“What do you think?” Dr. K. asked. I think I must have jumped when he finally started talking. For a moment, I’d forgotten him… forgotten everything. I was so wrapped up in the view.
“I’ve never seen the city like this,” I told him. “It’s amazing.”
He leaned against the door and smiled. “I think you’d have to pay a pretty hefty rent in one of the Rittenhouse Square high-rises to get a view like this,” he said.
I turned toward the river again, feeling the wind blow cool on my face. The air tasted delicious. All day long— or at least since Dr. Patel had given me the pamphlet listing Common Complaints of the First Trimester— I’d noticed that I could smell everything, and that most of what I could smell made me feel sick. Car exhaust… a whiff of dog crap from a trash can… gasoline… even things I normally enjoyed, like the scent of coffee wafting out of the Starbucks on South Street came to me at ten times their normal intensity. But up here the air smelled like nothing, as if it had been specially filtered for me. Well, me and whatever rich balcony-lined-penthouse-dwellers were lucky enough to have regular access.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Dr. K. sat down, cross-legged, and motioned for me to join him. Being careful not to sit on his lab coat, I did.
“Do you feel like talking about it?”
I shot him a quick sideways glance. “Do you want to listen?”
He looked embarrassed. “I don’t mean to pry I know it’s not any of my business”
“Oh, no, no, it’s not that. I just don’t want to bore you.” I sighed. “It’s the oldest story in the world, I guess. Girl meets boy, girl loves boy, girl dumps boy for reasons she still doesn’t really understand, boy’s father dies, girl goes to try to comfort him, girl winds up pregnant and alone.”
“Ah,” he said carefully.
I rolled my eyes at him. “What, you thought it was someone else?”
He didn’t say anything, but in reflected light from the streets below, I thought he looked abashed. I hunkered around until I was sitting facing him.
“No, c’mon, really. You thought I found another guy that fast? Please,” I snorted. “Give me a little less credit.”
“I guess I thought… well, I guess I really hadn’t thought about it.”
“Well, believe me, it takes a lot longer than a few months before I meet someone who likes me, and who wants to see me naked, and before I get comfortable enough to actually let them.” I looked at him sideways again. What if he thought I was flirting? “Just FYI,” I added lamely.
“I’ll file that away,” he said somberly. He seemed so serious, I had to laugh.
“Tell me something… how do people know when you’re kidding? Because you always sort of sound the same way.”
“Which is what? Nerdy?” He spent a long time saying the word nerdy, which, of course, made him sound… a little nerdy.
“Not exactly. Just serious all the time.”
“Well, I’m not.” He actually appeared to be offended. “I actually have a very fine sense of humor.”
“Which I’m just somehow managing to completely miss,” I teased.
“Well, considering that the handful of times we’ve spoken, you’ve been having some extravagant life crisis, I haven’t been at my funniest.”
Now he was definitely sounding offended.
“Point taken,” I said. “I’m sure you’re very funny.”
He looked at me suspiciously, thick brows furrowed. “How do you know?”
“Because you said you were. People who are funny know that they’re funny. People who aren’t funny will say, ‘My friends say I’ve got a great sense of humor.’ Or ‘My mother says I’ve got a great sense of humor.’ That’s when you know you’re in trouble.”
“Oh,” he said. “So if you were to describe yourself, you’d say you were funny?” “No,” I sighed, looking out at the night sky. “At this point, I’d say that I was fucked.”
We sat in silence for a minute. I watched the skaters turn.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?” he finally asked. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to”
“No, no. I don’t mind. I’ve only figured a few things out, really. I know that I’m going to keep it, even though it’s probably not the most practical thing, and I know I’m going to cut back my schedule when the baby comes. Oh, and I know I’m going to maybe start looking for a new place to live, and see if my sister will be my birth coach.”
Laid out like that, like a losing hand of cards fanned out on a table, it didn’t seem like much.
“What about Bruce?” he asked.
“See, that’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,” I said. “We haven’t talked in weeks, and he’s seeing someone else.”
“Seriously?” “Seriously enough for him to tell me about it. And to write about it.”
The doctor considered this. “Well, that might not mean anything. He might just be trying to get back at you… or make you jealous.”
“Yeah, well, it’s working.”
“But a baby… well, that changes everything.”
“Oh, you read that pamphlet, too?” I hugged my knees into my chest. “After we broke up… after his father died, when I felt so miserable, and I wanted him back, and all, my friends kept telling me, ‘You broke up with him, and you must have done it for a reason.’ And I know that it’s true. I think I did know, deep down, that we probably weren’t supposed to be, you know, together for the rest of our lives. And it was probably my fault I mean, I’ve got this whole theory about my father, and my parents, and why I don’t trust love. So I think that maybe even if he was perfect… or, you know, not perfect, but a good fit for me… that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to see it, or I’d have tried to talk myself out of it. Or whatever.”
“Or maybe he wasn’t the right guy for you. They always taught us in medical school, when you hear hoofbeats…”
“… don’t look for zebras.”
He grinned at me. “They said that in your medical school, too?”
I shook my head. “No. My father was a doctor. He used to say that all the time. But I don’t know. I think this might actually be a zebra. I mean, I know how much I miss him, and how awful I felt when I found out he had somebody else, and I think that I blew it… that he was actually supposed to have been the love of my life, my husband.” I swallowed hard, my throat closing around that word. “But now…”
“Now what?”
“I miss him all the time.” I shook my head, disgusted at my own mopiness. “It’s like being haunted or something. And I don’t have the luxury of being haunted right now. I need to think about myself, and the baby, and how I’m going to plan and get ready.”
I looked at him. He’d taken off his glasses and was watching me intently.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
He nodded.
“I need a male perspective. Do you have any children?”
“None that I… I mean, no.”
“See, you were going to say, ‘None that I know of,’ right?”
“I was, but I stopped myself,” he said. “Well, almost.”
“Okay. So no kids. How would you feel, if you’d been with someone, and then you weren’t with her, and she came to you and said, ‘Guess what? I’m having your baby!’ Would you even want to know?”
“If it were me,” he said, thoughtfully. “Well, yes. If it were me I’d want to know. I would want to be a part of the child’s life.”
“Even if you weren’t with the mother anymore?”
“I think children deserve to have two parents involved with them, and who they become, even if the parents live apart. It’s hard enough to grow up in this world. I think kids need all the help they can get.”
That, of course, was not what I’d wanted to hear. What I’d wanted to hear was, You can do this, Cannie! You can go it alone! If I was going to be apart from Bruce— and there was ample evidence that I would— I wanted every assurance that a single parent was a fine and proper thing to be. “So you think I should tell him.”
“If it were me,” he said thoughtfully, “I would want to be told. And no matter what you do, or what he wants, you’re still the one who ultimately gets to decide. What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“He and his mother sue me for custody and try to get the baby for themselves?”
“Wasn’t that on Oprah?” he asked.
“Sally Jessy,” I said. It was getting colder. I pulled the lab coat tight around me.
“Do you know who you remind me of?” he asked.
“If you say Janeane Garofalo, I’ll jump,” I warned him. I was forever getting Janeane Garofalo.
“No,” he said.
“Your mother?” I asked.
“Not my mother.”
“That guy on Jerry Springer who was so fat that the paramedics had to cut a hole in his house to get him out of it?”
He was smiling and trying not to. “Be serious!” he scolded me.
“Okay. Who?”
“My sister.”
“Oh.” I thought about it for a minute. “Is she…” And then I didn’t know what to say. Is she fat? Is she funny? Did she get knocked up by her ex-boyfriend?
“She looked a little bit like you,” he said. He reached out, his fingertip almost brushing my face. “She had cheeks like yours, and a smile like yours.”
I asked the first thing I could think of. “Was she older or younger?”
“She was older,” he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead. “She died when I was nine.”
“Oh.”
“A lot of my patients when they meet me want to know why I got into this line of medicine. I mean, there’s no obvious connection. I’m not a woman, I’ve never had a weight problem…”
“Oh, sure. Rub it in,” I said. “So your sister was… heavy?”
“No, not really. But it made her crazy.” I could only see the side of his face as he smiled. “She was always on these diets… hard-boiled eggs one week, watermelon the next.”
“Did she, um, have an eating disorder?”
“No. Just neuroses about food. She was in a car accident… that’s how she died. I remember my parents were at the hospital, and nobody would tell me for the longest time what was going on. Finally my aunt, my mother’s sister, came to my room and said that Katie was in Heaven, and that I shouldn’t be sad, because Heaven was a wonderful place where you got to do all your favorite things. I used to think that heaven was a place full of Devil Dogs and ice cream and bacon and waffles… all the things that Katie wanted to eat, and would never let herself have.” He turned to face me. “Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
“No. No, actually, that’s kind of how I imagine Heaven myself.” I felt terrible as soon as I’d said it. What if he thought that I was making fun of his poor dead sister?
“You’re Jewish, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I am, too. I mean, I’m half. My father was. But we weren’t raised as anything.” He looked at me curiously. “Do Jews believe in heaven?”
“No… not technically.” I groped for my Hebrew school lessons. “The deal is, you die, and then it’s just… like sleep, I think. There’s no real idea of an afterlife. Just sleep. And then the Messiah comes, and everyone gets to live again.”
“Live in the bodies they had when they were alive?”
“I don’t know. I personally intend to lobby for Heidi Klum’s.”
He laughed a little bit. “Would you…” He turned to face me. “You’re cold.”
I had been shivering a little bit. “No, I’m okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No, it’s fine! I actually like hearing about other people’s, um, lives.” I had almost said “problems,” but I’d caught myself just in time. “This was good.”
But he was already on his feet and three long-legged strides ahead of me, almost to the door. “We should get you inside,” he was muttering. He held the door open. I stepped into the stairwell, but didn’t move, so that when he shut the door he was standing very close to me.
“You were going to ask me something,” I said. “Tell me what it was.”
Now it was his turn to look flustered. “I… um… the, uh, pregnancy nutrition classes, I think. I was going to ask you if you’d consider signing up for one of those.”
I knew that wasn’t it. And I even had a faint inkling that it might have been something completely different. But I didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d just had a brief, fleeting thought of asking me… something… because he’d been talking about his sister and he felt vulnerable. Or maybe he felt sorry for me. Or maybe I was completely wrong. After the whole Steve debacle, and now with Bruce, I wasn’t feeling very trusting of my instincts.
“What time do they meet?” I asked.
“I’ll check,” he said, and I followed him down the stairs.
THIRTEEN
After much deliberation and about ten rough drafts, I composed, and mailed, Bruce a letter.
Bruce,
There is no way to sugar-coat this, so I’ll just tell you straight out that I am pregnant. It happened the last time we were together, and I’ve decided to keep the baby. I am due on June 15.
This is my decision, and I made it carefully. I wanted to let you know because I want it to be your choice to what extent you are involved in this child’s life.
I am not telling you what to do, or asking for anything. I have made my choices, and you will have to make yours. If you want to spend time with the baby, I will try my best to make that work out. If you don’t, I understand.
I’m sorry that this happened. I know it isn’t what you need in your life right now. But I decided that this was something you deserved to know about, so you can make the choices you think are right. The only thing I ask is that you please not write about this. I don’t care if you talk about me, but there’s someone else at stake now.
Take care,
Cannie
I wrote my telephone number, in case he’d forgotten, and mailed it off.
There was so much more that I wanted to write, like that I still pined for him. That I still had daydreams of him coming back to me, of us living together: me and Bruce, and the baby. That I was scared a lot of the time, and furious at him some of the time I wasn’t scared, or so racked with love and longing and yearning that I was afraid to let myself even think his name, for fear of what I’d do, and that as much as I filled my days with things to do, with plans and lists, with painting the second bedroom a shade of yellow called Lemonade Stand and assembling the dresser I bought from Ikea, too often, I’d still find myself thinking about how much I wanted him back.
But I wrote none of those things.
I remembered when I was a senior in high school and how hard it was to wait for colleges to send out their letters and say whether they were taking you or leaving you. Trust me, waiting for the father of your unborn child to get back to you as to whether or not he’s willing to be involved with you, or the baby, is a lot worse. For three days I checked my phone at home obsessively. For a week I drove home at lunchtime to check my mailbox, cursing myself for not having sent the letter via registered mail, so I’d at least know that he’d received it.