Up From the Blue
Up
FROM THE
Blue
A NOVEL
Susan Henderson
To David, who knows everything about me, and
he’s still here
Table of Contents
5
Things Beginning with the Letter D
PRAISE FOR
Up from the Blue
BY SUSAN HENDERSON
I
T STARTS LIKE A
tingling at the top of my abdomen. And then, as if I’m wearing control top pantyhose—which I’m not, I’ve never been that girlie—it begins to shrink in around me, tighter and tighter, until my belly feels rock hard. Nervous, I pace our new apartment, hoping to simply walk it off. It’s not a contraction. I won’t allow it—not now. The baby isn’t due for six more weeks.
When my belly relaxes again, the tingle fading, I dig through the moving boxes trying to find my address book and a telephone to plug in. I’m not even sure if we hooked up the service or not. I try to breathe slowly. The boxes are packed randomly, my husband’s idea to keep it simple and take the stress out of moving. “It’s all going to the same place,” he had said. He knows I have issues with too many orders and too many rules. Unfortunately, I also have issues with chaos.
I peel the tape off one box and find oven mitts, books, and shoes. Another has cups, a tape dispenser, and a notebook of unfinished poems that were better in my head than they are on paper. My hair, far past my waist, drips into the next carton filled with a lampshade
and stuffed animals from the baby shower. No phone. No address book. My breath comes faster as I scan the stacks of boxes lining this room I’ve only known for two days, and when I consider the time and the amount of lifting it would require to go through them all, I realize I could be in trouble.
I can’t reach Simon because he’s still midflight to Paris, where he’s helping to choose art pieces and oversee their shipment for the modern art museum that just hired him. He didn’t want to travel this late in the pregnancy, but he’s lucky to have this job. Majoring in art history is a lot like acquiring an expensive degree in unemployment, and now more than ever he wants to bring stability to our family.
I slam the cardboard flap closed on another box. And now I’m scared. I shouldn’t have been going up and down the stairs so much. If something hurts this baby, it’s all my fault.
Next door is a row house that looks like ours, Queen Anne style, brick—though ours is red with a round bay window and the other is white with a square bay window. I see glimpses of my neighbor moving from room to room, tidying up, sipping her coffee or tea. She looks about my age, and is the perfect image of how I planned to spend my day—slowly unpacking and cleaning, and later scoping out local restaurants to find a way to reclaim this town I thought I’d never live in again.
There’s another tightening in my belly. Out of options, I open the door to the bustle of traffic and fast-walking men and women with briefcases. I hold the rail and walk quickly down our steps and up the neighbor’s, knocking normally at first and then more frantically.
As I listen to her footsteps approaching, I’m stunned by my reflection in the glass on either side of her door. I was wrong to think I resembled this woman I’d seen through the window in any way.
“Can I help you?” she asks. She looks as if she dressed from an L.L. Bean catalog, professionally relaxed, makeup and hair done, but lightly. We may both be in our midtwenties, but with my wet, stringy
hair, gray maternity jumper, and untied, red high-tops, once again, I look like the kid without a mother.
“I just moved in next door, and … I think I need a doctor. Can I use your phone?”
“Of course. Of course.”
We move quickly through her immaculate house, past knickknacks and tapestries from Africa, Russia, China. This neighborhood is filled with young diplomats. The only reason we could afford something here is because we got a fixer-upper we have no immediate plans to fix up. I follow the woman into the kitchen, where she points to the telephone hanging on the wall.
“I’ll be in the next room if you need me,” she says. I wonder if she’s told me her name. I simply nod, take the receiver in my hand, and freeze. I don’t have anyone to call. I don’t know the name of the local hospital. I haven’t memorized my former doctor’s number and haven’t yet found a new one. I was going to get to all of that.
I’m aware that the woman who owns this house is listening for me to do something, and because I’m afraid, I dial the number of my childhood home, wishing I could talk to my mother, but of course she doesn’t answer.
“Hello? General Harris speaking.”
I haven’t heard my father’s voice in two or three years, maybe a call a few Christmases ago, and at first I say nothing. Then, because my belly is tightening again and I’m standing in a stranger’s house I say, “I’m scared.”
“Tillie?”
I never officially cut him off. There was no big falling out. Life just got busy, and the less we were in touch, the more peaceful I felt. I didn’t even tell him I got married.
“Tillie, is that you? Talk to me.”
“I’m in Dupont Circle. And I need a doctor.”
“You’re in D.C.? What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell the doctor what’s wrong. I just need to get to a hospital, and I don’t know which one or how to get there.”
This is what he’s good at, ignoring the emotions of the moment and solving a problem. After four or five minutes of him trying to give me directions I’m too panicked to follow, he decides to call me a cab that will take me to G.W. Hospital.
“Where are you?” he asks.
And I don’t remember that either. I haven’t memorized the new address yet, and when I ask the woman of this house where I am, I’m keenly aware that I’m giving her a very bad, though fairly accurate, first impression.
As I hang up the telephone, the neat, closed box that held my past is smashed open and oozing into the present. I had felt it coming though. This whole year it seemed that the world was conspiring to bring us together: First, it was the television coverage of Desert Storm this winter that flaunted my father’s satellite-guided bombs dropping on targets with the accuracy of a video game. Then it was Simon finding the rare opening for an assistant curator at an art museum here in D.C. Now this.
Still holding the phone to my ear I stand motionless, hoping to feel that little upside down foot kick my rib cage. I press in different spots to see if the baby will push back. Nothing.
I don’t want to have a full-on panic attack in a stranger’s house, but I’m definitely on my way. When I spot a pan of brownies on the stove top, I take just a pinch, hoping the sugar will get the baby moving. I turn to the wall, pretending I’m still on the phone, and say, “M-hmm,” eating one bite at first, and then going ahead and eating the entire brownie.
“Okay. And thank you,” I say to no one, then hang up. I only nod my thanks to my neighbor, afraid there might be brownie on my teeth.
Waiting on her front steps, I work my fingers through my wet hair, letting the loose strands float away in the breeze. I don’t dare turn around
to see if she’s watching me from her doorway. Instead, I think how good the sidewalk will be for hopscotch, what a nice climbing tree we have in the front yard, what a normal childhood we can offer this baby, if he or she will just hold on.
There’s the pain again—at first a wave of bad cramps, not just in my belly but in my back this time. And now the tightening.
My neighbor opens the screen door and asks, “Can I help? Want me to wait with you?”
I shake my head and raise my hand as if to say,
I’m fine, everything’s cool,
grateful to see the Red Top Cab pulling into view.
“G.W. emergency room,” I say, just as Dad told me to. As we drive away, I realize I have no wallet, no ID, and no cash. Head in my hands, I spend the rest of the trip with a view of the never-vacuumed floor.
When the cab pulls up to the hospital, I pat the seat beside me as if I’ve only now realized I’ve forgotten my purse. I figure he’ll be sympathetic to a distressed pregnant woman, but he drives off fast and pissed. I walk through the sliding glass doors and into the chaos of sick people. I have to pee, but I get in the registration line first, as people in front of me cough and complain and one applies pressure to a bloody wound. I’m terrified of another pain, of what waiting too long might mean for the baby, and wander up to the front of the line.
“Wait your turn,” a patient says.
“It’s not about me,” I tell him. “Me, I’d stay at the end of the line, but my baby needs to be seen right away.”
“You’re no more important than anyone else,” another patient says. “Get in back.”
I feel a hand on my arm. Instinctively I shrug it off, whipping my head around with a kind of growl, and there’s my father. His hair’s been gray since I was born, but now his skin seems to match it. He stands there facing me, the only one in the ER wearing a suit, his shoulders rounded from all the years hunched over his weapons research. I back up, folding
my arms over my chest so he can’t do anything weird and uncharacteristic like hugging me.
He stares first at my belly, then at my wet hair—something familiar—and finally at my wedding ring. I register his look of surprise, possibly because I never sent him an invitation, but my gut says it’s surprise that someone would have me.
“You didn’t have to come,” I tell him, trying to discover what looks so odd about his face.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, maneuvering me to the back of the line, his hand stiff against my shoulder.
“Dad, just leave me alone.”
“But you called me.”
“I needed a ride. I didn’t ask you to be here.”
And now, of course, I realize what looks odd about him is that he shaved his mustache, leaving this pale, swollen patch above his lip and exposing facial expressions I’ve never seen in him: uncertainty, nervousness, grief. When I find myself at the front of the line again, I shoo Dad away while the woman behind the desk takes down my information.
“Name?”
“Tillie Harris.” I spell it.
“ID”
“I don’t have it with me,” I say, combing my hair with my fingers.