The doctor was a man named Milo Brambilla, and when he arrived a few minutes later, he asked us many of the same questions the nurse had asked, then invited Laura to lie down. Back then there were no ultrasound machines, at least not in rural hospitals like Paolo Merlo, so the doctor took measurements of Laura’s stomach, then spent several minutes pressing a stethoscope into it. Finally, he looked at me and said, “Non c’è battito cardiaco.”
I turned to Laura, terrified to translate what he’d said, but she must have read it in my eyes.
“It’s bad?” she said.
I nodded. “I’m so sorry. There’s no heartbeat.”
God, did she wail then. It was a full-bodied scream that ripped its way out of her throat, past her lips, and into the tiny room. I could feel the sound in my chest, and it made me want to cover my ears, to crawl under her hospital bed and hide. I forced myself to wrap my arms around her, to stroke her head, to whisperI’m so sorryover and over and over.
“I want Bobby,” she cried, and I promised that he would be there soon, and the miracle was that, not two seconds later, he came running down the hallway, calling her name.
Paul was there, too, but he hung back. I told Bobby what had happened, and he took my place beside Laura, pulling her into his chest in a bear hug so big I thought he might break her.
I wanted to give them time alone, but Bobby’s Italian was almost as bad as Laura’s, and they needed someone to translate the doctor’s instructions.
“Do you want to do it?” I asked Paul, who had a better vocabulary than I did, if not a better grasp on grammar.
He shook his head and said it looked like I had things under control.
Together with the doctor, I walked Laura and Bobby through their options. The doctor recommended Laura remain at the hospital overnight. She was technically in labor, and the bleeding would continue until she had passed not only the fetus but also the placenta. He warned them that, at fifteen weeks, most women needed a D&C.
I started to explain the surgical procedure, but Bobby stopped me. “She had one before.”
“Right,” I said, “of course.”
“Ask him if he thinks she needs to go to Naples for that,” said Bobby, but it was an awkward question to pose because it insinuated that we believed the man standing in front of us might not be up to the task.
“Her husband,” I translated, “wants to know if she should travel to the American hospital in Naples for the procedure.”
“Perché mai dovrebbero volerlo?” the doctor asked.
“He wants to know why you’d want to,” I said to Bobby softly, and he seemed to get that this was delicate.
“Maybe talk to Doc Callaway at the clinic tomorrow,” said Paul. “See what he says.”
Paul and I remained at the hospital for another quarter of an hour. When we left we promised to bring Laura and Bobby back some dinner and a change of clothes. Bobby gave us his house key, and we hugged them both, and it was only after we got out of the building and into the parking lot that I began to bawl.
93.
DOC CALLAWAY RECOMMENDEDthat Laura fly to Naples for her D&C. Nothing against the local medical establishment, he said, but the obstetrics team at the Naval Hospital in Agnano did these things all the time. Laura wasn’t in a great position to make clearheaded decisions, so it was Bobby who ultimately decided to put her on the next MAC flight to Naples.
I don’t know who told Mary Lou what was going on with Laura, but as soon as she learned about the miscarriage, she activated the phone tree, and I got a good look at the way these navy wives took care of one another in times of trouble.
It was Barb Norris who knocked on my door, a couple of hours after Laura and Bobby had left for Olbia, to tell me that Mary Lou was organizing meals and she wanted a group of us to go over to the apartment at nine o’clock the following morning and clean the place from top to bottom. “Maybe put away some of the baby stuff, if there is any?” Barb said, and I thought of the Moses basket Laura had bought on a recent trip to Castelsardo.
I got to the apartment, on the other side of town, a little early because I had the key and I figured Laura might appreciate me giving the place a once-over before Mary Lou arrived. I wandered the rooms looking for cast-off underwear or any other embarrassing detritus, but Laura was a much better housekeeper than I was.
In the living room was a small table crowded with framed photographs, and I stood before it for a long time, studying the life Laura and Bobby had built together. There were photos of their wedding and what I assumed was their honeymoon, which she had told me was in the Poconos, but there were also early photos of them dating—one taken at an arcade and another in a dinghy on what looked like a hot summer day. I was struck by a photograph she’d framed of the two of them in Munich. They were standingin Marienplatz, and I realized with a jolt that I was the one who had taken the picture. They’d been so happy that night, having just made their big announcement.
No one can ever really know what’s going on in another person’s marriage, but I suspected Laura and Bobby’s marriage was a good one. Certainly, when she’d learned the baby was gone, Bobby was all she had wanted. I tried to recall a time when I’d wanted Paul in that same primal way, and I couldn’t do it, which made me wonder what I was doing wrong. I hadn’t even gotten around to framing our wedding photographs. They lived in the same paper sleeve they’d been in when my aunt picked them up at the drugstore, and only now did it occur to me that I could at the very least put them in an album.
I grabbed a sponge and a can of Vim from under the kitchen sink and headed to the bathroom, where I was up to my elbows in bath suds when I heard a familiar voice behind me. “I thought we said nine?”
I turned to find Mary Lou leaning on the doorframe. She was wearing jeans and an old USC T-shirt, and she’d tied her hair back in a bandanna, which made her look a little younger and a lot less intimidating.
“Oh, hey,” I said. “You did. I just had some time to kill, so I figured I’d get started.”
Mary Lou didn’t acknowledge what I’d said, just nodded in the direction of Laura’s shower curtain. “That thing could stand to be bleached. When you get a sec, will you take it down?”
