He was in the hospital three days, rehydrating and having bloodwork done, just in case. Meredith visited him each evening, plagued by a vague worry that she’d caused his illness by speaking her mind. Her fiancé came along on the third day, a jowly guy in Adidas track shoes—not so dissimilar from Phil in appearance. As it turned out, he wasn’t a corporate type at all, but a writer for Rolling Stone. He’d seen Anhedonia twice, once at Mercury Lounge and once when they’d opened for Reynold Marks. They were friends now, too, the three of them, and Sadie and even Beth (and Will, if he was in town) sometimes joined them for drinks or dinner in the neighborhood. “It’s stupid,” Meredith told Sadie (who told Lil, who told Dave). “We were meant to be friends, but we couldn’t really become friends until I was married and we could kind of relax about all the sex stuff. If we were both women, none of this would have happened. We would have just become friends, with no complications, no pressure to sleep with each other, no wondering whether we were ‘in love.’ None of that stupid shit.”
“Unless you were both lesbians,” Sadie responded. “Or bi.”
“Right,” Meredith said, “but you know what I mean.”
“I do indeed,” Sadie told her, twisting her mouth to one side. “Except, well, I don’t mean to be querulous, but Dave has lots of close female friends. Emily, Lil. Me. And we’ve never had anything like this happen. No weird ambiguity.”
“Right,” said Meredith, in her clear, reedy voice. “Except that’s a whole different pair of gloves.” Sadie laughed. This was one of Rose Peregrine’s pet expressions. Sadie’d taught it to the group. And now Meredith. “Nothing like this would ever happen with you,” Meredith went on, swishing the dregs of her coffee. The stuffed alligator on the wall of the café stared down at the girls with his dusty glass eyes.
“Why not?” asked Sadie. Meredith rolled her eyes.
“Haven’t you seen the movie?” she asked. “He’s in love with you.”
ten
Sadie Peregrine was pregnant. This was big news. For many reasons, not the least of which being that she wasn’t yet married—Rose Peregrine was going to lose her shit, the group said—or that the father, as it turned out, wasn’t her boyfriend, Agent Mulder, but Ed Slikowski, whom they hadn’t even realized she was seeing, though they’d certainly been a bit suspicious of the frequency with which his name began showing up in conversation.
It was January of 2001, a bleak, cold winter, the sort that unfailingly led Rose to cry, “Don’t you wonder how the settlers survived? I could barely make it home from Bendel’s!” But the weather gave Sadie a convenient excuse to stay home (“It’s cold, Lil, I’m not schlepping all the way to Williamsburg”), so that she might avoid her friends and family for as long as possible, until she figured out what to do. There was a chance, she knew, that the pregnancy wouldn’t stick, and she could put it behind her and think through this mess she’d gotten herself into with Michael and Ed. And Tal, too, she supposed, for it was he that she wanted to call, he that she wanted to ask for help, but she couldn’t, of course. But she also knew, somehow, that it would stick, that this was it, that she needed to be a grown-up and rise to the occasion, make some decisions. And though, rationally, she knew the best thing would be for her to wake up bleeding one morning, the mere thought of this possibility, as the weeks went on, became enough to crowd her eyes with tears.
At the end of the month, she made an appointment with an obstetrician in Soho, randomly selected from her insurance plan’s directory—she certainly wasn’t going to old Dr. Moss, up on Park, whom her mother saw—and told her assistant she might be gone for a few hours. “I’ll hold down the fort,” he said, with a tight smile. She’d been arriving late and leaving early in recent weeks—waking sick and headachy, and growing so again by the end of the day, so that she couldn’t wait to get home, take off her too-tight dress, and lie down—and she could feel the hot force of his resentment as she breezed by his desk and closed the door to her office with a satisfying click. She’d harbored the same during her years with Delores.
“So, you’re ten weeks,” said the doctor, a pert young woman with a blonde pageboy, running a wand over Sadie’s stomach, her eyes fixed on the screen of a creaky sonogram machine. “Everything looks great.” She pointed to a tiny, pulsing bean. “Nice, strong heartbeat.” She pressed a button and, with a whir, the machine emitted a small paper version of the image on the screen. “Here’s a picture to show your husband,” she said, meeting Sadie’s eyes for the first time. She was visibly pregnant herself, Sadie realized. Everyone seemed to be pregnant lately. In her neighborhood and Lil’s, she couldn’t walk a block without coming across some hipster, heavy with child, or a grinning new mother, baby strapped to her chest in a carrier or peeking out of a sling. “I probably won’t be able to deliver you,” she went on, gesturing toward her abdomen. “But the other doctors in the practice are excellent.”
“Great,” said Sadie. She’d been half expecting the doctor to tell her that it was a hysterical pregnancy and send her off to a shrink. Barring this, her intention had been, she supposed, to ask about her “options”—she couldn’t utter the word “abortion,” even silently—but she could not bring herself to do so, whether it was because of the doctor’s own pregnancy or her cheerful assumption that Sadie, like the doctor herself, was a settled matron, anxious to call her husband with the good news.
“And you’re feeling okay? Any bleeding? Cramping?”
Sadie shook her head.
“Nausea? And you can keep food down?” She picked up Sadie’s chart.
“Mostly. I do get pretty nauseated. When I wake up. And then again around five or six.”
“But you can keep food down?” Impatience was creeping into the doctor’s voice. How long have I been in here? thought Sadie. Five minutes?
“I can.”
“Excellent. Just try not to let your stomach be completely empty or too full. Eat small meals. The nausea comes from having no food in your stomach. Or from eating too much. Carry saltines around with you.”
“Okay,” said Sadie, thinking, Saltines? That’s your advice? Eat saltines?
“Do you have any questions?” The doctor had already repositioned herself closer to the door.
“I shouldn’t tell anyone until twelve weeks, right?” she asked hopefully.
“That’s the rule,” said the doctor, moving closer to Sadie. “But I’d say it’s fine. Once we get a heartbeat, it’s usually fine. Most miscarriages happen around six or seven weeks.”
“Oh, okay.”
She looked down at the chart again. “So you’ll go up to the hospital in two weeks for the nuchal. Call and make the appointment today.” She smiled and made for the door. “You can bring your husband. It’s pretty cool. Anything else?” Her hand reached for the doorknob.
Sadie sat up on the table. “Um, I’m so tired all the time. That’s normal, right?”
The doctor smiled. “Completely normal. Just make sure to listen to your body. Sleep when you’re tired.”
But Sadie couldn’t sleep when she was tired. She had a job. She’d been slogging through her days like a somnambulist, missing her stop on the train, forgetting to buy milk, unable to make it past a few pages of a manuscript. And so it was that she dressed herself, handed over thirty dollars for her copayment, and fought her way up Broadway, a sharp wind lashing her face, to Lil’s new office, on the twelfth floor of a small building between Prince and Houston. At the end of the last semester, Lil had suddenly—and without consulting with Sadie—taken a leave from school and accepted a full-time job at the poetry foundation where she’d interned the past few summers. She’d started after the New Year, editing the foundation’s little magazine, really a glorified newsletter. “The last editor became a staff writer at New York magazine,” Lil told Sadie as she showed her around the office, a large loft cordoned off into columns of offices. Lil’s was doorless, a sort of pen, but beautifully situated by the back window, which looked out over the low buildings and water towers of Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side.