“No. Hell no. My husband can’t find out. He can’t. Do you understand me?”
“I thought he’d left you already.”
“We’re taking a break. That’s all. Just for a little bit. How do you even know that?”
“Word on the street.”
“A real investigative reporter.”
We were quiet for a moment. A group of women now headed for the studio door—extras who played the Port Middleton nursing staff.
“This is big, Nona. Bigger than you. Bigger than us,” John Dale said. “Think about it. You can redeem yourself. A redemption story is the greatest kind of story there is.”
He leaned against my car as I stepped out and passed him. I felt nothing when our bodies brushed, two objects in time and space.
THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE AGAIN. FLUORESCENTlights. Plastic diorama of a uterus that looked like a bull’s head. Pamphlets about menopause. A jar of oversize wooden tongue depressor things that were not for depressing tongues. I sat on the exam table, fully dressed. The doctor came in, same inky birthmark. His mood was jovial; he walked on his toes.
From his body language, I expected good news. He whistled and bounced. He flipped a light switch with his elbow, and a wall-mounted box illuminated. Then he placed a film up against it. “Here,” he said. “And here. And here.” The film looked like the deep ocean. I tried to make out a fish. “Tumors,” he said. I sucked in my breath, but he held up a palm like he was taking an oath. “Calm it. Not cancer.”
I exhaled. Still, I felt dizzy. “That’s good,” I said. “Right?”
“Good? No, I wouldn’t call it good. No tumors at all would be good.”
“Then what?”
The tumors were the size of kiwi fruits, he told me, and I thought of the week-by-week pregnancy book I’d read, how every stage of thebaby’s life is compared to a fruit or vegetable. Why think of the uterus as containing food at all? It leads one to believe the mother will eat whatever’s inside.
The tumors had a name that sounded astral, like something you’d find in outer space. But this wasn’t outer space we were talking about. This was my body. This was me.
“There is some good news,” he said. “A hysterectomy. The science has advanced. We’ll take the whole thing out. Three days in the hospital. Six-week recovery. Boom.”
“No boom,” I said. “No boom.” The back of my knees stuck to the pleather exam table. The doctor turned off the box light, and the picture of my uterus went dark. “What are my other options?” I asked.
The doctor spun on his stool, then pushed himself up. Small tufts of hair poked above the V-neck of his scrubs. “This is a relatively common procedure for women like you.”
“Like me?”
I touched my stomach protectively, as though the doctor would attempt to yank my insides from me right then and there. I imagined the scene, the two of us in some anatomical tug-of-war.
“Middle-aged,” he added.
Middle-aged. That’s what my agent had called me, Elliot, too—middle-aged. The term is never not an insult.
I drove home in silence. I tried to consider the bright side: no more periods, that monthly window of socially condoned rage. No more bleeding, no more cramps. No tampons or pads cluttering my bathroom cabinets. More storage space for other products. Nair! Mustache bleach! Those bendy curlers they advertise on commercials. No more obsessively looking at the calendar. Women were bound by time in a way men never would be. In fact, no calendar at all. Time would expand, or collapse. What did it matter? I’d never have a child, and so my time would be my own.
And, then, I heard it again, for the third time: What I thought wasa baby’s wail in my head, filling the space so loudly I took my hands off the steering wheel to cover my ears.Waa. Waa.
I was tired. I needed sleep.
I thought of what that nurse had said to me as they began the procedure to extract mystillbaby: “Tummy’s still flat.” She was saying it as a compliment, I know, but it felt like an insult. I’d never know what I’d look like with a melon-round belly unless I played a pregnant woman, and I’d never been cast as one so I could only figure I didn’t look the part.
When I was pregnant, I only ever looked bloated, like I’d eaten a diet of bacon and beans. Still, Wyatt would see me pulling up from the store and wave me in. “I’ll get the groceries,” he’d say. He’d kiss me on my temple and lift the bag from me because he didn’t think I should carry heavy things, and I wanted to ask him:Well, how’d you think I got the bags in the car?But I wouldn’t say that, because the gesture was intended to be sweet, and half of marriage is learning the right moments to keep your mouth shut.
After our child was born—or unborn, not born, stillborn, dead—Wyatt and I stopped talking. Maybe we figured we’d talk about it later, when it didn’t hurt so much, or maybe it never stopped hurting, or maybe I felt guilty, so guilty, responsible somehow.
I don’t believe in coincidences, really I don’t. Or maybe I do—maybe I do believe in signs, like Halley did, because it means I can hand myself over to the universe. I can stop worrying about whether the choices I’ve made were the right ones. There’s a freedom to that. I walked into my house; I hit power on the TV.Stars and Shadowswas on. Vincent stood at Celeste’s hospital bed. A nurse was covering her with a sheet. Bianca Dupont was comforting him. They were about to kiss, then it cut to commercial, and there she was on the TV in my living room: the Earthshine Girl.
The Earthshine Girl had a gap between her teeth, like I once had. She was submerged in a sudsy bath, her hair cascading past her shoulders,covering her chest. Her hand hung over the lip of the tub; in it, she held an Earthshine canister.
