He splashes water on his face and checks his reflection. Clean face, clean start. Like nothing’s happened yet.
He pictures Addie in a hospital gown, lying on a table, her thin white arms and legs. Is she scared?
Maybe he’ll write her a song. Call it “Desolation Angel.”
Love, Stay, Keep
The clinic has certain people for certain things. One hands you pills in a paper cup. Another escorts you from room to room: the paperwork room, the changing room, the ultrasound room, small and dark. The lab, all bright lights and needles. The counseling room with windows and potted plants. The procedure room. Finally, the recovery room like a big beauty salon, with magazines and soothing music and reclining chairs lined up in two long rows and a smiling, pink-cheeked woman who walks around serving graham crackers and ginger ale. “More?” she asks. “More?” If kindness could be eaten and drunk, it would taste like graham crackers and ginger ale.
The first couple of rooms — paperwork, changing — are nothing, except the blue gown Addie has to put on is an insult, a thin blue plastic thing that clings to her skin and crackles when she moves and makes her hair electric.
The ultrasound room is where she comes face to face with what she’s doing. She’s on a table and a nurse comes in and rubs warm Vaseline on her belly and glides a camera over her. “Show me,” she says, and the nurse points to a spot on a black-and-white TV screen. The spot is gray and smaller than a baby bird. Which is how Addie tries to think of him in the beginning: as a bird, something that doesn’t belong in her, a mistake, all blind and gray and no feathers. She wonders what others see when they look at the screen, what images they conjure up to fool themselves. She wonders why the clinic, which has people for everything else, doesn’t have a person to help with this. A useful-metaphor woman in a nice blue smock and crepe-soled shoes.
Or maybe that’s the job of the clinic counselor, the one with potted plants. She sits them down, Addie and two others, a nervous high school girl and a bored twenty-year-old, and asks a few questions to make sure they’ve come here of their own free will. Then she gives a speech that’s supposed to make them feel brave and wise and strong.
“Is there anything else you need to talk about?” she asks them.
The high school girl wants to know if she’ll be able to go to the basketball game Friday night. The twenty-year-old says she’s been through this before and knows the drill. Addie says nothing. What can she say? Thirty-two and still no readier to be a mother than they are.
“Will it hurt?” the high school girl asks.
“No,” the twenty-year-old says.
Why not, Addie thinks. Don’t we deserve at least a little pain?
In the procedure room, she lies on a table with her feet in stirrups and stares at the chipped polish on her toenails. Mystic Mauve, the color she wore to California to tell Roland.
“Don’t move,” the doctor says. “I can’t do this if you move.”
She’s shivering; she can’t help it. She’s cold. Her gown is so thin. She twists her head to find the nurse. “Can I please have a blanket?” she asks. “A sheet, anything?”
“Right back,” the nurse says, and disappears out of the room in her silent white shoes, leaving Addie alone with the doctor. Addie tries not to look at him, at his red-rimmed eyes constantly blinking, or the acne scars on his face. She pictures him as a teenager — unpopular, afraid of girls, the shy boy at the dance. Even now, he doesn’t make small talk, no “What kind of work do you do?” or “Have you always lived in North Carolina?” or “How about this weather?” Nothing to take her mind off what he’s doing. His white coat has a dark fleck on the pocket. Addie tries not to look.
She tries not to look at the tube he is holding.
The sun was brighter that day than she had ever seen it. Everything shone. They sat on Roland’s roof and Roland put his arm around her and he was warm, he made her warm, and she wanted to believe, she almost did, that warm could be enough.
“Don’t worry,” he said, and rubbed his hand up and down her back. “It’ll be okay.”
He was kind. He didn’t say anything wrong. The problem wasn’t what he said, but what he left out. Things Addie thought he might say, even if they weren’t true, he didn’t. He didn’t say love. He didn’t say stay. Or keep.
“Keep your feet in the stirrups,” the doctor says, blinking. “Keep your knees apart. Relax, please.”
Finally the nurse comes back with a flannel sheet. She drapes it over Addie, tucks it around her bare arms as if she were the child. “There,” she says. “Better?”
Mistake
So much they didn’t tell her.
They told her to expect spotting, wear pads, call if the bleeding got heavy. They told her to expect cramping. Take ibuprofen, not aspirin. Use a hot water bottle.
They didn’t tell her her breasts would continue to swell and ache and leak.
They didn’t tell her about the insatiable hunger, the strange cravings. Sharp cheddar cheese. Egg salad sandwiches — plain, no lettuce — on untoasted white bread. Peanut M&Ms. She eats them by the jumbo bag until she is sick.
She keeps gaining weight. More than can be explained by the M&Ms.
They didn’t tell her she would cry over everything, every song on the radio, every line in every book, every movie. She goes to matinees, romantic comedies—Say Anything, See You in the Morning—and comes out of the dark theater with her face puffy and wet, her eyes red. People waiting to buy tickets stare at her, puzzled—are we in the right line?
It’s hormones, she thinks. Hormones and grief. Yes, grief — she has had a loss. That she chose it makes it no less a loss.
They didn’t warn her about the nightmares. Every night, a vivid, lifelike dream in which it falls to her to rescue some helpless creature from sure death. A kitten stalked by lions. A nest of robin’s eggs invaded by a snake. A child on a banana-seat bicycle pedaling into the path of an oncoming train. Impossible situations, beyond her; even in her sleep she knows it. Somehow she always wakes up a split second before the catastrophe, always in a cold sweat.
This, she has always imagined, is how it must feel to be a mother. Terrifying. Numbingly exhausting. She is so tired her whole body hurts but she is afraid to sleep, afraid of what may happen to the next poor dream-creature entrusted to her.
Finally she makes an appointment with her doctor.
“Sounds like you’re pregnant,” says the nurse who takes her blood pressure and charts her symptoms. The nurse has round brown perpetually stunned eyes.
“Impossible,” Addie says. She had not intended to confess her abortion to anyone, even her doctor. Certainly not to this Bambi-eyed nurse.
“Have you had a period since?” the nurse asks.
“No, but—” Even as she protests, she knows the nurse is right. Her body knows.
The test confirms it. The doctor doesn’t try to explain how this could have happened. She refers Addie to an obstetrician; Addie insists on a woman. No more men, not after the pockmarked clinic doctor who botched her abortion. She would like to sue him, but for what? Unnecessary pregnancy? Wrongful life?
The obstetrician is tall and grandmotherly — gray hair, a big rosy face, blue eyes so pale they seem full of light. There are hand-knit booties on the stirrups of her examining table.
“You have an unusual uterus,” she tells Addie. She has a hint of a foreign accent — Scottish? “It tips at an odd angle. You have a blind spot where a baby can hide.”