“Yes,” Rae said.
“And I don’t want you to call me again,” Lila said.
“You hate me,” Rae said. “Don’t you?”
It was really much too late to be talking to strangers, it was the time of night when mothers went to their children who had nightmares, and they held their sons and daughters close, and stroked their hair until they fell asleep.
“Call a doctor,” Lila said gently.
“All right,” Rae agreed.
“Good girl,” Lila said.
After she’d hung up, Rae couldn’t sleep, and in the morning, when she called for an appointment at a clinic nearby, her voice was so hoarse she had to struggle to whisper. They made room on the schedule that afternoon. In the waiting room, Rae tried to imagine that Jessup was beside her, but she knew he would have never come here with her. She considered leaving, but before she could the nurse called her name and took her into a small office for blood tests. Rae didn’t panic until she walked into the examining room. The doctor was a woman who seemed much too young—and really, Rae knew, this visit was pointless.
“I don’t think this is the best time for me to be examined,” Rae said.
“You’re right,” the doctor said. “The best time would have been two months ago.”
Rae took off her clothes, put on a paper smock, and lay down on the examining table. She closed her eyes during the internal, and when she was told that everything looked fine, she was sure this doctor was a fool.
Rae answered all the questions for a medical history, but as she did she could feel herself growing colder. If she really thought about it, it was better this way. She wasn’t meant to have a baby alone, it was fate; and if there was a good time to lose a baby it was now, before she began to feel it move inside her, before she started to wait for the rhythm of its turning in its sleep.
“Is something wrong?” the doctor asked her. “You just don’t seem interested.” She had been going over a food chart and discussing the vitamins she was about to prescribe.
“How long have you been a doctor?” Rae asked.
“Four years—is that long enough for you?”
Rae felt herself grow embarrassed. “Oh, it’s enough, all right,” she said. “It’s just that you missed something. My baby is dead.”
“I see,” the doctor said. “You’re positive?”
Rae was so cold that she was certain her blood had begun to freeze. When she looked closely at herself she noticed that the skin on her arms and legs was faintly purple.
“Don’t you think I know?” Rae said. “Don’t you think I can tell?”
“Lie down,” the doctor said.
Rae knew now—this was the moment when she would be cut open: the doctor would reach her hands deep inside and lift the baby out, then hide it as she sewed Rae back together.
“You’d better not touch me,” Rae said.
She could not believe her voice. Her real voice didn’t sound that way. The doctor rolled over a tall, metal machine, and when she moved closer to the examining table, Rae sat up straight.
“Don’t come near me,” she said.
It was her voice after all. God, she was practically squeaking. It wasn’t so much being cut open that terrified her, it was the fact that it was now. Now the operation would begin. Now she would lose her baby.
“I don’t know what you think I’m going to do to you,” the doctor said. “But all I’m going to do is listen to your baby’s heartbeat.”
Rae nearly laughed out loud; this was supposed to comfort her? A wild search for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.
“Okay?” the doctor said.
Rae looked at her coldly, then shrugged. She lay back down on the table and closed her eyes.
“This amplifies sound,” the doctor explained as she rubbed some gel on Rae’s abdomen.
With her eyes closed, Rae could feel the ice in the room, and it made her think of the time she and Jessup had taken a bus to Rockport one winter. The harbor had been frozen solid, but as they stood by the docks they could see the tide moving beneath the ice, and when they knelt down and peered beneath the dock they could see that the ice itself was shifting.
“That’s the placenta you hear,” the doctor said.
“If I lived in this town I’d go crazy,” Jessup had said. “Imagine trying to sleep with the sound of the goddamn ocean ringing in your ears.”
“I’d love it,” Rae had said. It was one of the few times she had disagreed with him. She didn’t look over at him, but could tell he was studying her.
“Yeah, well, maybe you get used to it if you hear it every night,” he had finally allowed her.
“I think I’ve found it,” the doctor said.
Rae opened her eyes. She leaned up, resting on her elbows.
“I don’t hear it,” she said.
“Just listen,” the doctor told her.
That was when she heard it, and at the moment she heard it she started to cry.
“That’s it,” the doctor said. “That’s your baby.”
Rae was hit by something as immediate as lightning, but more piercing, whiter, a thousand times more perfect. The heartbeat seemed to come from a very great distance away. She had to remind herself that it was inside her. If she’d ever said she didn’t care about this baby she’d been a liar. When the amplifier was turned off and she could no longer hear it, she sat on the edge of the examining table and wept. Later, she apologized to the doctor and got dressed. She filled out her medical forms and drove back to her apartment, but if anything it was all more of a mystery than it had been before: how anything as fragile as a body might suddenly be so strong it could carry two hearts, and not even feel the weight.
In less than a month, Rae found that she could come home from work, spend the entire evening in Jessup’s easy chair reading Dr. Spock, and actually enjoy it. There was a whole new language to learn: colic and cradle cap and expressed milk. She began to wake every night at three a.m., as though she were in training. She bought milk by the quart and drank herbal tea. When none of her clothes buttoned any more, she decided against a secondhand store. Instead, she took two hundred dollars out of the bank account, went to the maternity department at Bullock’s, and then spent more money on clothes in forty-five minutes than she had in the last five years. By the time the saleswoman had handed her two shopping bags, Rae was so out of breath that she had to go out to the parked Oldsmobile and lean her head against the steering wheel. There, in the parking lot, Rae felt something move for the first time. It wasn’t at all what she had expected, and she picked her head up from the steering wheel and waited for it to come again. She’d been expecting an actual kick, but what she felt was more like fluttering, as if a pair of wings were deep inside her. When it happened a second time Rae realized that she had been feeling the exact same thing for weeks.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said to herself in the Oldsmobile. This was really it: her child was moving.
She decided on natural childbirth and discussed it with her doctor. But when the subject of a labor coach came up, Rae found herself lying—her husband, she said, was currently on the road, selling truck tires. It was a career so unlike the ones Jessup dreamed of that for a moment she almost felt as though she had gotten back at him. She imagined him in a VW van, with a load of oversized tires, and she left him stranded on the interstate in Nebraska with a blowout and no tire small enough to fit his van.
The first person she asked to be her coach was Freddy, and he told her it was out of the question. For days afterward he was afraid to talk to her. Finally, he offered her money to hire a labor coach, and he couldn’t understand why she refused him.
“It would be totally different to have you as my coach,” Rae told him. “I wouldn’t be paying you—you’d be there because you wanted to be.”
“Oh, no I wouldn’t,” Freddy said. “Believe me. I wouldn’t want to be there. Rae, I don’t even want to hear about somebody’s birth. I don’t want to see a photograph. Is
that the kind of coach you want?”
She nearly asked the woman next door, an actress she sometimes arranged to do her laundry with so they wouldn’t both have to sit in the laundromat alone after dark. But when Rae met her out by the mailboxes one evening and mentioned natural childbirth, her neighbor looked stricken. She couldn’t even step inside a hospital, she told Rae—if she were ever to have a child, they’d have to knock her out at the door.
And so it wasn’t as if Rae wanted to ask Lila Grey—she simply didn’t have anyone else.
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it?” Rae said, after she’d phoned Lila and explained what she wanted. “That I have to ask you.”
What was infinitely worse, Lila thought, was to be stupid enough to get trapped on the stairwell, and to have your water break right there, in a place that was so dim it was difficult to find your way on an ordinary day. No one had been there to help her on that stairway—but there were times when Lila liked to think that Hannie grabbed at her own side at the very same moment she did, searching each rib for the pain.
“Don’t you have anyone else?” she asked Rae. “A friend?”
“If I did would I be calling you?” Rae said.
“I told you not to call me,” Lila said, but she didn’t sound convincing, not even to herself. If she had only had the nerve to walk into the restaurant on Third Avenue she might not have been in that awful hot bedroom when her labor began, curled up in a bed that had been too small for her since she was twelve. She could have been safe in Hannie’s house, and for days afterward someone would have brought her hot tea and thin slices of toast, and she wouldn’t even have had to get out of bed, she could have held her daughter close, and watched as she slept.
“Just think about it,” Rae said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
For two weeks Lila thought of nothing else, but she didn’t return Rae’s call. She simply couldn’t bring herself to say no, not when she knew what it was like to be alone in a room that was so dark it sucked you into itself and filled your throat with so much darkness that every time you took a breath a dozen black plums pushed down on your tongue. When the door to Lila’s room had opened, the light from the hallway had saved her. She could still feel the sensation of the light on her skin as her cousin had walked into the room, she could feel each footstep as her cousin came closer, then mercifully put her arms around Lila and helped her up from the floor.
If that symbol hadn’t appeared in Rae’s cup, if it hadn’t been so clear that her child would be either stillborn or so damaged that a future was impossible, Lila might have agreed to help her. But instead, Lila stopped answering her phone. She told Richard she’d been getting crank calls, and the two of them lay in bed, still as stones, whenever the phone rang late at night, with a ring so piercing it cut right through your dreams. Lila’s readings suffered—not just because she missed appointments when she didn’t answer the phone, but because she had used up so much energy in not telling Rae the truth that she now couldn’t seem to lie to anyone else. She told one bad fortune after another: old clients began to cancel their appointments for weekly readings, new clients at the restaurant fled from their tables in tears and complained to the management. But Lila couldn’t seem to stop herself. She told old women to draw up their wills, and young women wept when they heard that the lover who was absent on holidays was not with a sick friend but with a wife. The manager of The Salad Connection gave Lila one more chance, and when there were three more complaints in a single afternoon—a divorce, failure at a job, and possible drug abuse—he fired her.
In a way it was a relief. That very same day Lila took all the tins of loose tea from her cabinets and poured the tea down the drain in the sink. She had Richard call the phone company and change their number; she cut up her white silk turban with a pair of garden shears and threw out the red shawl she always used as a tablecloth during readings. When she decided to go into the auto shop each morning and take over the books, Richard was shocked, but Lila explained that she couldn’t stand another moment of listening to someone’s troubles; adding up the repair bills for BMWs and Audis was exactly what she needed to clear her head. But in the afternoons, when she was alone in the house, Lila was so uneasy that she couldn’t sit still. And when she looked out her window one day and saw Rae sitting in her parked car, Lila’s throat went dry, but she wasn’t surprised. She had been expecting her to appear for days, and, what was worse, she had wanted her to. Lila put on a sweater and went outside; she got into the passenger seat next to Rae and slammed the door shut.
“I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to come in and let you have it,” Rae said. “You could have at least answered the phone. You could have told me that you didn’t want to be my labor coach.” She stole a look at Lila. “Unless you haven’t decided yet.”
“I’m not the right person,” Lila said.
“It hardly takes any time,” Rae insisted. “There are only six weeks of Lamaze class, and they don’t start until February. You wouldn’t even see me again until then.”
Lila shook her head. “You need somebody else.”
“Don’t you understand?” Rae said. “I don’t have anyone else.”
They both looked out through the front windshield. Rae was close to tears, but Lila was the one who was afraid: if Rae reached out during labor and put her arms around Lila’s neck, she might be pulled back into the darkness. Already, she could hear the flapping of huge wings.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Lila said evenly. “You may not need me after all. Your boyfriend may come back.”
“My boyfriend!” Rae said. “That’ll be the day.” But she looked over at Lila, interested. “What makes you say that?” she asked.
“I just feel it,” Lila said. “He’s not gone yet.”
Lila found herself agreeing to be Rae’s labor coach if Jessup failed to return—that’s how sure she was that she wouldn’t be needed. But afterward, when Rae had driven away and Lila was walking up the path to her front door, she felt a peculiar kind of regret, almost as if she wanted to witness the birth. She stood on the porch, between the two rose bushes. Even though the front door was open, she stood there a little longer, and she looked down the street. But Rae had pressed down hard on the accelerator—just in case Jessup had already come home—and the Oldsmobile was gone. There was nothing to see on Three Sisters Street except for a line of blue clouds in the western sky, a sure sign that before long the weather would change.
The following week it rained every day, but in spite of the weather the superintendent of Rae’s apartment complex strung white Christmas lights in the courtyard. The baby seemed more restless than usual, shifting its weight and throwing Rae off balance, so that she had to grab onto furniture and walls to stop herself from falling. It was the worst time of the year, those weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas when being alone can send you over the edge. Rae had just about given up hope that Lila’s prediction was right—expecting Jessup to come back left her lonelier than ever before. Every morning when she got out of bed Rae switched on the TV, just so she could hear someone’s voice. After a while she moved the set into the kitchen and propped it up on the counter so she could watch as she ate dinner. It was some time before Rae realized that this was exactly what her mother used to do, and it drove her wild to think that now that she finally was no longer haunted by the scent of Carolyn’s perfume she had to go and take on her habits. Once, she actually added mustard to her egg salad before she remembered it wasn’t she who liked egg salad that way, but her mother. Too much time alone was what was making her watch the news while she ate dinner and add mustard to things. When she was with Jessup she used to count the hours till the weekend, now weekends meant nothing to her, and there were times when Freddy had to remind her what day it was.
It was a Friday, and still raining, when Rae ran through the courtyard to get to her apartment before she was soaked. The door was slightly ajar, and she knew right away that Jessup was inside. She could hear the s
ound of the TV and she smelled fresh coffee. For a moment as she stood in the courtyard it was almost as if everything was the same as it had been before that awful heat wave. But as soon as she went inside and saw Jessup in the kitchen, she knew that it wasn’t the same. He didn’t even look as if he belonged any more: he seemed too big for the wooden chair he sat in, his boots stuck out from under the far side of the table, his denim jacket was hung over the back of the other chair, dripping water onto the linoleum. The oven was turned on so that his jacket would dry, and Rae felt uncomfortably warm. She stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at him and was surprised to find she had nothing to say.
Jessup cleared his throat. “I made some coffee,” he finally said.
Rae looked at the table now and saw that he had set out a ceramic mug for her and filled it with coffee. She could not remember his ever doing that for her before, not in seven years.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m staying away from caffeine.”
“Oh,” Jessup said, as if he suddenly remembered her condition. He looked at her dead center, and Rae immediately pulled his old rain slicker more tightly around herself.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Jessup said, as if it was his place to invite her in.
Rae stayed exactly where she was.
“I’ve got myself a room in a place outside Barstow,” Jessup said.
“You don’t even have the decency to tell me what you think,” Rae said.
“Think about what?” Jessup said uneasily.
“About the way I look,” Rae said.
She really had to watch herself; she could hear her voice cracking. She went to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of milk.
“You look great,” Jessup said.
“What a liar,” Rae said.
She sat across from him at the table and she knew that he hadn’t come back for her.
“After the movie wrapped I figured I had two ways to go,” Jessup said. “I could try and get my foot in the door of the movie business, which is a joke because once you’re a driver they think you’re an imbecile. Or I could get involved in a business proposition with a guy I met in Hesperia.”