“Oh my dear,” she said as I retched. “Oh my dear heart.”
The shrimp, I tried to say, but I couldn’t. I breathed and breathed the green smell of her bath’s steam. Ruth climbed from the tub to hold back my hair, her nails circling my shoulder blade. When I stood the knees of my jeans were wet.
“Take my bathwater,” she said, toweling. “While it’s still hot.”
The pain nested inside my pelvis, an unrelenting ache, throbbing and tunneling. When I got into the warm water it felt better.
“You going to make it?” Her cheeks were swollen and stippled red. She was an ugly crier, like me.
“Yeah.”
“Splash your face,” she said. Her eyes were bright with mothering.
“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you before,” I said between splashes. “I knew I had a UTI. But then it went away.”
“Is there pain now?”
I nodded.
She sat on the edge of the tub, brushing off the sole of one foot and then the other before putting them in the water beside my legs. Scars webbed her knees and she caught me looking.
“When you’re pregnant, your center of gravity keeps changing. I didn’t know that, they don’t tell you that, unless you’re an athlete or something. I was working in the city, and the sidewalk between our apartment and my studio was uneven, and I tripped almost every day. All my tights had holes at the knees and Jay would dress my knees with Band-Aids. I was like an eight-year-old boy.”
I pictured Ruth at my age, hurrying in a trench coat and French twist, scabs under her tights, the sidewalk invisible beneath the dome of her belly. It was a comfort to picture her.
I found Luke under the blankets on my pullout bed, and climbed in with him to tell him about the UTI. I could feel that he hadn’t wiped the sand and crumbs from the sheet before getting under. He was sad, and he didn’t know why.
“I’m sorry you’re sick.” He put his head on my stomach.
“You stay,” Ruth said to Luke, as she bundled me in her scarf before we left for the hospital. It was ninety degrees out but my teeth chattered. “No offense, sweetie, but you’ll get in the way.” She kissed the top of his head.
Nothing went like it was supposed to. I was trying to be in love with Luke, but we were stranger and stranger, like the smoothly twirling top that begins to lurch and wobble in loose circles.
* * *
When the doctor saw me he said, “Are you sexually active?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Within the past week?”
“Yes.”
“With the same partner?”
“Well, there was that one wild night,” I said, and listened to my laugh trail off. “No, no, just the one partner.” Maybe it was the fever that made me joke. The only other man on the vacation was Jay. Ruth’s hands folded one way and then another, an arrangement in her lap. She had followed me from the waiting room without asking, and stayed quiet and small in the corner. I had thought maybe she would hold my hand.
The hospital rooms were overflowing, so after the doctor saw me they wheeled my gurney into the hall and Ruth trailed alongside, her arm linking my IV stand. My teeth were still chattering, and my whole body ached. They gave me anti-nausea medication and an IV of saline, which was cold as it flowed into my arm.
Somehow between the fever peaking, the doctor, and the gurney, I think, I’m not certain, that Ruth got drunk and sad. My hospital gown was open at the back. When I fell asleep, I turned onto my side, and woke in fear of the hallway’s drifters spying my underpants with no Ruth to guard me. I didn’t know where she’d gone. An old man with deflated nakedness under his gown shuffled past wailing, “Martha!” The IV leashing him tugged from his arm and he weaved untethered, trailing neat drops of blood into the hallway’s crowd.
Far away down the hall was Ruth, tiny inside her tailored clothes, their crisp lines wilting in the heat, purse strap slipping from her shoulder, her hair wispy and undone. Compared to her I felt moonfaced, wide-palmed, a sturdy girl, and a plain one with plain sadness. The doctor was walking toward me, and he reached me before Ruth did. His drawl made him sound amused. His big, soft hand patted mine. He drawled slow, but Ruth moved slow, and he fit it all in before she could reach me. Click, a key turned inside me as he mouthed about the baby, dumbly obvious as he spoke it aloud, growing inside me. The kidney infection and the baby, and the one could hurt the other, but we caught it in time, he said, and it was so early in my pregnancy that the risk was very low with a course of antibiotics.
“Don’t you worry. Your baby’ll be just fine,” he said, rushing elsewhere.
Ruth was so small in the breeze of her drunkenness. It swayed her.
“Can’t keep secrets in this place,” she said. Each syllable dragged. “I see big news all over your face. Let me up.”
She climbed onto my gurney. I tried to rearrange my expression but it was no use, I felt it telling things to Ruth. In hindsight I was feverish, but I knew then that she was like a psychic, seeing it all, my bumps and hollows and innards and growths. I told her I was pregnant.
She curled against me. Her sigh was warm and wet, sharp-smelling. Her head was a nice weight on my shoulder.
“Luke had a twin who died,” she said. “In utero. I was still pregnant with him for three more weeks, waiting for Luke to be born.”
I smoothed her hair, trailing my IV cord.
“I spoke to my belly like that baby was still alive. I couldn’t picture him gone inside me. I thought the sadness would kill me.” Everyone was fast, wheeling around us. No time to stare, they had spills to mop. “But then my beautiful Luke was born.”
A long time later she said, “Luke’s a wonderful boy, but he’s a baby. He’s not at all ready to be a dad.” It was advice, and I needed a woman’s advice. She put her hand into her purse and worked it around in there for a minute, two minutes, fishing for lipstick. She drew the red bow of her mouth perfectly, but capped the lipstick without screwing it back down.
“Fuck,” she said. Our bodies made little noises on the sheath of tissue paper that lined the gurney.
I was supposed to crave pickles, and sauerkraut, and have the kind of husband who would pick up jars of these things at the corner store in the middle of the night, and stay up with me while I ate, rubbing my stomach with cool lotion. I was supposed to have long hair, and a wide, wise mouth, and to have read many more books, traveled, married with a flower garland and a backless silk dress, taught in tweed coats with elbow patches, spooned my husband and taken long baths with him, and I was supposed to have seen my own mother, frail and stooped, through many years of sickness with grace and patience, and be cauterized by the pain of losing her, and turned bright and still and steady inside, like a mother should be, and then I’d be a mother.
I’ve imagined Ruth and me together, in Maine, in a cabin by the bay. Ruth, pacing the floor in a painter’s shirt, like the one I took from my grandmother’s bureau after she died, long and pilled, stiff where the paint streaked. Ruth’s smile, too wide, a baby bouncing on her shoulder. Her clear steady voice rings through my vision, guides the baby into sleep.
I left Florida the next day. I told Luke I was too sick to stay, and this was true. They had me on all kinds of antibiotics. Ruth hugged me at the airport and she didn’t say anything, or look at me in any special kind of way, which made me wonder if it was possible she was so out of it at the hospital that she’d forgotten I was pregnant. Luke and I didn’t make the effort to see each other again that summer. Whatever we had slipped away easily, just a summer fling. Luke phoned a couple times but I didn’t return his calls, and I didn’t go back to school in the fall. Rumor never got around to Luke as it might have if I lived in a town that was closer to our college, but I don’t, and it didn’t.