It Started in June

by Susan Kietzman

  Five minutes later she pulled onto Main Street. There wasn’t another car on the road, as most of the stores had already closed for the holidays and most people, Grace assumed, were settled into their homes for the evening. The florist was not quite a mile down the road; she’d just make it, she thought, pressing down on the accelerator. She switched on the radio and turned the dial from Bradley’s sports station to the weather. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a fresh coating of snow for Christmas morning? Realizing, when she passed a police car going in the opposite direction, that she was going forty-five when she should have been going thirty, Grace stepped on the brake. But the car, at that moment traversing a sheet of black ice, didn’t slow or stop. Grace turned the wheel toward the curb, but this action had no effect. She reached for the seat belt she should have fastened before she left her driveway, but she had time for nothing except bracing herself against the back of her seat, and watching, wide-eyed, as the telephone pole on the other side of the street seemed to move in her direction. A second later, the car came to an abrupt stop, Grace’s head and stomach slamming against the steering wheel. The engine stalled when the car hit the pole. It was quiet, except for the sound of Grace’s rapid breathing. She would have thought everything was okay if she hadn’t tasted blood and felt the release of warm liquid between her legs.

  * * *

  Within an hour, Grace was in a hospital bed, with Bradley, Dorrie, and Bruce standing over her. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve ruined everything.” She was as close to tears as she could get without actually crying.

  “No, no, you haven’t,” said Dorrie, patting Grace’s hand. “All of that doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does matter,” said Grace. “I made a wonderful dinner that I was so looking forward to sharing with you.”

  “And we will share it,” said Dorrie. “Tomorrow.”

  Bradley was on the opposite side of the bed, holding Grace’s other hand. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay,” said Grace. “Am I bleeding?”

  “You have a gash on your forehead,” said Bruce. “You lost a bit of blood. But the bleeding has stopped and I’ve already talked with the plastic surgeon about stitching you up. She’ll be here shortly.”

  Grace shifted her gaze from Bruce to Bradley. “Am I bleeding from anywhere else?”

  Bradley swallowed. “You lost some blood.”

  “What about the baby?” asked Grace. “Is the baby okay?”

  “The doctor thinks so, but he’s ordered an ultrasound,” said Bruce. “The ultrasound tech will be here shortly. Lie back, Grace, and try to relax. Everything will be okay. A few deep breaths now.”

  Grace covered her face with her hands, not wanting to see anyone, to be lying in a hospital bed, for any of this to be real. She didn’t want to think about the possibility of losing her baby because she needed flowers for a dinner table. Bruce, standing behind Dorrie, briefly rested his hand on her shoulder. “Shhhh. Shhh, Grace,” he whispered.

  A moment later, the ultrasound machine was wheeled into the room by the technician. “Let’s have a look at that baby,” he said.

  * * *

  In spite of the fact that Dorrie knew it was deeply wrong for her to feel this way, she hoped Grace had lost the baby. She didn’t wish this because she disliked Grace. In fact, she liked Grace very much, considering the circumstance that brought them together. Grace had had a troubled childhood, to be certain, but this was not particularly worrisome to Dorrie. Grace appeared to have been able to propel herself out and away from it, something many people were unable to accomplish, even after a lifetime of effort. And Grace had done it on her own, without a sympathetic sibling who could listen to her complaints or provide comfort over the phone in the middle of the night. This showed unusual resilience, an inner strength that Dorrie admired.

  So yes, she admired Grace. But the baby was wrong. Unplanned pregnancies seldom led to strong, lasting marriages. No, instead they created walls of resentment, chasms of anger. If the mother and father did not have a deep love and commitment to each other before the baby, they would not likely have it afterward. Didn’t everyone know this? All anyone had to do was watch an episode or two of Dr. Phil, or talk to a neighbor, or peruse a magazine article in a doctor’s office waiting room to know that unplanned pregnancies were a bad deal. Heck, anyone wanting to know more about unplanned pregnancies could talk to a teenager—they all knew! The girls carried condoms now, as well as the boys.

  The ultrasound tech squirted gel onto Grace’s belly. And then five pairs of eyes moved quickly and silently to the screen. He moved the wand over her belly until he found, in three long seconds, what he was looking for. “Here we go,” he said, zeroing in. “Your baby’s got a strong heartbeat, Grace. Everything appears to be fine.”

  He looked at Grace, as did Bradley, Bruce, and Dorrie—and then he looked at Dorrie, as did Bradley, Bruce, and Grace, because no one expected her to be the woman in the room with tears in her eyes. They were not tears of joy or sadness. Instead, they were the manifestation of her guilt at what she had been thinking at such a distressing time for Grace, guilt that had pushed its way to the surface. And Dorrie was ashamed. No matter what she thought was good or right, Grace was six months pregnant with her son’s baby. Dorrie could either continue to fight, or she could, as she so often advised her patients to do, accept reality.

  CHAPTER 28

  When Grace was advised to stay in the hospital overnight for observation, Bradley decided they would all stay for a while and have a cafeteria dinner together. Bruce insisted on staying nearby while the plastic surgeon finished sewing up Grace’s forehead, so Bradley and Dorrie took the elevator down to the cafeteria, where their preconceived thoughts about institutional food were disproved by the delicious-looking entrees and variety of soups available in honor, they told each other must be the case, of those needing to be at the hospital, either working or recovering, for the holiday. They enthusiastically bought butternut squash bisque, sliced ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese, tossed salad, and apple crisp for dessert. Loading all the food, plates, glasses, napkins, and cutlery onto two large trays, they rode the elevator back up to Grace’s room, where Dorrie cheerfully dished out whatever everyone wanted, all the while remarking that this would be a Christmas Eve that everyone would remember for years to come. They chatted amiably over the meal and Bradley, Dorrie, and Bruce lingered for an hour or so afterward until Grace announced she was tired. She was feeling more embarrassed than fatigued, but she knew admitting this would prompt everyone to tell her not to feel the way she did.

  While Bruce and Dorrie were putting on their coats, Bradley hovered over Grace. “You’re okay with me leaving?” he asked. “I can drop my parents at their place and come back here.”

  “I’m fine,” said Grace. “Plus, it’s snowing now. I don’t want you to come back out in this. Drive carefully, will you?”

  Bradley kissed her softly on the lips. “Of course,” he said.

  * * *

  After they all got into Bradley’s car, Bruce and Dorrie immediately told their son how lucky Grace was to have come through the accident without any serious repercussions. “That cut on her forehead will heal nicely,” said Bruce. “It will blend in with her hairline.”

  “And the baby is fine,” said Dorrie. “What strong little beings they are!”

  “You’ve got a fighter in there,” said Bruce. “I think you’re going to have a boy.”

  “And that’s precisely why I think it’s going to be a girl,” said Dorrie. “What do you think, Bradley?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bradley, when he meant I don’t care. He didn’t care if the baby was a boy or a girl because he didn’t care, in this particular moment, about the baby at all. There was room in his brain for Grace only. And all he could think about, care about, was that he could have lost her. The car could have hit the pole on Grace’s side, sending torn metal and shattered glass into her body. The car
could have hit another car, sending Grace’s untethered body through the windshield. He and his parents could be on their way home from the morgue right now instead of from the hospital.

  “Bradley? Are you okay?”

  Bradley turned to look at his mother, who was sitting in the passenger seat next to him. “Other than the fact that Grace was in an accident and is now in the hospital, I’m fine.” He faced front again, focusing on the tiny, furious snowflakes his wipers were failing to adequately clear from the windshield.

  “Honey,” she said in that omniscient tone that annoyed him. “Of course you’re not okay. Of course you’re afraid.”

  Bruce, sitting behind Dorrie, leaned forward in his seat and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Grace came through this beautifully,” he said. “She’s going to be fine. The baby’s going to be fine. You’re all going to be fine.”

  “I wish I could feel as confident as you two.”

  “I give you permission,” said Bruce, chuckling at his own joke.

  “It’s not funny, Dad. Grace could be dead right now. Our baby could be dead.”

  “But they are not,” said Dorrie. “They are alive. They are healthy. Why this concentration on the negative when you could be celebrating the positive?”

  “Because now I realize that something like this can happen at any time. That Grace and our baby are not safe from harm. All she did was drive down the street to get flowers for the dinner table.”

  “Is that why she went out?” asked Bruce.

  “Yes. She forgot to get flowers for the table. She wanted everything to be perfect.”

  “Isn’t that always the way? Perfection comes with cost.”

  Bradley twisted his head in the direction of his mother. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

  “Just that it’s often hard to understand, to realize, that good enough is good enough.”

  Bradley had no response.

  “Hey,” said Bruce, when Bradley pulled the car into the gravel drive of the B&B, “how about coming in for a nightcap? We’ve all had a stressful evening.”

  “By all means, let’s throw some alcohol into the mix,” said Dorrie, exhibiting the stress Bruce had just referred to.

  “Bradley?” said Bruce, not acknowledging his wife’s remark.

  “I think I’m going to head home,” he said. “This snow is only going to get worse. And I need to sort through the food.”

  “I pulled everything out of the oven and turned it off before we left,” said Dorrie. “Put a cover on the potatoes and the broccoli casserole and wrap the roast in foil and put it all in the fridge. Tomorrow, Grace and I can figure out how to best serve it.” Dorrie opened her car door. “Call us in the morning with an update. We can either go with you to the hospital to get Grace, or we can do whatever needs doing at the house.”

  When Bradley got back to the house, he did not shovel the inch of snow that covered the front path and steps. And he did not immediately put away the food that had been sitting out for close to four hours. Instead, he decided he’d have a beer first, and sat on the couch. Two minutes later, his phone vibrated and he pulled it from his pocket. There was a text message from someone named Rachel: Merry Christmas Bradley!

  * * *

  The next day dawned sunny and bright. It took Bradley a moment when he opened his eyes to realize it was Christmas Day. He reached for his phone on the bedside table and called Grace. “Merry Christmas,” he said when she answered the phone.

  “And a merry Christmas to you,” said Grace. “You can take whatever you got me back to the store. I have all I want for Christmas.”

  “I was hoping you’d feel that way,” said Bradley, getting out of bed. “Because I didn’t have time to get you anything.”

  “Ha! I know you did! I saw those packages in the back of the coat closet.”

  “What packages? The ones for my parents?”

  “You are such a bad liar.”

  “I think that’s a good thing,” said Bradley. “Hey, I’m going to take a quick shower, and then I’ll be over. Have you heard anything about when you might be sprung?”

  “The doctor has to see me first. The nurse told me she’s making rounds right now.”

  “Okay. Should I bring my parents along?”

  “They’ve probably seen enough of the hospital,” said Grace. “Maybe they can hang out at the inn, or, if they want, they are welcome to be at the house. Maybe you can make them cappuccinos.”

  “I think I’ll do that. My dad said something about shoveling.”

  “We can shovel, Bradley. They are our guests.”

  “You aren’t touching a shovel. And I can help my dad when we get back.”

  “Fair enough,” said Grace.

  * * *

  By one o’clock, the five inches of snow that had fallen the night before were cleared from the driveway, front walk, and back deck. Bradley and his dad were sitting on the couch, Bloody Marys in hand, talking college football. Dorrie was in the kitchen with Grace, where they were in the process of resurrecting the holiday feast. The casseroles were back in the oven. The undressed salad had been retossed and then sprinkled with the oil, vinegar, and herb mixture Grace had made the day before. And the roast was sitting on the counter, after being gently reheated. The table was still set from the night before. As soon as they all sat around it, Bradley said, “Hey, where are the flowers?” Dorrie and Bruce snuck looks at Grace, who hesitated only a moment before she offered them a smile.

  After dinner, Bradley and Bruce cleaned up the kitchen, so Grace and Dorrie could relax. As soon as they sat down on the couch together, Dorrie asked Grace how she was feeling. “Other than embarrassed, I’m feeling fine,” said Grace.

  “There is no need to feel embarrassed, Grace.”

  “It was a ridiculous thought, to go out and get flowers in the dark on icy roads. Who does this?”

  “Perfectionists,” said Dorrie.

  Bradley listened from the kitchen. He wished his mother would drop it. But she could be like a dog with a bone, gnawing, gnawing, gnawing until the meat was gone. She had been chewing, no doubt, on the notion that Grace was a perfectionist since she had mentioned it in the car the night before. The most effective way of getting Dorrie to let go of topics or thoughts, Bradley knew, was to either jump into the conversation and steer her in another direction or proclaim Dorrie’s brilliance.

  “I can be a perfectionist, yes,” said Grace. “However, I think my flower errand was more about me wanting everything to be just as you’d want to see it than the final item on the list for a perfect evening.” Dorrie nodded. “But maybe they’re the same thing, and I am now trying to justify my actions.” Grace smiled at Dorrie. “I’m rusty,” Grace said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to impress anyone other than my boss or myself.”

  Bradley and Bruce had finished their kitchen duties and filled four mugs with freshly brewed decaffeinated. “We’re impressed,” said Bruce, approaching his wife and handing her a mug. “Very impressed,” he added, sitting in the chair opposite Dorrie. “Aren’t we, Dorrie?”

  In the way that people who have been together for decades often communicate with each other without saying anything, Bruce was telling Dorrie to let it go, to drop whatever insignificant line of questioning she was pursuing and to give Grace the love she needed. And while Dorrie appeared a little miffed, she complied. They had all had a scare the night before that seemed, at the moment, resolved. And it was Christmas Day. “Indeed, we are,” said Dorrie.

  CHAPTER 29

  Winter was Bradley’s least favorite season. He thought the snow was pretty when it was silently falling from the sky and when it was white and fluffy on the ground. But, as an adult, it was more of an encumbrance to him than a source of pleasure or entertainment. As a child growing up in the Midwest, he had loved winter, with its sledding and tobogganing, pond hockey, school cancellations, and coats and boots that kept him warm and dry in freezing temperatures. His mother worked pa
rt-time when Bradley was in elementary school, so she could be home when Bradley got off the bus. And whenever he came in from playing with his neighborhood friends outside, where they would build forts, tunnel through roadside banks created by the snow plows, and throw snowballs at one another, she told him he smelled like cold air and made him hot chocolate with mini marshmallows.

  At thirty, Bradley didn’t play in the snow. He wasn’t a skier, so he was not part of the crowd that drove north every Friday after work in cars packed with sleeping bags, coolers, boots, and poles, jackets and hats, with skis strapped to rattling roof racks. And he did not skate anymore, his interest in playing hockey having waned after suffering a broken collarbone from a particularly aggressive check in a high school pickup game. And he hadn’t been on a toboggan since college, when he and several friends, all coerced by liquor, made weather-permitting midnight runs down the steep slope in the front yard of the unpopular provost’s Georgian-style mansion. Bradley now viewed snow as something to be shoveled from driveways and decks, to be avoided on the roads, to be bundled up against, to be wished gone, so that he could return to his preferred methods of enjoying the outdoors.

  January and most of February had been atypically brutal, with thirty inches of snow landing in southeastern Connecticut, resulting in six taxing shoveling sessions that had generated little support from Grace. He could accept that he should do the heavy work outside because she, in her condition, was no longer able. But she seemed to think he should look forward to the task, that he should bound out of bed in the morning, eager to pop a muscle in his back moving snow off her driveway one eight-pound shovelful at a time until it was done. There was no hot chocolate. There were no mini marshmallows. And in their stead were only brief, barely audible thank-yous. On his good days, Bradley understood Grace’s inability to shower praise on him for completing household tasks. After all, she was raised in a household that didn’t believe in kudos for hard work. Instead, Grace’s mother and grandparents expected her to do whatever needed to be done; the only reward was the nightly applications of hand lotion to calloused fingers and palms and cracked knuckles. But other days he craved kind words from Grace, perhaps because she was so reticent to utter them. On these days, he became irritated, not willing to understand why someone who grew up in such a miserable environment would want to perpetuate rather than change it. Would it kill her, after he’d shoveled for two hours, to make him some hot chocolate?