“Great,” said Rodger. “Because here’s our plane.”
From behind the small squat brown brick building rolled a tiny-looking plane. Its cabin seemed as if it were hardly large enough to hold the two of them…
“So—here, I’ll take your coffee,” said Rodger and something in his voice caused Melissa to look over at him in surprise. His face was transformed; he had dimples now, and his eyes were shining, and his mouth was stretched in the widest, gladdest grin Melissa had ever seen. He loved doing this sort of thing, she realized. He was in his element. This was the kind of thing he'd been born to do.
Deep breaths, thought Melissa as she handed off her coffee.
They walked into the tiny airplane hangar and listened to what seemed like a briefer than possible safety briefing. After this, they put on their harnesses and practiced pulling the safety chutes.
Melissa would be diving with a certified instructor, which she at least appreciated. In theory, even if she blacked out, she’d still make it to the ground safely because this dude would take care of her. She liked that, at the very least. Rodger had decided to jump alone—a first for him—but the additional risk just seemed to invigorate him.
At last it was time for them to ascend to the skies. Rodger and Melissa sat in the back, the diving instructor and the pilot sat in the front. That trip up to the heavens was one of the longest of Melissa’s entire life, even though in actuality it only lasted about fifteen minutes. When the diving instructor moved back to her and motioned that it was time to get into position, she found herself hardly able to move. Only Rodger’s smile and warm hand were able to get her up and out of her seat. The diving instructor clipped her in. She at least found solace in the fact that the clips binding her to him were very strong. Rodger, next to them, was going through his final safety check. He gave her a thumb’s up and a wink.
And then, entirely too soon, it was time for them to fall.
Melissa knew that she wasn't going to be able to step out of the plane. Something about that would have felt far too dangerous. She knew that she would have lifted one foot over the whoosh-y abyss and then stood, paralyzed except for her palpitating heart, very possibly until the plane was grounded and had run out of gas. She might have frozen in place, very literally, up there. She knew that that wasn’t going to be an option.
However, for legal reasons, she could also accept the fact that no one was going to push her out of the plane. However much she told herself that she wouldn’t litigate anyone who attempted such an idea while up in the air, she knew that if anything went wrong (and she was still able to walk and talk and complain) that she would be suing the pusher the second she hit the ground. She didn't particularly love this about herself, but at least she knew it.
Melissa therefore settled upon the half-fall that her instructor had walked her through down on the Earth’s surface. She and Rodger sat, facing each other, while the assistant in the plane gestured—three, two, one—with knobbly white fingers.
She felt a jerk and a shove from her side. Rodger’s smile flashed before her eyes one last time before his mouth opened and began to flap about like a rubber band.
A gust of air bore her away, and she was falling.
Tumbling through the emptiness, whizzing toward an ever-growing earth. The warmth of her instructor, the strange man tied to her back, was nothing in comparison to the chill at her fingertips and her toes. She thought she might never be warm again. She thought she might never be able to think again, not properly. She gazed out, down, through her eyelashes, at fields and lakes and highways streaming with tiny ants—no, cars—which were rocketing closer to her.
Her ears were filled with the rushing of the wind. She felt the immense pressure of the air all around her. She was too scared to scream.
Out of the very side of her left eye, she saw a dot in the distance—Rodger—his hands out like they were supposed to be; he looked as if he were falling gracefully, somehow, not paralyzed in the fetal position that she was—
And then, in a far-off voice, she heard the man next to her yell CHUTE and after that, after a count of three, she felt another shove, but this one upward; and suddenly they were buoyed a bit and their hectic, fatal fall toward the earth slowed with all of the grace and niceties of a very old, rickety car which only has binary brakes.
Melissa gasped, feeling as if all of the wind had been simply punched out of her.
The roaring of the wind lilted to a stop—or at least a lull—or at least it wasn’t screaming in her ears anymore. Instead, now she and her flight instructor were floating on the breeze. It was higher up than she would have thought when first she imagined what it would be like when the man to whom she was strapped pulled the chute and sent their parachute blooming like a rose above them. She closed her eyes, and then opened them again. The ant-cars were getting bigger.
Her instructor stayed silent. She liked him for that.
They whirled toward the earth—now in growing concentric circles—and Melissa settled in to try and see everything she could before it was over. She liked this gentle sailing feeling—quite different from the rip-roaring dramatic fall from a few moments ago. Her skin felt chafed from that fall, and the scream which had been stuck in her throat from it had never quite got a chance to rip out. She wondered when it would go away; as of right then it was still sort of hiding, as an un-coughed cough might—an annoying tickle which made itself more known the more she thought about it.
They were near enough to the earth now that Melissa could make out her shadow—and that of Rodger, who was spiraling to the ground a little beneath them. Had he fallen faster? Melissa tried, for a moment, to figure out the physics of why precisely that might have happened, but she drew only blanks. She watched and listened for the tiny crumpling sound as he landed on the earth. They were still too far up; she couldn’t hear it.
“Prepare for landing, now,” she heard. The flight instructor began to fiddle around with the lines of their parachute, directing it as one might manipulate the sail on a boat.
Her shadow, which seemed very bulky, very bulky indeed—but then, of course, she realized, it was a shadow which belonged to two people—veered and swerved across the empty, grassy field over which they were flying. Round and round they circled. Rodger was on the ground, looking up and waving at them. Melissa started, realizing that they were close enough to see him waving, which meant—oh no, she realized—they could hit Rodger, couldn’t they? It seemed the heights of stupidity, suddenly, for Rodger to be standing there in what was going to be their landing zone, even if he had just used it as a landing zone himself moments previously—
“Landing in ten seconds,” said her instructor.
Melissa didn’t seem to be able to use her voice. It was clammed up in her throat along with the scream from earlier. She wanted to shut her eyes. It didn’t seem that she had control over those, either. She set herself to survival mode, and watched as the ground came closer.
It arrived with a sickening thunk, a crunching sound, and an intense shock of burning pain running through her left leg.
The scream she'd been hiding let loose.
Her leg, she thought.
Chapter 5
The hospital was much smaller than Melissa had remembered it to be.
Of course, the last time she had been there was a very long time ago. She couldn’t have been more than eight or perhaps twelve at the time. She’d been playing in a peewee soccer match in her elementary school. Melissa had been the goalie; how she’d gotten that position, she could never later tell as she had very little natural talent at any position in any group sport—particularly one upon which the entire team would naturally depend. But the goalie she'd been, perhaps due to the fact that it naturally required so little running and she’d never been fast…an attribute which she sorely needed when the much taller main defensive kicker from the other side had leveled an astonishingly (for a young kid) strong kick, landing the ball deep in
Melissa’s stomach. She’d been thrown across the field and had landed on her own leg with a sickening crunch. That was what her teammates had told her, anyway; Melissa had blacked out upon first impact with the soccer ball. She only remembered waking up in the sterile white room with a fuzzy, funny taste in her mouth.
The room was the same, she thought. Now her feet reached to the edge of the bed and the bathroom didn’t seem quite so far away; and, as she'd never fallen asleep, she wasn’t finding herself here, waking up, disorientated, alone.
Of course, she wasn’t alone this time, either. Rodger had rushed her in, him white-faced, her sweating and panicky, and held her hand throughout all of the paperwork and wheelchair-ing and initial tests. Even though her leg—as she kept reassuring him—was ‘only broken’, Rodger had insisted that the full battery of exams be run on her to eliminate the sorts of things which often turned up in her medical soaps like internal bleeding and other unpleasant-sounding things.
Just now he tilted his head downward and covered his face with his hands.
“Rodger,” Melissa said. Her voice was low and a bit scratchy. This wasn't the first time in this hour which she'd begun this very same speech. “Rodger, it’s going to be okay.”
“But if it’s not, it’s my fault,” Rodger said, hoarsely. “I was so cocky about our day—I thought things had gone so well that I just stopped being worried—and when I stop worrying, bad things happen—“
“So you’ve got to keep worrying, is that it? That’s crazy, you won’t stave anything off that way, and you’ll give yourself an ulcer to boot,” Melissa said calmly. “If this was your fault, I’ll get you back for it later. To be clear, that was a threat. A conditional one,” she said, nudging him gently in the ribs and grinning. He didn't smile.
“Come on, Rodger, I really shouldn’t be having to make you feel better. I’m the invalid.” She pouted, sticking her lower lip out, and making sure that he could see the devilish twinkle in her eyes.
“Right, right, of course,” he said. She watched as he took a very deep breath and let it all out in a stutter-y stream. “Is there anything I can get you? How are you doing? Perhaps if I—”
“Just sit here with me,” Melissa said, smiling.
In a way, his paranoid paroxysms were helpful, because she was forced to stop worrying about herself in order to get him to calm down. But she wasn’t about to tell him that. In the meantime, she was enjoying the distraction from the dull throb in her leg. She also had the silly—unsubstantiated but nevertheless very real and persistent—fear that one of her doctors was going to come back and let her know first with a look and then with a sigh and then with a series of unpronounceable words that one of the just-for-kicks tests which Rodger had requested she order returned with some really weird, incredibly rare, and vehemently lethal disease. Or—some sort of mutation which would let her know that she was in the lane for early onset Alzheimer’s. Or—even just—something—something awful. She had a tiny pit-like feeling in her stomach. Perhaps that was an ulcer beginning to form….
She shook her head. Rodger was just starting to look less stressed. Melissa wanted to have fun with him.
“You know,” she said, “This is pretty much still a date, right?”
Rodger looked at her with hollowed eyes. “What?”
“A date. We never went home, we never kissed goodbye—we’re still on our date. The one that started—” she looked at her watch “—ome ten hours ago.”
“This is not a date,” Rodger said. “You’re implying that I hospitalized you on our date—”
“Don’t think of it that way,” said Melissa. “Think of it as a very good story that we get to tell. And you didn’t hospitalize me. I decided to go to the hospital, and you accompanied me. I won’t hear anything differently.”
Rodger gave her a long look and then adjusted his fingers around her hand.
“You can let go, too. I’m not angry or anything, your hand is just sweaty.”
Rodger gave her a small smile and then released her hand, then leaned back in the chair and sighed.
Melissa grinned. “Actually, one thing you could do; switch on the TV and find us something mindless to watch. I think we could do with a brain break.”
“Excellent,” said Rodger, obviously very pleased to have something to do—even if it was something very small and simple. He flipped channels until he found an old rerun of a Friends episode. He turned, arching his eyebrows questioningly at Melissa. She grinned and then nodded at him, patting the bed beside her. He sat up on the mattress with her—she adjusted the pillows so that he would be comfortable as well—and the two of them sat, speaking softly from time to time, and watched two sitcoms. It was a very pleasant hour of their lives. It bore many aspects of a quick interlude of peace, as many calms before many storms so tend to do.
It was interrupted and conclusively ended, as many brief respites are, by a knock on the door.
The hospital knock never waits, and neither did the person behind this one; the door opened and Rodger flew out of the bed as if he were a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Melissa looked at him in exasperation. She was sure that if he'd just acted like a normal person, not a guilty one, no one would have batted an eye…
She looked up at the nurse who had just walked in. “Hi,” she said brightly. “How are you?”
“I’m just here to let you know that your tests have been completed and your doctor will be in shortly to discuss the results.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Melissa, and she smiled as the nurse let herself out. She thought to herself that that might have been the most pointless nurses’ visit ever, and made a note to remind herself, later, to put together a list of requests for just such an occasion to better dispel and make use of incredibly awkward conversations.
She turned back to Rodger. “Get back over—”
“Hello,” said another voice, smoothly. The voice had an educated lilt about it and a brightness which could only be described as forced.
Melissa turned. She didn't particularly like what she was hearing. Another woman had walked into the room. Her lab coat and stethoscope gave the immediate impression that this must be the warned-of doctor, as well as the name tag which was pinned to her chest. It said, Dr. Stevenson.
“Dr. Stevenson,” Melissa said. “Hi! I hear that you have news for me.”
“Yep,” said the doctor. She smiled. “Well, first of all, I’m happy to inform you that you do not seem to be in any immediate danger, and that every indication tells us that you will recover quickly and completely from this leg fracture.”
“That’s fantastic, doctor,” murmured Melissa, “Though I do think that it’d be even better if you hadn’t prefaced that with ‘first of all’, which only tells me that there’s more news coming.”
“There is,” said the doctor. She paused, and she glanced briefly at Rodger. “I wonder—would you mind speaking for a moment in private?”
Melissa clutched at Rodger’s arm. It was ridiculous, she thought. She’d only just met the man. But already he seemed like more than just a security blanket. She wanted the warmth of his hand in hers suddenly, more than she’d ever wanted anything, as she braced herself for whatever the doctor was about to say.
“Well,” said the doctor, “I don’t know if there’s an easy way to say this—but—well. One of the tests that was performed at the request of your—well,” she said, moving along hastily, “Was a pregnancy test.”
Melissa clutched at the sheets next to her, the words instantly injecting fear into her heart—before she realized something, a stupidly simple fact. She couldn’t be pregnant. She hadn’t slept with—well—with anyone, not recently, at least—certainly not—but she couldn’t bring herself to look at Rodger. Not after those words. She licked her lips; they were dry. “Negative, surely,” she said. “I can’t think of—”
“Oh, it was negative,” said the doctor, and in Melissa’s ensuing wave of relief she felt a f
licker of impatience. What kind of doctor was this, that kept cutting Melissa off?
“Okay, then,” said Melissa. She felt as if she were missing something, and she wished the doctor would just get to the point.
“But we saw something curious in your hormone levels, and ran a few more tests to get to the bottom of things—and—well, it turns out, Melissa, that you have only a very few eggs left in your left ovary.”
Okay,” said Melissa after a moment taken to digest this. “But—you see, just as you said—that’s in my left ovary. I have a whole other one.”
She was feeling increasingly sure that she’d have to request a new doctor. Aside from having a very disjunctive bedside manner, this one didn’t seem to have a grasp on how basic female anatomy worked—which was even more disturbing when taken into account that the doctor was a woman herself.
The doctor—Dr. Stevenson, Melissa reminded herself—twisted her lips. She suddenly looked very unhappy. That made two of them, Melissa thought.
“I have some tough news, Melissa,” Dr. Stevenson said. “Your right ovary has been completely subsumed into scar tissue. It won’t be producing any eggs anymore.”
Melissa sat a second and digested this. A sudden pressure on her hands—Rodger had squeezed them—she suddenly wished that she hadn’t been so firm that Rodger should stay with her. Suddenly, this felt like very private news. But there was nothing for that now.
She swallowed.
“So, you’re saying that I only have a few eggs left in the only ovary left which will work at all?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying,” said Dr. Stevenson. “This might not have to change your life at all; it depends on what your plans on future childbirth are. I’ll give you two a moment alone.”
She left the room, quietly clicking the door shut behind her.
Melissa stared at the empty chair where she'd sat and then turned mutely to Rodger. He had a queasy expression on his face . She thought it was funny, for a moment. Her brain must have been desperately looking for a break—comedic relief, however contrived—in the moments after the revelation had occurred.
Be My Bride and Have My Baby Page 5