“At least those were turned on,” Raya laughs. “And they’re pretty at night.”
Harrison leans forward to refill wineglasses.
“Anyway, it’s better than an exhibit of human skin.” Raya eyes Marcel purposefully.
I slowly turn toward him; Harrison’s head follows suit. “Um . . . explain?” I say.
“It’s some article I read—there’s a museum in London that has over three hundred tattoo specimens. Like, real pieces of human skin.”
“Marcel’s thinking of donating his,” Raya chimes in. “After he’s dead, of course.”
“Ew,” I say.
“Thank you,” Raya says. “That’s what I think, too.”
“Why?” Marcel says. “It’s art. Besides, how’s it any different than preserving organs for scientific research? This is for posterity, too, in a different way.” He turns to Harrison, no doubt looking for solidarity from the medical viewpoint, but Harrison holds up his hands.
“I don’t know, man. It’s a little too Silence of the Lambs for me.”
“Yes!” Raya shrieks. “Put the lotion in the basket!”
We all laugh.
“So, what’s the story with your tat, Mia?” Marcel asks. “I’ve never noticed it before.”
I look down at the inside of my left wrist, at the three small Chinese characters, and smile. “It’s nothing.”
“Yes, please tell us,” Raya says. She’s been trying to get it out of me for years.
“Nah. It’s a long story.” I feel Harrison’s eyes on me, warming my skin.
“She lost a bet.” Harrison pipes up. “To me.”
“What bet?” she prods, but Harrison just smiles. Raya groans. “Whatever. Show them your new one, babe.”
“His new what?” I ask. Marcel doesn’t answer. He slides his plate off his lap onto the coffee table and stands up, then turns, lifting his shirt up to reveal his skinny lower back—and a large full-color portrait of David Bowie.
“Oh!” I exclaim, before I can stop myself.
“I know, right?” he says, then quotes the words written beneath the image. “There’s a starman waiting in the sky. He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.”
“That is . . . something,” Harrison says, catching my eye once again.
I hold my water glass up to my mouth and concentrate on not laughing, but it’s no use.
* * *
That night I dream I’m back in the True Value. Jules is there in her apron and beads, but instead of sleeves her arms are covered in Marcel’s tattoos, the dragon breathing fire onto her neck. She smiles and offers me a package. But her smile vanishes as I take a tinfoil-wrapped gift from her hands. I study the bundle, not understanding. When I look up, she’s gone. And for some reason, a sense of dread fills my belly. I peel back a corner of the foil. A white downy feather peeks out. And then another. I quickly unwrap the rest with urgency, but it’s too late.
The chicken in my hands is dead, and I am gutted. Devastated. I’m grieving the lifeless carcass of a helpless bird and I’m grieving it deeply, as if it were as precious to me as my sister or my dad or Harrison himself. Suddenly the chicken jerks in my hand, its big mouth gaping open, the large beak coming at me, a deafening squawk filling the air. Panicked, I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. And then I wake up.
I open my eyes, taking in the darkness of my bedroom, my heart thudding double time in my chest. I take a deep breath.
It was a chicken. A nightmare about a chicken. I slowly release the air from my lungs.
Until I feel it. The heavy wetness, sticky between my thighs, and I forget all about the dream and the tinfoil and the chicken, and a wail escapes my lips, this time ringing out loud and clear into the air.
* * *
“Mia, what is it?” Harrison says, his voice groggy, his hand groping for my shoulder and gently squeezing.
The thin blanket on top of me is heavy, oppressive, so I throw it off and lay my hands gently on my cramping belly. “I’m losing it.”
“What?” I hear the click of his bedside lamp and light floods the room, temporarily blinds me. Harrison slides his glasses on and his gaze travels the length of me. His eyes widen, alarmed.
“Mia!” he shouts. I glance down and all I can see is the bright scarlet fanning out onto the sheets on either side of me. I know bleeding is part of the miscarriage process, but it’s more—a lot more—than the spotting from the previous two losses.
“Oh my god—there’s so much,” Harrison says.
I jerk my head to him, even though he verbalized what I was thinking. “Seriously, Harrison?”
“What?” he says, standing up, but never taking his eyes off my body.
“You’re a doctor. You’re a doctor!”
“I know!” he says and rushes to the dresser. I let out a grunt of pain and clutch my stomach, feeling another gush of blood dampen the already saturated sheet beneath me.
“But Jesus,” Harrison says as he reaches my side, gripping an old T-shirt in his fist. “You’re my wife!”
The contraction passes and he puts his hand behind me, gently guiding me up, and then hands me the shirt. “Here, hold this down there. We’re going to the hospital.”
He scoops me up, and strangely, I flash to our wedding day when he spontaneously lifted me into his arms after the kiss, marching us back down the dirt-trodden path, grinning back like a fool at everyone cheering for us. Now, he rushes me to the car, grabbing his keys from the cardboard box in the foyer on his way, gently depositing me in the passenger side of his Infiniti, ignoring my shouts to take my car. “It’s older—I’ll ruin the leather in yours!”
The car is silent for the twenty-minute drive to Fordham, aside from my intervals of moaning brought on by a mix of the painful contractions and my overwhelming grief.
When we pull up in the emergency lane of the hospital, Harrison runs over to my side and lifts me back into his arms, hurriedly walking through the sliding glass doors into the fluorescent-bright waiting room. I turn away from the lights and bury my head into his neck.
I hear the exchange between him and the night nurse on duty as if I’m listening to a TV show.
“Dr. Graydon?” she says, recognizing him.
Harrison stops walking and without preamble announces: “My wife. She’s having a miscarriage.”
And at the word, I let out a sob against his collarbone and press the hot wet of my tears into his skin.
Chapter 4
Harrison doesn’t cry.
I learned this a month after we moved in together, when he came home early from a shift at the hospital only to find me crossed-legged on the floor, my cheeks wet with tears.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, rushing to my side.
“Nothing,” I said, taking a deep breath and swiping under my eyes with my fingertips. “It’s this song.” I pointed at the air, filled with the sounds of Peter Cetera and Cher harmonizing: “Two angels who’ve been rescued from the fall.”
He paused. “You’re crying over a song?”
I shook my head no. “It’s the movie!”
“What movie?”
“Chances Are. This is the song playing at the end when Cybill Shepherd walks down the aisle to Ryan O’Neal, and Robert Downey Jr. leans over and says, ‘There’s something I have to tell you. I’m in love with Miranda.’ And Ryan looks at him and says—” I teared up again and couldn’t finish.
Harrison looked at me warily. “Are you being serious right now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re crying because a song reminded you of a scene in a movie that no one has heard of.”
“Chances Are is a classic!”
“Is it?” He cocked an eyebrow, unable to wipe the grin off his face.
“Stop making fun of me. I
’m an artist. I’m sensitive.”
He laughed. “No, there’s sensitive and then there’s this. I don’t even know what to call this.”
“C’mon, don’t you ever just need a good cry?”
“No,” he said without hesitation. “I don’t cry.”
I would have thought he was being contrary but for the sincerity on his face. It stopped me short. “What do you mean? Like, ever?”
“Nope.”
“That can’t be true—not even when you lose a patient?”
“Nope.”
“When’s the last time you cried?”
He pondered the question. “Ita’s funeral,” he said, telling me he was eleven when his grandmother died. He remembered his mom fingering a rosary, muttering prayers in Spanish. His uncle walking a cartoonishly large ornate gold cross down the aisle of the church. And his dad tweaking his ear when, out of nowhere, a sob overcame him, shaking him to his core. “Be a man,” his dad whispered, thumping his chest lightly with his fist.
“That’s awful,” I said, my heart breaking for eleven-year-old Harrison.
He shrugged. “No,” he said. “What’s awful is this song. Is that Cher? You hate Cher.”
Dry-eyed, Harrison’s currently sitting on a hard chair next to me, holding a Michael Crichton paperback open with his right hand, while his left gently rubs the inside of my wrist, absentmindedly tracing the small black tattoo with the pads of his fingers.
It’s been four days since that night in the hospital. Since the nurse swiftly removed the blood-soaked disposable pads from beneath me, patted my knee and said, “The hard part’s over,” and I realized the “hard part” was our baby. Four days since Harrison assured me it wasn’t my fault—“There’s nothing we could have done”—and I only half believed him.
And now, in the waiting room of an OB/GYN office for a postmiscarriage checkup, I feel like a soldier in a field of visual landmines. Nowhere is safe to look. Not the black-and-white photos of cherubic babies on every single wall, or the rounded bellies protruding from proud mothers-to-be, all glowing and puffed up with their success of carrying a baby nearly to term—I can’t even look the receptionist in the eye, not wanting to see either her pity or judgment of my slack belly.
I keep my eyes trained to the floor, glancing up only when I hear a sharp peal of laughter that feels too loud for the hushed reverence of a waiting room. The woman is on her cell phone, her mouth wide and smiling, happy as can be, her stomach swollen and full. I stare at it sadistically, letting the raw jealousy, anger and grief course through me until I’m nearly vibrating with emotion.
She makes it all look so easy, this woman. I bet she was one of those who simply decided to become pregnant and whoopsie! Next thing you know, two darling little lines on the white stick. Part of me wants to jump up and grab her by the shoulders: Why you? Why you and not me? But I don’t—not because that would be outrageous behavior that would likely draw police officers to the scene, but because I’m secretly afraid she would whisper the answer, and it would sound something like: You don’t deserve them.
The tears come quick, burning my eyes, stinging my nose, wetting my cheeks, and I brush them away with a practiced hand.
Dr. Okafor has a charming South African accent that set me at ease the first time I heard it. Today she’s silent as she wands my belly, staring at the monitor. I bury my head in the crook of Harrison’s arm, the grainy emptiness of the screen too much to bear.
After a few minutes of moving the baton back and forth and studying the screen, Dr. Okafor speaks. “OK,” she says. “I don’t see anything to cause concern here. How’s the cramping?”
“Better,” I admit. “But I’m still spotting.”
“That’s normal. Even for a few more weeks or so. If it gets worse, make sure you call,” she says, echoing the ER doctor. She gives me a handful of tissues to wipe the goo off my belly. “Any questions for me?”
I clear my throat, hating to ask, but needing to know. “When can we . . . When is it OK . . .”
“To try again?” she supplies.
I nod and Harrison’s bicep, which I’m still holding on to, twitches.
“Physically, after your next normal cycle, you should be fine to start. Emotionally—it’s up to you. Take all the time that you need. It’s a difficult experience, I know.”
Do you? I want to snarl. But I bite my lip. Maybe she does really know. I feel myself getting teary again and don’t trust my voice, even to thank her for her kindness.
“I’d also like to recommend, if you do want to try again, that you see someone, a specialist, for testing. This being your third miscarriage, it’s important to suss out any underlying factors that could be responsible, and if possible, hopefully correct them.” I open my mouth to ask the obvious, but she holds up a hand. “I’m not saying it is anything. Plenty of couples after multiple miscarriages have gone on to have healthy, viable pregnancies. It’s something to consider—that might help prevent you having to go through this again.”
I nod. What she’s saying makes sense, and I would do anything to keep from going through this again, but on the other hand, I’m scared . . . What if something is wrong? What if we can’t actually . . . I can’t even finish the thought in my head, much less say it out loud.
I didn’t always want to be a mother. In fact, I think I was dead set against it for most of my life. My own mother left us when I was eleven and Vivian was fourteen. Ostensibly, she was leaving my dad because she didn’t love him anymore. Apparently, she loved our neighbor Mr. Frank, who had been like an uncle to us most of our lives. But instead of her moving in with him, they decided it would be easier to pick up and move clear across the country to Seattle, and I remember thinking, Easier for who?
Vivian refused to go, but I went to visit every summer until college and it was like an alternate universe. Or a movie set where the role of my dad was being played by an understudy.
As I got older and realized that most mothers don’t leave their children behind when they get divorced, I wondered if she was maybe missing some mother gene, some important basic instinct—and that maybe, that meant I was missing it, too.
While most people I know ooh and aah over babies, sniffing the tops of their heads like rabid dogs, I never understood the allure. Even when Vivian had Finley, who I did think was the most adorable baby on earth (until Griffin came along), I was terrified to be alone with her and I didn’t know how to hold her or what it meant when she cried, and I certainly didn’t feel any internal pull to have a baby of my own.
But then I met Harrison. And I don’t know exactly when the switch flipped—before we got married, I had told him in no uncertain terms that I didn’t think motherhood was in the cards for me, and later, as we were talking marriage, he said he didn’t fully care one way or another as long as we were together. So no one was more surprised than me when, one morning over orange juice and waffles at the diner down the street from us, I looked into his eyes and said, “Let’s do it.”
“What?” he said.
“I want to have your baby.”
Stunned, Harrison stared at me—one beat, two beats—and I got nervous. What if he thought that we had agreed not to, and he really didn’t want them? And I—me!—started to panic at the idea of not having kids with him. Like I suddenly couldn’t think of anything in the world that I wanted more. When I thought I couldn’t take his silence anymore, and was ready to go into full offense mode about why I’d changed my mind and how it was absolutely the right thing for us to do, he opened his mouth and said: “Can I finish my bacon first?”
* * *
Once I’ve arranged my clothing back in place and we leave the exam room, Harrison places his hand on the small of my back, guiding me through the waiting room. I keep my head down, not wanting to see any more pregnant women. We’re almost to the glass door when a woman’s voice calls from behi
nd us: “Dr. Graydon?”
Harrison stops, turns his head toward the direction of the voice. “Hey there,” he says, genially, and from the cadence of his voice, I know it’s one of his patients. I clench my teeth, because all I want is to be out of there, to be in the car, at home, away from here. I consider forging ahead, through the doors. Harrison would understand, of course. But social conditioning commands me to stay put, to engage, to play the role of friendly doctor’s wife. So I put on a small smile and pivot on my heel.
And that’s when I gasp. Like punched-in-the-stomach, wind-knocked-out-of-me, loud-sucking-intake-of-air gasping.
It’s not the woman Harrison is talking to that catches me off guard. It’s the man that’s next to her.
The man from the Giant.
The man from my dreams.
Fortunately, I’ve been crying on and off the past three days, so Harrison isn’t too alarmed by this outburst. “Mia?” he asks, gently. Three pairs of eyes are suddenly trained on me, waiting for my response.
But all I see are his two familiar orbs, so brown they’re almost black. And they’re boring into me as intensely as they do in my dreams. I know it’s because I’m gawking at him, transfixed, as if he has suddenly erupted in flames and I have never seen fire before.
I drop my eyes to the ground and try to recover, or cover up, because what could I possibly say? How could I explain?
“A cramp,” I whisper, touching my stomach. “I’m OK.”
Harrison pulls me toward him. “This is Caroline,” he says. “One of my patients.” I force my gaze to her, trying to ignore the thrumming of my heart, the bizarre, out-of-body fog I’m experiencing.
“Your husband saved my life last week.” She smiles, and I focus on her teeth—Chiclet sized, off-white—simply because I have nowhere else to look.
I offer a weak smile back.
“Hardly,” Harrison says, modestly. And then he goes into doctor mode: “Are you getting your rest? Not lifting heavy objects?”
You Were There Too Page 4