She told him about the bleeding but tried to play the whole thing down. “Rachel said it was probably fine.” Except the cramps were worse, and her head was fuzzy.
And then in the middle of the night she woke up to find their bedsheets wet. She flicked on the light and saw all the blood, and Nick freaked out, which was good, because itmeant she didn’t have to. He was ready to call an ambulance, but she wouldn’t let him. It was important for things not to be crazier than they already were, so she doubled up on the enormous pads and they headed to the hospital in a cab.
“I think I’m losing it,” is what she told him on the way there, and she didn’t mean the baby until she realized what she’d said and what was happening.
At the hospital, they were only one of many couples who were miscarrying, a situation that was established after an ultrasound. There were a few hopeful seconds in which the technician searched for a heartbeat and Clara held her breath, daring to hope. But there was nothing. The baby was gone. Nick and Clara stared at the monitor as they had done on previous visits, but there was no magic left to see.
They sent her home without pain pills. “Over-the-counter will be fine.” There would be days of bleeding, so the pads would come in handy after all. Clara would be okay, and although she knew this—feeling despondent and at the same time entirely numb at the enormity of what she and Nick had lost—more than anything else she was shattered by the thought of the pain and the blood that she’d have to go through for nothing. She felt like such a body, a bag of flesh, and a useless one at that. It was all so familiar, this feeling. She was bloated with self-pity.
“But sometimes there really is no one to blame,” said Nick as he handed her a tub of ice cream and a spoon.
Clara said, “That feels like a cop-out.”
“I can’t believe how shitty I feel.”
“How shittyyoufeel?”
“Not worse than you,” he said. “I’m not saying that. It’s not the same, but I’m just so sad. And I wasn’t expecting that.It barely seemed real to me, the baby, so it seems strange to be mourning.”
“I know,” she said. She put the ice cream down on the side table.
Nick climbed onto their bed and put his arms around her, and his tenderness made her cry. “I just love you so much,” she said. “And I loved our baby too.” It was the first time she had ever articulated this, because she’d been so afraid of what she stood to lose. A creature with a physical body, even one insubstantial enough to disappear with the flush of a toilet—there had been so much blood, but most of it was hers. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
“I know,” Nick said, turning her face his way and holding her chin. “This is not your fault.” And then, “We’re going to have a baby,” he said, pulling her against his chest, his sweater. It had been washed a million times, but she could still smell the smoke, the smell of him, embedded deep in its fibres. That sweater was older than all of time. “I promise.”
—
The shore was a distant blur, an outline, a suggestion. Clara had thought she was adrift before, but she had no idea. Her baby had been a lifeline, and once she let it go there was nothing to hold her. Even Nick’s arms didn’t count, because he was drifting too. With his age, and her history—there was significant scarring in her uterus, the doctor said, that made her vulnerable—the odds might be working against them. She would never be able to get pregnant naturally, according to the doctor, and Clara hadn’t known how badly she wanted this until they told her it couldn’t be had.
There was one good thing: her contract at the museum was renewed. And Nick agreed that he’d have to quit walkingaround the city imagining he was John Lennon in New York in the 1970s. He’d have to buckle down, get an actual job. Clara had found a fertility clinic with five-star reviews. “This is going to be expensive,” she warned him.
He found a position coordinating banquets at a hotel downtown, something she knew was a compromise, but it came with health benefits and better hours than a bar. She was so grateful and surprised that they’d hired an older guy with very little related experience, but he told her they were struck by his erudition. To the interviewers, who didn’t know any better, Nick sounded like someone who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, and he acknowledged that there were some advantages to emigrating after all.
And so a shore—albeit different from the one they first envisioned—was just perceptible on a faraway horizon.
But Jess was out of reach. The break between them finally arrived after nearly six months of distance—they’d both been so busy, schedules misaligned, they could easily manage to avoid each other in perpetuity. Clara didn’t want to see Jess—it felt too much like pressing on a bruise, and she knew that Jess was avoiding her too. Especially after she’d signed them both up for weekly email updates about fetal development. These started arriving about three weeks after Clara’s miscarriage (“Your baby is the size of a navel orange!”), and it wasn’t until the baby in the email was the size of a large mango that Clara finally told Jess she’d lost the pregnancy. Jess felt terrible, but she was just as upset that Clara had waited ten weeks to tell her the truth. Clara had no explanation for this, words failing her, which had been the problem all along: she’d started writing texts and emails but ended up deleting every one, and she was unableto just pick up the phone and call, because what could she have said that would make any sense?
They met up one last time in the new year, because Jess insisted on taking Clara out for her birthday. Clara wouldn’t have gone, except Nick urged her to, reminding her, “She’s your very best friend,” even though Clara couldn’t summon the sentiment that invested the phrase with any meaning. And this seemed like just one more thing that she was failing at—Clara felt as numb to her friendship as she did to everything, except for the grief and intermittent rage she’d been walking around in for the last five months like a fug.
It wasn’t Jess’s fault, not really, and it was likely that no matter what she did, everything still would have been wrong. Even if Jess hadn’t been pregnant, Clara would likely have pushed her away, because Clara was pushing everyone away.
The restaurant was called Tabala, way out in the east end. Its decor was spare and minimalist, and it was so expensive that the mains didn’t come with sides and Clara could only recognize every other word on the menu. Jess was already seated in a booth when Clara arrived. She was just eight weeks away from her due date, her pregnancy so conspicuous, but it was one more thing they didn’t know how to talk about, along with Clara’s miscarriage, Bella, and those email updates Jess would have continued to receive, which Clara knew all about because she’d never unsubscribed. This week her baby would have been the size of a cantaloupe.
I should never have come, Clara thought, as Jess prattled on about landscaping, cleaning women, and idle gossip about people Clara barely knew. She stared at Jess across the table, barely recognizing her, trying to channel steel so that she wouldn’t crumble. She’d suffered so much lately that itseemed absurd to have to endure this as well—the affront of a relationship that seemed to have been drained of all meaning. She could just walk away. Away from Jess, who managed to get pregnant with ease. Whose body was burgeoning and blossoming and doing all the things that women’s bodies are supposed to do, and who was really here only because she was waiting for Clara to assure her that all this was fair and fine.
“You’re so quiet,” said Jess at last, as close as she could get to acknowledging the situation, possibly finally running out of words to string together. “But listen,” she said, as though Clara had been doing anything else. “I’ve got a proposition.” And Clara just knew, the thing that could make this worse.
“Would you be willing,” asked Jess, “to be this baby’s godmother?” As though such an offer could tip the scales towards balance.
Clara said, “We don’t believe in God.”
“Well, we don’t have to call it that,” said Jess, still looking hopeful, excited. “We could call it anything.”
“A consolation prize?” Clara asked. Jess’s face fell, she looked wounded, which wasn’t fair—shewas the one who had steered this so wrong. And Clara thought of the evil fairy godmother in “Sleeping Beauty,” the one who laid the curse, and she wondered whether that godmother had simply been pushed so close to the edge she couldn’t bear it anymore.
“I have to go,” Clara said, getting up from the table, pulling her coat around her shoulders. She headed for the door, leaving Jess scrambling in her wake, no doubt struggling to get unstuck from the booth, pay the bill, all the while calling after Clara to wait.
But Clara didn’t wait. She imagined that this was the end of it, of them, finally. It felt good, like ripping off a bandage. Clara was free now, wholly unencumbered, lighter than she’dfelt in forever…until she heard Jess calling her name just in front of the subway entrance, waving her arms, Clara’s bag in her hand. Clara had left her bag, with her wallet, her keys, and everything else, at the table. Jess’s entire body heaved as she struggled to recover her breath, falling against a brick wall for support, a disturbing sight for passersby. She was just barely able to form the words, “This is all so hard, I know.”
