“I guess,” she said. “But it’s really… it’s really terrible. Bed rest! Aside from losing the baby, it’s sort of the worst thing that could have happened.”
“We’ll work it out. You’ve only got ten weeks. That’s not so long.”
“Ten weeks! That’s forever.” She beat her hand lightly on the sheet next to her. “That’s unbearable.”
“But it could have been so much worse.”
“I know that,” she said. She began, softly, to cry. She turned her head to the wall.
“Don’t,” he said. “Janey, don’t.”
“But,” she whispered. “How am I going to make it through? All day, lying down, at home? For ten weeks?”
“We’ll figure it out. It might not be the whole time. If the placenta—what’d they say? Moves away?”
“Resolves, I think they said.”
“Right. Resolves. Then you’re fine. You’re good to go.”
“What about work?”
“We’ll figure it out. We’ll figure all of it out. You can work from bed.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But I can promise you that we’ll figure it out. What’s important is that the baby is going to be fine.”
“Is probably going to be fine. What if it happens again? All the bleeding?”
“Then we’ll deal with it. Even if the baby came today, it would be okay. We would take care of it.”
“But ten weeks.” She gathered a handful of the hospital gown in her fists and lifted it to her face. Silently, Stephen handed her a tissue from the box on the table closest to him.
“Thank you,” she said morosely. From the depths of her bag her phone began to ring.
“That’s work,” she said.
“Don’t answer.”
“Maybe I should—”
“Don’t.”
“Okay.”
He had not yet told her the rest of it, which the doctor, summoning him into the hallway, had discussed with him several minutes ago. The doctor was Indian, with dark hair pulled back into a bun and unlined caramel skin. Young, from the looks of it—maybe his age, give or take. No nonsense. Clearly busy.
“Listen,” she’d said, looking at a clipboard, then glancing up at Stephen. “You’re visiting family here?”
“Yes, my parents.”
“I think it’s best she remain.”
“In the hospital?” he’d asked.
“For forty-eight hours, yes. So we can confirm the bleeding has stopped. But after that, here in town. For the duration.”
He swallowed hard, beginning to understand. “For the duration of—”
“Of the pregnancy. For the duration of the pregnancy, your wife should be resting.”
“I’m not sure I—”
The doctor sighed, and made a nearly imperceptible shift of weight. “She should not make the trip back to New York. What if the bleeding were to begin again?”
“She’ll never go for that.”
The doctor shrugged and met Stephen’s eyes. Her eyes were remarkably dark, no makeup. “Sometimes it’s not up to us.”
“But… are you saying for certain?”
“I am saying for certain that if you want to give this baby the best possible chance, your wife will rest at home in Burlington until she delivers. Which may be in ten weeks, and which may be sooner. The nurses will give you discharge instructions and talk to you about setting up appointments.” She shook his hand then, and turned to walk down the hallway.
“Jane?” he said. “One more thing we need to talk about.”
She held out her hand. “First, phone,” she said. “I’m going to try my mother.”
He watched her scroll through the numbers, watched her bite her bottom lip and put her thumbnail between her teeth. After a moment she put down the phone and looked up at Stephen. She touched her hands to her stomach. “She’s not picking up. I’ll call her when we get back. Do you think we can go soon, Stephen? Is there anything else we need to do? I really just want to go home, to my own bed, back to the city. Please take me home.”
“How come you’re allowed to eat in the den?” Olivia demanded from the kitchen.
“I’m a grown-up,” Lillian said. She was holding a cherry Popsicle; Olivia’s was grape. “I can be very careful.” She was flipping through a gardening magazine that she had found on the coffee table. The photographs in the magazine—the perfect outdoor spaces, the perennial gardens in full bloom, even the advertisement picturing a happy middle-aged couple sharing a bowl of granola—reminded her of all the deficits in her own life. She closed the magazine and put it back where she’d found it.
“Can I eat mine in the den?”
“No. You can eat yours where you are, or outside.”
“Why?”
“Grandma’s house, Grandma’s rules.”
“Outside. But I want you to come with me.”
“All right.” They stepped together onto the back deck. Lillian shifted Philip’s car seat near the door so that she could see inside it. Miraculously he wasn’t sleeping, but he wasn’t crying either. He was regarding both of them seriously, sucking on his fist. “Good boy,” said Lillian. Olivia crouched down and stuck her head inside the car seat.
“Careful,” said Lillian. After she had talked to Tom, Lillian had fed Philip and then handed him to Ginny while she took a half-hour nap. Thirty minutes hadn’t been enough to replenish her completely—her reservoirs, after all, were completely dry—but it had helped, and she felt that now she could face the rest of the day.
“I’m just giving him a kiss,” said Olivia, and she was; Lillian heard the gentle smacking sound and then Olivia emerged, triumphant, still grasping her Popsicle.
The pots of geraniums on the deck were beginning to droop in the sun. Lillian found a watering can on the deck and filled it from the tap in the kitchen, then held it out to Olivia, who smiled and began serenely to water the deck around the pots.
“In the soil,” said Lillian.
William was working in the back garden. Ginny had gone out to do errands. Next to William was parked the old green wheelbarrow Lillian remembered from her youth. She watched William dip his shovel into it, then bring it out.
“When’s Daddy coming?” asked Olivia. “Tomorrow?”
“No, not tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Daddy has to work.”
“So, when?”
“I’m not sure,” said Lillian.
“What’s Grandpa doing?” Olivia’s Popsicle was beginning to drip a purple river down her chin.
“Spreading mulch.”
“What’s malch?”
“Not malch. Mulch.”
“Malch.”
“It keeps the gardens healthy for the summer. Keeps the weeds away.”
“Oh.” Olivia worked at her Popsicle for some time. “I don’t like the way it smells,” she said, then looked squarely at Lillian and said, with a fair amount of indignation, “Grandpa has hair in his nose.”
“Does he?” Lillian snorted. “How lovely of you to notice. I suppose you pointed it out to him?”
Olivia nodded. “He said it’s because he’s old.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I wanted to take it out. But he wouldn’t let me.”
“I expect not.”
Olivia finished her Popsicle; she licked the stick until there was no grape left and handed it to Lillian. “Here.” Lillian ignored her. “Here,” said Olivia again, and this time Lillian took it and put it, with her own, on the table. Lillian peeked inside at Philip: still content, he was looking up at the bright plastic spider hanging from the car seat’s handle. She sat down on the bench that wrapped around the inside of the deck.
“I have nothing to do,” Olivia said.
“What do you want to do? Hopscotch?” She hoped Olivia didn’t say yes to that. She didn’t have enough energy for hopscotch.
“No…”
“Color?”
�
��No…”
“Just sit here in the sun, then?”
“Yes!”
“Come here.” Lillian patted the spot beside her on the bench. She closed her eyes. Perhaps Olivia could be persuaded to fall asleep in the sun with her. She was trying to convince herself—and the Popsicles were part of this ploy—that this was merely a vacation, just a little jaunt to visit the family, and that at some point soon they would return home and resume their normal existence. She had found that by keeping her marital wound tightly covered, indeed, by refusing to acknowledge it at all, and by refusing to acknowledge the now rudderless state that accompanied it, it hurt much less.
She thought about her visit to the church the day before, and the unexpected lift she had felt sitting there in the pew talking to Father Colin. There was the way he’d looked at her that had allowed her to believe for a moment that everything would be all right. The feeling had dissipated entirely by the time she got home, of course. But if she thought very hard, and if she imagined herself back in the pew, with the smell of incense that reminded her of sitting beside her siblings, of having both of her parents beside her, of the utter ordinariness and simplicity of a Sunday morning, then she could almost call the sensation back again.
Stephen and Jane, whose unannounced appearance had first surprised her and then, quickly thereafter, offended her—mostly because she felt they felt as though she ought to turn over the proper guest room and take the pullout couch in the den—had proved to be much less of an obstruction to her little homecoming fantasy than she had at first feared.
Still, she was glad they were off at the end of the day, glad that she would have her mother’s attention back where it belonged, on her and the children. Ginny did tend to dither so around Stephen and Jane. Lillian supposed that they all did, in their own way.
But Lillian, this time, had found herself dithering less than usual. After years and years of looking up to Jane, after years of hearing about her tremendous earning power and her efficiency and industry, about her ability to rise at five o’clock in the morning and to be at her desk by seven-thirty after a trip to the gym, it seemed that her pregnancy had put them, at last, on something resembling equal footing.
“She looks miserable,” Ginny had whispered fiercely to Lillian the previous night, after Stephen and Jane had gone to bed. Lillian, sitting at the kitchen table with Philip, about to hitch up her shirt and give him a final feeding before putting him down, had agreed.
“Swollen ankles don’t discriminate,” she observed.
“Yes,” said her mother, and they’d sat there companionably for some minutes while Philip worked his way onto the breast and settled down contentedly to nurse.
As for discriminating, the same was true for heartburn and overworked veins and all of the other maladies visited upon mothers-to-be in their third trimester. No matter how fancy your business degree, no matter by how much you outearned your husband, no matter how your presence in your sleek and quiet office contributed to the mysterious workings of the international economy, the fact of another being growing inside of your body was simply not comfortable.
The phone rang. William, blithely attacking the mulch with his shovel, didn’t hear. Lillian rose, then stood for several seconds, regarding the scene before her. It was no longer her telephone that was ringing; it was her parents’ phone, and the likelihood that it would be for her was relatively small. Should she answer it? Or should she let it go, let her parents’ ancient, creaking answering machine to pick it up?
“Dad,” she called into the garden. “Dad, phone’s ringing. You want me to get it?”
William did not look up from his work.
“Right back,” she said to Olivia, who had stretched herself out on the bench, eyes closed, little pointed chin lifted to the sky, and who was uncommonly, exceptionally, blissfully, quiet and immobile.
She returned to the deck holding the cordless phone, and it must have been something in her tone of voice that caused both Olivia and William to look at her with identical expressions of concern and attention.
“It’s Stephen,” she said sharply, holding the phone out to her father, watching him put down the shovel, peel off his gardening gloves, and make his way over to the deck before she’d completed the sentence. “He wants to talk to you, Daddy. He’s calling from the hospital. I think something’s wrong.”
From inside the house, from the depths of his car seat, loudly, boldly, announcing his disinclination to be ignored, and his awareness, perhaps, that he would be ignored anyway, Philip began to cry.
Ginny’s face went pale. She was holding a paper sack of groceries, which she set down on the counter. William began to unload them, laying out the food carefully on the counter.
“Jesus Christ,” Ginny said, and Olivia, thrilling to the words that she knew, perhaps from Ginny’s tone and perhaps from the way Lillian looked at her warningly after Ginny had spoken, to be forbidden, looked down and repeated it softly, to her sandals: Jesus Christ.
“Bed rest,” said Lillian. “Can you believe it?”
“We’ll have to move them upstairs,” Ginny said. “To your room, Lillian.”
“My room?” Lillian had Philip pressed up against a burp cloth on her shoulder. His eyes were open and he was breathing deeply, contentedly; he had just eaten.
“Well, we can’t have her lying down all day in the den, can we?”
“Why not?” said Lillian. “The den’s more comfortable.”
“Because that bed isn’t as good,” said Ginny. “You can’t be on bed rest on a pullout couch. The springs jab you in the back.”
“Then we shouldn’t have had a pregnant woman sleeping there in the first place,” suggested William.
“There’s a television—” said Lillian.
William watched his daughter and his wife. He had so far remained out of the conversation; he had left it to Lillian to relate the situation to Ginny, and he had begun putting the food away. He had filled the sink and was dunking the plums into the water. “Doesn’t matter about the television. The bedroom’s better,” he said firmly. He peeled a tiny orange sticker off one plum and a bit of the skin came off too, exposing the tender flesh beneath.
“Can I have a plum?” said Olivia, and wordlessly William handed her the one he was holding.
“This one’s broken,” she announced, looking at the peeled-away section of skin.
“It’s not broken,” said Lillian.
“Broken,” said Olivia. “I want a different one.”
William chose another from the sink and held it out.
“Be careful of the pit,” said Ginny and Lillian at the same time, looking at Olivia before turning again to face each other.
“But I can’t sleep in the den.” Lillian’s voice rose. “I’ve got the baby. The den’s too… public. People walking in and out.”
“Exactly,” said William. “That’s why Jane can’t have the den.”
“But I’ve got to nurse!” said Lillian plaintively.
“You can go into Stephen’s room for that,” suggested Ginny.
“And in the middle of the night—”
“In the middle of the night,” said Ginny, “there will be no need to worry about privacy.”
“There’s no room in Stephen’s room! It’s full of junk.”
“Hey,” said William.
“Well, it is.” Lillian chewed vengefully on a thumbnail.
“We can move some of it.”
“Now?” said Lillian. “After ten years of piling crap in there?”
“Crap,” said Olivia delightedly.
“Lillian,” said William. “We can move some things out of there—not all, but some—and you can sleep in there, if you like.”
“No,” said Lillian. “I don’t like.”
William was beginning to feel a trickle of annoyance with his oldest daughter—no, more than a trickle. More like a stream. “Lillian,” he said. “You’re being uncharitable. You’re being ridiculous.”
>
Lillian colored. “I am?” She turned to Ginny. “I am?”
“Well, sweetheart,” said Ginny. “Just listen to yourself.”
“Yes,” said William. “You are. And I’ve had enough. Here’s what we’ll do. Jane will take over the bedroom, and that’s that. You can move in with Olivia, Lillian, or you can sleep in Stephen’s old room, or you can move down here to the den. Whichever you prefer.”
“Fine,” said Lillian. “Den.” And then, reluctantly, “I’ll move my things.”
“Wonderful,” said Ginny.
“Wonderful,” said Olivia, who had plum juice running from the corner of her mouth and onto her white T-shirt. The T-shirt said, “Princess in Training” in pink sparkly cursive, but too many journeys through the washing machine had caused the first r to rub mostly off so it actually said, “Pincess in Training.”
“I’ll go change the sheets, get it all sorted out for her,” said Ginny. She rubbed her temples in a gesture that William recognized as a sign of stress and anxiety. “And then, let’s see—what else should we do? To get ready? Lillian, what would you need, if you had to go on bed rest? Books, magazines?”
“Straitjacket,” said Lillian. She was still put out, anyone could see that. Her eyes narrowed.
“Oh, come now,” said William. He folded the paper bag from the grocery store and put it in the pantry closet with the others.
“I mean it. She’s not going to be able to keep still. For weeks? Jane? It’s not going to happen.”
“Well, it has to happen,” said William. “My understanding, from Stephen, is that it has to happen, or the baby will be at risk.”
“Well, yes, but.”
“There is no ‘yes, but’ is the way I took it,” said William.
One thing he had not yet related to Ginny was the current of panic he had heard running underneath Stephen’s words during his conversation with him. He thought of Jane earlier that day, drinking orange juice in the kitchen, checking in with work. He thought of the authority with which she’d ended her phone call, and the certainty and confidence with which she talked about work. Here, in this house, in Vermont, perhaps she was a little bit of a fish out of water. But he knew from Stephen, and he knew from Lillian, and he knew from observing her himself, that she was steely.
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 10
