A few seconds passed, then I heard the slide of a bolt. I opened the door a crack and slid inside. The room was tiny—just a toilet and a small sink, with barely enough room for one person, let alone two. Laura was on the toilet, her gingham dress pulled up around her waist. All of that makeup, which had looked so cute a few minutes ago, was smeared across her face, and as I knelt before her, I saw what she must have seen when she’d sat down—the unmistakable smear of rust in her otherwise white underwear.
“I see,” I said, softly. “Okay.”
“I’m losing the baby,” she sobbed.
“We don’t know that,” I said in a singsong voice I didn’t recognize. “Don’t lots of women have spotting?”
“This isn’t fucking spotting,” she said.
I had never heard Laura say the wordfuck. Not once in the ten months I’d known her.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to pull up your pants, and we’re going to get to the hospital as quick as we can. I’m sure there’s something they can do.”
“You mean the clinic?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re going to go to a real hospital for this.”
“But Mary Lou says—”
“Mary Lou doesn’t know everything,” I said, and Laura looked at me like I’d just called Jesus a crank.
I put my hands on her knees and looked straight into her eyes. “Laura, I want you to think hard about who you want dealing with this. A navy doctor who’s delivered zero babies? Or an Italian doctor who’s delivered every baby on this island?”
A tear slipped down her cheek. “The Italian doctor.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We looked for the guys the whole way down the Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, but we didn’t see them. At the steps where we’d been sitting a few minutes earlier, I got the attention of a matronly woman wearing a witch’s hat. “Our husbands will be looking for us,” I said in Italian. “Here. In a few minutes. They’re American, and one looks like this.” I waved in the general direction of Laura and her Raggedy Ann getup. “Tell them we went to the hospital. Tell them there’s a problem with the baby.”
The woman craned her neck, looking behind us. I think she was looking for a baby, but then she saw the way Laura was cradling her stomach and understood. “Glielo dirò,” she said, then to Laura she added, “E pregherò per te.”
“What did she say?” Laura asked as I led her toward the Piazza Comando, where I hoped we’d be able to hail a taxi.
“She said she’s praying for you.”
92.
OSPEDALE PAOLO MERLOwas a couple of small buildings that sat at a busy intersection at the top of the hill. It was hard to tell where the emergency room entrance was, or if there was an emergency room entrance, so I hoped that the taxi driver was depositing us in the right place. When the car came to a stop, I threw several thousand lire at him, then ran around to Laura’s side of the car and helped her out.
“You okay?” I asked, but it was a stupid question because she looked about as far from okay as it was possible to get. She was crying again, but the truth was she’d never really stopped.
“Let me get this for you,” I said, and removed her stupid red wig. Underneath all that red yarn, her brown hair was tied back into a tight ponytail, which she’d bobby-pinned to her head. I pulled a few of the bobby pins free, to make her look a little more like herself, but until I got my hands on a wet washcloth, there was nothing I could do about the face paint.
At reception, I told the woman behind the desk that Laura was having a miscarriage. Except I didn’t know the word formiscarriage, so I said, “Penso che la sua gravidanza stia finendo,” which translated to something likeI think her pregnancy is ending.
I was thankful for once that Laura’s Italian was so terrible.
The woman asked for Laura’s ID, and Laura opened her wallet, then seemed to lose steam on the assignment. I took the wallet from her, shuffling through her cash and coins until I found what we were looking for. “Ecco.”
“Lei è americana?” the woman asked, and I confirmed that this was the case, then steered Laura toward the empty waiting room.
We had waited only a few minutes when a triage nurse came to get us. I could watch her taking in Laura’s clownish appearance. “Eravamo al Carnevale,” I explained.
She led us to an examination room and began peppering Laura withquestions, which I translated. I did okay with that, but even after all my lessons, there were plenty of words I didn’t know.Trimester, due date, spotting, blood.When you don’t have the precise word you need, you say things the long way. So, instead of describing Laura’s cramps, I said she had pains in her stomach. Instead of describing the bleeding, I said there was red in her underwear.
While we waited for the doctor, I wet some paper towels and dabbed at Laura’s face. The makeup left a waxy residue under her eyes, around the rim of her nostrils, and in the creases of her mouth. Still, with her own skin showing, she looked better prepared to deal with whatever was coming next.
At one point, on my way to the restroom, I ran into Bianca. In my panic, I had forgotten she worked at the hospital. She asked what I was doing there, and when I told her, she gave me a sympathetic hug and said she’d try to get the doctor to hurry.
