Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  She’s the type to do things by the book, the proper way. She likes fancy clothes and fine dining and high art.

  For Christmas a few years ago, she got me a Burberry purse. I said thank you and tried really hard not to scuff it up, not to ruin it. But I lost it by March. I felt bad, but I also sort of felt like, Well, what was she thinking giving me a Burberry purse?

  “We brought you magazines,” she says now. “The good British ones. I figured if I was in a hospital bed, I’d want the good stuff.”

  “I’m . . . we’re just so glad you’re OK,” my mom says. She’s about to start crying again. “You gave us quite a scare,” she adds. My mom’s hair is naturally a dirty blond. Her coloring is lighter than the rest of us.

  My dad has jet-black hair, so thick and shiny that I used to say his picture should be on boxes of Just For Men. It wasn’t until I was in college that it occurred to me he was probably using Just For Men. He’s been squeezing my hand since he sat down. He now squeezes it harder for a moment, to second my mom’s statement.

  I nod and smile. It’s weird. I feel awkward. I don’t have anything to say to them, and even though I couldn’t really say anything anyway, it seems odd for us all to be sitting here, not speaking to one another.

  They are my family, and I love them. But I wouldn’t say we are particularly close. And sometimes, seeing the three of them together, with their similar non-American affectations and their British magazines, I feel like the odd man out.

  “I’m sleepy,” I say.

  The sound of my voice causes them all to snap to attention.

  “Oh, OK,” my mom says. “We will let you sleep.”

  My dad gets up and kisses my temple.

  “Right? We should leave? And let you sleep? We shouldn’t stay, right? While you’re sleeping?” my mom says as Sarah and my dad start laughing at her.

  “Maureen, she’s OK. She can sleep on her own, and we will be in the waiting room whenever she needs us.” My dad winks at me.

  I nod.

  “I’ll just leave these here,” Sarah says, pulling a stack of magazines out of her bag. She drops them onto the tray by my bed. “Just, you know, if you wake up and you want to look at pictures of Kate Middleton. I mean, that’s what I’d do all day if I could.”

  I smile at her.

  And they leave.

  And I am finally alone.

  I was pregnant.

  And now I’m not.

  I lost a baby I didn’t know existed. I lost a baby I was not planning for and did not want.

  How do you mourn something like that? How do you mourn something you never knew you had? Something you never wanted but something real, something important. A life.

  My mind rolls back to thinking about when I got pregnant. Rolls back to the times I took a pill later than I meant to or the time one accidentally rolled underneath the bed and I couldn’t find it. I think about when I told Michael we should use a condom as backup for a few days and Michael said he didn’t care. And for some reason, I thought that was OK. I wonder which exact time it was. Which time we made a mistake that made a baby.

  A baby that is now gone.

  For the first time since waking up, I start crying.

  I lost a baby.

  I close my eyes and let the emotion wash over me. I listen to what my heart and mind are trying to tell me.

  I am relieved and devastated. I am scared. I am angry. I am not sure if any of this is going to be OK.

  The tears fall down my face with such force that I cannot possibly catch them all. They make their way to my hospital gown. My nose starts to run. I don’t have the physical capacity to wipe it on my sleeve.

  My head hurts from the pressure. I roll toward my pillow and bury my face in the sheets. I can feel them getting wet.

  I hear the door open, and I don’t bother to look and see who it is. I know who it is.

  She sighs and gets into bed next to me. I don’t turn to see her face. I don’t need to hear her voice. Gabby.

  I let it erupt. The fear and the anger and the confusion. The grief and the relief and the disgust.

  Someone hit me with their car. Someone ran me over. They broke my bones, and they severed my arteries, and they killed the baby I didn’t love yet.

  Gabby is the only person on the planet I trust to hear my pain.

  I howl into the pillow. She holds me tighter.

  “Let it out,” she says. “Let it out.”

  I breathe so hard that I exhaust myself. I am dizzy with oxygen and anguish.

  And then I turn my head toward her. I can see she’s been crying, too.

  It makes me feel better somehow. As if she will bear some of the pain for me, as if she can take some of it off my hands.

  “Breathe,” she says. She looks me in the eyes and she breathes in slowly and then breathes out slowly. “Breathe,” she says again. “Like me. Come on.”

  I don’t understand why she’s saying this to me until I realize that I am not breathing at all. The air is trapped in my chest. I’m holding it in my lungs. And once I realize that’s what I’m doing, I let it go. It spills out of me, as if the dam has broken.

  Air comes back in as a gasp. An audible, painful gasp.

  And I feel, for maybe the first time since I woke up, alive. I am alive.

  I am alive today.

  “I was pregnant,” I say, starting to cry again. “Ten weeks.” It is the first real thing I’ve said since I woke up, and I can feel now how much it was tearing up my insides, like a bullet ricocheting in my gut.

  Talking isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I think I can talk just fine. But I don’t need to say anything else.

  I don’t need to tell Gabby that I didn’t know. I don’t need to tell Gabby that I wouldn’t have been ready for the baby I don’t have.

  She already knows. Gabby always knows. And maybe more to the point, she knows there is nothing to say.

  So she holds me and listens as I cry. And every couple of minutes, she reminds me to breathe.

  And I do. Because I am alive. I may be broken and scared. But I am alive.

  Ethan and I are circling the block around the café he wants to go to. Despite the fact that it is Tuesday morning and you’d think most people would be working, the street is packed with cars.

  “When are you going back to work, by the way?” I ask him. He’s called in sick twice now.

  “I’ll go back tomorrow,” he says. “I have some vacation days saved up, so it’s not a problem.”

  I don’t want him to go back to work tomorrow, even though, you know, clearly, he should. But . . . I’ve been enjoying this reprieve from the real world. I quite like hiding out in his apartment, living in a cocoon of warm bodies and takeout.

  “What if I eat so many cinnamon rolls that I gain four hundred pounds? Then?”

  “Then what?” he says. He’s only half listening to me. He’s focused on trying to find a place to park.

  “Then would this be over? Would that be a deal breaker?”

  He laughs at me. “Try all you want, Hannah,” he says. “But there are no deal breakers here.”

  I turn and look out the window. “Oh, I’ll find your weak spot, Mr. Hanover. I will find it if it’s the last thing I do.”

  He laughs as we slow to a red light. He looks at me. “I know what it means to miss you,” he says. The light turns green, and he speeds down the boulevard. “So you’ll have to find a pretty insurmountable problem if I’m going to let you go again.”

  I smile at him, even though I’m not sure he can see me. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, smiling.

  We finally find a spot relatively close to the café.

  “This is why people leave this city, you know,” I say as he squeezes into the spot.

  He turns the key and pulls it out of the ignition. He gets out of the car. “You don’t have to tell me that,” he says. “I hate this city every time I circle a block like a vulture.”

  “Well, I’m jus
t saying, in New York, there’s the subway. And in Austin, you can park anywhere you want. The Metro in D.C. is so clean that you could eat off the floor.”

  “Nowhere is perfect. But, you know, don’t go racking up reasons to leave already.”

  “I’m not,” I say. I’m slightly defensive. I don’t want to be the person no one thinks is going to stick around.

  “OK,” he says. “Good.”

  He turns and opens the door to the café, letting me in first. We get in line, and it so happens that the line snakes around the bakery case. I see the cinnamon rolls on the top shelf. They are half the size of my head. Covered in icing.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “I know,” he says. “I’ve wanted to take you here ever since I first found this place.”

  “How long ago was that?” I ask, teasing him.

  He smiles. For a moment, I wonder if he’s embarrassed. “A long time. Don’t feel like you need to trick me into admitting I’ve been hung up on you for years. I’m confident enough to say it outright.” I smile at him as he laughs and steps forward. “A cinnamon roll, please,” he says to the cashier.

  “Wait, aren’t you having one?”

  “They are huge!” Ethan says. “I thought we’d split one.”

  I give him a look.

  He laughs. “Excuse me,” he says to the cashier. “Make that two cinnamon rolls. My apologies.”

  I try to pay, but Ethan won’t let me.

  We grab some waters, sit down by the window, and wait for a server to warm up the rolls. I fiddle with the napkin dispenser.

  “If I hadn’t stayed out with you on Saturday, would you have tried to sleep with Katherine?” I ask him. It’s been in the back of my mind since that night. I’m trying to be better at actually asking the questions I have instead of avoiding them.

  He starts sipping his water. I can tell he is put off by the question. “What are you talking about?”

  “You were flirting with her. And it bothered me. And I just want to make sure this is . . . that this is just me and you, and we aren’t . . . that there is no one else.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, there’s not another woman on the planet. I’m into you. I’m only into you.”

  “But if I hadn’t stayed out . . .”

  Ethan puts his water down and looks me right in the eye. “Listen, I went to that bar hoping to get you alone, hoping to talk to you, to gauge how you felt. I tried on ten different shirts to find the right one. I bought gum and kept it in my back pocket in case I had bad breath. I stood in front of the mirror and tried to get my hair to look like I didn’t do my hair. For you. You are the only one. I danced with Katherine because I was nervous talking to you. And because I want to be honest with you, I’ll admit that I don’t know what I would have done if you had turned me down on Saturday, but no matter what I would have done, it would have been because I thought you weren’t interested. If you’re interested, I’m interested. And only in you.”

  “I’m interested,” I say. “I’m very interested.”

  He smiles.

  The cinnamon rolls arrive at the table. The smell of the spice and the sugar is . . . relaxing. I feel as if I am at home.

  “Maybe all of this time,” I say to Ethan, “I’ve been looking for home and not realizing that home is where the cinnamon roll is.”

  Ethan laughs. “I mean, if you’re going to go all over the country looking for where you belong, I could have told you years ago you belong in front of a cinnamon roll.”

  I grab a knife and fork and make my incision, right into the deep heart of the swirl. I put the fork to my mouth. “This better be good,” I say before I finally taste it.

  It is absolutely delicious. Wonderfully, indulgently, blissfully delicious. I put down my utensils and look up at the ceiling, savoring the moment.

  He laughs at me.

  “Would it surprise you if I finished this entire roll myself?” I ask.

  “Not since you insisted on having your own,” he says. He takes a bite of his. I watch as he chews it casually, as if it’s a ham sandwich or something. He’ll indulge my sweet tooth, but he doesn’t share it.

  “How about if I finish yours, too?” I ask.

  “Yes, I would actually go so far as to say that would shock me.”

  “Challenge accepted,” I say, except that none of the syllables comes out clearly. There is too much dough in my mouth. I accidentally spit cinnamon on him.

  Ethan moves his hand to his cheek to wipe it away. On a scale of one to ten, I’m about a six for embarrassment. I think my cheeks turn red. I swallow.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Not very ladylike.”

  “Kinda gross,” he says, teasing me.

  I shake my head. “How about that? If I make a habit of spitting cinnamon roll chunks on you, is that a deal breaker?”

  Ethan looks down at the table and shakes his head. “Just get over it, OK? You and me. It’s happening. Stop trying to find cracks in it.” He puts down his knife and fork. “Maybe there are no cracks in this. Can you handle that?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I can handle that.”

  I can, right? I can handle that.

  I’ve noticed that in TV shows, visiting hours are only certain set times. “Sorry, sir, visiting hours are over” and that sort of thing. Maybe this is true in the rest of the hospital, but here on whatever floor I’m on, no one seems to care. My parents and Sarah were here until nine. They only left because I insisted they go back to their hotel. My nurse, Deanna, was in and out of here all day and never said anything to them about leaving.

  Gabby showed up about two hours ago. She insisted on setting up camp on the poor excuse for a sofa in here. I told her that she didn’t have to stay the night with me, that I’d be OK on my own, but she refused. She said she’d already told Mark she was sleeping here. Then she handed me the bouquet he sent with her. She put it on the counter and gave me the card. And then she made a bed for herself and talked to me as she closed her eyes.

  She fell asleep about a half hour ago. She’s been snoring for at least twenty minutes. I, myself, would love to fall asleep, but I’m too wired, too restless. I haven’t moved or stood up since I was standing in front of LACMA four days ago. I want to get up and move around. I want to move my legs.

  But I can’t. I can barely lift my arms above my head. I turn on a small light by my bed and open up one of Sarah’s magazines. I flip through the pages. Bright photos of women in absurd outfits in weird places. One of the photo shoots looks as if it took place in Siberia with women wearing polka-dot bikinis. Apparently, polka dots are in. At least in Europe.

  I throw the magazine to the side and turn the TV back on, the volume low. No surprise to find that Law & Order is on. I have yet to find a time when it isn’t.

  I hear the show’s familiar buh-bump just as a male nurse walks into my room.

  He’s tall and strong. Dark hair, dark eyes, clean-shaven. His scrubs are deep blue, his skin a deep tan. He has on a white T-shirt underneath.

  It only now occurs to me that Deanna probably isn’t working twenty-four hours a day. This guy must be the night nurse.

  “Oh,” he says, whispering. “I didn’t realize you had company.”

  I notice that he has a large tattoo on his left forearm. It appears to be some sort of formal script, large cursive letters, but I can’t make out exactly what it says. “She won’t wake up,” I whisper back.

  He looks at Gabby and winces. “Geez,” he says softly. “She sounds like a bulldozer.”

  I smile at him. He’s right.

  “I won’t be too long,” he says. He moves toward my machines. I’ve been hooked up to these things all day, to the point where they are starting to feel like a part of me.

  He starts checking things off his list just as Deanna did earlier today. I can hear the sound of the pen on the clipboard. Check. Check. Check. Scribble. He puts my chart back into the pocket. I wonder if it says in that file that I lost a baby. I push the thought
out of my head.

  “Would you mind?” he asks me, gesturing to the stethoscope in his hand.

  “Oh,” I say. “Sure. Whatever you gotta do.”

  He pushes the neck of my gown down and slips his hand between my skin and the cloth, resting the stethoscope over my heart. He asks me to breathe normally.

  Deanna did this earlier, and I didn’t even notice. But now, with him, it feels intimate, almost inappropriate. But of course, it’s not. Obviously, it’s not. Still, I find myself slightly embarrassed. He’s handsome, and he’s my age, and his hand is on my bare chest. I am now acutely aware of the fact that I am not wearing a bra. I turn my head so I’m not looking at him. He smells like men’s body wash, something that would be called Alpine Rush or Clean Arctic.

  He pulls the stethoscope off me when he’s satisfied with his findings. He scribbles something on the chart. I find myself desperate to change the mood. A mood he’s probably not even aware of.

  “How long have you worked here?” I ask, whispering so as not to wake up Gabby. I like that I have to whisper. At a whisper, you can’t tell my voice is shot.

  “Oh, I’ve been here since I moved to L.A. about two years ago,” he whispers as he stares at my chart. “Originally from Texas.”

  “Whereabouts?” I ask.

  “Lockhart,” he says. “You wouldn’t have heard of it. Small town just outside of Austin.”

  “I lived in Austin,” I say. “For a little while.”

  He looks up at me and smiles. “Oh, yeah? When did you move here?”

  It’s hard to answer succinctly, and I don’t have the voice to give him the whole story, so I simplify it. “I grew up here, but I moved back last week.”

  He tries to hide it, but I can see his eyes go wide. “Last week?”

  I nod. “Last Friday night,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Wow.”

  “Seems sort of unfair, doesn’t it?”

  He shakes his head and looks back down at the chart. He clicks his pen. “Nope, you can’t think about that,” he says, looking back up at me. “From experience, I can tell you that if you go around trying to figure out what’s fair in life or whether you deserve something or not, that’s a rabbit hole that is hard to climb out of.”