November Sky

by Marleen Reichenberg

  I kept calling for Nick. And then I saw him. He’d climbed over the railing of the pedestrian bridge. He was standing about twenty-five feet from me on the narrow projection beyond the railing, clutching the rail from the outside with both hands.

  He didn’t respond to my shouts and stared without moving at the gravel about a hundred feet below. I had to get closer to him so he could even see me. Without a second’s thought about how dangerous it was, I got my legs over the lower railing and then inched closer to the concrete pier, hand over hand, until I came to the entrance to the barrier; outside of it was the narrow concrete projection on which Nick stood. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches wide.

  My hands clawed at the rough stone, and my smooth-soled ballerina slippers made me lose my footing several times. To reach Nick, I’d have to take a giant step from the upper end of the sloping embankment to get to the bridge. Everything inside me fought against doing it, but I had no choice. With the hypnotized look on Nick’s face, I was terrified he would let himself go.

  Again and again, I shouted his name. I somehow managed to get my foot on the projection, and I clung tightly to the steel. I felt like throwing up. Just don’t look down, I told myself. Instead, I alternated my gaze between the grille and the wooden planks inside the footbridge, while I slowly felt my way to Nick. My breathing was rapid and shallow, my heart was pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer, and my hands were cut and bloodied from the rough stones and the sharp-edged grille. I fought the feeling of vertigo and struggled to keep breathing deeply and calmly. It seemed like an eternity before I reached Nick. His hand clutched the grille on my left. I took two tiny steps sideways, got very close to him, and ignored the fact that we were many, many feet up over a huge drop. I carefully got my balance, and then loosened my grip on the grille brace I was holding on to with my right hand. I put it on Nick’s hand. His fingers were ice-cold. Relieved, I felt him respond to my touch. He slowly raised his head and turned it toward me. The glazed look in his eyes disappeared. He looked at me with confusion, and then he came to. His pupils dilated with horror, and I was again seized with the fear that he might suddenly let go.

  I screamed, “Come back with me. You have to help me, or I won’t make it.”

  In that moment he realized the danger he’d placed us in. He pressed his body onto mine and instructed me how to work backward by hand and foot, slowly and carefully toward the embankment that would save us. He stayed close by my side. When we had managed to get halfway back, a rushing noise suddenly increased in volume. I closed my eyes and felt the vibrations from the approaching train. The floor under our feet swayed as the train roared just a few yards overhead. I felt like I was going crazy. Panic seized me, and my right foot slid down. I clung desperately to the grille. Nick threw an arm around my waist and held me close until I regained my footing.

  “Stay calm; it’ll be over in a second,” he yelled. The wheels on the rails above created a deafening rattle. And the completely irrational thought ran through my mind that if anyone saw us, they’d think Nick was saving me from an act of madness. The bridge’s shaking finally died away as the train noise subsided in the darkness.

  We somehow managed to work our way back to the concrete bridge footing and the steep embankment. Completely out of breath, we stood there for several moments, gasping for air. My hands, feet, and stomach hurt from the tension, and I felt like an iron ring was closing around my head. I saw a flickering before my eyes, and I couldn’t utter a word. Not that there was anything more to say. After this terrifying experience, all my hopes for a rosy future free from fear—for a normal family life—were dashed like a ship on a cliff in a storm. Nick looked at me with desperation in his eyes, but I felt empty inside. When he opened his mouth, I lifted a feeble hand.

  “I don’t want to hear a thing. No professions of gratitude, no apologies, no false promises. I’ve had it and just want to go home and go to bed.”

  Arduously, like an old woman, I climbed over the lower railing and walked back down the path, refusing to take the hand he offered.

  We went back in his car, leaving my car there. I was shaking and vomited violently before we got in. Nick sat silently at the wheel and kept giving me intensely worried looks.

  I didn’t say anything when we arrived home. Nick started to speak several times and tried to help me take off my wet things, but I ignored him, stubbornly shaking him off whenever he tried to touch me.

  “Leave me alone. I don’t feel well. I just want to go to bed.”

  When I undressed in the bathroom, I discovered some slight bleeding. But I was too physically and emotionally spent to worry about it. I sank onto my bed, completely wiped out, and turned away when Nick lay down beside me and reached for my hand.

  “I’ll go get your car right away in the morning.”

  My car was of no concern to me and neither was anything else. I pointedly turned my back to him and drew my knees up to my chest like a fetus seeking protection. I pulled the down duvet around my shivering body. I paid no attention to Nick’s presence and didn’t say one word about the blood in my underpants or the aching pain below my navel. Nick finally gave up trying to get me to talk and left me alone. I half heard him tossing around restlessly on his side of the bed and sighing softly. For the first time in our marriage, I was perfectly detached from how he felt or what was going on inside him. I’d reached the stage where I could only think about me and my baby. I had no interest in anything apart from my hurting body and tortured soul.

  I made it through the following day as if in a trance. The cramps in my lower abdomen and the bleeding got worse by the hour, until Nick called an ambulance. I lost my baby shortly after arriving at the hospital. I spoke to no one. I felt like I was standing outside myself with no emotional involvement, looking disinterestedly at what was happening to this woman, Laura Vanderstätt. I watched how she was lifted onto a stretcher, taken to the ER accompanied by a wailing siren and flashing red lights, and examined by a doctor. I’d withdrawn to a place deep within me. A place so buried that no one could find me, and nothing could hurt me. After the curettage, I was placed in a private room. Alone, I stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. When somebody came in, I closed my eyes and only opened them after the person had left. I didn’t care who it was. I resolutely blocked out the sound of crying babies each time the door was opened.

  The doctors and nurses who treated me came and went and tried to provoke some reaction out of me. I heard voices and understood what they were saying, but I didn’t show it through any movement. There was talk of a severe depression resulting from miscarriage, and that I might have to be sent to a psychiatric hospital. Nick furiously protested that. When he was alone with me, I heard the crackling of some cellophane wrapping, and the sweet scent of roses spread throughout the room.

  Nick brushed a kiss onto my forehead, and he said in a pained voice, “Today’s our anniversary. Laura, I’d give my life to undo what happened. Please talk to me.”

  He squeezed my hands, but they lay limply in his. Wrong approach. He ought to at least promise to stop toying with his life. He hadn’t understood a thing. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a small voice told me I should congratulate him on his birthday, but I quickly pushed it away. All I wanted was to stay horizontal for all eternity, and not have to do anything or speak or think. I was convinced that if I began to brood and open myself up to the outer world again, the pain, guilt, and anger would kill me. I simply edited out his presence until he finally left me alone.

  I ignored the oversized bouquet he’d put in a vase on the little table against the wall opposite me, choosing to look instead up at the ceiling. I felt relieved when the nurse carried the vase out of the room that evening.

  “There, Frau Vanderstätt, I’ll take your flowers out. They’re beautiful, but the scent is too intense and will take away your oxygen.”

  She was the only member of the staff
who talked to me in a normal way and didn’t seem to expect me to answer. Maybe she liked talking to herself.

  I also registered the snide remarks of another nurse without showing the slightest reaction. When she and another nurse came to make my bed in the morning, I kept my eyelids closed and pretended to be asleep. That was the only way I could completely shut out people and my environment, and escape inside myself.

  “Frau Vanderstätt is still asleep. Or is pretending to be at least,” she said. “She shouldn’t act so stupid with that depression of hers.”

  The word depression sounded snarky. Her partner probably motioned to her to be quiet, because I immediately heard the high, loud voice again.

  “So what? Even if she can hear me, she should know there’s a woman three rooms away who lost her baby in the seventh month because her husband kicked her in the stomach. Now that is a tragedy to make you depressed.”

  I twitched involuntarily when she took off my bedcover to shake it out. The cool draft on my legs gave me goose bumps.

  She wasn’t done quite yet. “But the poor woman didn’t have any time to grieve because her other three kids needed her. This one here”—it was clear she meant me—“has a luxury problem. She has an incredibly caring husband who’s half insane with worry. You can’t even properly call a miscarriage at this stage a premature birth—there’s no reason for her to be making such a big deal of it.”

  “Look, she’s sensitive,” the other nurse said in my defense as they were leaving. I didn’t hear the response, but I’d have guaranteed it wasn’t complimentary.

  Incredibly caring husband pounded through my brain in an endless loop. Was a “husband” caring if he forced his pregnant, acrophobic wife to go out in the middle of the night in a rainstorm to drag him off a hundred-foot-drop bridge with all her strength, putting her at risk and thereby killing their unborn child?

  I knew he hadn’t done it deliberately, but he’d refused to do anything to deal with his blackouts. If he had done what I’d constantly pleaded with him to do, our child would still be alive.

  Tears ran through my closed eyelids and down my cheeks, wetting my pillow. The nurse’s rude words had knocked big cracks in the wall I’d erected to protect my wounded psyche. Later that day, the wall collapsed completely, thanks to my mother’s visit. She entered the room with Nick. I’d heard them talking softly outside in the corridor and closed my eyes as the door opened. Nick’s big, warm hand gently reached for mine, which lay immobile on the bedcover. The unmistakable scent of his aftershave hit my nose when he bent down to give me a tender kiss on the cheek.

  “Hello, Laura dearest. Won’t you ever wake up? We have to talk,” he whispered in my ear. I could only just manage to keep from violently shaking my head. The last thing I wanted was to talk to him. Everything had already been said. No words could describe what he’d done to me.

  In that one horrible night, Nick had wiped out my last hope that we could live a happy, carefree life together, that I could bear our child, and that he and I could raise a family together.

  For the moment, I didn’t give a damn whether he’d done it intentionally or not. Nick had to finally get it through his head that he was sick. He had to address it. I couldn’t save him from himself. My role of always assuming responsibility for his survival and keeping everything from the outside world was allowing him to shirk his own responsibility—and it was killing me. No person could keep another person alive if he was intent on ridding the world of his presence.

  I felt his long, worried look at me but I kept my eyelids shut and lay completely still. He ought to go and leave me in peace.

  “Nick? Would you please leave me alone with my daughter for a minute?” my mother asked in a firm but friendly way. Thanks, Mama.

  The door closed as Nick left the room and she sat on the edge of the bed, took the hand that Nick had just released with a sigh, and squeezed it gently.

  “Laura, I know you’re not sleeping and can hear me perfectly well. Papa, Peter, and Anna and her family all wanted me to tell you that they are thinking of you.” After pausing to see if I would react, she went on: “I understand how very sad you are about losing the baby. But that’s not a reason by itself for you to withdraw the way you’re doing now. It’s not you. Let your grief out. Cry, but don’t beat yourself up. You’re so young, you—”

  Something compelled me to lift my head, open my eyes, and angrily hiss at her, “Don’t you dare tell me that I can have another child any old time! I never want to go through something like that again in my entire life!”

  A slight, fleeting smile spread over her concerned face.

  “Welcome back, dear, I know that—”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I interrupted. My voice sounded frail, and I cleared my throat. Then the words poured out of me.

  “It’s Nick’s fault I lost the baby, and I can never forgive him for that.” I looked at her in pain. “I’d prefer him not to come and visit me. I can’t go back to him.”

  Mama wasn’t easily knocked off her feet, even by the announcement that I wanted nothing more to do with my husband. She didn’t defend him, something that another mother might have done for a son-in-law she loved. And she didn’t condemn me for my harsh words.

  She cautiously asked, “Can you tell me the reason why? What has he done?”

  “I can’t. I don’t even know if I still love him. I’ve no feeling in me; it’s all so cold and empty. I’m sorry, but I can’t live with him any longer. I’ll end up going crazy if I do. But I’m scared of telling him.”

  She fondled my cheek to console me. “And you don’t have to. At least not right away. You should never make a decision like that too hastily. Certainly not when you’re as upset as you are. Come home to the farm when you’re discharged. Leave Nick to me. I’ll tell him you need some space and a bit of recovery time. And then you can think in peace and quiet what you’re going to do.”

  Chapter 19

  Two days later, I put my bag with the things Mama had fetched from our house onto my old bed in the room I’d once shared with Anna. It had been a long time since I’d slept there, even for a weekend visit. I opened the window and breathed deeply. My eyes roamed over the harvested fields and mowed meadows and the little fishpond that mirrored the dark-blue, cloudless sky. The storm and rain showers from the last few days had given way to calm, sunny weather. The air was fresh, the nights clear and cold, and the bare branches were only half covered with leaves—everything hinted at winter’s approach, even in the golden October sunshine.

  My parents had picked me up from the hospital right after breakfast and brought me straight to the farm. Mama had gone to Grünwald the day before with a list of things I wanted from home and had talked to Nick and his newly arrived parents, and explained to them that my nerves were still very much shot, and I needed to recuperate. I was staying with them for the time being.

  Nick wanted to talk to me and see for himself that I was getting better, but Mama prevented him from coming to the farm in no uncertain terms. My mother-in-law, Angela, had supported her, Mama told me afterward.

  “Your mother-in-law is one capable lady. She freely confessed to Nick that she’d had two miscarriages before giving birth to him, and they had affected her deeply. She sends all her love and best wishes and fully understands that you need to regroup and work through everything before you resume a normal life. Hanna thinks the same way and sends her best. Our combined forces convinced Nick to wait until you called him.” She gave me an inquiring glance. “He’s really suffering and misses you awfully.”

  I still wasn’t ready to tell her or anybody else what had happened, and only gave a tired shrug. Here I was in my old room. I felt like I’d come full circle. I felt beaten down, tired, listless, and didn’t have the faintest idea how my life was going to move forward.

  For the next few days, I slept a lot and went for long wal
ks. Sometimes one of the barnyard cats kept me company—she was a shy black-and-white-spotted kitty that followed me like a shadow at a proper distance no matter how far I walked. The cat apparently didn’t trust me one inch, because each time I stopped and tried to get her to come to me, she halted and sat down with her ears pricked up. She viewed me with distrust, restlessly wagging her tail back and forth. As I approached, she ran away. So I pretended to ignore her but was all the same glad a living creature I didn’t have to converse with kept me company.

  My parents had a lot of work to do, as always, but we ate meals together and talked about everyday things—but not Nick. That subject was taboo.

  At least it was until the day my mother asked me to help her in the vegetable garden. Side by side we gathered the last zucchini, squash, pepper, and cucumbers. When we finished, Mama stood up, took off her work gloves, and pointed to the little wooden bench in the middle of the beds.

  “Come sit with me, my child.”

  I followed her with some trepidation and sat down beside her. I still wasn’t sure if I should tell her about the problems Nick and I had. How to start? My husband feels a repeated, unpredictable, disastrous urge to kill himself, and he counts on me to rescue him. That sounded so insane that an outsider probably wouldn’t have believed it. But when she put a loving arm around me, the floodgates opened. I told her everything. While listening to me chronicle the ups and downs of our marriage, she didn’t say a word but held me closely again and again each time I stopped to collect myself. It affected me so much to talk about it.

  “I can’t go on. I know for certain that if I go back to him now, the whole thing will start all over at some point. Besides, I can’t forgive him that I lost the baby that night.”

  She looked at me intently. “You told me you didn’t feel well all that day. Most miscarriages in the first three months have nothing to do with anything the mother’s done.”