“It’s like you’re my slave,” said Jillian, not quite believing his behavior.
“Yes, mistress,” he said. “I am here to serve.” Jillian leaned back in the tub and laughed. “Am I dreaming. Spencer?”
Spencer shrugged. “I thought I was. Maybe we both are. It’s possible, I suppose.”
Jillian slipped a little down the tub, her ears under the water. She looked up at him as he worked shampoo into her hair, his fingers massaging her scalp. All sound was muffled. The only thing she could hear was the beating of her own heart.
13
The first mother of twins said, “For the first three months I was pregnant—every time my husband touched me, I threw up. True. I’m not making itup.
The other women laughed. Some of them nodded knowingly and looked a little sad.
A second woman chimed in with her tale of woe. “I’m okay during the day—really. Just fine. But at night I have the worst thoughts about them. I lie in bed tormenting myself for half the night. Are they still alive? When did they last move?”
A third: “Yeah… I know those sick thoughts. Real sick thoughts. Like I convince myself that one of them is dead and the other one is alive. In there… you know, with it.”
It was not the sort of thing she would have done under normal circumstances, but Jillian steeled herself and went to the support circle for prospective mothers of twins. To her great surprise and delight she enjoyed it immensely and derived a great deal of comfort from hearing the stories of others in the same position as she.
There were about a dozen of them and they met once a week, changing apartments every week. Some were older than Jillian, a number were younger; a couple seemed to be richer, but Jillian’s husband’s position put her in the upper income bracket. They were all in different stages of pregnancy. But they were bound together by a single common bond—they all had two lives growing inside them.
“My husband,” said a fourth woman, “he tries to give me that look. You know that ‘I understand, honey’ look. Hah! I don’t care how long he rubs my feet, I know he doesn’t understand a thing about what I’m going through.”
“He rubs your feet?”. exclaimed one of the women. The rest of them laughed.
“I know what you mean,” chimed in another woman. “We’re supposed to be going through this together, but I’ve never felt further away from him. There’s this thing going on inside my body that he knows nothing about.”
“Wait, let me get this straight. He rubs your feet? You actually get your feet rubbed?”
All of them laughed again, including Jillian. Her face was lit up, glowing with health. She felt good and happy and she would never tell these women that her husband often rubbed her feet.
“Anyone have memory loss?” asked someone. “This morning I was looking for my glasses…”
Another woman filled in the punch line. “And they were on your face all the time, right? You think that’s bad. Yesterday I got into the bathtub with my socks on.”
Before she knew it, Jillian found that a month had passed and she was back at her doctor’s office for her next checkup. The support group and Spencer’s kindness had helped her enough.
She had not needed to call her doctor for assistance, not once. But she had achieved one breakthrough—she now called her doctor by her first name: Denise.
Jillian lay on an examination table while Denise palpated her belly, her finger probing, feeling for irregularities and abnormalities. She did not find any.
“Let me take some blood,” Denise said. “Just to make sure that you’ve got some nice rich blood for the kiddies.” She tied a rubber tube around Jillian’s upper arm and put a needle into the vein in the crook of her arm. She filled a vial, marked it, and put it in a tray. “Now that didn’t hurt, did it?”
“Hardly felt it,” Jillian said.
Want to hear the heartbeats of those two you have tucked away down there?’ Denise asked.
“I would love that, Denise,” Jillian said. “Can we do it here? In your office?”
Denise nodded. “Yup, with this thing.” She held up a stethoscope that appeared to be attached to a small amplifier. “It’s a Doppler stethoscope. It picks the frequency of sound waves and that thing”—she pointed to the speaker—“converts them into sound.”
“Fine,’ said Jillian. “Let’s do it.”
Denise put the membrane of the Doppler stethoscope on Jillian’s belly and fiddled with a couple of knobs on the body of the machine. Suddenly the room was ripped by the horrible noise—the insect shrieking—as loud as an anguished scream.
Jillian jumped and paled as the noise. screamed from the speaker. Denise jumped too and adjusted a couple of knobs. Abruptly the noise ceased.
“What was that?” asked Jillian, still trembling at hearing the sound of her nightmares.
“Just a wrong setting,” said Denise. “That was just feedback or something.” She could tell that the noise had spooked her patient. “Hey, don’t worry about it, Jillian, that sound did not come from you. Here, listen to your babies.”
The speaker reverberated with the sound of two heartbeats, rhythmic and sturdy.
“Do they sound healthy?” Jillian asked anxiously. “I mean, they’re okay, aren’t they?”
“Perfectly healthy,” said Denise firmly. She cocked her head and listened for a moment longer. “I’m going to send you to a colleague of mine for an ultrasound.”
Jillian started and her eyes widened in alarm. “Why? You’ve done ultrasounds on me. Why can’t you do one here the way you always have, Denise?”
“Hey,” Denise replied. “Calm down… Jillian, at twenty weeks I send everyone to him. Everything’s fine. You are perfectly normal. It’s just that he’s got specialized equipment; I don’t have it here. With the more sensitive equipment we’ll be able to get a good look at their spines, count their fingers and toes…” She smiled broadly. “It’ll be like their first checkup. You’ll even get a picture… The first one for the photo album, okay? Relax…”
It didn’t take long for Jillian to calm herself down from the slight shock of the examination and by the time she got home she had convinced herself that her visit to another ob/gyn specialist was just as routine as Denise said it was.
She got even better news that evening when she answered the phone and found that it was her sister Nan—and she had a big announcement to make.
“I’m coming to New York,” she squealed.
“Oh, Nanny!” Jillian yelled. “That is fantastic news. Really great. When?”
“Next Tuesday,” Nan replied, “that is, if Tuesday is okay with you. I mean if the whole trip is okay with you. You don’t mind putting me up or anything. And if you’re sure Spencer won’t mind.”
“Spencer will love it and so will I.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh God yes.” Despite the successes of recent weeks Jillian had not realized how much she craved the sight of a familiar face. A visit from her sister was just what she needed. “Nanny, I can’t wait. I wish it was sooner. Just wait until you see how fat I am.”
“Oh yeah, right,” Nan replied. “I’ll bet you’re that kind of woman that you can’t even tell is pregnant when you look at them from behind… By the way, is it true what they say about your boobs getting bigger when you’re pregnant?”
Jillian giggled. “You’ll have to ask Spencer for his expert opinion. He’ll know.’”
“Ooooo, really,” said Nan. She laughed happily. “I have to say you sound a lot better, Jilly. In fact, you sound great.”
Jillian nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I do, don’t I?””