“What’s the matter?”
“I’m bleeding,” she said.
14.
AN ER NURSE at the university medical center took Sara’s vitals and asked lots of questions. A different nurse drew a vial of blood from her arm, asked the same questions as the first nurse, and handed her a cup to pee into.
The attending physician reminded me a little bit of one of my grad students back at Dixson. He configured the gleaming steel stirrups on either side of the examination table and helped Sara in.
“You’re still closed,” he said when he’d finished, stripping off the latex glove and dropping it in the trash. “That’s good.”
A smile. A squirt of gel on Sara’s belly.
An impossibly long minute or two, watching the doctor push the microphone- shaped probe around in the gel.
“How many weeks?” he asked, still smiling.
“Nine,” Sara said.
Another squirt of gel. Had the doctor’s smile faded slightly?
I couldn’t be sure.
All I knew for certain was that we hadn’t yet heard the grainy, crackling wow wow wow sound we’d heard before—the day Sara’s new doctor in Clark Falls had used the same kind of machine to let us hear, for the first time, this baby we’d been hearing about.
Wow.
We’d made that sound, I’d thought that day, holding Sara’s hand the same way I held it now.
Wow.
We’d started a heartbeat.
Wow wow wow.
“It’s an intangible,” Dr. Finley told us the following afternoon.
We were sitting in his private office on the first floor of the Finley Pointer Clausen LLC building. Three chairs arranged in a loose triangle. Sara and I together, Finley on point.
Sara said, “But it’s a possibility.”
“Certainly we think that stress can be a factor,” he said. “But we don’t necessarily know how, or what kind of stress, or how much.” He smiled kindly. “All I can say about that is, whatever you’ve found on the Internet that makes you think this is somehow your fault, Sara, you should regard that information as nonmedical bullshit. If you’ll pardon my language.”
“Of course,” Sara said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
Yesterday, while I’d been lounging off my hangover inside the air- conditioned house, she’d spent the afternoon outside, working in her flower garden in the suffocating August heat. I’d told her to come in and relax. She told Finley that she hadn’t felt well once she finally did.
“Of course you didn’t feel well,” he said. “It was ninetyeight degrees yesterday. With a heat index of a hundred and twelve. You’re probably lucky you didn’t keel over in the marigolds.” He shrugged. “But based on my experience, I’d be willing to bet a reasonable sum that working in your garden didn’t terminate your pregnancy.”
On the wall behind him, there hung a framed photograph of Finley with two teenage boys, whom I took to be his sons. All three of them were geared in helmets and bright yellow life jackets, paddling an inflatable raft through a whitewater run. While Dr. Finley talked, I found my eyes drawn to the photo.
“Not just yesterday,” Sara said. “I’ve been feeling…”
“Yes?”
“Overwhelmed,” she said. “For weeks. I know I haven’t been taking the best—”
“Let’s see,” Finley said. “You’ve moved halfway across the country, away from your family and friends, to a new town where you didn’t know a soul. Add the pregnancy. A challenging new job. For heaven’s sake, Sara, add the fact that you were attacked just a few weeks ago.” He shook his head, pantomiming amazement. “I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it.”
“That’s what I—”
Another gentle smile. “But in my opinion, the most likely culprit is simpler than all of that.”
Sara sighed. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Our statistics still suggest that an otherwise healthy woman’s chances for miscarriage increase as she passes the age of thirty- five. That’s all.”
Finley was somewhere in his sixties himself. He’d been in the baby business more than half those years, and we’d felt comfortable with him almost immediately. Just then I felt strangely disappointed that we wouldn’t need to come see him anymore.
“Even speaking as an economist,” she said, “I can tell you that statistics don’t seem like much comfort at the moment.”
“Sara.” Finley reached out and took her hand. He looked at both of us. “There isn’t a number in the world that tells anyone how to feel about something like this.”
I put my hand on her back, completing the triangle. The look she gave me seemed apologetic. Almost ashamed.
“No,” I said.
“I have more useful numbers to give you,” Finley told us. “I know at least three people here in town whom I’d recommend to my own daughter, if you find that you’d like to talk to somebody. Either one of you.”
Sara nodded. I copied her.
“And of course you can call me anytime.”
“Thank you.”
“Is there anything you’d like to ask now?”
“To be honest,” she said, “I’m just wondering what happens next.”
Finley took a moment to explain our options, the first being a procedure, which he would perform himself, here in the office. It was called a D & C, which stood for dilation and curettage.
“Or,” he said, “you can wait to pass the tissue.”
At first I thought he meant Kleenex. Being that it was a sad occasion. Pass the tissue. Then I realized what he meant.
“Nature will take its course,” he assured us. “But it’s really your decision, Sara.”
“How long will it take?”
“The procedure? Normally it’s a—”
“Nature.”
Finley nodded. “Assuming everything proceeds normally, it could happen today. More likely sometime in the next day or two. I would generally expect you to complete inside the week, though these things are never entirely predictable.”
“And I just wait?”
“If you choose,” Finley said, “I can prescribe medication that may help nature along.”
We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Sara nodded her head. It seemed almost an absent motion, as though she were listening to some advice I wished I could hear.
I looked back at the photo of Finley and his sons, manhandling Mother Nature. For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder: who had been operating the camera?
“Thank you,” Sara said.
It was over by Thursday afternoon.
We stayed close to home and tried to stay busy. Early Wed nesday evening, Sara went to bed with the chills. By Thursday morning, she’d started cramping, and by noon, regular contractions had set in.
A few months down the road, I’d have grabbed our bags and driven like hell for the hospital. Instead, I drove to the SaveMore on Belmont for more maxi pads. Michael Sprague came over to be with her while I was gone.
At a few minutes past five o’clock, Sara went to the bathroom one final time. She stayed there, behind the closed door, until almost five- thirty.
Eventually, from my spot on the couch in the living room, I heard the sound of the toilet flushing. The pipes rattled under the floor.
Sara came out, walked to the couch, and sat down beside me. I put my arm around her shoulders. She tucked up her feet and laid her head in my lap.
For the first time that week, she let herself cave in. We cried.
Two hours later, she told me, “I didn’t know how much I’d wanted this until two hours ago.”
I stroked her hair. “Me either.”
We went on.
15.
I M STALLING.
Douglas Bennett doesn’t need to hear all of this. None of it is news to Sara. I played golf, Roger’s a control freak, we’re not going to be parents. Couldn’t these points be summarized?
Of course they seem significan
t. To me.
And if I were one of my freshman composition students, and if this story were my term paper, I’d be slashing every page with a red pen.
Are these details necessary?
Condense.
Everybody has their tricks, and I know mine. How do we tell a convincing lie? By sticking as closely to the truth as we can. How do we make the truth compelling? By choosing our angles. Selecting which points to embellish or skim.
I’m trying to paint a realistic backdrop so that the preposterous, when I reach that point, will seem more believable. I’m attempting to establish a trustworthy narrative voice so that my own actions will seem easier to understand.
The truth is, Douglas Bennett doesn’t need a realistic backdrop. He doesn’t need every detail to get up to speed.
All Douglas Bennett really needs to know is that I’d quit the neighborhood patrol before the end of September. By October, my marriage was in trouble. In November, I made the worst mistake of my life. Afterward, Roger Mallory came to our house to inform me that he wanted me gone.
And that’s what started all of this.
“Where is it that you think I’m going?” I’d asked Roger.
“That’s up to you,” he’d said.
“You’re kidding.”
“Don’t think that I want this.”
“Let me get this straight,” I’d said. “You’re banishing me. From the neighborhood.”
“If that’s the word you want to use.”
“You mean, like in the Bible?”
“You can have until December sixteenth,” Roger said. “That’s the end of your semester.”
I’d laughed in his face. “You’re actually serious, aren’t you?”
“Let’s not keep asking that question.”
“You honestly believe that we’re going to pack up and move out? Because you say so?”
“I didn’t create the situation, Paul.” He spoke in a regretful tone. “And I haven’t said anything about Sara.”
“Ah. Right.”
“We’ll say the sixteenth, then.”
“Or what, Roger?” I remember saying. “You’ll tell on me?”
16.
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING THE ATTACK, Sara developed a ritual. Each night before bed, she’d make a trip around the house, checking the locks on all the doors and windows. If I’d already set the alarm, Sara would punch in the standby code and rearm the system herself.
If observed, she’d laugh about it, like she realized this regimen was silly, though I’d never suggested that I thought so. Whenever that night came up in conversation, she’d speak freely about the subject, sometimes with a gallows chuckle over some small, unimportant detail that had grown to seem absurd with time. Generally, she gave little indication that the experience had created any lingering ill effects to speak of, and all our neighbors had expressed their admiration of her fortitude.
But in private, she still flinched sometimes when I touched her without warning.
One night in September, I sat in my chair with a book on my knee and watched Sara make her rounds. The next day, I cut my Friday afternoon class short, left campus, and drove to the county/city building downtown.
It had been a couple of weeks since I’d checked in with Detective Harmon. I didn’t expect that he had any new information, but I wanted him to see my face again, just to remind him that we were still out there. A uniformed sergeant escorted me to Harmon’s office in the Detectives Division on the second floor.
“Mr. Callaway, hello.” Harmon stood and reached across his desk to shake my hand. That afternoon his shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow, jacket and shoulder rig hanging on the back of his chair. He looked like he’d had a long day. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” I shook his hand and nodded to the other man sitting casually in one of the chairs in Harmon’s office. “Sorry to interrupt, I should have called.”
“Not at all.” Harmon gestured to the man in the chair. “Paul, this is John Gardner. Old friend of mine. We were just catching up.”
“By old friend, he means old boss.” John Gardner grinned and shook my hand. He looked lanky and fit for a man I guessed to be in his sixties, completely bald- headed, with sharp features and smallish eyes that gave him a vaguely hawklike appearance. “And by catching up, he means bullshitting and wasting your tax dollars. Let me get the hell out of here.”
Something in the way Gardner and Detective Harmon exchanged glances gave me the impression that I had, in fact, interrupted something more than a friendly visit. But before I could volunteer to leave and come back later, Gardner had risen from his chair, shrugged into a light jacket with a Ducks Unlimited patch on the sleeve, and headed for the door. “Fly low, Detective.”
Harmon said, “Lieutenant. Love to Nancy.”
Gardner waved a hand over his head and left us alone in the office.
“Paul, come on in.” Detective Harmon sat and leaned back in his chair. He motioned me to the chair his old boss had just vacated. “Good to see you. How’s Sara?”
“She’s doing well enough, thanks. Keeping plenty busy.”
“I know the feeling. How are you?”
“Me? Too much time on my hands, apparently.” I wished I’d called ahead. “Listen, I know there’s probably not much you can tell me, but I just wanted to check in and see if you’d come up with anything new. I don’t mean to bother you.”
“It’s no bother,” Detective Harmon said, sighing a little. “I just wish I had something new to give you.”
“Nobody’s come forward and confessed, I take it.”
“And nothing’s come in over the tip line.” Harmon gave me the same look of empathy I remembered him giving us in our unassembled living room two months previously. “For tu nately for us, unfortunately for your particular case, our subject—so far as we know, anyway—hasn’t tried his act again.”
“I suppose that’s a good thing,” I said.
“Definitely a good thing.” Harmon said. “But I understand your frustration.”
“What about the golf club?” Somehow, my sand wedge had been lost in the shuffle between our house and the Property Unit here at the police department. “Did it ever turn up?”
Harmon pursed his lips as though this topic still chapped his hide. “Believe me, I chewed asses up and down the chain of custody. And I can tell you, we’re in the middle of an internal procedure review, soup to nuts.”
“I see.”
“In all honesty, I don’t believe we stand to gain much from the golf club that we weren’t able to collect from elsewhere in the house,” Harmon said. “But of course that’s not the point. It was a royal screwup.”
I didn’t disagree.
“If you or Sara wanted to press the issue, you could probably hang somebody’s job on your wall, and I wouldn’t be able to say that I blamed you.”
I’d thought about this more than once over the past few weeks, but in the end, it seemed that Harmon had a point. “Like you said,” I told him. “We probably wouldn’t stand to gain much.”
We chatted awhile longer, Harmon did his best to reassure me that our case was still important to the Clark Falls Police Department, and I left with nothing more than I’d had when I arrived.
Outside, on my way back to my car, I felt a tingle at the back of my neck and glanced over my shoulder. John Gardner, Detective Harmon’s old boss, stood smoking a cigarette in one of the building’s exterior doorways, watching me. When I saw him there, he lifted his chin and held up a palm. I don’t remember if I waved back or not.
Later that afternoon, Brit Seward returned a collection of short stories I’d given her, thinking it seemed like something she’d like. I asked her what she’d thought of the stories.
“I liked the main one,” she said. “About the truck driver and his wife. It was sad.”
“Something happier, then.” I started browsing my shelves, looking for something funny but not too light. A challenge, but not too far b
eyond her. She was a tricky case. Thirteen going on twenty- three, Michael Sprague had said. He’d had it about right.
Brit said, “What about this?”
I took the book she’d pulled from the R’s—a hardback copy of Russo’s Empire Falls—and remembered her claim that she’d chosen to read Emily Brontë because Wuthering Heights reminded her of Ponca Heights. I liked that Brit liked titles and stories that reminded her of where she lived.
I nodded and handed the book back to her. “Happy parts,” I said. “And sad parts.”
“Sounds good.”
“It’s pretty good,” I agreed. “What makes you pick this one?”
“My dad has the DVD.”
“Yeah? Paul Newman?”
“I guess so. He’s the old guy? Max?”
“Hey,” I said. “Read the book before you watch the movie.”
“Too late, but thanks for the advice.”
“You’re killing me.”
Brit laughed. “Can I hang out here?”
I’d set up a reading nook for myself in the far alcove: a beat- up couch that had come from an early apartment of mine, with wide flat arms, where you could set a cup of coffee or a beer or a rocks glass or, in Brit’s case, a plastic Diet Mountain Dew bottle; an unmatched footstool that stood at just the right height; and a floor lamp that had come from my grandmother’s house in Cresskill, New Jersey, which seemed to make an ordinary lightbulb produce more pleasing light.
If allowed, Brit would spend all day up here. This had in fact become a habit of hers in recent weeks, but as long as Pete and Melody didn’t mind, and I didn’t have any work to do in the office, it didn’t bother me.
“Fine by me,” I said. “Your dad knows you’re here?”
“I told Melody I was coming over.”
“Fair enough.”
“Like Melody’s fair.”
She liked to try and get me to take sides. “None of my business.”
“I’m just saying.” She hopped into the couch with the book and her soda and tucked her long legs up.
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