Still Life with Husband (29 page)

Meg bursts into tears immediately. It’s a full minute before she can get any words out, but even as I’m waiting for her to speak, my heart sinks, and I know. “There’s no heartbeat,” she says finally, still sobbing. “They couldn’t find a heartbeat.”

“Oh, Meg.”

“The baby’s gone. It’s dead.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

“Again,” she whispers. She cries, the most racking sobs I’ve ever heard. I can make out Steve’s low tones in the background, a soothing murmur. I’m sitting on the edge of their bed in a towel, marveling at the small-scale meanness of the universe, its banal cruelty. Meg is not pregnant, but I am. In seventh grade, Amelia Huber, the prettiest, most cold-blooded, and, not coincidentally, most popular girl in our class, asked me if I wanted to eat lunch with her and her friends. The entire day I was giddy with anticipation. When I finally sat down with them, she and her friends giggled, gathered their trays, and got up and moved. The universe is Amelia Huber. “I wasn’t expecting this,” Meg says after a while. Her voice is high and small.

“No,” I say. “I know.”

“Emily, what am I going to do?”

“It’ll be okay,” I say stupidly, an echo of her words to me just an hour ago. They sound as wrong coming out of my mouth as they did coming from hers. “Where are you now? Are you at the doctor’s office?”

“No, we’re in the car,” she says. “We’re on our way home.” Meg used to call me in the car on her way home from school to tell me all the silly details of her day, and she loves to annoy Steve by phoning from the passenger seat when they’re heading somewhere together. “We’re going to a movie!” she’ll say happily. “Steve’s wearing that awful shirt his mom got him for his birthday!”

“Is there anything you need? Do you want me to be here when you get home?” I ask.

Meg confers with Steve for a moment; I hear their muffled voices. “Actually, maybe could you go to your parents’ or something for a while? I’m sorry. I think I’m going to need to go to bed…” She and Steve need to be alone, but she’s too polite to say that. Meg, poor Meg.

“Of course. I’ll get out of here.”

“Call me later, okay?” Meg sounds like she’s about five years old.

“I love you,” I say, and think,
which is worth very little in today’s market.
After we hang up, I quickly towel off, put on my ratty clothes, and gather my things together. I could go to my parents’, and I might even be able to make up a plausible lie so as not to arouse suspicions—the heat’s out in the apartment; there’s a mouse infestation; all of my possessions have mysteriously been incinerated—but the fact is, I need to go home and talk to Kevin. He deserves that, at the very, very, very least.

In the car on the way back to the apartment, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I was pregnant; not exactly. The news I had just learned felt strangely like something I had known for years, for my whole life. I felt a weird tingling in my limbs. I was alone, and pregnant, and I didn’t know who the father was. But I was anesthetized. There was so much to freak out about, I couldn’t pick just one thing, so I somehow abstained completely.

As I merged into three lanes of light traffic, I convinced myself that Kevin would not be there. I figured that he would have fled, that he would have hastily packed his bags, a rerun of my actions earlier today, and booked the first flight back to Oregon. Simultaneously, I came to believe, as I was driving over the Hoan Bridge, that Kevin would in fact be home: that he would be holed up in the living room with some canned goods, a flashlight, and a few blankets, vowing never to leave, and that he would have chained the door, and maybe propped some heavy furniture against it for good measure. Why would he want to see me? I wouldn’t want to see me. I would knock on the door a few times and then turn away in resignation, allowing Kevin time, the one thing I could give him. I even started to relax a little bit, believing that I was about to receive a stay of execution, a snow day on the morning of a math test I hadn’t studied for.

“Hey, kid, your mom’s a coward,” I said out loud to the fetus. “But starting today, I’m going to try harder.” I nodded and gripped the steering wheel. Then I thought that those words might have confused the fetus: try harder? Try harder to do what? To be a coward? The fetus hasn’t had any experiences yet in the world. For all he knows, being a coward might be something to aspire to. I tried to explain. “What I mean is, I’ve behaved terribly. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.” I was gesticulating, and rambling, and when I flicked on my turn signal to change lanes and glanced out the window, I noticed that the man in the green Honda in the next lane was staring at me as if I were crazy. I gave him a little wave.

Now, trudging down the hallway to our apartment, I see Kevin’s shoes lined up neatly on the doormat—even in crisis he remains steadfastly tidy—and I know that the lock will not have been changed and the door will not be barred, and that this, to put it mildly, is it. “Brace yourself, kid,” I say to the fetus, and I slide the key into the lock and open the door.

I sense Kevin’s presence before I see him. If this were a horror movie, all the ten-year-olds in the audience would be shouting at the screen, “Don’t turn the corner! Don’t turn the corner!” But, just like in a horror movie, the girl never heeds the warnings. I plod through the empty, darkened kitchen to the living room. The only light is coming in through the half-open blinds, dim and diffuse. The first thing I see is my collection of colored glass bottles smashed, the carpet littered with pretty shards of red, blue, yellow, and green. I swallow thickly. I deserve this, and more. The next thing I see is Kevin, sitting primly on the couch. His hands lay folded on his lap. He looks up at me, as pale as I’ve ever seen him, which is saying quite a lot; he’s as white as a mushroom, and the skin under his eyes is an alarming shade of gray. He looks like a corpse. This is how I’ve made him feel.

Kevin gestures at the wall and the broken glass. “Sorry about that,” he says, no trace of irony in his voice.

I nod, swallow again.

“Why are you here?” he asks politely, as if he’s never seen me before.

“I thought you—” I have to clear my throat. “I thought you might want to talk. Or yell at me. Or throw things at me.” I smile wanly.

Kevin shakes his head. “No.”

“Okay. Um.” I clear my throat again, hug my arms close to my chest. “How are you? How’s it going?”

He looks at me calmly, icily. “It’s going fine. It’s going great.” He lifts his hands and thrusts them into the air as if he’s about to conduct a symphony, then just as abruptly drops them back into his lap, defeated. “It’s going fucking swimmingly, Emily. How’s it going with you?”

“Oh, um, okay. Okay.” I survey the living room again, wonder if I should gather up the few things I feel attached to—my grandmother’s candlesticks, the potted begonia, Aunt Mimi’s blanket—to protect them from Kevin’s wrath. But he seems pretty wrathed out; he seems to have wreaked what wrath he had. “Okay,” I say again, stupidly. I look away from Kevin; I can’t bear his gaze. My eyes land on our wedding album, displayed neatly where it always is, on top of the bureau. At least he hasn’t destroyed it. I probably would have. I have the urge to grab the pretty white photo album and run. Our apartment suddenly seems like an archaeological site, the foreign habitat of a lost civilization, and I want to flee with the most important relic. My favorite picture in that album is a candid one of the two of us, taken just after the ceremony. After the guests had descended upon us like pleasantly scented preying mantises, had bestowed their good wishes and kisses on us, and had moved on to embrace our families, Kevin and I sneaked off behind the big maple tree, to where we thought no one could see us. One of the guests, armed with a disposable camera, caught us there, holding hands, our foreheads together, leaning into each other. In that photograph, I look giddy and keyed up; Kevin looks relieved. We look happy. I remember feeling at that moment that Kevin and I had blended together, that our wedding ceremony really had created something new and better out of us, a lovely sculpture from two hunks of clay. I think of that photograph now, and it’s a picture of somebody else’s life. We’ll never have a moment like that again.

I walk over to the wall opposite Kevin, where the broken glass is strewn over the carpeting. I kneel down and start picking up the bigger pieces, placing them carefully in the palm of my right hand. They’re like tiny daggers, and I’m slow and deliberate as I try not to slice my skin. I avoid the tiniest shards; when I’ve cleared up most of the bigger pieces, I’ll use the mini–vacuum cleaner we keep in the bathroom closet for the smaller ones. I pile bits of glass into my hand. I reach for the thick, intact bottom of the green bottle my mom got me for my birthday, the razor-sharp edge of my favorite, delicate, pink one that I found at a garage sale. For a second, I feel unfairly, unaccountably angry for what Kevin has done to my bottles. Then that feeling disappears. Mixed together in my palm, the broken pieces look like little, lethal Christmas ornaments, or precious jewels.

“You don’t have to do that,” Kevin says softly. It’s all ahead of him, all of the ugly cleanup work, how he’ll have to navigate the terrain of despair and recovery and the way he’ll finally shape his life without me. Just like Meg and Steve, who will have to stumble through their own new, familiar grief: it’s all just beginning. I suppose there are emotional minefields ahead of me, too. Along with other things.

“I don’t mind,” I say. I pull a longish segment of the neck of a blue bottle from the carpeting. My hand is full of broken glass now. I can picture exactly how Kevin did this, exactly how he destroyed these bottles: not in rage or bitter passion, not blinded by the image of my face as he hurled the glass against the wall in uncontrollable fury. That’s not Kevin. Kevin, I’m certain, considered his actions for a full ten minutes before lining up the bottles in a careful row on the coffee table, one by one pitching them deliberately, precisely at the wall as if he were trying to win a giant teddy bear at the fair.
Step One, lift bottle in hand and aim at target. Step Two, extend arm back and behind head for maximum velocity.
Kevin, I’m sure, winced as each bottle shattered and fell, beyond repair, to the floor.

“Kevin,” I say, still kneeling, surrounded now by only the most minute shards of glass, still gingerly holding the larger pieces in the palm of my hand. “I’m going to vacuum the rest of this, but don’t walk around in bare feet for a while, all right?”

He nods, absently fiddles with the corner of a couch pillow.
What a mess, what a mess, what a mess.
I could turn things around here; in an instant, just by squeezing my hand shut, I could initiate a sequence of events, a reaction: Emily feels pain, sees blood, cries out. Kevin jumps up. Together, Emily and Kevin discard glass, clean and rinse wound, apply bandage. Kevin would tend to me with sympathy. He would wash away my blood, watch with me as it mixed with water and flowed down the sink. Kevin would hold my hand and carefully wrap it in gauze. He would do this, tenderly, whether he wanted to or not; unlike me, he always rises above his worst instincts and obeys his best ones. And I would stand there, inelegant and dripping, letting Kevin comfort me. I would ease into him, let him cradle my hand in his. Maybe then I could inflict the final injury.

Instead I stand, walk over to the kitchen garbage can, and let the pieces of glass drop from my hand into the pail.
See, kid? I didn’t manipulate this one. I’m getting better.
I stand there, looking at the contents of the garbage pail: coffee grounds, take-out containers, dirty napkins, onion skins and spinach stems from a dinner I made two nights ago. I stare at the debris, trying to divine my future. A stink rises up to meet me. How will I do this? How exactly will I say to Kevin, “I’m pregnant, but it’s quite possibly not your baby?”
Hey, fetus, any suggestions? Now’s your chance.

I hear Kevin move in the other room: there’s the soft thud of his feet on the floor; there’s the creak of the squeaky floorboard next to the rocking chair. “Go,” he says from the living room, just loudly enough for me to hear. I’m still standing in front of the garbage can, my feet glued to the ground. I let the lid drop, but I don’t move. “Forget about vacuuming,” he says, more loudly now. “Just leave.” I’m immobile. After another minute, I hear Kevin start coming toward me. I’m still frozen where I stand. “Emily, just
leave
!” he shouts from the hallway just a few feet away. “Why can’t you
listen to me
? Just LEAVE, JUST LEAVE, JUST LEAVE!”

He’s behind me now as I turn away from the garbage can. “Leave,” he says again, this time almost a whisper. I turn to him. His face looks pinched, as if I repulse him, or he’s bracing himself, or both. He stands there for a minute, studying me. We’re close enough to kiss. I’m seized with the urge to look away again, but I don’t. Kevin’s hair is greasy and sticking up in strange places, and he’s unshaven, although, since he is not a hairy person, only the most observant viewer would recognize this. He looks like he hasn’t showered in a week, even though he learned about my infidelity just a few hours ago. He looks like he’s aged five years in one morning. He presses his lips together so hard they disappear. “Did you love him?” he asks finally. “Was it worth it?”