“Leave you alone?” I repeated. “Leave you alone? See, this is the theme you keep coming back to, and I don’t understand it. I’m not doing anything to either one of you. I live in Philadelphia, for heaven’s sake”
And then I saw it. Something in her face, and I knew what it was.
“He’s still talking about me, right?” I asked.
She opened her mouth to say something. I decided I didn’t want to stay around and hear it. I was suddenly enormously tired. I ached for sleep, for home, for my bed.
“He doesn’t,” she began.
“I don’t have time for this,” I told her, cutting her off. “I’ve got a life.” I tried to walk past her, but she was standing right by the sink, not giving me the room to pass.
“Move,” I said shortly.
“No,” she said. “No, you listen to me!” She put her hands on my shoulders, trying to get me to hold still, shoving me slightly. One minute I was up, trying to get past her, and the next minute my foot slipped on a puddle of water. My ankle buckled, turning underneath me. And I fell sideways, slamming my belly into the hard edge of the sink.
Bright pain flared, and I was lying on my back, lying on the floor, my ankle twisted at an angle I knew couldn’t mean anything good, and she was standing above me, panting like an animal, her cheeks flushed hectic red.
I sat up, putting both palms flat on the floor, and grabbed for the sink, when I felt a sudden tearing cramp. When I looked down and saw that I was bleeding. Not a lot, but… well, blood is not something you want to see anywhere below the belt when you’re only halfway through month seven.
Somehow I yanked myself to my feet. My ankle hurt so badly I felt sick, and I could feel blood trickling down my leg.
I stared at her. She stared back, following my gaze down to where the blood was falling in thick drips. Then she clapped one hand over her mouth, turned, and ran.
Things were starting to go fuzzy around the edges, and waves of pain were making their way through my belly. I’d read about this. I knew what it meant, and I knew that it was too early, that I was in trouble. “Help,” I tried to say, but there was no one there to hear. “Help…,” I said again, and then the world went gray, then black.
PART FIVE
Joy
EIGHTEEN
When I opened my eyes, I was underwater. In a swimming pool? The lake at summer camp? The ocean? I wasn’t sure. I could see the light above me, filtered through the water, and I could feel the pull of what was underneath me, the dark depths I couldn’t make out.
I’d spent most of my life in the water swimming with my mother, but it was my father who’d taught me how, when I was little. He’d flip a silver dollar into the water, and I’d follow it down, learning how to hold my breath, how to go deeper than I thought I could, how to propel myself back to the top. “Sink or swim,” my father would tell me when I’d come up empty-handed and sputtering and complaining that I couldn’t, that the water was too cold or too deep. Sink or swim. And I’d go back into the water. I wanted the silver dollar, but, more than that, I wanted to please him.
My father. Was he here? I turned around frantically, paddling, trying to flip myself up toward where I thought the light was coming from. But I was getting dizzy. I was getting all turned around. And it was hard to keep paddling, hard to stay afloat, and I could feel the bottom of the ocean tugging at me, and I thought how nice it would be just to stop, not to move, to let myself float to the bottom, to sink into the soft silt of a thousand seashells ground down fine, to let myself sleep…
Sink or swim. Live or die.
I heard a voice, coming from the surface.
What is your name?
Leave me alone, I thought. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I could feel the darkness pulling me, and I craved it.
What is your name?
I opened my eyes, squinting in the bright white light.
Cannie, I muttered. I’m Cannie, now leave me alone.
Stay with us, Cannie, said the voice. I shook my head. I didn’t want to be here, wherever here was. I wanted to be back in the water, where I was invisible, where I was free. I wanted to go swimming again. I shut my eyes. The silver dollar flashed and glittered in the sunlight, arcing through the air, plunging into the water, and I followed it back down.
I closed my eyes again and saw my bed. Not my bed in Philadelphia, with its soothing blue comforter and bright, pretty pillows, but my bed from when I was a little girl— narrow, neatly made, with its red and brown paisley spread tucked tight around it and a spill of hard-cover books shoved underneath. I blinked and saw the girl on the bed, a sturdy, sober-faced girl with green eyes and brown hair in a ponytail that spilled over her shoulders. She was lying on her side, a book spread open before her. Me? I wondered. My daughter? I couldn’t be sure.
I remembered that bed— how it had been my refuge as a little girl, how it had been the one place I felt safe as a teenager, the place my father would never come. I remember spending hours there on weekends, sitting cross-legged with a friend on the other side of the bed, with the telephone and a melting pint of ice cream between us, talking about boys, about school, about the future, and how our lives would be, and I wanted to go back there, wanted to go back so badly, before things went wrong, before my father’s departure and Bruce’s betrayal, before I knew how it all turned out.
I looked down, and the girl on the bed looked up from her book, up at me, and her eyes were wide and clear.
I looked at the girl, and she smiled at me. Mom, she said.
Cannie?
I groaned as if waking from the most delicious dream and slitted my eyes open again.
Squeeze my hand if you can hear this, Cannie.
I squeezed weakly. I could hear voices burbling above me, heard something about blood type, something else about fetal monitor. Maybe this was the dream, and the girl on the bed was real? Or the water? Maybe I really had gone swimming, maybe I’d swum out too far, gotten tired, maybe I was drowning right now, and the picture of my bed was just a little something my brain had whipped up by way of last-minute entertainment.
Cannie? said the voice again, sounding almost frantic. Stay with us!
But I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be back in the bed.
The third time I closed my eyes I saw my father. I was back in his office in California, sitting up straight on his white examining table. I could feel the weight of diamonds on my finger, in my ears. I could feel the weight of his gaze upon me— warm and full of love, like I remembered it from twenty years ago. He was sitting across from me, in his white doctor’s coat, smiling at me. Tell me how you’ve been, he says. Tell me how you turned out.
I’m going to have a baby, I told him, and he nodded. Cannie, that’s wonderful!
I’m a newspaper reporter. I wrote a movie, I told him. I have friends. A dog. I live in the city.
My father smiled. I’m so proud of you.
I reached for him and he took my hand and held it. Why didn’t you say so before? I asked. It would have changed everything, if I’d just known you cared
He smiled at me, looking puzzled, like I’d stopped speaking English, or like he’d stopped understanding it. And when he took his hands away I opened mine and found a silver dollar in my palm. It’s yours, he said. You found it. You always did. You always could.
But even as he spoke he was turning away.
I want to ask you something, I said. He was at the door, like I remembered, his hand on the knob, but this time he turned and looked at me.
I stared at him, feeling my throat go dry, saying nothing.
How could you? is what I thought. How could you leave your own children? Lucy was just fifteen, and Josh was only nine. How could you do that; how could you walk away?
Tears slid down my face. My father walked back to me. He pulled a carefully folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, where he always kept them. It smelled like the cologne he always wore, like lemons, and the starch the Chinese laundry place put in, like they always did. Very carefully, my father bent down and wiped away my tears.
Then there was the darkness below me again, and the light above.
Sink or swim, I thought ruefully. And what if I wanted to sink? What was there to keep me afloat?
I thought of my father’s hand on my cheek, and I thought of the steady green-eyed gaze of the girl on the bed. I thought about what it felt to take a warm shower after a long bike ride, to slip into the ocean on a hot summer day. I thought about the taste of the tiny strawberries Maxi and I had found at the farmer’s market. I thought about my friends, and Nifkin. I thought about my own bed, lined with flannel sheets softened from many trips through the dryer, with a book on the pillow and Nifkin perched beside me. And I thought for a minute about Bruce… not about Bruce specifically, but the feeling of falling in love, of being loved, of being worthy. Treasured, I heard Maxi say.
So okay, I thought. Fine. I’ll swim. For myself, and for my daughter. For all the things I love, and everyone who loves me.
When I woke up again I heard voices.
“That doesn’t look right,” said one. “Are you sure it’s hanging the right way?”
My mother, I thought. Who else?
“What’s this yellow stuff?” demanded another voice— young, female, crabby. Lucy. “Probably pudding.”
“It’s not pudding,” I heard in a raspy growl. Tanya.
Then: “Lucy! Get your finger out of your sister’s lunch!”
“She’s not going to eat it,” Lucy said sulkily.
“I don’t know why they even brought food,” Tanya rumbled.
“Find some ginger ale,” said my mother. “And some ice cubes. They said she can have ice cubes when she wakes up.”
My mother leaned close. I could smell her— a combination of Chloe and sunscreen and Pert shampoo. “Cannie?” she murmured. I opened my eyes— for real this time— and saw that I wasn’t underwater, or in my old bedroom, or in my father’s office. I was in a hospital, in a bed. There was an IV taped to the back of my hand, a plastic bracelet with my name on it around my wrist, a semicircle of machines beeping and chirping around me. I lifted my head and saw down to my toes— no belly looming up between my face and my feet.
“Baby,” I said. My voice sounded strange and squeaky. Someone stepped out of the shadows. Bruce.
“Hey, Cannie,” he said, sounding sheepish, looking wretched, and horribly ashamed.
I waved him away with the hand that didn’t have a needle stuck in it. “Not you,” I said. “My baby.”
“I’ll get the doctor,” said my mother.
“No, let me,” said Tanya. The two of them looked at each other, then hustled out of the room as if by mutual agreement. Lucy shot me a quick unreadable look and dashed out behind them. Which left just me and Bruce.
“What happened?” I asked.
Bruce swallowed hard. “I think maybe the doctor better tell you that.”
Now I was starting to remember— the airport, the bathroom, his new girlfriend. Falling. And then blood.
I tried to sit up. Hands eased me back onto the bed.
“What happened?” I demanded, my voice spiraling toward hysteria. “Where am I? Where’s my baby? What happened?”
A face leaned into my line of sight— a doctor, no doubt, in a white coat with the obligatory stethoscope and plastic name tag.
“I see you’re awake!” he said heartily. I scowled at him. “Tell me your name,” he said.
I took a deep breath, suddenly aware that I was hurting. From my belly button on down it felt like I’d been torn open and sewn back together sloppily. My ankle throbbed in time with my heartbeat. “I’m Candace Shapiro,” I began, “and I was pregnant…” My voice caught in my throat. “What happened?” I begged. “Is my baby okay?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “You had what’s known as placenta abruptio,” he began. “Which means that your placenta separated from your uterus all at once. That’s what caused the bleeding… and the premature labor.”
“So my baby…,” I whispered.
The doctor looked somber.
“Your baby was in distress when they brought you in here. We did a cesarean section, but because we didn’t have the fetal monitor in place, we aren’t sure whether she was deprived of oxygen, and if so, for how long.”
He kept talking. Low birth weight. Premature. Underdeveloped lungs. Ventilator. NICU. He told me that my uterus was torn during the delivery, that I was bleeding so badly, they had to take “radical steps.” Radical as in my uterus was now gone. “We hate to have to do this to young women,” he said gravely, “but the circumstances left us no choice.”
He droned on and on about counseling, therapy, adoption, egg harvesting, and surrogates until I wanted to scream, to claw at his throat, to force him to give me the answer to the only question I cared about anymore. I looked at my mother, who bit her lip and looked away as I struggled to sit up. The doctor looked alarmed, and tried to ease me back down onto my back, but I wasn’t going. “My baby,” I said. “Is it a boy or girl?”
“A girl,” he said— reluctantly, I thought.
“Girl,” I repeated, and started to cry. My daughter, I thought, my poor daughter whom I couldn’t keep safe, not even on her way into the world. I looked at my mother, who’d come back and was leaning against the wall, blowing her nose. Bruce put his hand awkwardly on my arm.
“Cannie,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Get away from me,” I wept. “Just go.” I wiped my eyes, shoved my matted hair behind my ears, and looked at the doctor. “I want to see my baby.” They eased me into a wheelchair, sore and stitched up, hurting all over, and wheeled me to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I couldn’t go in, they explained, but I could see her through the window. A nurse pointed her out. “There,” she said, gesturing.
I leaned so close my forehead pressed on the glass. She was so small. A wrinkled pink grapefruit. Limbs no bigger than my pinky, hands the size of my thumbnail, a head the size of a smallish nectarine. Tiny eyes squinched shut, a look of outrage on her face. A dusting of black fuzz on top of her head, a nondescript beige-ish hat on top of that. “She weighs almost three pounds,” the nurse who was pushing me said.
Baby, I whispered, and tapped my fingers against the windows, drumming a soft rhythm. She hadn’t been moving, but when I tapped she pinwheeled her arms. Waving at me, I imagined. Hi, baby, I said.