“I know,” I say.
“You knew?” Hannah asks Greg.
“Only since Cole announced that she didn’t have a thyroid problem.”
“I know,” I say again, before either of them can tell me how stupid I am.
That lunch hour in the school foyer, discussing Lauren’s disintegrating fashion sense and Greg’s dating plans—the whole scene rotates around me. The giggling girls. The posse surrounding Lauren. The guy trying to jump onto the snack stand counter. Greg sitting beside me, tenting his fingers and working up the courage to tell me he wants to date Lauren.
But this entire scene wasn’t rotating around me. All the big things were happening to other people. I was just a bystander. Just the guy behind the camera. A scrap of space junk in a universe of shit.
“Sorry.”
Greg snorts. “You so completely do not deserve that girl,” he says flatly.
Hannah says nothing, but I feel her shoulders curl inward.
I’m about to agree. I don’t deserve Lauren. Or Hannah. Or Greg either, for that matter. But then we’re at the hospital. We fling ourselves out of the truck and all three of us run—run—across the parking lot, our togas flapping behind us like surrender flags.
chapter 28
hospitals smell like lysol, pee, and death
“We’re here for Lauren Michaels,” Greg says to the woman at the desk, who looks entirely uninterested in emergencies.
“Have a seat.” She waves vaguely to the waiting room chairs without looking up.
We move in unison across the room, pulled together somehow by her indifference.
“Did someone call Lauren’s mom?” I wonder as we drop into the orange plastic chairs.
As if in answer, the glass doors sweep open and Lauren’s parents race into the room with a blast of cold air. Her dad goes straight to the desk. Her mom sees us as we jump up from our seats, and she stops.
“They took her inside,” Greg says.
“I didn’t know, until . . . ,” I blurt, much less helpfully. I can’t help feeling like there’s accusation in Mrs. Michaels’s eyes.
She doesn’t respond. Maybe she doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. Her husband says her name, and they both half-jog past the desk and down the hallway. Greg, Hannah, and I flop back down.
We wait. Hannah takes my hand, which is more helpful and less uncomfortable than I would have thought. A few more of Lauren’s friends show up and perch, sniffling softly, on the other side of the waiting room. A man in green hospital scrubs sweeps through from outside, his hair sticking up as if he was called out of bed. He too disappears down the hallway.
We wait.
Greg calls his mom and I listen as he summarizes the events. I consider calling my dad, but I wouldn’t know how to start explaining this particular situation.
Hannah goes to find a bathroom, leaving Greg and me side by side.
“I messed up,” I say, staring at the scuffed floor.
“Yeah. You two will work it out, though.”
“No. I mean, yes, I messed up with Lauren. But I messed things up with you too.”
Greg just grunts.
“You’re a better friend than me.” Some people have a talent for that. For turning up exactly when you need them and being exactly what you need. I’m not one of those people.
Hannah sits down again.
After a while, my butt seems permanently molded to the plastic chair.
The door from the parking lot slides open, and everyone in the waiting room looks up expectantly. It’s Greg’s mom. She hands us each a pair of pants and a T-shirt. Once we’ve pulled them on and ditched the sheets, she drops into the seat beside Greg, her shoulder against his. She sits there without saying anything. For the first time since elementary school, I find myself loving Greg’s mom.
We wait.
This time, it’s the clicking sound of high heels that makes our heads snap to attention. Lex emerges from the ER, looking as if she was pulled behind the ambulance instead of allowed to ride inside.
“She’s okay so far,” she says. “They say she lost a lot of blood, but she’s stopped hemorrhaging for now.”
My jaw relaxes a little, and I wonder how long it’s been clenched. Maybe since Dallas’s house.
“What about the . . . ?” one of the girls asks from across the room.
“We don’t know yet.” Lex doesn’t look at me. No one looks at me.
Finally, I can’t stand it anymore. This is not a sit-in-the-waiting-room sort of situation. I get up and walk toward the swinging doors that divide us from the ER.
“Only family members allowed,” the woman behind the desk says.
“I’m the father of the baby.” The word “father” falls like a brick off my tongue, but at least it gets me past the desk. In the row of green-sheeted compartments, I find Lauren lying on a hospital bed, face turned slightly away from where her mom stands gripping Lauren’s dad’s arm.
Mrs. Michaels glares at me. There’s no question this time. She knows.
“I’d like to talk to Cole,” Lauren says. Her skin is still frighteningly pale, but she doesn’t sound as scared anymore.
When her mom sniffs, Lauren turns to look her in the eye. Her mom glances away. Mr. Michaels pats his wife’s arm and avoids looking at his daughter.
The two of them squeeze by me, stiff like icicles, careful to ensure their clothes don’t brush against mine in the narrow opening between fabric walls.
Once they’re a few steps away, I perch on the edge of the bed. There are no chairs in this enclosure, only machines.
“I should have talked to you earlier,” Lauren says.
“I should have figured things out months ago.”
“You were already with Hannah. . . .”
“What did they say? The doctors?”
Lauren bites her lip. “Nothing yet. The doctor came and left. The nurses did an exam. They said the bleeding’s stopped. Someone’s supposed to come and talk to me.”
I take her hand.
I’m not used to the hospital being this quiet. For once, there’s no old lady groaning in pain, no loud, beeping machines, no crazy man yelling from the hallway about his bowel movements. There’s only the efficient slap of the nurses’ shoes as they pass back and forth. Red numbers blink at me from the terminal beside the IV stand, and fluid drip, drip, drips down the plastic tubing into Lauren’s arm. I hold her palm lightly, rubbing my thumb across it. Mostly to reassure myself.
In the week before my mother died, her skin loosened itself, bagging under her eyes and folding itself down her neck like a balloon with the helium seeping away. Before that, Mom would sometimes look tired or pained or angry. In those last few days, she started to look . . . absent. I didn’t ask the nurses about it, not even Tracy or the once-a-day doctor on his hurried rounds, because I didn’t want to hear their answers, and I didn’t want Mom to hear them either. Dad and I stopped talking too. It was the end of August. I went to the hospital every lunch hour and every afternoon. Dad would go early every morning before work and late each night. We barely saw each other. Sometimes we left notes to each other on the table with Mom’s portions of hospital food. Unread notes tucked underneath trays of uneaten food.
“What am I going to do, Cole?” Lauren whispers. The question’s a few months too late, but I don’t say that.
“We’ll figure it out,” I reassure her. “We can get a place, if you want. Or we can stay at my place, although it’s a little more crowded than usual at the moment. My dad’s girlfriend moved in, with her daughter.”
Lauren looks surprised, and her eyebrows go even higher at the end. I don’t explain. I’m busy feeling dreams pop, like soap bubbles: my Vancouver apartment, actresses fawning over me, coffee shops, martini bars, film school. Film school.
It hurts, as each one disappears. It hurts less than I would have expected, though. As I stare at Lauren’s eyelashes, translucent against her skin, I imagine a baby—an actual baby—with
those lashes. Turning the word “father” over in my head, I remember what my subconscious was trying to tell me while I was stuck in that tree well, about friends being safety nets.
I think about what Dallas said: You don’t go to the bar and then scoot your ass out when the fight starts.
All this time, I’ve been thinking of the Web as a trap. Maybe it’s a safety net. All those tangled relationships—they keep you stuck in one place, but they also keep you together. Web. Net. Are those the same thing?
“We’ll figure it out,” I say again.
There’s a loud throat clearing behind me and a nurse nods at both of us. Lauren’s parents are back, peering over the nurse’s shoulder.
I stand and inch back against the curtain.
“Do they know what’s happening?” Lauren asks as the nurse slides a blood pressure cuff onto her arm.
“The doctor will be here in a little while,” the nurse says, her eyes focused on the equipment.
Another throat clearing. Lauren’s dad this time.
“Cole? Can you come back in a few minutes?” Lauren says.
I’m released back into the hallway, but I don’t go through the swinging doors. I hover at the edge of the ER.
• • •
Here’s another soft-focus scene, slightly overexposed from the light bouncing off the all-white walls.
One afternoon in the hospital, Mom looked at me with her eyes a little brighter blue than they had been, and she asked me to find her a specific story.
“It’s in one of my old textbooks,” she said. “A little girl is sick and she’s supposed to die before the last leaf falls off the vine by her bedroom window.”
“Mom!” I protested. “What kind of story is that?”
“No, she doesn’t die. Someone . . . her grandfather, maybe, or her neighbor . . . I don’t remember; someone paints a leaf on the wall by the vine so it never falls.”
Mom closed her eyes a few minutes later. Even that much talking was enough to tire her. I got up to go, barely kissing her cheek so I wouldn’t wake her.
“Cole?” she asked just as I was in the doorway. “You’ll be okay?”
I nodded, my throat closing up in that way that I hated.
I never did find the story about the leaf. Later that night a nurse called from the hospital and woke Dad and me. We picked up two separate phone extensions simultaneously.
“Her pulse ox is pretty low,” the nurse said. “You should probably be here.”
Within minutes, we were in the truck, shivering from the damp cold and driving through darkened streets without another car in sight. We didn’t say a single word to each other.
By the time we got there, a nurse was already disconnecting Mom’s wires.
“She left?” my dad said, disbelieving. Taking Mom’s hand from the sheet, he leaned down and pressed it to his forehead. The nurse bustled a chair behind him, but he didn’t sit. He stayed bent in half, like a broken tree.
“She left,” he repeated. He didn’t say, “She’s gone.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
• • •
I’m standing in the middle of the hallway when a pair of arms wrap around me.
“I came as soon as I heard.” It’s Tracy, and I swear I’ve never been so happy to see a pierced lip in my entire life. She knows Lauren, of course. We spent enough lunch hours here together last year. I let myself rest my head on Tracy’s shoulder, just for a second.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I tell her.
She tilts her head down the hall, and I follow her to a little row of chairs lined against one wall.
“She’s pregnant,” I tell her. “Someone said she was bleeding all day. And she was bleeding at the party. . . .”
Tracy nods. I guess she knows all this already.
“Her mom doesn’t want me in there with her, and I don’t know what’s happening.”
“The doctor’s going to talk to Lauren,” she says. “He and I just spoke.”
“What? What did he say?”
Tracy sighs. “Cole,” she says. “There was a lot of blood. She could bleed again at any time. And her cervix is open.”
I don’t really know what this means.
“She’s far enough along that there was a small chance that a baby could survive. But there was no heartbeat.”
In Tracy’s eyes, I find the meaning of those words. She takes my hand and squeezes it as the significance sinks in.
“There’s no baby,” I say finally.
“Not anymore. She’ll have to have surgery, something called a D and C, to remove the tissue and the placenta. They’re waiting for the anesthetist to arrive.”
Another bubble pops, just like the film school bubble popped a little while ago. Strangely, this one hurts more.
“She doesn’t know yet?”
“Only the doctor’s supposed to tell her,” Tracy says.
I have to tell her. We’re in this together now. I can’t let her hear the news from a stranger, without me there.
I’m surprisingly calm. I’m breathing normally. My heart rate is steady. I notice these things with one half of my brain. The other half only registers that my guts have been scraped out with a spoon. Inside, I’m all raw wounds. A big bloody mess.
And yet, I thank Tracy, my voice solid. Then I clear my throat at the door of the cubicle. Her parents and I perform the same sheet-doorway dance for a third time.
I sit on the bed beside Lauren, my hip touching hers. “I talked to a nurse,” I say. I don’t use Tracy’s name. I don’t want to get her in trouble if this gets repeated later.
Lauren surprises me.
“The baby’s gone,” she whispers.
I nod, and then she’s crying. Her arms are around my shoulders, tubing everywhere, and she’s shaking with sobs, crying like a little girl. I cry too, partly for Lauren and partly for me and partly because of what used to be a baby, a small human being. Gone. The images flashing through my head are all mixed up. There’s my mom, lying on hospital sheets like the ones on this bed. There’s Lauren on the bathroom floor, pale and bloody. There’s even the damn dead deer, side heaving on the highway.
“You always teased me for wanting to stay in Webster,” Lauren says after a long while.
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“No, it’s okay. I just want you to know, I didn’t want to stay like this. This isn’t how I planned things. I didn’t want to be the girl who didn’t finish high school.”
“It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have taken care of a baby.”
She nods. “I think I knew it was gone, Cole. I think it’s been gone for a while.”
After that, we’re quiet for a long time. I guess we don’t need to explain to each other this mix of sadness and confusion and, though it feels wrong, relief.
“I should tell my mom,” she says eventually.
“Do you want me to stay?”
She shakes her head. “No. If Lex is calm, you can send her in after a bit.”
“Cole?” Lauren calls me back as I turn to leave. “Thanks for telling me. And thanks for offering. To stay with me.”
I nod. I did offer, didn’t I? I offered to stay and be a decent dad. I stayed between these curtains with her and shared the pain of our whole messed-up situation. And even though I caused this pregnancy in the first place, I was also part of the safety net. I feel a tiny, amoeba-size bit better.
• • •
Back in the waiting room, everyone stands as I enter. All of them. Greg and Greg’s mom, Hannah, and Lex, and the girl posse. Even Ms. Gladwell and my dad, who have somehow arrived too. You can’t escape anyone in this town.
They’re all staring at me, waiting.
“She lost the baby,” I say. The entire room exhales.
I turn toward Lex. “Have you got it together?”
She glares at me as if she’s never had an un-together moment. I glance at Hannah, who nods that Lex is okay.
“Lauren is ask
ing for you.”
“Are you all right?” Ms. Gladwell asks me. At the same time, my dad puts a cup of vending machine coffee in my hand.
I nod. I’m as all right as I can be under the circumstances. Not quite ready to deal with these two yet, though. Not ready to analyze my feelings for Ms. Gladwell or make light of them for my dad. Not ready to wonder how you can lose a baby so soon after you’ve discovered its existence.
I step up to the sensor and the doors swoosh open, releasing me into the cold. The air sears my lungs, but it doesn’t stop the tears rolling down my face. Suddenly, what I want most in the world is to talk to my mom. Even my imaginary mom would do. I’d take a hallucination.
The lights in the houses across the road are dark. There’s only the streetlight shining down on the corner church with its marquee board.
I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS, EVEN UNTO THE END OF THE WORLD.
It seems less like a threat this time and more like a message. Maybe from God, or maybe from my mom. Looking at that sign makes me feel a little better.
Behind me, the door opens again. Greg and Hannah emerge, their shoulders hunched against the wind.
I’m happy to see them. I turn that over in my head for a minute, just to make sure the feeling’s real.
It is. I’m happy to see them.
“I’m going for a walk,” I say. “You want to come?”
And even though it’s the middle of the night and pretty much the Arctic outside, they both say yes. It’s hard to come by friends like that. Or so says my dead mother.
• • •
If this were a film, there would be a real ending. Something solid to point to and say “final scene.” In a documentary like Hoop Dreams, I’d be the basketball player who failed to make it big. I would have told Lauren we would care for the baby together, my film school dream would have popped like a bubble, and I would be left here in obscurity. Or maybe I’m one of the kids who failed to win the good-school lottery in Waiting for Superman. But there’s no baby anymore. School is waiting, as is the promise of success.
This night doesn’t seem entirely tragic or entirely happy. Not even close.
Seems like life doesn’t have a documentary ending. In fact, it’s possible that my bleak film, bundled into its manila envelope, has entirely the wrong conclusion. It turns out that Webster isn’t necessarily the problem and escaping isn’t the answer. In reality, things are messier.
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