The door slammed shut in my face.
Someone had seen me.
I ran away, out of labor and delivery.
I was due back at my desk in just a moment. Soon the other women in billing would wonder where I had gone, and why I wasn’t yet back from lunch. They would tell our manager. I would be given a scolding.
But I couldn’t go back to billing at that moment.
I needed to get away.
I got behind the wheel of my car and I drove and drove.
I drove to the chophouse, needing to see Aaron, desperate suddenly to see him, for him to hold me in his arms, to stroke my hair and tell me everything would be all right. If I’m being honest, I was scared of the person I was, scared of the person I’d become. I was quite terrified, if Aaron didn’t put a stop to it, of what I might do. My thoughts were scattered, sown like seeds in my mind, and there was no telling which ideas would bloom, the sensible ones like going home and putting myself to bed, or the misguided ones where I return to the hospital and force myself into Joe and Miranda’s room, screaming like a lunatic, demanding that they give me their child.
I left the car parked haphazardly across parallel lines on the street outside, nearly a block from the chophouse. Parking in town was never easy to come by. I stepped from the car, my ankle giving on me as it sunk deep into a crater on the street. I shook it off, kept moving, feeling the ligaments beneath my shoes begin to ache and swell.
It had begun to rain outside, the sky darkening. The restaurants, the gift shops, the galleries that lined the street radiated light. They beamed from the inside out, while outside people scattered like roaches in daylight, hiding under canopies and slipping inside stores, seeking shelter, huddled in throngs beneath ample-size golf umbrellas, clutching one another, laughing.
But not me.
I made my way to the chophouse alone, fully intent on going inside. On speaking to Aaron. On begging him to help me, on pleading with him to take me back. I was desperate. What else could I do? The rain came pouring down, permeating my skin, so that I could feel it inside my bones. I hurried past people tucked warmly, drily beneath their umbrellas, no one offering to share. The rib of a passing umbrella poked me in the shoulder, but no apology came thereafter, as if it was my fault, as if it was my shoulder’s fault for getting in the way of this man’s umbrella.
I closed in on the chophouse, smelling that scent that always followed Aaron home and into bed with us, that coiled around us while we slept. Grease, Worcestershire sauce, the flesh of meat.
But before stepping inside, I caught a fleck of Aaron through the restaurant window, seeing his face through the small partition that separates the kitchen from the dining room. A flyspeck only, but in that flyspeck, there was a lightness about him, a nimbleness, a radiance to his skin. Rain streaked down the window, but I peered past it, watching as a smile danced on the edges of Aaron’s face. In the very same fleck some other man made a wisecrack, I could only assume, because then Aaron was laughing,laughing!, the edges of his lips reaching upward to the sky like he hadn’t done in years. Aaron was laughing and it was beautiful to see, an openmouthed laugh, nothing curbed or restrained about it, and I saw in Aaron’s eyes a felicity that I hadn’t seen in quite some time. Never did he press his hand to his mouth to hide the smile, but rather chuckled with all of his might.
Aaron was happy. Aaron had found his happy place.
Unlike me, his heart had healed and he was no longer broken. He was whole.
Oh, how I wanted to be there beside him, laughing too.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to shatter what had already been fixed. I’d ruin him, that I knew, if I stepped foot into the chophouse, as I imagined the laughter drawing to a sudden close if I walked in, that lovely smile vaporizing from his face at the sight of me.
And so instead, when a hostess poked her head outside and asked if I’d like to take a peek at the menu, I shook my head, scurrying the other way like all the other roaches, seeking shelter indoors from the rain.
It was an upscale restaurant where I went, fine dining with a bar attached, the kind where one might have a glass of wine while waiting for their table to be set. This hostess offered a table, but I strutted straight past her and to the bar—sopping wet, leaving a trail of rainwater behind me as I walked. I climbed onto one of the tall stools and ordered a chardonnay to drink. A chardonnay! The glass came to me full to the rim, a generous pour at the hand of a bartender with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, a man who must have been six years younger than me, barely old enough to be serving alcohol at an upscale establishment. And yet here he was, and in the moment I felt suddenly old, much older than my twenty-nine years, but that didn’t matter. That was the least of my concerns.
With the wine he also brought a dish towel, which I used to towel dry the ends of my hair.
The first sip of wine tasted like battery acid to me.
It choked me on the way down, burning the lining of my esophagus so that the bartender raised an eyebrow at me and asked if I was all right. I pressed a hand to my mouth, nodding, but I wasn’t sure that I was all right. The wine settled in the pit of my stomach, and the feeling was a mix of repulsion and nausea, along with a warmth and prickling that I quite liked.
And so I had another sip, wanting the warmth and prickling to have its way with me, to help me forget about Aaron and the miscarriage, all those wasted months trying unavailingly to create a baby.
How stupid I’d been in believing that with Dr. Landry’s help we could outsmart nature. Aaron and I were infertile; that was the nature of the beast. That couldn’t be changed.
The universe was laughing at me for my arrogance and my vanity.
I took another sip of wine and this time, I didn’t choke.
I thought of my baby, of my unborn baby. Of my dead baby. I wondered what she would have looked like had she had a chance to grow full-term. Would she have looked like Aaron, with dark hair and light eyes, or would she have looked like me?
Would she have been a she, or would she have been a he?
I still think about her all the time.
