Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Seven

Carrie was there in five minutes, and she confirmed what the nurse had said. I was so shocked I didn’t know which piece of knowledge was more stunning; the fact that I’d gotten pregnant without knowing it, or the fact that I’d lost a baby.

“Our baby,” I said to Jack, trying to absorb the loss, the impact of the facts. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I was too tired to blot them. I didn’t know if I was exactly sad or just profoundly astonished.

He was just as amazed as I was at the whole incident. He left the cubicle in the emergency room abruptly, and I was left staring after him from the gurney.

Carrie reentered. “He’s crying,” she whispered to me, and I could not imagine that. Then I remembered that when Jack’s previous lover, Karen Kingsland, had been murdered, she had been pregnant. Carrie said, “Did you really not know?”

“I never even thought of it,” I admitted. “I never put everything together. I guess I’m just dumb.”

“Lily, I am so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

I shook my head. I didn’t know what she could say, either.

“I thought I had too much scar tissue,” I told Carrie. “I thought between the indications that I wouldn’t be very fertile, and the fact that we used birth control every single time, I was safe as I could be.”

“Only abstinence is a hundred percent safe,” Carrie said automatically. Her round brown eyes fixed on me from behind her big glasses. “Lily, I have to do a D and C.”

That meant operating room fees and an anesthesiologist and an overnight stay in the hospital. I began to protest.

“You don’t have an option,” she told me firmly.

Jack said, “You do what you have to do, Carrie. We’re good for it.” He’d come back through the curtains behind her. His eyes were red. He took my hand.

“You know,” Carrie said very slowly, propping her bottom against the wall and hugging a clipboard to her chest, “If this has happened once, this could happen again.” She rested her chin on the clipboard, and I could tell she was thinking of saying something she knew she ought not to say.

I looked over at Jack. His hair was hanging in tangles around his shoulders, and his scar almost gleamed in the harsh overhead light. He didn’t seem to know what to think, and I couldn’t even figure out how I felt about what had just happened to me, or at least how I fully felt. But the truth was, it was like being at the bottom of a deep pit of sorrow.

“A baby,” Jack said tentatively. “A baby.”

“Lots of work,” I said, thinking of the Althaus home.

Carrie braced herself. “Of course,” she interjected in a very low voice, looking anywhere but at us, “I think it’s always nice if a baby’s parents are married.”

“Oh, no problem,” Jack said absently. Then he snapped to, and his eyes met mine. I shrugged.

Carrie perked up. Her glasses glistened as she raised her head. “So, you guys are going to get married?”

“No,” I said. “We already are.”

After all that “parents should be married” preaching, Carrie gave us hell because we were married. I’d been her only bridesmaid, and I should’ve returned the compliment; Claude would’ve liked to have been at the ceremony; they would’ve welcomed the chance to give us a wedding present; etc.; etc. Blah, blah, blah.

“Listen, Carrie,” I told her. “I am going to say this once because I am your friend. We don’t want to talk about being married, we don’t want to change the way we are, we don’t want to put it in the papers. I haven’t even told my parents, though Jack did tell his sister, since he can’t seem to stop hinting.” I cast a look at Jack, who had the grace to look abashed. “This isn’t a good day for us anyway, right? Wait and hop on us when I feel better.”

“I’m sorry.” Carrie apologized thoroughly. “Listen, Lily, I’m going to do your D and C in…” she looked at her watch. “About an hour. The operating room’ll be free then, Dr. Howard’s in there now.”

“What can I expect afterward?”

We went over that for a while, and I began to feel better. Carrie was sure I’d be feeling physically well very soon.

When she ducked out from the curtain, Jack took my hand. He hooked a chair with his foot, drew it closer, and settled in by the bed, resting his head against it. We were still and quiet together for a while, and it was wonderful after the hubbub of arriving at the hospital, the struggle to remove my jeans, the shock of the miscarriage. I felt drained, mentally and physically. I’d lost a lot of blood. After a while, I think I dozed a little, and Jack may have, too.

As I drifted in and out of uneasy napping, I was thinking that this was the first time I’d felt really married. It felt like a cord ran between Jack and me, an umbilical cord, pulsing with life and nutrients. Then I thought of the baby, the baby who’d been attached to me with a real umbilical cord, and I thought of Jack leaving this brilliant white cubicle to cry for our lost child. I stared at the wall, at the incomprehensible medical things attached to it, and I considered that if I had not allowed Jack into my life, none of this pain would have been mine or his. Dry eyed, I stared at the wall, from time to time stroking his dark hair, and I did not know if I was glad or miserable that I’d ever seen him.

That evening Tamsin and Cliff came to my room. It was a double, but there wasn’t another patient in there, which was a relief I was sure I owed to Carrie. Jack had left to spend a little time at the house cleaning up the disorder we’d left behind us that morning and to shower and change. I’d been dozing again, this time from the anesthesia, and I was startled to open my eyes and see the couple standing in the doorway.

“Tamsin,” I said. “Cliff.”

“I was visiting a client on my lunch hour and I saw your name on the admissions list,” Tamsin explained. She had a little arrangement of daisies and baby’s breath in her hand. “Are you feeling all right, Lily?”

“Yes, much better,” I said, being careful not to move. “Thanks for coming by.”

Tamsin placed the flowers on the broad windowsill, and Cliff came to the side of the bed and peered down at me. “We’ve had a miscarriage, too,” he said. “Tamsin lost our baby about three years ago.”

Tamsin looked away, as if the mention of the loss was a reproach.

“How are you doing?” I asked her.

“You mean, about the death of Saralynn?”

I nodded.

“I’m adjusting,” she said. “Her mother came to see me. That was bad.”

“I can well imagine,” I lied.

“I brought you some magazines.” Tamsin fumbled with a bag. “Here, maybe one of them will distract you for a while.” She arranged a stack on my rolling table. She’d been smart enough to avoid House Beautiful and Vogue.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Then, I guess, we’ll see you later. I hope you feel better.”

“Thank you.”

After they’d left the room, I was ashamed of my eagerness to have them gone. I didn’t want to see anyone, not a soul, but normally I would have expended some effort to be more polite.

Between the slit left between the curtains, I could see the late summer sun setting on one of the longest days of my life. I was seeing only a slice of the brilliant ball of glory, the briefest flare of red and orange. I looked for a long time. Then I pressed my call button.

The nurse eventually arrived to help me to the bathroom. She was a burly middle-aged woman who had no sympathy for me at all… kind of a relief after the emotional fire-walking I’d had that day.

As I shuffled back to my bed across the bright linoleum, I realized that Tamsin herself must be going through much the same difficulty. Her life was churned and risky, and she and Cliff most probably could not see any end to that risk.

In my self-protective way, I wanted to hold my counselor at arm’s length because I had too much trouble of my own to help her out of hers.

Whatever Tamsin was doing, or whatever was being done to her, I wanted no part of it. I had worked myself into a state of revulsion for my increasing entanglement in the lives of others, even Jack. This was where it led, to this hard white bed in this hard white place, where pieces of me bled out of my body.

I caught my breath, revolted by my own self-involvement.

When Jack returned, he tried to hold my hand, but I pulled my fingers away and turned my eyes to the wall.

“I’ll feel better before long,” I promised the wall. I forced myself to go on. If there was anything I hated, it was explaining myself. “I’ll just brood for a while and get it over with.”

I just couldn’t, shouldn’t, treat Jack this way. I was ashamed. I did my second least favorite thing, and began crying. My tears felt hot against my face. I bit my lips to keep from making a sound, but it didn’t work.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t hold on to our baby.”

“Move over.”

I scooted as much as I could in the narrow bed. I heard Jack’s shoes hit the floor and then the mattress took the weight of his body. He wrapped himself around me. There was not anything to say, but at least we were together.