“Thank you, Frances,” she says. “It sounds delicious. I’ll eat it at my break, I promise.” Impulsively, she reaches her arms out, and Frances steps into them, and they hug. “You really are the World’s Best Grandma,” Kristie tells her. “You really are.”
Frances beams.
Later, at home, Kristie boils some pasta and eats it with a little bit of salt and butter, sitting cross-legged on the blue denim couch. It has been a long day. A very long day. “I know you need more vegetables,” she tells her kumquat. “I’m sorry. Today was a rough one. Tomorrow it’s one hundred percent spinach and broccoli, I promise.” For the first time since he left, Danny’s absence takes on the feel of a background throb rather than an all-out screaming pain. She watches a little TV, not really paying attention to it, and then crawls into bed.
“Good night, kumquat,” she says. She lays her hand on her stomach.
Just before she drifts off, her phone buzzes. She jerks awake—Danny? Please, please. Let it be Danny.
Hey. It’s Louisa. You should come to dinner at the house. Bring Danny. How’s the tenth?
Kristie stares at the phone for a long time, her heart pitter-patting. She doesn’t know how to respond. She turns off her phone and goes to sleep.
She lets two days go by. In the middle of the night on the second night, she wakes. Her stomach is cramping something awful. She lies in bed for a few minutes, gripping her midsection, hoping the feeling is a dream and that it will go away.
It gets worse.
No, she thinks. No no no no no.
She doesn’t even know where the nearest hospital is. She knows she’s supposed to be setting up prenatal care, but so far all she’s done is take the giant vitamins she bought at Walgreens. She’s been planning to figure out how to go about the rest of it soon, on her next day off, as soon as she has the money.
She drags herself to the bathroom and is horrified to see that there’s blood in her underwear, blood on the toilet paper after she wipes. No no no no no. She sits for a minute staring at her phone, but she doesn’t sit for too long, because she doesn’t know how long she has. She presses the call button.
She says, “Danny. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with the baby. There’s blood. Danny, I need help.”
For the rest of her life Kristie will remember how everything Danny does at that point is perfect.Perfect.He doesn’t say, What baby? He doesn’t say, I thought we broke up. He doesn’t say, I’m with another woman, a more honest, better woman. He sounds like his normal calm self, like someone who wasn’t woken out of a deep sleep, like someone who isn’t surprised and bewildered. He says, “I’ll be right there.” He says, “Kristie, stay where you are. Don’t move. Don’t hang up. Stay on the phone with me, I’ll talk to you while I’m driving.” He says, “I’m coming, Kristie.”
While they are waiting for the doctor in one of the partitioned-off emergency room cubicles, Kristie thinks about the story Claire told her about the gorilla dragging the kid through the pen at thezoo. She never found out what happened, and she needs to know. She asks Danny to google it. She sees a range of emotions cross Danny’s face as he watches the video. At the end he frowns.
“What happened?” she asks. “What, Danny? What happened? Did that little boy die? Please tell me he didn’t die.” This suddenly seems like the most important thing in the world. “Please, Danny.”
“He didn’t die.” He shakes his head. “The boy didn’t die. Thegorilladied. They had to shoot the gorilla to get the boy away safely.” He sounds immeasurably sad about this, and looking at the downward pull of his mouth, his clouded expression, Kristie thinks:I love this man.
“But what if the gorilla didn’t mean any harm? What if he was trying to help the boy?”
“I don’t know,” says Danny. He squeezes her hand. “I guess they couldn’t take that chance.”
When they get home it’s almost morning. The black nighttime sky, turning now to navy blue, with lighter blue around the edges, is going to give way any minute now to stripes of light. At this hour most of the other cars on the road are pickups, many with lobster traps in the back.
The lobsterman’s truck is not in the driveway. Danny leads Kristie upstairs and tucks her into bed. She can hear him rattling around in the kitchen as she drifts in and out of sleep. At one point she wakes up and discovers a cup of hot tea on the nightstand by her bed. She doesn’t even like tea! But the gesture is so kind, so without judgment or condemnation, soDanny-like,that her eyes, which she thought were empty, all cried out, fill up once again. She’s been crying all night. She cried while they waited in the emergency room. She cried her way through the exam, and she couldn’t stop crying when the doctor told her that the cause of her bleeding was a “subchorionic hematoma.” (She’d had Danny write this down so she wouldn’t forget.) “Bleeding behind a portion of the developing placenta,”the doctor had explained. “Plenty of womenwith a subchorionic hematoma in the first trimester go on to have a perfectly normal pregnancy,” she’d added, and Kristie had cried some more, this time tears of happiness. If the bleeding stopped, which the doctor had every reason to believe it would, the rest of Kristie’s prenatal care could be routine.
(It’s time, she realizes, to acquire a prenatal routine.)
She cried oceans and rivers and creeks and streams when the tech hooked up the ultrasound machine and squirted the cold gel on her belly and showed her the little blob that is her baby. Of course she cried when she heard the heartbeat, which was, after all, sure and strong. She sits up and takes a sip of the tea. Danny has added milk and a little bit of sugar and it turns out Kristiedoeslike tea: it turns out this mug of tea is the best thing she’s ever tasted. The tea warms her from the inside out. She starts to cry, because the tea is so wonderful.
Danny whips his head around the doorway and says, “What is it? Why are you crying? Does something hurt again?”
She shakes her head and holds her tea and more tears leak out of her eyes. “I’m just so happy you’re here, Danny. I just—it’s just—” She hesitates, and the weight of all the bad years and the mistakes and the regrets lifts right off her shoulders. “It’s just that things like this don’t happen to me.”
He is drying his hands on a dish towel; she bets he went to town on the dirty dishes she’d left in the sink. “Things like what?”
“Things like this. Like you. Like this tea.” She points to her belly. “Like thisbaby.Like everything looking like it’s going to turn out okay.” Of course there are still so many obstacles. There is money, for instance. There is the bill she’s going to get from the emergency room, and all the other bills that are going to come on top of that, bill after bill after bill, all piled on top of her mother’s bills. There is the question of whether Danny is here for the moment or for the long haul.
He takes her hand in both of his and examines it. Then he wrapshis fingers tightly around hers. “Maybe things like this didn’t used to happen to you,” he says. “But now they do. I’m not leaving you, Kristie. We’re going to do this together.”
Her eyelids are so heavy. “I have to call Diana,” she says. The doctor told her to take it easy for a couple of days. “I have to tell her I can’t work tomorrow.”
“Not just tomorrow. You’re not going back to work there,” says Danny. “No way, no how. You’re not doing a job that requires any heavy lifting. Not withmybaby in there.” He grins to show her he doesn’t mean that in a misogynistic way and puts his hand on her belly. “I’m making good money from Gil right now, and with what the Fitzgeralds pay me on top of that, I can cover us, Kristie. For a while anyway.”
