Authors: Mary Kubica
Eve
After
She certainly can’t be alone. I leave the house as soon as James arrives home without Mia in tow. There’s nothing more important than Mia. I am positive she’s standing alone on a street corner, deserted by her own father, and certainly lacking the resources to get back home.
I’m screaming at him. How could he do this to our child?
He let her walk out of that doctor’s office alone, into the cold January day, knowing full well she isn’t able to make herself breakfast, much less find her way home.
And he told me that
she’s
the one who’s being stubborn. That Mia is the one being unreasonable about this
damn baby
. He said that she refused the abortion, that she walked out of the obstetrician’s office just as the nurse called her name.
James stomps into his office and slams the door, unaware of the suitcase I pack and quietly walk down the stairs before I leave.
I don’t give her enough credit. By the time I pry my car keys out of James’s hands and circle the doctor’s office many, many times, she’s tucked safely in her apartment with a can of soup warming on the stove for lunch.
She opens the door and I fall into her and hold her as tight as I possibly can. She’s standing in the small apartment she used to call home. It’s been a long time since she was here. Her houseplants hold on to life by a thread, and there’s dust everywhere. It smells like a new home, that scent that says no one’s been here for quite some time. The calendar on the kitchen refrigerator is stuck on October, the image ablaze with red-and-orange leaves. The answering machine beeps; there must be a thousand messages waiting for her.
She’s cold, frozen from all that time walking and waiting for a cab. She says that she didn’t have a dime on her for the fare. It’s freezing cold in the apartment. She’s slipped her favorite hooded sweatshirt over a thin blouse.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say over and over again. But she has it all together. She holds me at an arm’s length and asks what happened and I tell her about James. It’s me who’s losing it, who’s falling apart. She takes the suitcase from my hands and brings it into the bedroom.
“Then you’ll stay here,” she says. She sits me down on the couch and covers me up with a blanket, and then walks into the kitchen to finish the soup—chicken noodle, she says, because it reminds her of home.
We eat our soup, and then she tells me what happened at the obstetrician’s office. She runs a hand across her abdomen and curls into a ball on a chair.
Everything was going as planned. She said that she had talked herself into it and it was only a matter of time before it was all going to be through. James was sitting there, reading from some law journal and waiting for the appointment. In just a few minutes the Russian doctor was going to get rid of the baby.
“But,” she tells me, “there was a little boy and his mother. He was barely four.” She tells me about the woman, with her belly the size of a basketball. The boy played with his Matchbox cars up and down the legs of the stiff waiting room chairs.
Vroom, vroom, vroom...
He dropped one at James’s feet and the bastard had the nerve to push it away with his Italian loafers, his nose never rising from the book. “And then I heard his mother,” Mia says, “dressed in these cute denim overalls and looking as uncomfortable as could possibly be, say to the boy, ‘Come here, Owen,’ and he ran for her and zoomed a car over her protruding belly and climbed into her lap, saying, ‘Hi, baby,’ to the unborn child.”
She stops to catch her breath, and then admits to me, “Owen. I didn’t know what it meant, but it meant something. I couldn’t take my eyes off the little boy. ‘Owen,’ I heard myself say aloud and both the boy and his mother looked at me.”
James asked Mia what she was doing and she related the feeling to déjà vu. It was as if she’d been there before. But what did it mean?
Mia says that she leaned forward in her seat and told the little boy that she liked his cars. He offered to show Mia one, but his mother laughed and said,
Oh, Owen, I don’t think she wants to see them,
but Mia did. James scolded her and told her to give the kid his toys back. But she wanted to do anything to be close to the boy. She says that the sound of his name made it hard to breathe. Owen.
“I took one of the cars in my hand, a purple van, and told him how much I liked it, and then drove it over the top of his head and he laughed. He said that he was going to have a baby brother soon. Oliver.”
And then the nurse was there in the doorway calling her name. James rose to his feet and when she didn’t he told her that it was her turn.
The nurse called her name again. She looked right at Mia; she knew who she was. James said her name more than once. He tried pulling on her arm and got in her face to discipline her as only James would do. He reminded her again that it was their turn.
Mia tells me, “Owen’s mother called to him and I saw myself reach out and stroke that curly hair and I don’t know who was the most aghast, the boy’s mother or Dad, but the boy liked it and smiled and I smiled back. I placed the two Matchbox cars back in the boy’s hands and stood from my seat.” She tells me that James sighed:
Thank God—it’s about time.
But it wasn’t time. She reached for her coat and whispered to him, “I can’t do this.”
She slipped out into the hall. He ran after her, of course, full of condemnation and criticism and threats. He urged her to reconsider, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know what any of it meant. Owen. She didn’t know why that name meant so much to her. All she knew was that it wasn’t time for her baby to die.
Colin
Before
It’s 2:00 a.m. when I’m woken up by her scream. I stand from the chair and see her pointing across the pitch-black room at something that isn’t there.
“Mia,” I say. But I can’t get her eyes off it. “Mia,” I snap again. My voice is firm. I must look at the spot five times because she’s scaring the shit out of me. Her eyes, filled with tears, are locked in place on
something
. I reach for the light and turn it on, only to reassure myself that we’re alone. Then I drop to my knees before the couch. I take her head into my hands, and force her to look at me. “Mia,” I say and she snaps out of it.
She tells me that there was a man at the door with a machete and a red bandana tied around his head. She’s hysterical. Delirious. She can describe everything about him down to a hole in the right thigh of his jeans. A black man with a cigarette pinched between his lips. But what concerns me the most is the heat coming off her face when I press my hands to it. The glazed-over look of her eyes when she finally looks at me and her head drops to my shoulder and she begins to cry.
I run the water in the bathtub and let it fill to the top. I have no medicine. I have nothing to bring the temperature down. It’s the first time I’m grateful that the water refuses to warm beyond lukewarm. Warm enough to keep her from becoming hypothermic. Cool enough that she doesn’t begin to seize.
I help her rise to her feet. She leans on me and I carry the weight of her into the bathroom. She sits on the toilet seat as I peel the socks off her feet. She flinches when her bare feet touch the bitter tile. “No,” she begs.
“It will be okay,” I coax. It’s a lie.
I turn off the water and say that I’ll give her privacy, but she reaches out and clenches my hand. She says to me, “Don’t go.”
I watch as a convulsing hand attempts to undo the button of her khaki pants. She becomes weak and reaches for the sink to steady herself before she can finish. I step forward and unclasp the button. I lower her onto the toilet seat and pull her pants to the ground. I peel a pair of long johns from her legs and throw a sweatshirt over her head.
She’s crying as she sinks into the bathtub. She lets the water rise up to her knees as she pulls them into her chest. She drops her head to them and her hair falls one way, the last few inches swimming in the water. I kneel beside the bathtub. With my hands, I cup the water and drop it where it doesn’t reach. I soak a washcloth, drape it over the back of her neck. She doesn’t stop shaking.
I try not to look at her. I try not to look below the eyes as she begs me to keep talking, anything to avoid the freezing cold. I try not to imagine the things I can’t see. I try not to think about the color of her pale skin or the curvature of her spine. I try not to stare at her hair, bobbing on the surface of the bath.
I tell her about a lady who lives down the hall from me. This seventy-year-old lady who always manages to lock herself out of her apartment when she takes the trash to the chute down the hall.
I tell her how my mother cut my father out of all our early family photos. All their wedding photos she stuck in the shredder. She let me keep one photo of him. But after we stopped talking I used it for target practice.
I tell her that as a kid I wanted to play in the NFL. Wide receiver, just like Tommy Waddle.
I tell her that I can fox-trot because my mother taught me. But it isn’t the kind of thing I’d ever let anyone see. On the Sundays when she’s having a good day, she plays Frank Sinatra on the radio and we limp around the room. These days I’m better than her, by a long shot. She learned it from her own parents. There was nothing better to do, growing up when times were tough. Really tough. She always told me I knew nothing about being poor, even on those nights that I snuggled up with a sleeping bag in the backseat of our car.
I tell her that if it were up to me I’d live somewhere like this, in the middle of God knows where. The city isn’t for me, all those damn people.
What I don’t tell her is how beautiful she looked that first night. How I watched her sitting alone at the bar, masked by the faded lights and cigarette smoke. I watched her longer than I needed to for the pure pleasure of it. I don’t tell her how the candle made her face glow, how the photograph I was given didn’t do her justice. I don’t tell her any of it. I don’t tell her the way she makes me feel when she looks at me, or how I hear her voice at night, in my dreams, forgiving me. I don’t tell her I’m sorry, though I am. I don’t tell her that I think she’s beautiful, even when I see her look in a mirror and hate the image she sees.
She tires from shaking. I see her eyes close as she begins to fall asleep. I press a hand to her forehead, and I convince myself the fever has gone down. I wake her. And then I help her stand in the bath. I wrap a rough towel around her and help her step over the side of the tub. I help her dress into the warmest clothes I can find, and then I towel-dry the ends of her hair. She lies on the couch before the fire. It’s beginning to die, so I lay a branch across the logs. Before I can cover her with a blanket, she’s asleep, but she continues to hack. I sit beside her and will myself not to sleep. I watch the rise and fall of her chest so I know that she’s alive.
* * *
There’s a doctor in Grand Marais. I tell her we need to go. She tries to object.
We can’t,
she says. But I tell her we need to.
I remind her that her name is Chloe. I do everything I can to disguise us. I tell her to pull her hair back, which she never does. On the way, I run into a grocery store for a pair of reading glasses. I tell her to put them on. Not perfect, but it will have to do. I wear my Sox hat.
I tell her we’re paying in cash. No insurance. I tell her not to talk more than she has to. Let me do the talking.
All we need is a prescription.
I drive around Grand Marais for a good thirty minutes before deciding on a doctor. I do this by their names. Kenneth Levine sounds too formal. Bastard probably falls asleep every night to the news. There’s a clinic, but I keep driving—too many people. There’s a dentist, an ObGyn. I decide on some broad named Kayla Lee, a family practitioner with an empty parking lot. Her little sports car is parked out back. Not very practical for the snow on the ground. I tell Mia we don’t want the best doctor in town, just one who knows how to write a prescription.
I help her cross the parking lot. “Be careful,” I say. There’s a layer of ice on the ground. We skate across it to the door. She can’t get rid of the damn cough, though she lied and said she was feeling better.
The office is on the second floor, above a copy shop. We enter and head straight up the narrow stairway. She says that it’s heaven to be somewhere warm. Heaven. I wonder if she really believes in that kind of shit.
There’s a lady sitting behind the desk, this woman who’s humming Christmas crap. I usher Mia into a seat. She buries her nose into a tissue and blows. The receptionist looks up. “Poor thing,” she says.
I get the paperwork from her and sit down in the bariatric chair. I watch Mia fill out the forms. She manages to remember Chloe, but when she comes to
last name
her hand becomes still.
“Why don’t I do it for you?” I ask. I slide the pen from her hand. She watches me write Romain. I make up an address. I leave the insurance information blank. I bring the paperwork up front and tell the lady we’ll be paying cash. Then I sit beside her and ask if she’s okay. I take her by the hand. My fingers slip between hers and I squeeze lightly and say to her, “Everything’s gonna be okay.”
She thinks it’s all a ruse for the receptionist’s benefit, but what she doesn’t know is that I suck at acting.
The lady leads us to a back room and takes Mia’s vitals. The room is small and there’s an animal mural painted across the walls. “Low blood pressure,” the lady says. Increased respiration rate and pulse, temperature of 104. “Poor thing,” she says again. She says the doctor will be in soon. I don’t know how long we wait. She sits on the edge of the table staring at whimsical lions and tigers while I pace back and forth across the room. I want to get the hell out of here. I say it at least three times.
Dr. Kayla Lee knocks and then lets herself in. She’s chipper—brunette, not blonde as I expected. A blonde bimbo was what we were hoping for.
The doctor is loud and she talks to Mia like she’s three. She sits on a swivel stool and pulls it close to Mia. Mia tries to clear her throat. She coughs. She’s a fucking mess. But maybe feeling like shit helps disguise the fact that she’s scared half to death.
The doctor asks if she’s seen us before. Mia can’t come up with the words so I step in. I’m surprisingly calm. “No,” I say. “New patients.”
“So what’s going on—” she peeks down at the file “—Chloe?”
Mia is growing exhausted from this trip. She can’t hold the doctor’s stare. I’m certain the doctor smells the BO on both our clothes, clothes we’ve worn almost every day so that we no longer smell the stink. She’s hacking up a lung. There’s a barking cough that sounds like a dozen terriers fighting inside her. Her voice is hoarse. It threatens to disappear.
“She’s been coughing like this for about four days,” I say. “Fever. Chills. I told her we needed to get in to see you Friday afternoon. But she said no, it was only a cold.”
“Fatigue?”
Mia nods. I tell her that Mia is lethargic, that she passed out at home. She writes this down in her notes.
“Any vomiting?”
“No.”
“Diarrhea?”
“No.”
“Let me take a look,” the doctor says and quickly shines a light in Mia’s eye, up her nose, into her ears. She tells her to say
ahhhh
and feels her glands. And then the stethoscope finds its way to Mia’s lungs. “Take a deep breath for me,” Dr. Lee says. Behind her I continue to pace. She moves the stethoscope around Mia’s back and chest. She has her lie down. Then sit up again as she taps on her chest and listens.
“My suspicion is pneumonia. Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“History of asthma?”
“No.”
I take in the artwork: a polka-dot giraffe. A lion whose mane looks like one of those damn cones dogs wear when they can’t stop licking themselves. A baby-blue elephant that looks like it just crawled out of the delivery ward.
“I hear a lot of junk in your lungs, in layman’s terms. Pneumonia is inflammation of the lungs, caused by an infection. Fluid blocks and narrows your airways. What starts as a cold might decide to settle in your lungs for whatever reason and what you get is this,” she says, sweeping her hand across Mia’s perimeters.
The doctor reeks of perfume. She doesn’t shut up when Mia’s hacking, though we all know she hears.
“We treat it with antibiotics,” she continues. She lists the possibilities. Just give us a prescription. “But first I’d like to confirm with a chest X—”
The color fades from Mia’s face, as if there was any there to begin with. There’s no way we’re stepping foot into a hospital.
“I appreciate your diligence,” I interrupt. I step forward, close enough to touch the doctor. I’m bigger than both of them, but I don’t use my size to change her mind. We’d run into dozens of people in a hospital. Maybe more.
I plaster a fucking smile on my face and confess that I’m between jobs. We’re uninsured. We can’t afford the two or three hundred dollars that a chest X-ray will cost us.
And then Mia starts coughing until we all think she might puke. The doctor fills a little plastic cup with water and hands it to her. And then she stands back to watch her patient gasp for air.
“Okay,” she says. She writes out the damn prescription and leaves the room.
We pass her in the hall on the way out. She’s bent over a countertop, writing notes in Chloe Romain’s file. Her smock hangs low, to the top of leather cowboy boots. There’s an ugly dress beneath. Her stethoscope is wrapped around her neck.
We’re almost to the door when she stops and says, “Are you sure I haven’t seen you before? You just look so darn familiar.” But she isn’t looking at Mia. She’s looking at me.
“No,” I say dismissively. No need to be kind. I got what I need.
We make a follow-up appointment for Chloe Romain, one she’ll never keep.
“Thank you for your help,” Mia says as I gently shove her out the door.
In the parking lot I tell her that we did good. We have the prescription. That’s all we need. We swing by a pharmacy on the way back to the cabin. Mia waits in the truck while I run inside, grateful to find a sixteen-year-old pothead working the register and the pharmacist, tucked in back, never raising his head. I give Mia a pill before we pull out of the parking lot and I watch, out of the corner of my eye, as she falls asleep on the way home. I slip out of my coat and lay it over her so she doesn’t get cold.