Angels (37 page)

“No, the other idiot from the other next door. Mike. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said. Well, he was right, I wished for someone to buy my script and now I wish they hadn't.”

“It might be a great film. You never know.”

“No, it's going to be a piece of shit,” she said, and tears began to spill down her face. “My lovely script that I worked so hard on until it was perfect, perfect, perfect. I was so proud of it and now it'll never see the light of day. No one will ever see it. Seven months I slaved on it, to make it wonderful, and now he wants it totally rewritten in a week. It can't be done! And he's taken out all my one-liners, all the funny stuff is gone, and any of the touching moments now involve a fucking DOG!”

I rummaged for a tissue while she howled like a child. “I'll be ashamed, Maggie, I'll be so ashamed to have my name on a cheesy, schmaltzy, moralizing movie about a dog.” She tried to catch her breath. “About a dog
called Chip
.”

“Could you pull out?” I suggested. “Just tell him to stick his money and you'll find someone else to make your movie, thanks very much!”

“No. Because no one else wants to buy it. I know all that and I need the money to live on. But there's no doubt that everything comes with a price tag.”

“Just refuse to make the changes,” I urged. “Tell him this is the movie he bought and this is the movie he should make!”

“Then he'll fire me and I'll get paid almost nothing but ANGELS / 295

they'll still own my script. They'll just get some other writer in to make the changes.”

“They can't do that!” But I knew they could; in my time I'd worked on enough contracts to know how much power the big studios retained. I'd just never seen it in action before.

“They don't just buy your script, they buy your soul. Troy is right to try and get all his work produced independently.” Emily's sobbing began to quiet down and she smiled regretfully. “You make a deal with the devil, no point complaining if you get a pitchfork in the ass.”

Then tears began to spill again. “But that script was like my baby, I loved it, I wanted the best for it, and it kills me to see it torn apart like that, my poor baby.” Aghast, she stopped. “Oh, Maggie, I've done it again, I'm so sorry.”

WHEN YOU HAVE
a miscarriage, you get given a huge amount of information, but you actually discover very little. People bombarded me with well-meant advice—which varied too much for comfort: some said we should try again immediately; others insisted it was vital that we grieve the loss before moving on.

But nobody could tell me the one thing I wanted to know, and that was: why had it happened? The best that Dr. Collins, my gynecologist, could come up with was that 15 to 20 percent of pregnancies routinely end in miscarriage.

“But why?” I persisted.

“It's nature's way,” he said. “Something must have been wrong with the fetus, so that it wouldn't have been able to survive on its own.”

I'm sure that was meant to be comforting, but instead it enraged me. In my mind's eye, my child, wherever it was, was perfect.

“But it won't happen again?” Garv asked.

“It could. It probably won't, but I'd be lying to you if I said it wouldn't.”

“But it's already happened to us.” Meaning we'd had our quota of bad luck.

“Just because it's happened once is no guarantee that it can't happen again.”

“Thanks a bunch,” I said bitterly.

ANGELS / 297

“Another thing,” he said warily.

“What?” I snapped.

“Yeah, what?” Garv echoed.

“Mood swings.”

“What about them?”

“Expect them.”

I went over the past nine weeks with a fine-tooth comb, searching for the thing I'd done wrong. Had I lifted heavy objects? Accidentally gone on loop-the-loop roller coasters? Booked myself into a German measles hospital? Or was it just down to the fact—now unimaginable to me—that I simply hadn't wanted it, and he or she had known?

They provided a nurse-counselor-type person who told me that there was no way that the baby would have known that it hadn't been entirely welcome. “They're thick-skinned little creatures,” she said. “But it's natural to blame yourself. Guilt is one of the emotions everyone feels when this happens.”

“And what else?”

“Ooh, anger, grief, loss, frustration, fear, relief—”

“Relief?” I glared at her.

“Not for everyone. And did I mention irrational rage?”

Because we'd told so few people that I was pregnant, there weren't many who knew I'd miscarried. So almost no one made allowances for us as we tried to fill the hole in our lives.

And it was a hole. We'd already thought up names—Patrick if it was a boy, Aoife if it was a girl.

The due date had been April twenty-ninth and already we'd started looking at baby clothes and planning the decoration for the bedroom. Then overnight we no longer had any need of teddy bear wallpaper or revolving lamps that throw patterns of stars on the walls, and that was hard to get used to.

Even more painful was that I'd been excited about getting to know my child. I'd been looking forward to a lifetime 298 / MARIAN KEYES

with this new person, who was part of me and part of Garv—and abruptly it had all been whipped away.

You know how it is when your boyfriend ditches you—from out of nowhere, the world is full of loving couples, holding hands, kissing, clinking champagne glasses, feeding each other oysters. In the same way, as soon as I'd lost my baby, out of the woodwork suddenly emerged busloads of heavily pregnant women, ripe and gorgeous, carrying their swollen bellies with pride. And worse still, there were babies everywhere I turned: in the supermarket, on the street, by the sea, at the optician's. Perfect little creatures with their dolphin-smiley mouths and lustrous skin bursting with freshness.

Flapping their pudgy arms, clapping their sticky hands, kicking their socks off, and making high-pitched swooping, singing noises, like bald mini Björks.

Sometimes it was too painful to look at them, but at other times it was too painful not to. Garv and I used to eyeball them with hungry gazes, thinking,
We nearly had one of them
. Then Garv usually whispered, “We'd better stop, we're being weird, the mother will call the cops on us.”

My instinct was to get pregnant again immediately so that we could almost pretend that the first loss had never happened, and Garv said he wanted to do whatever made me happy. So I went straight out and bought a temperature thing because I wanted to leave nothing to chance. My life was pared down to just one all-consuming need, and terrible fear tormented me. What if this time it took a year? What if—unthinkably—it never happened?

But we were lucky; I'd miscarried at the beginning of October and I was pregnant again by the middle of November. It's hard to describe the giddy mix of relief and happiness I felt when the blue line appeared on the stick; we'd been given a second chance.

Breathless, we squeezed each other and we both cried, as much for the loss of the other child as the joy of the new one.

But almost right away, the joy was overtaken by anxiety. Blind terror, actually. What if I lost this one too?

ANGELS / 299

“Lightning doesn't strike twice,” Garv said, even though it does, and it wasn't lightning anyway.

I became so very, very careful; I stopped going to pubs because I was afraid of inhaling cigarette smoke; I drove at about fourteen miles an hour (quite fast for Dublin, actually) so there'd be no danger of any sudden braking; and I never permitted myself the luxury of a belch—quite understandable when you consider that I even worried about
breathing
too hard, in case it dislodged the baby.

Horrible dreams dogged me: one night I dreamed that the baby had died and was still inside me, another night I dreamed I gave birth to a chicken. And this time around there was no playing hooky from work and buying handbags from JP Tod's; we'd been so badly punished the last time for being happy that we were afraid of doing anything that smacked of celebration.

Mind you, I wasn't at all as sick the second time—apart from when I found something very funny (almost never) and my laughter segued seamlessly into dry retching. (I was a model dinner-party guest.)

We cautiously took the reduced nausea as a good sign. Though there was no medical basis for it, I said to Garv that the terrible sickness the first time around had probably been a sign that something was wrong. Then he repeated it back to me and thus we tried to reassure each other and ourselves.

But every twinge in me could indicate the onset of disaster. One night I got a really bad pain in my armpit and I was absolutely
convinced
that this was it. Garv tried to restore calm by pointing out that my armpit was miles from my womb, but I countered defiantly, “Yeah, but when people have heart attacks, they get a pain in their arm,” and then I could see I'd put the fear in him too.

But we survived that night and in the seventh week we went for our first scan, where anxiety stripped the event of the joy we'd had with the first baby. I kept asking if everything looked okay and the nurse said over and over that it did.

As we approached the ninth week, the tension built and 300 / MARIAN KEYES

built. During the ninth week itself, time slowed down to the ticking of each individual second. We breathed as though the air was rationed. Then—unbelievably—it had passed without incident and we'd moved into the clear blue waters of the tenth week. The cloud lifted and suddenly we were gulping breaths as if the air was chocolate-flavored—you could actually
see
the change in us. I remember smiling at Garv and watching him smile back at me and being shocked by how unfamiliar it was.

Week ten passed. Week eleven arrived and we went for our second scan, where we were a lot giddier and lighter than at the previous one. Then something happened that upped the ante more than I could ever have imagined—as I was lying on the table, the nurse indicated that we should be quiet, she flicked a switch, and the sound of our baby's heartbeat filled the room. A lightish pitterpatter, so fast it was absolutely belting along.

It is impossible for me to convey the depth of my wonder and joy. I was transported with it. As you might expect, we both cried buckets, then had a little laugh, then shed a few more tears. Our awe just knocked us sideways. And the relief was glorious: it had a heartbeat, things must be fine.

And just as soon as we were over week twelve, we'd really be in the clear. “Two days to go,” I said that night as we squeezed hands before we went to sleep.

The pain woke me. There hadn't been pain the last time, so I wasn't immediately alerted. Then, when I understood what was happening, I went into a dreamscape:
I can't believe this is happening to us
.

When bad things happen, I'm always taken by surprise. I know some people react to disaster by stomping around shouting, “I knew it, I just fucking KNEW this would happen!” But I'm not one of them. Bad things are supposed to happen to mythical “other people”

and it comes as a shock when I discover that I am one of the mythical “other people.”

As we hurried out to the car, I looked up to the night sky, silently begging God not to let this happen. But I noticed ANGELS / 301

something that seemed like an omen. “There are no stars tonight,”

I said. “It's a sign.”

“No, baby, it's not.” Garv slid his arms around me. “The stars are always there, even in the daytime. Sometimes we just can't see them.”

The sense of déjà vu as we drove to the hospital turned reality into a nightmare. Then we were sitting on the orange chairs again, then someone was telling me that everything would be okay, and once again it wasn't.

It was still too early to tell the sex, not that I cared. All that mattered was that this was the second time I'd lost a child. A whole ready-made family, gone before it had arrived.

This time it was far, far worse. Once I could live with, but not twice—because the one thing we'd had the last time, that we didn't have now, was hope. I hated myself and my defective body that was failing us so terribly.

People provided stories that were supposed to be comforting.

My mother knew a woman who'd had five miscarriages before carrying to term and now she had four fine children, two boys and two girls. Garv's mother could go one better: “I know a woman who had
eight
miscarriages and then she had twins. A lovely pair of boys. Mind you,” she added doubtfully, “one of them ended up in prison. Embezzlement. Something to do with a pension fund and a villa in Spain…”

Everyone tried to instill optimism back into Garv and me, but I didn't buy it. Hope was utterly absent and I was in the grip of an evermore intense belief that this was all my fault. I'm not given to fanciful nonsense, talk of hexes and jinxes and the like (that'd be Anna you're thinking of), but I couldn't chase away the conviction that I'd brought all of this on myself.

I OPENED THE
front door. Emily was on the daybed, bent over her computer, working hard.

“Hi,” I said cautiously.

“Hi,” she replied, equally cautiously. “Did you have a nice evening?”

“Yes. You?”

“Yes.”

“How were Troy and Shay?”

“Fine. Helpful. They both say hey.”

I nodded at the computer. “So, ah, how's
Chip the Dog
going?”

“Nightmare. I'm getting cramps in my stomach from writing this stuff. Did you make out with her?”

A pause. “Yes. Sorry.”

“Not at all, whatever floats your boat. So what was it like?”

“It was…different.”

“Did you…?”

“It was only the first date,” I said. “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

“Jesus Christ,” she said faintly. “And what did you do?” Then she hit her forehead. “Duh! I didn't mean like that!”

“We went to a movie. Look, I'm going to take a shower and get some rest.”

ANGELS / 303

“Sure, you must be exhausted. I mean, I'm not saying…Oh Christ,” she clicked. “See you later.”

I went into my bedroom, closed the door, then sat at Emily's desk and wearily flicked through some of her unsold scripts, looking to be distracted.