by the time we arrived I wanted to kiss the ground.

  At the desk, I was given a work sheet featuring the drawing of a unisex figure on which I was to circle the places that were giving me pain. On the right margin was a chart numbering the severity of pain, 1 being mild, 10 being the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. Each number came with a corresponding smiley or frowny face.

  “Why would I have a whole body to choose from?” I asked. “It’s my foot.”

  “Circle the head and see if they ask you about depression,” Zoë said.

  We were moved to a private room immediately, but it was an hour and a half before I saw the doctor. He walked through the door reading my chart, glancing up long enough to offer a hearty handshake. His name was Dr. Santini. He looked nineteen.

  “Swelling and sharp pain?” he asked.

  My pant leg was already rolled up. I had taken pains to shave that morning, though vanity seemed beside the point considering my ankle had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. Dr. Santini’s examination was far more brutal than Michael’s had been.

  “Probably a sprain,” he murmured. “But I’d like to get this X-rayed. Better safe than sorry.”

  I wondered how often he practiced his tone and delivery. It was hard to talk with young physicians without seeing my brother.

  While we waited for the X-ray results, Zoë pulled a chair up to my bed and belabored the inefficiencies of the hospital. She dismantled everything from the outdated chart system (“they’re all online now”) to the outdated yellow curtains (“an offense to the patient’s sensibilities”).

  “It’s not a resort,” I reminded her.

  “It’s not the UC medical center, either.”

  Zoë was a very devoted fan of the oncology centers that had administered her mother’s treatments. She stood beside these hospitals, like an alumna eternally defending her alma mater.

  Dr. Santini’s verdict was that I had very badly sprained my ankle. His recommendation was that I stick to a careful regimen of RICE.

  “Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation,” he explained.

  “But I work on campus,” I said. “I walk everywhere.”

  He shook his head. “Best way to let it heal is to stay off it as best you can. Crutches the first five days, some exercises as followup. You’ll be in an air cast for at least four weeks—maybe as many as six.”

  “Don’t worry, dearest.” Zoë laid her head against my shoulder. “I’ll drive you.”

  “That doesn’t worry me at all.”

  Dr. Santini wrote me a prescription medication for the pain, along with specific instructions on what exactly I was and was not to do. Zoë, who loves being needed, wrote everything down in her Hello Kitty notepad.

  10

  News of my malady spread through the ranks. Mom called to inform me that the First Fundamentalist Church of God prayer chain had been alerted to my
condition; Grandma FedExed a Ziploc bag of crumbs that had once been homemade oatmeal cookies; and Brian called to ask if the painkillers had had any adverse effects. I was touched, though I suspected he only wanted to test his memory of pharmaceuticals.

  My brace was plastic instead of plaster, but Eli drew on it anyway. A cartoon old man holding a bundle of balloons rode a bicycle on the left side of my ankle; a field of overly large flowers sprouted on my right. Over the Velcro straps he wrote Feelings Happen in fat bubble lettering.

  “I broke my leg when I was twenty-one,” he said. He was coloring the daisies in with a hot pink marker he’d bought just for the occasion.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Being an idiot.” He set his foot on the couch and rolled up his pant leg. He had thin legs covered in wiry black hair. A scar ran up his ankle, lines of tender pink skin in a row neat and orderly as the dotted punches of perforated paper. “I was trying to jump off the roof of a shed onto a trampoline. My leg broke my fall and the fall broke my fibula. Worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  He rolled his pant leg back down. The silver charm of his hemp bracelet caught the light and winked.

  “I suppose it would be predictable on my part to ask why you would be trying to jump from a rooftop to a trampoline.”

  “It was a dare.” He’d returned to his drawing. “And I wasn’t exactly sober.”

  “Was there ever a time in your life when you weren’t abusing your body in every way imaginable?”

  He pulled the reading lamp over my foot. “Sit here at least half an hour—until the ink dries.”

  When I went to bed that night I was startled by a blur of light at the foot of my bed. It darted erratically like a stage Tinker Bell dancing. The pink daisies on my cast were glowing in the dark.

  The next morning, Mom called to update me on her progress with Mr. Moore. This required a half hour conversation clarifying the difference between dating and going out.

  “I just don’t understand why you say ‘going out.’ You’re not going anywhere.”

  “It’s an expression,” I said. “It’s the modern equivalent of being pinned. It means you’re together.”