I was a kid, I wanted to say, but then I saw a blur of white before I felt it: the pelt of the egg that slid down my coat and dripped onto my shoe.
Can you be buried alive without ever being put underground?
I hadn’t heard from Wyatt in six days, the longest we’d gone without speaking.
I hadn’t told him yet about how I’d seen a doctor again, for the bleeding that started a couple months ago, like a period without a period, more like a comma or an ellipsis. In the exam room, I’d shivered in my paper gown. Why are doctors’ offices always so cold when they know we disrobe? The fluorescent lights flickered overhead. The doctor had an ink splotch birthmark on his face, and though I’d already filled out the office forms and narrated my symptoms to the attending nurse, the doctor read through my chart and asked, “How are you doing today?” and out of habit I responded, “Good! How are you?”
He sat on his stool and swiveled toward me. “But maybe you aren’t so good.”
“No,” I admitted. “Maybe not.”
He flipped through the pages on his clipboard, and he read to himself. “History of… uh-huh. I remember.”
What a story my uterus could tell. It would explain how Wyatt and I tried for a family for years. How he switched from tighty-whities to boxers after reading an article inPopular Sciencehypothesizing that cooler balls lead to stronger sperm. How, soon, it was tests and shots and procedures and doctors telling us when to have sex, or when not to. Recovery periods and waiting periods and fertile periods, then monthly periods. Then nothing, followed by excitement, followed by something worse than nothing, a something that was not a baby, but a painful whooshing of blood that felt like a punishment for my attempts to have a baby in the first place.
The doctor called for a nurse, who entered then stood by the door, bored. He asked me to lie back. I put my feet up in the plastic stirrups. “Now let’s hear your body talk,” the doctor said.
“That’s an Olivia Newton-John song,” I said.
“What?”
“Scooch forward,” the nurse instructed. “Till your bottom touches the end of the table.”
The doctor pressed my abdomen, and I felt pressure, a stitchy pain, then the familiar warmth of blood as he slid his fingers inside me.
“Sorry,” I said. He peeled off his gloves and dropped them in the biohazard bin, and then he scrubbed his hands so vigorously as to insult me.
After the first miscarriage, Wyatt had gone out to get lunch to save me the pain of seeing him cry. I knew this because when he arrived home his eyes were bloodshot, and he was holding a pastrami sandwich out like an offering. I couldn’t eat it. I could see the pain in Wyatt’s eyes, and yet a small part of me resented that, too, that pain of his that wanted equal recognition, his need to suddenly do something useful and the best he could do was pastrami. Besides, pregnant women are told to avoid lunch meat altogether for fear of trichinosis, so that sandwich seemed further insult.
Wyatt hadn’t dealt with the blood. The blood that soaked through pads more quickly than I could change them, the clots reminding me of cherry jam that I would never eat again, blood-soaked tampons that looked like gruesome mice I held by the tail, the blood that made me feel like this was an injury from which I would never recover. I would never recover, but I’d also never speak of it, never again. Not to Wyatt and not to anyone else, not even when it happened a second time, then a third.
The doctor left. The lights dimmed. I was lying on my back, naked from the waist down. A technician pressed a wand to my stomach. The screen looked like a weather radar. The technician called for the nurse. They pointed and nodded. I watched their expressions, their eyes scrutinizing what was there, a body reduced to its most functional components.
Once, in my Stage Presence class, the teacher squirted his students in the face with water from spray bottles as he yelled insults at us. The goal was to remain unflinching. We were supposed to imagine ourselves a mountain and chant:I am made of stone. I can still imagine the needling spray on my forehead. The purpose of the exercise was to show how a good actor can divide her body from her mind, separate emotions from experience, and, in this way, open herself to the possibility of containing someone else.
I decided I would be stone. I would be Stella in that box beneath the ground.
When I got home, it was late. The moon sat fat in the sky. I could see it out my bathroom window as I stood practicing my lines in the mirror. “Can anyone hear me? I’m coming!” OnStars and Shadows, Vincent Glass proposed to Celeste, but then she’d caught the mysterious disease that Stella had ostensibly died from, only her cure didn’t work because Bianca Dupont had swapped out the vial of medicine for something vague and sinister. Somehow, from beneath the ground, Stella knew all this. The script called for me to paw at the fabric lining of the casket while the camera cut to Bianca Dupont cackling.
In her last scene Stella managed to use her dagger-shaped necklace, a parting gift from the people of the island nation of Notelddim Trop, to break through the coffin and to begin digging her way up, up, up. I tried the line again, this time channeling Stella’s desperation, her determination, too.
In the mirror I was framed by the shower curtain Wyatt had picked out—white with navy blue stripes. It looked vaguely nautical, and I never told him I didn’t like it. Now, I imagined I was on a boat in choppy waters, adrift at sea with nobody to save me. “Can anyone hear me? I’m coming.”
Melodrama is a legitimate technique in soap operas. Characters say exactly what they mean, and there’s beauty in that, in speaking so directly. In real life, this rarely happens. I couldn’t just call Wyatt up and say:I’m confused about what we are to each other. I couldn’t just ask:Should we fix this marriage or abandon it?
Maybe I didn’t want to know the answer.
In my bedroom, I dialed Wyatt’s number. It rang three times before his answering machine picked up.
The last time I saw Wyatt we made love in his new apartment. I called it making love, but maybe it was just sex. To be honest, I’m not sure I know the difference. I imagine lovemaking means you’re in love, and this wasn’t quite that, more like we were staking claim to something we believed to be ours. Breaking up is a series of goodbyes, and sex just another farewell. He was using our old pie chest as a dresser. I could see bulbs of his rolled-up socks through the glass. He’d brought all his plants from home, the ones he kept in our sunroom, and now they were squeezed onto the ledge by the bay window. He used to feed his plants his hair clippings, saying the nitrogen and phosphorus acted as fertilizer, and I used to love that about him—that he never wasted a thing, not even his hair. I thought about what it felt like to have his mouth pressed against my own, and about desire, and about how petty sex can seem, in light of everything.
Now I stood in my bedroom and scrutinized my body in thefull-length mirror. At forty, my breasts sagged. I cupped them and pushed them up. I sucked in my stomach. I tried to imagine my body as a lover might. I had fine lines around my eyes, despite the mud masks and oils and serums I frequently applied. When my scenes called for close-ups, Elliot directed the cameraman to use a special filter to soften my image.
The moment I turned off the bedside lamp the phone rang. It was past eleven o’clock—too late for a casual call. “Wyatt?” I said when I picked up. Nothing at first, just some breathing.
“Halley…” Charlie’s voice.
“Charlie. This is Nona,” I said. “Wrong number.”
