The Grief of Others (37 page)

THE QUESTIONS—“How many weeks do you think you are?” “What was the date of your last period?” “Have you had your pregnancy confirmed by a doctor?” “When was your last prenatal visit?” “Did you hear a heartbeat at any earlier exam?”—for all that they were put neutrally by the succession of healthcare professionals, those at Ricky’s own ob-gyn office and then by the nurses and technicians and doctors at the hospital, seemed to carry the air of the courtroom, of the cross-examination. Jess found herself responding as though she were covering for a lie, could feel herself reddening in a lady-doth-protest-too-much way, and on several instances she turned to Ricky, who sat unwaveringly beside her in each of the waiting and examination rooms (who had taken the day off work in order to ferry her to these appointments), and repeated the answer she’d just given, adding desperately, as if seeking to persuade, “My mother was with me! The doctor said it.”

Although Jess was now thirteen weeks along, no heartbeat could be heard on the doppler, not even with the intravaginal transducer. She was sent for ultrasound, which confirmed the lack of heartbeat and put the gestational age of the fetus at seven weeks. “Seven?” Jess repeated hoarsely, and felt the world swing away from her. That meant it had been dead before she ever showed up in Nyack. Perhaps before the Greyhound left San Francisco. “Could be seven and a half,” the short man in the short white lab coat, whoever he was—she never saw his name tag—allowed, but he said it with such terrible, futile compassion that Jess understood it to be a kindness only.

When they left her alone in the room—“You can dress”—she stood wiping off the gel in slow motion, staring at the nowblack monitor. Gone was the initial, unpardonable giddiness she’d felt when she first saw the blood. (What had that been about? Adrenaline? Gladness for any event linked to her pregnancy, any kind of outward manifestation of what until then had been a silent, unembodied, phantom fact? Or was it gladness for any event that called attention to her, period, anything that warranted her asking for help, for attention, from Ricky, from John?) Gone, too, was any sense of perpetrating a sham. Now that the authorities had detected proof of her failed pregnancy, she no longer found herself in the position of having to insist she really was pregnant. There was something, she recognized mechanically, funny in that. But she seemed to have lost, along with the giddiness and the queer sense of shame, something like proximity to her own emotions. In their stead was a well-water stillness, a thing deep and hard, with an aftertaste of sulfur.

No, she replied blandly, obediently, to their questions, she had not “passed” any more “fluid,” “colored discharge,” “tissue,” or “clots.” She had not experienced any “pain or cramping” in her “abdomen or lower back.” She had no fever, no chills. Her options, she was informed, were “expectant management” (go “home” and wait for her body to “expel the fetal tissue” by itself; this could take “a few days” or “weeks”) or a “dilation and aspiration,” which, contrary to its hopeful-sounding name, referred to a “procedure” that used a “suction curette” to “empty the uterus.” Did she have a “preference”?

“Jess?” Ricky prompted.

She said, “I have a dead baby in me.” It was not properly either a question or a statement, but the dumb parroting of a sentence that had formed, seemingly all by itself, inside her head, and now required expulsion. “Take it out.”

 

 

THEY WERE ABLE to schedule her for the following day, a piece of information delivered not quite grudgingly but with the clear implication that she was lucky in this regard. This still left nineteen hours from the time she and Ricky got home from the hospital to the time she was scheduled to arrive at the day surgery. Nineteen hours, stretched before her like a bridge, a grim, girdered span extending into heavy fog, appearing to lead nowhere.Yet crossing it turned out not to be hard, only joyless, only dull. She sat with the family at supper, ate a little chicken. Biscuit cleared her plate for her, and gave her a pat as she passed behind her chair again on her way to the den. After dinner Jess retired to the living room couch with her father’s paperback Whitman, which she thumbed but did not read. Paul, having apparently decided to play off their brief, mortifying entanglement as if it had never happened, stopped before her and said in a voice that might have been pitched for sincerity but came out sounding drily comic, “Uh, sorry about”—tongue click—“you know.” He had his hands clasped behind his back in what looked like mock-formality.“The pregnancy thing.” Perhaps it was simply a teenage boy’s valiant, dissonant effort to introduce levity into all situations, the sadder the situation, the more pressing the urge. She turned up the corners of her mouth dully. John had cleared off the mantel in the living room and lined up Will Joiner’s boxes in a row. He had not, he said, made the call yet to the art world friend, but he would, he promised, soon. Now, this evening, he stood before the boxes, examining them at length, making frequent appreciative comments, and Jess felt it was for her benefit and was not ungrateful.

Ricky came to her later, knelt by the couch. “You must want to call your mother.”

Jess shrugged.

When Ricky continued to look at her searchingly, her brows tilted up in encouraging inquiry—as if what she sought was not simply an affirmative response but the whole story behind the purported estrangement, the mystery revealed, the offenses confessed—Jess proffered a tiny, empty smile, shook her head and turned her face into the couch.The truth was she wanted nothing more than her mother now, but how to make that happen when it would mean everyone finding out she’d been telling tales? That was the real unnavigable bridge, the span leading into blind mist.

 

 

SHE WOKE FROM the anesthesia in tears and shivering. Her teeth chattering. “Do you kn-kn-know . . . ?” she tried, but it was difficult because of the crying, which seemed different from her own crying. It was like a foreign species of crying, something she hadn’t remembered encountering but must have acquired while traveling far from home. “C-c-c-could you t-t-tell . . . ?”

“All right, Jessica,” someone soothed, a woman, who adjusted something at the side of the shiny hard bed, and looked at something, a monitor, mounted high over her head.

“C-c-could you t-tell if it was a b-b-b-boy or a g-girl?”

There was the doctor on her other side now, she recognized him: Asian, elderly, with a wonderful mane of white hair and a peaceful, wrinkled countenance. “No,” he said quietly. He seemed to be taking her pulse, or maybe just trying to steady her.

“I kn-kn-know . . .”Jess meant to say she’d known the answer, she didn’t want him to think she was ridiculous; she’d known the fetus got suctioned into a tube, came out unrecognizable as anything human; it had just not been possible not to ask. But these tears, this sobbing: it was hard to get any words by this kind of crying, so virulent, so
thorough
was it. A warmed blanket was placed over her shivering legs, and both the heat and the weight reminded her of being buried in sand at the beach.

“Okay, Jessica?” said the woman again, or a different woman, but with the same professional brightness; there seemed to be various bodies, busy, unconcerned, moving efficiently about the bed. “We just want you to rest now,” said the woman, moving in and picking up a tube, something to do with the IV. “Okay? Just relax.”

 

 

THE NEXT TIME she woke they brought her apple juice, and after she drank it they brought her Ricky.

“How you doing?” said Ricky from the foot of the bed, and Jess started to cry, but this time it was regular, her own normal crying, close to soundless.

Ricky, haggard-looking, smiled sadly at her. Jess wondered how long she’d been in the waiting room. This whole time? How much time had passed since she’d come out of the anesthesia and then gone back to sleep again?

“Sweetheart, I spoke with your mother,” said Ricky. “I thought—we both thought—we owed your parents a call. Both of us talked with your mom, and John also talked with your father. You know, Jess, they’re not mad at you.”

The intensity of her crying, though not the volume, increased. “I know,” Jess got out, though whether intelligibly or not she wasn’t sure.

“They never kicked you out.” It was a statement, but one seeking confirmation.

Jess managed a nod, pushing away the tears as they fell. “I’m sorry.”

Ricky sighed.

Jess cried and cried.

“Poor Jess.” Ricky looked at her, touched her ankle through the blanket. “You’re young,” she said eventually. “You have so much time. And you know it’s common, don’t you? It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to have children.”

All of this only made her cry harder. She managed to choke out, “It isn’t that.”

Ricky came around closer. She perched on the wheelie stool beside the bed and brought her face near Jess’s. She took over the clearing of tears, stroking them away with her thumbs.Very gently, she asked, “What, then?”

Jess’s whole face crumpled. She held her hands over her mouth.

“It’s hard to let go of
this
baby, even if there’ll be others,” guessed Ricky.

Jess shook her head more vigorously: no, not that.

“What, then, sweet girl?”

It was too much. Jess looked up, horrified. “I’m
not
sweet! I’m
relieved
.” It was as though a scream were being forced through a whisper-sized tube: an ugly, scraping sound from her throat. “I didn’t want it. I didn’t
want
it.” This was a truth she had not previously allowed herself to know, and now it had come out she felt fear creep into its place. The fear was not vague. It took the form of a certainty: from now on anything might happen to her and no matter how terrible it was, the worst part would be knowing she deserved it.

Some time passed before the sobbing abated. Ricky did not touch her or speak, and Jess took this as a sign of disgust. But when she finally lifted her face from her slippery fingers, gulped a long shuddering breath and used the edge of the hospital sheet as a handkerchief, she saw that Ricky had not wheeled the little stool any distance from the bed but sat as close as before, gazing at her with sorrow and without judgment. And now Ricky plucked thoughtfully at her own lip, and drew a breath and gazed hard at the blanket, seeming to lose herself in contemplation of some deep and powerful interest, as though whatever she was working out was not for Jess’s sake only. When she looked up she said: “That might be harder.”

Jess did not follow.

Ricky spoke slowly, deliberately, as though the words would require time and great focus to comprehend. “Losing a baby you don’t want might be harder than losing one you did.”

All around them were clean things: sterile, aseptic, hygienic. White and black and red and blue, metal and plastic, wired and motored, nesting and depending. Expensive things, each with its own highly specialized purpose, each invented, manufactured, purchased, and employed in the service of preservation of life. Tubing, buttons, calibrated dials, casings and liners, speakers and lights.
They
were the living things in this room, or not room but cubicle, this makeshift capsule enclosed by curtains on metal tracks. They, Ricky and Jess, possessed—
were
—the life that was the object, the sole point, of all these pieces of equipment, none of which could know or grasp or approach how muddy, how complicated and ignoble such lives might be.

Jess let her head rest back against the pillow and closed her eyes, and the hot tears flowed again, bathing her already salty cheeks. “I don’t have the right,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I don’t have the right to cry.” She spoke in a low, rusty voice, as if she were loath for anyone else to hear, to learn what they were, both of them, guilty of. Yet the thought that she was not alone, that Ricky must be speaking from her own experience, was also a relief. Crying blindly now, she reached for Ricky’s hand. Ricky held on, tightening her grip as Jess tightened hers.

After a while Ricky spoke. “Listen to me.”

She waited until Jess opened her eyes.

“Are you listening?” Ricky’s eyes were dry. “It doesn’t have anything to do with right.”

W
hen she woke there was the sun already high in the sky, dappling the slim spriggy branches outside her window. The leaves still had that dainty, new-green look, the tree equivalent of baby teeth. Biscuit lay there, yawning, and saw there was a rolling wind that lifted the branches high and set them down at close intervals. There was something else, too, though she could not at first remember what.

The space beside her bed was bare: no raft of an air mattress beached broadly upon the floor. The duffel bag that had lolled like a giant sausage in one corner of her room, and which had, week by week, gradually disgorged its guts as piles of clean and dirty clothing scattered and bunched and stacked in the area around it, was also gone. As was, she knew, though its absence could not be marked in her room, her mother’s mandolin, bestowed hastily in the moments just before Jess’s departure and last seen being handed into the back of her father’s pickup.

It had been a loosely, laggardly frenetic departure, with no one directing it and none of them seeming sure how it was to be handled. There had been Jess, her hair still wet from the shower, a small cloth bag slung over one shoulder, sunglasses perched on top of her head, Congers Community College travel mug in hand, first standing by the open door on the passenger side, then going back in the house to the bathroom, then wandering out again and turning a small circle on the front walk, as if to take everything in one last time. There had been Gordie, insisting on carrying Jess’s duffel down from the porch, then struggling with it across the little lawn before handing it to Biscuit’s father, who would be driving Jess to LaGuardia, and who relieved Gordie of the bag and lofted it easily into the truck. There had been Ebie, trotting down to sniff at the bushes by the sidewalk, then doubling back in an ear-inverting bound to see where Gordie was headed with that bag, then putting both paws up on the tailgate as if debating leaping onto the truck bed, then bumping instead over to Biscuit for a stroke of reassurance before mounting the porch stairs to investigate the sound of someone else coming out.There had been Biscuit’s mother, who’d been outside earlier but disappeared mysteriously back into the house without explanation, reemerging now with the mandolin in its figgy case, and a flush traveled up her neck as she bent at the waist and spoke inaudibly to Jess, sitting on the bottom step, and then transferred the instrument onto her lap. There had been Paul, hanging back in the shade of the porch; he showed signs of having woken up only recently, but managed to deploy this sleepiness in the service of cool, with his bare feet, his ragged jeans, his undershirt and porkpie hat, which he’d slapped rakishly over his pillow-mussed hair.There had been Biscuit’s father, securing the tailgate, checking his watch, scowling across the patch of grass (that scowl a stranger might have chalked up to the sun’s brightness, but which everyone in the family understood to be a sign neither of anger nor of glare, but of knowing a particular emotional response was expected, and not knowing how to deliver it), looking caught off guard when her mother approached and, on tiptoe, slid her arms around his neck and pressed the side of her face against his chest, right below the throat. Seconds had passed; then he’d gone ahead and slid an arm around her waist. More seconds, and then he’d slid the other. Then he put his face down and rubbed his forehead, just lightly, back and forth, across the top of her mother’s hair. They’d stood like that for what seemed a peculiar length of time; so peculiar Biscuit felt she was expanding, as though helium were being poured into her body, filling it so completely that her toes might lift up off the porch and she might go floating out over the little lawn.