But now Molly seemed the least of her worries. Why expend precious energy grappling with the problems of someone who didn’t want her there?
Steph crossed her arms in front of her. “I’m not some fragile being,” she said, bumping her shoulder good-naturedly against her husband’s. “I’d have been fine on my own for an hour.”
Liza took a chance. “Do you mind if I ask … What’s the complication, exactly?”
Steph clunked her seltzer onto the table matter-of-factly. “It’s called an incarcerated uterus.”
Liza pulled a face. “Incarcerated?”
“Sounds scandalous, doesn’t it?” Steph chirped. But her eyes were anxious, sad.
Luke, looking the picture of discomfort, dropped a protective hand onto her shoulder.
“Honey, you don’t have to—”
“Essentially the baby is caught in my pelvis,” she explained, ignoring him. “As your uterus expands, it’s supposed to pop up, then out. Mine is starting to grow, but hasn’t lifted, so it’s creating problems.” She turned to her husband. “Women can have these conversations without getting freaked out by our anatomies.”
“That’s not why I—”
“She’s going to be living with us. There’s no reason to hide what’s going on. That’s just going to stress me out worse.”
The last bit did the trick. He fell silent, but Liza was wishing she hadn’t asked. Causing any kind of tension between them was the last thing she wanted. Still, they’d come this far. She wanted to know. “What kind of problems?”
“It puts pressure on her bladder, for one thing,” Luke said, sitting up straighter, more comfortable with this scientific tact. “That’s how she was diagnosed.”
“You know how sometimes you wake up and you really have to go?” Steph asked. Liza nodded. “Well, I ran to the bathroom to pee, and nothing came out. Weirdest moment ever. At first I thought it was some weird UTI, or—I don’t even know.”
Liza cringed. “What did you do?”
“I thought maybe I just needed to move the baby around a little, so I hopped on the elliptical machine for a few minutes and then tried again. It worked, thank God—turns out some people need a catheter. But then I Googled the symptom. Bad idea because—”
Luke cut her off with a shake of his head. “There are these yoga poses she’s supposed to do, and she’s already on it,” he said firmly. “They’ll help the baby lift up and out. Everything is going to be fine.”
“It’s a rare cause of second-trimester miscarriage,” Steph finished.
A small cry escaped Liza, an involuntary hand flying to her mouth.
Luke frowned at his wife. “That won’t happen,” he said, his voice eerily calm. “We’re not even going to say the words.”
Steph met her eyes, and Liza understood: Steph didn’t want to be alone with her fear, but Luke didn’t want to acknowledge it. This was the same work-around her brother had given her over the years, every time she’d tried to talk to him about the slightest worry. Mr. Positivity, her mother called Luke affectionately.
Cloying as his approach could be, it was not ineffective. Still, sometimes you wanted to have a real conversation about your not-entirely-positive feelings.
Liza leaned in. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do to help, or you want to talk—anytime. I’ll even do the yoga poses with you. What are they?”
Steph blinked back tears. “They’re ridiculous,” she said, and Liza laughed.
“I specialize in ridiculous,” she assured her.
She wished it weren’t so true.
* * *
After her parents had come and gone—a visit marked by her many assurances that she was “fine, as you can see,” and, more usefully, by her mother’s care package of toiletries and clothes that, while not exactly her taste, she could hardly turn away—after she’d helped with the dishes and cut the tags off the jersey-knit pajamas, after she’d sprawled on a yoga mat next to Steph while they positioned themselves pelvis up for an unconscionably long time (up and out, Liza silently willed the baby, you can do it, up and out), she retreated to the sleek gray-toned guest room in the back corner of the second floor and marveled at the silence. She didn’t miss the Chicago street traffic, but she’d become accustomed to tolerating it, like a runny nose that won’t go away. Amid the honking and idling and shouting had always been sirens, she realized now, and yet she’d scarcely even registered them with curiosity about what the emergency was.
How flippant she’d been; how dismissive everyone was. Never again would she encounter someone in a hurry and ask, Where’s the fire?
Lights out, covers up, she tried to sink into the exhaustion that had plagued her all day. Her mind was a movie reel—charred brick walls and flames in the darkness and Max’s face, sadder than she’d ever seen it. She couldn’t switch it off, couldn’t even find the mute button.
In the past, the worries that had proven unshakable to Liza had ultimately meant something. Her grandmother was going to die in that hospital bed—against her doctor’s assurances that she was fine, on the very day she was scheduled to be discharged. Her best friend was more crippled by her pain than she’d initially let on. The move to Chicago was not going as planned, not even close.
Yet this new set of endlessly spooling worries related mostly to the past—didn’t they? She would have to learn to separate anxiety from intuition if she wanted to stay sane.
An owl hooted outside her window, a soft song in the cool night. Her eyes blinked open and she held her muscles rigid. Had she imagined it?
Who. Who-whoooo, who. A second set of hoots repeated, then a third. She strained to hear it again, trying to remember if she’d ever actually heard one before. It felt special, just for her—so close and so clear. Sacred.
Liza burrowed once more into her pillow—which was not like the pillows she’d cast off to guests, in the custom of her own parents, flattened and yellowed and lumpy beneath the clean cotton cases, but billowy and soft, as if she were in a hotel. She felt welcome, if not at home. Perhaps the wide-eyed bird was standing guard, a sentry hidden in the branches. A nice idea. She could use the protection.
But wait. Wasn’t there something about a hooting owl being an omen?
She would not reach for her smartphone, right there on the bedside table. She would bask in how the moment had made her feel—the novelty of it. Why bring the internet into this?
She would go at last to sleep.
But the question would not leave her now that she’d dared to think it. Just a peek. She was probably wrong. She’d sleep better knowing so. She palmed the device and squinted as its garish glow responded to her touch, pecked in her search terms with an index finger.
Her nocturnal visitor, it turned out, could be interpreted many ways, depending on who you asked. In some cultures, owls signified wisdom. In others, yes, protection.
Maybe she could ignore the ones that felt an owl foretold death.
But the search results favored bad omens, even via sources that believed owls sacred. There existed instructions for attempting to hoot back, to gauge the severity of the impending doom. The death in question could, it seemed, be symbolic rather than literal.
Three nights ago she’d been mindlessly going about her life, and tonight she was contemplating hooting out a window. It should have been her clue to pack it in, stop looking, before she got to the hysterical pregnancy board thread where a woman swore that every member of her family was terrified her baby would die now that she’d heard a set of three owl hoots.
OMG, someone had written. X3 = death of a newborn. Not to freak you out, but I’ve heard that, too! Others had chimed in, sending premature sympathy.
Liza stared down the dark shape of the window, willing the creature beyond it to sound a fourth time. If only she weren’t sure she’d heard three.
Had death followed her here? Luke and Steph’s baby was nowhere near being a newborn—Steph wasn’t even showing yet—but ther
e was already a problem, a risk, and now here was Liza, sweeping in with nothing but the contents of her bag and bad karma on her back. She felt a strong, irrational urge to leave, to get as far as she could from everyone she loved.
This was crazy. She told herself that in the morning she’d see this for the irrational bout of late-night anxiety it was. She’d smile, again, over the surprising sound of the owl, just passing through. And she’d stay.
Of course she’d stay.
Where else would she go?
12
Clarity—damn it to hell—had a way of coming in the middle of the night. Molly sat with the invoices spread on the coffee table in front of her, every moan of the refrigerator or creak of the kitchen floor jerking her head reflexively over her shoulder. She wasn’t sure what would be more terrifying at this point: the masked man’s return or the sight of her rumpled husband looking for the missing occupant of his bed.
Right here, at the very table where Liza had witnessed the triggering of Molly’s undoing, would not have been her choice of places to face facts, to do what she’d resisted before.
To view all of her failures at once, in the exact spot they might have added up to another.
But it was the only place in the house she could risk turning on a light without discovery.
In the dining room or the kitchen, Daniel could come up on her too quickly. And there was no plausible reason for her to be in the stuffy, never-used guest room or down in the basement, which she avoided because they could never seem to keep the mice out for long. Here, at least, she’d have the buffer of the galley kitchen, should anyone wander downstairs, to buy her precious seconds to sweep the evidence into a pile or at least to hide the slips beneath the photo albums she’d set on the table’s edge as cover. Here she could say she couldn’t sleep, that her back was acting up, that she’d come down to turn on the TV and gotten caught up reminiscing instead.
As usual, her ready excuse was only a half lie.
There was plenty here to reminisce over. Because in her quest to end one pain after the next, when the round-robin referrals from one specialist to another had done nothing but spin her around a circuitous track, Molly had taken matters into her own hands and tried … a few things.
At first she told Daniel about them all—the theory, the approach, and, yes, the cost. The healing massage, the herbal supplements, the Reiki, the meridian point tapping, the gel supports and orthopedic braces. But as his skepticism became clear, she began keeping them to herself. What did she care if he thought her anti-inflammatory diet was a waste of effort, if he wrinkled his nose at her essential oil diffusers, if he smirked at the pouch of crystals she strung around her neck? He was entitled to his opinion, and she was entitled to hers—which was not, contrary to his deaf assumptions, that all these things worked. She only believed that they were worth a try. As for the dollar signs attached to each one—well, those weren’t so hard to rationalize. One might grumble over the cost of a doctor’s visit in these days of high deductibles, but no one questioned that they were necessary. Was this so different? In fact, compared to the orthopedists and neurologists and otolaryngologists she’d already been through, an alternative treatment could save her a bundle, if she could just hit on one that worked.
The little ones added up, but slowly enough for her to delay doing the math. And the big ones? As time wore her down, even those seemed a small price to pay to be free from the grips of this unrelenting captor.
Molly had never struggled with anything like addiction before. But she recognized that this was something like it—though being aware of it and putting an end to this chain of if-not-this-how-about-that did not go hand in hand. Even failures that should have been shrugged away cut deep. Reading hours of reviews of a new miracle cream that was bringing thousands of people relief, only to have it break her out in a terrible rash, was disheartening enough to feel like a devastating setback. She could only boost her spirits with some other brand of prepackaged hope.
Daniel had accused her once of “being taken in by quacks.” Pretty high-and-mighty coming from someone who’d privately questioned whether his employer’s entire nontoxic product line was even necessary (“It’s not as if people eat their furniture.”) and yet had no qualms about collecting his paychecks there.
Somehow she’d lost her ability to laugh things off. The difference, she supposed, was that she used to get some help doing it. Early on, a lot of it had come from Liza. The time Molly trailed tampons down the high school halls through a rip in her backpack, she’d played sick for two days until Liza drew her out with a hilarious reenactment, skipping down the sidewalk in front of her house dropping Snickers and Midol behind her. Later Daniel had taken the baton and, for a while, carried it well. Even a shared bout of food poisoning in a Miami hotel room had, once they could hold down Gatorade, left them giggling at their misfortune until skipping the cruise they’d planned on actually seemed romantic.
But now, as her private attempts at self-healing fell short, she had no one with whom to share these disappointments, these foibles. Except, occasionally, for Rick.
Even so. It wasn’t the failures that had caught up to her. It was the cost of them.
Alternative health was mostly uncovered by their insurance, and it didn’t come cheap.
She’d known it was wrong, opening the credit line Daniel didn’t know about. When she found herself maxed out and shamefully dodging phone calls and burying payments—thank goodness they’d forgone a landline and kept separate bank accounts in addition to their joint ones—she’d also known what a bad idea it would be to open another.
She’d done it anyway, steep interest rate be damned, and hit that limit, too. She tapped retirement funds she wasn’t supposed to touch to slow the bleed, but the problem was, she couldn’t bring herself to ebb the spending, either. With your well-being slipping away from you, how could you put a price on getting your life back?
Enter a worse idea.
She’d seen the man before, around the meditation center. They got to chatting one day in the parking lot, and when he alluded to a future encounter she fessed up that she wouldn’t be back. His kind concern and her rock-bottom desperation made her suddenly tearful, explaining herself for no real reason. Her TMJ was at its worst then—her jaw so tight she could barely chew, her ears’ incessant fluting driving her mad—and the classes still held hope for some relief. She worried she hadn’t learned enough to maintain the discipline on her own but could no longer afford it.
That’s when he volunteered that alternative treatments also had alternative payment options. Of course they did. If good people like Molly couldn’t trust the medical system of all things to take care of them, why would the credit racket be any different? She could make that call she’d been planning to the debt relief help line, but that wouldn’t buy her more than time. He worked with a place that specialized in helping sufferers like her fund wellness without adding to the stress they were already enduring. Founded by a few generous advocates who preferred to remain anonymous, this godsend of a company could lend her what she needed to pay off the five thousand here and the seven thousand there and all the rest, and then she’d owe only them. One bill, instead of so many to juggle, and he could guarantee their interest rate was lower than the credit cards’. All she had to do was join and let them help. Let go of that bag of rocks she’d been dragging around and let them carry it for a while.
YWBF, they were called: Your Way Back Financial. Even their logo held promise: a spiral reminiscent of the sun, rimmed by arrows pointing outward. Their office was inconveniently located, but they could bring the paperwork to her—they did it all the time. She could find a whole page of grateful testimonials on their website—but what luck, here comes a client now. Samantha, are you in a hurry? Do you by chance have a few minutes to tell Molly here about your experience with us?
The picture of reclaimed health, Samantha had been an especially nice touch.
It was too late to lament
now what a fool Molly had been, that “if it sounds too good to be true…” had become an adage for a reason.
Because Molly had signed. She had practically cried with gratitude when she paid the other bills—punching in the totals as fast as her fingers could fly, getting it over with, putting it behind her, not even stopping for a last look at how she’d gotten here and what she might do to avoid returning in the future, because things would be different now, simpler. Streamlined.
But she was looking back now.
She couldn’t afford not to anymore.
The interest rate had been a lower number. The language very cleverly buried the startling fact that it would not, however, be applied monthly. These invoices were coming weekly. She’d actually ignored the first few, tossing them unopened into a drawer, so certain was she that they were duplicates. She’d ignored, too, the “reminder” calls and messages, so close together. “Hold your horses,” she’d grumbled. “What happened to lowering my stress?” At this interest rate, she hadn’t concerned herself with the fact that she had no intention of paying for a while. She’d deal later; the penalty would be manageable. And she needed a break from all this. She hated anything to do with money, typically leaving those matters to Daniel.
Finally, last month, she’d torn open an envelope, taken in the total, and thought it had to be a mistake. She’d called. They assured her it was not. She hung up, staving off panic, and did her own math, applying the interest rate weekly, and still her total didn’t near theirs. She called back, triumphant, an error after all. But no. This loan was intended as short term. Evidently, they’d assumed bags of money were going to rain into her lawn and magically supply the funds they already knew she didn’t have. And in the absence of such a rainstorm, penalties were being applied. More fees.
She drained what was left of her retirement funds to pay what she could. It barely sandbagged the rising floodwaters. She’d started to wonder if this was even legal, but she had signed the contract. She’d never felt so stupid.
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