by Nicki Chen
“I don’t know,” Jay said. “I’ll call Dr. Granville.”
She nodded through her tears. While he was calling the doctor, she sat on the toilet. It didn’t seem right to sit there though. Whatever was coming out of her, it wasn’t waste. It was . . . Well, she didn’t know exactly what it was, but how could she just let it fall into the toilet and be flushed down the drain?
A moment later Jay stood in the doorway, his face drained of color, his hands at his sides. “Dr. Granville is sending his wife. He said she’s a midwife.” For a moment he seemed frozen in place.
Diana was still sitting on the toilet, trapped there, and she needed to go someplace else. “Could you . . . um . . .” She looked around the room. She could sit in the shower. But, no. “Could you put something on our bed, honey. Something for me to sit on. Towels maybe, lots of towels.”
He opened the closet door and threw a stack of towels over his arm.
“And could you bring me . . . some, uh, clean underpants,” she said, struggling to get the words out.
The cramps had stopped, so she made her way on shaky legs to the sink to wet a washcloth. She was sitting again on the toilet seat, wiping blood off her legs when Jay returned with the underpants. “I’ll need a heavy-days pad,” she said, concentrating so the words would come out right. “They’re in the bottom right drawer.” The washcloth in her hand smelled metallic, like blood. It didn’t remind her of the smell of menstrual flow. She wanted to consider whether that was a good sign, but it was hard to think. The bleeding had stopped, though. She hoped that was the end of it, that her body would repair whatever had happened and the baby would be all right.
Jay helped her to the bed. She was just getting settled on the towels, arranging pillows behind her back when the doorbell rang announcing Gwendolyn’s arrival.
From then on, Diana’s pain and bleeding stopped being private. Gwendolyn, who arrived with a serious-looking medical bag and none of her usual makeup, took charge of Diana and Jay’s bedroom. “We’ll keep watch,” she said, setting down her bag. “Try to sleep.” Clarita, who always heard the bell, came rushing down the stairs. She was quick to bring a chair and some water for the doctor’s wife/receptionist/nurse/midwife, who crossed her legs and settled in for what could turn out to be a long night.
“Isn’t there something I can do?” Diana asked. It was her body, her baby. She must be able to have some effect on what was happening to her.
“Just relax.”
Oh, my god! That word again! How many times had she heard it? She didn’t want to relax. She wanted to do something. But what they were all telling her, what Dr. Feliciano had been saying all along was, “It’s out of your control. Live with it. Smile. Breathe. You’re helpless.” She clamped her teeth together and glanced from one to the other. They looked as helpless as she felt—Jay and Clarita, scared; Gwendolyn, professionally noncommittal. Diana sighed and fell back on the pillows. Who in the world would help her?
It was three in the morning when she looked at the clock beside the bed. She’d felt too jittery to sleep. Besides, whether she could influence the course of events or not, still, she felt the duty to keep watch, to monitor her body. To pray for her baby. Eventually, Clarita nodded off in the chair she’d brought in, then Gwendolyn, then Jay, who had insisted on climbing into bed beside her. Then, just before dawn, Diana, too, fell asleep.
With the first rays of light sneaking in between the curtains and a mismatched chorus of birds chirping, cheeping, and warbling to greet the day, Diana was jolted awake by intense pain. It came in waves, low in her belly. And then in her back. She tried biting her lip, but she couldn’t keep from crying out. This time the blood gushed out, filling her pad and spilling over onto the towel.
“Diana. Honey.” Jay crawled back onto the bed and knelt over her, his face a portrait of agony.
“Mr. McIntosh,” Gwendolyn said in the no-nonsense voice of a medical professional in charge of sickness and health, life and death. “Please wait outside.”
He squeezed Diana’s hand and kissed her cheek.
“Go,” Diana said. Right now she couldn’t think about him and whatever it was he was feeling.
“Mr. McIntosh, please.”
Reluctantly, Jay stood up and backed away from the bed.
The contractions continued off and on for the rest of the morning. Sometimes clots and bits and lumps came out with the discharged blood. Sometimes nothing. The contractions would begin and build and continue as though they would never finish. She moaned through the pain; and when the contractions hit her hard, she screamed. She couldn’t help it.
Then, just before noon, the contractions stopped. Diana sat up and looked around the room. At Jay, standing in the doorway looking bedraggled as he tried to muster a closed-mouth smile. At Gwendolyn, who, with her dark hair and big brown eyes, looked striking even without her makeup. At Clarita, who stood faithfully beside the bed looking anxious.
When she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, everyone smiled and asked if she was feeling better. No one mentioned the baby. No one said, “It looks like the baby will be okay now.” Or, “That’s it. The baby is gone.” But Diana knew. It was over. All that was left was to finish the painful, melancholy work of giving birth—either naturally or in the hospital—to a dead baby.
The afternoon sun was casting a scarlet glow on the bedcovers when the pain began to intensify again. This time she didn’t fight it. She let it happen, the blood and clots and tissue slowly working its way out of her. She was too tired to stop it, too disheartened. Clarita brought clean towels and took the stained ones away.
She didn’t cry as she was losing bits of the lining of her uterus. But then as the pain strengthened, strange animal sounds she didn’t recognize came out of her. She felt too confused to think, but her body knew exactly what to do. Without her willing it, she pushed out a clot bigger than all the others.
Gwendolyn leaned over and picked it up. “Do you want to hold it?” she asked.
Diana held out her hands. It was tiny and warm, curled up in her hands like the pictures of fetuses she’d seen in magazines. And it wasn’t moving.
Jay sobbed beside her, his hand on her shoulder. The way he stood there beside her struck Diana as being a cruel parody of a crèche scene, Joseph with his hand on Mary’s shoulder and Mary holding Jesus. Except in this manger scene, Diana and Jay’s baby was dead.
45
Diana ran her hand down Jasper’s back, taking what comfort she could from his warm fur and vibrating body. “You’re a good kitty,” she whispered. He raised his head and squeaked a tiny meow. Ever since the miscarriage, as though he knew she needed him, Jasper had stayed close to her. Now, making room for the book in her lap, he stayed snuggled up beside her leg.
She rubbed her fingers over the cover of the old corner-curled paperback as if it had something to tell her. And heaven knows, she did need some direction.
The first few days after the miscarriage, she was a basket case, too tired and weak to do anything. All she’d wanted was to be left alone to cry. For a while, crying had felt good. Only for a while, though. After that, it just made her chest ache and her eyes puff up, reminding her and everyone else that the pregnancy she’d waited so long for had failed. That her baby, the baby that never became more than a fetus, was dead and buried.
That was just one more thing that haunted her: the burial. She bit her lip. Maybe they should have pretended the fetus was just another blood clot and flushed it down the toilet. There’d been nothing particularly right and solemn about what they did. It was more like the “funeral” she and the neighbor kids performed on a summer’s day for a dead bird than a real burial service. Jay had wrapped the fetus in an embroidered handkerchief and placed it in a lacquer box. Then, with his arm holding her up, they’d taken the box out to the backyard to the hole he’d prepared. After he covered the box with dirt, neither of them could think of a prayer suitable for a fetus, so they simply stood in silen
ce for a moment looking down at the bit of disturbed earth. And then they left. No one else was there except Clarita, watching from the kitchen window.
Now, five weeks after the miscarriage, Diana’s sadness was impervious to crying. With every passing day her grief burrowed deeper and spread wider into everything she saw and touched. This baby had been her hope. And now it was gone. Without that hope, nothing else mattered.
Jay went to work every day, carrying on. When he returned home, they smiled tiny smiles and made the smallest of small talk. Neither of them wanted to discuss the miscarriage, but they couldn’t maintain interest in anything else. After dinner the prior night, Jay had suggested they listen to music.
“Okay,” Diana said. “What do you want to hear?”
He shrugged. “You choose.”
She popped a Whitney Houston cassette into the player and sat down beside him on the sofa. The first song was okay. She even forced herself to hum along now and then. Only a few bars into the second song, though, she had to jump up and stop it before she drowned in a tsunami of musical drama and sorrow. She tried a few more cassettes, but the loud upbeat songs grated on her nerves, and even Beethoven stirred up emotions she wasn’t ready to contend with.
Maybe, she’d decided the following morning, reading would be something she could handle.
Port Vila didn’t have a bookstore, but it did have a small library. She’d peeked in one day months ago and found nothing but a colorless room that looked more like a storage space for a used-book store, so she’d turned right around and left. This morning, though, she’d needed a book. Opening the door and venturing inside, she passed through a thin shaft of light dancing with dust motes and began looking for the fiction section. What she found was two small shelves marked fiction, most of which appeared to be hundred-year-old novels and cheap supermarket romances. Finally on the lower shelf she found The Trembling of a Leaf, a book of short stories about the South Seas by Somerset Maugham.
It should have been a good choice. And yet, here she was, still sliding her fingers over the cover. It occurred to her that the Tahitian woman smiling out at her was the standard image of a South Pacific Paradise—a beautiful woman in a sarong with flowers in her hair sitting on the grass stringing frangipani flowers into leis. She was a white man’s image of Paradise that somehow everyone else had been conditioned to adopt.
Jasper looked up at her and meowed his tiny squeak. This was her Paradise, she supposed—this perfect house, this veranda that ended in planters filled with bright pink bougainvillea. The view of the lagoons was as lovely as anyone could hope for. And though the pleasure it brought Diana these days was muted, the breeze was indeed pleasant and the plastic-slatted lounge chair she sat in was comfortable. She sighed and opened the book to the first story.
It began with a long paragraph about a man swimming in the sea, showering, drying himself, and then dressing for breakfast. In the second paragraph, which was even longer, the man complained about the mosquitoes, the heat, and the constant roar of the breakers on the reef. It was obvious already that the man, who coincidentally was named Macintosh, hated his situation. Everything about the beautiful island seemed to be driving him crazy. To find out why, she’d have to keep reading. Her mind kept wandering, though. Even when she succeeded in reading a whole page, she found that by the time she reached the end of it, she had no idea what she’d just read.
Folding back her page, she closed the book and looked out at the grassy, downhill slope of their front yard. I won’t forget you, she whispered. Everyone else wanted her to move on, to forget about her baby, the small promise of life that had seemed so real to her when it lived inside her womb. At lunch yesterday, Suling had tried to encourage her by telling her not to worry. She would surely get pregnant again soon. Suling hadn’t meant to call attention to her own bulging belly, but her hand just naturally fell there.
She and Abby had dragged Diana out to lunch at La Terrasse to cheer her up, and for a while it seemed to be working. When you were surrounded by Port Vila, you couldn’t ignore its distinctive enthusiasm for life—the chatter and clatter of expats and locals inside the little café and outside at the sidewalk tables, the traffic on the street, the ocean-scented breeze. As time went on, though, the invisible shape of what wasn’t said cast an ever larger shadow. Why didn’t either of her friends mention the baby she lost? Okay, the fetus, but it was on its way to becoming a baby. And why couldn’t Diana bring herself to talk about it?
She wiped her eyes and stood up, dropping the book on the chair next to Jasper. He meowed his little peep, and she leaned over and scratched him behind the ears. “I’m going to take a walk,” she told him. She would walk down the hill, maybe turn into the Radisson, walk through its lobby, past the swimming pool and out onto the little island with the path along its shore and the back nine holes of a golf course in the center. She wouldn’t think. She’d just walk. And maybe, for just a little while, she’d forget.
46
Walking was one way Diana got through her days. Sketching was another. When she wielded a pencil or paintbrush, she didn’t have to think about herself. She didn’t have to plan and make sense of her life. She could just wander around, a sketchbook under her arm, a pencil in her pocket. And when something caught her eye, she could simply sit down and make a quick sketch of it. If drawing involved making choices—emphasizing one pattern or shape over another, choosing which leaf or tree or person to accentuate, which to heighten or soften—they came naturally to her. She’d been sketching what she saw all her life.
Most mornings after breakfast, she walked down to the Radisson Hotel, through the grounds, and around the little island, where tourists hit golf balls and walkers like her listened to waves lap against the shore and watched shorebirds wade and fly.
She took the little lasagna-pan-shaped ferry to Erakor Island where she swam in the lagoon and walked on the trail. She sketched Aussie children on the beach and the ni-Vanuatu waitress in the little café. She walked out to the end of the island where Erakor Lagoon met the Pacific Ocean and sketched the waves and the graceful, tangled mangroves.
When she got back to the house, she elaborated on the sketches with colored pencils or watercolor.
Thus she got through the days and weeks without crying too much. During the dark and silent hours of night, however, her thoughts inevitably sank into a morass of sadness and defeat.
It took a month for her to finish reading the first story in Somerset Maugham’s book of short stories. Each time she sat down to read it, her mind wandered. Sometimes she paced back and forth on the veranda as she read. It was not a happy story. Despite being set on a beautiful little island in Samoa, it was all about the clashing personalities of two men, the British administrator of the island and his assistant, Macintosh. On page after page, Macintosh found more reasons to hate his boss until he was obsessed with his hatred. The ending came fast. Reading it, she could only gasp and slam the book shut.
That night in bed, she told Jay she was going to take the book back to the library without reading the other stories.
“Why?” He rose up on his elbow and looked at her. “He’s a great writer.”
“Maybe so, but his stories are too dark, at least the first one was. A murder and a suicide? The main character walking out into the ocean and blowing his brains out? You can’t get much darker than that.”
“Hm. Did he have a good reason?”
“You could say so. He was implicated in the death of the other man.”
Jay nodded and fell back on his pillow.
In the past, they would have had a longer discussion. They used to enjoy talking about the books they were reading. Now neither of them had the heart to talk about difficult topics.
“Night,” Jay said.
“Goodnight, honey.”
What woke her from a more-or-less sound sleep she couldn’t say. It might have been a noise . . . maybe a feeling. All she knew was, something was wrong somewhere. She reached for J
ay and blinked her eyes open. The sheet on his side of the bed retained his shape, but it was flattened, as though he’d melted into the bed.
“Jay,” she called softly, throwing off the sheet. “Where are you?” She hurried to the bathroom. She was going to feel foolish if he’d just gone there to pee.
He wasn’t in the bathroom, though.
She started down the hallway, poking her head into the nursery that was now just a study. “Jay?” she called, her voice just above a whisper in deference to the secret quiet of the night.
She peeked in the laundry room. Then she walked into the kitchen where pale moonlight fell silently on the breakfast table and the counters and floor. The view out the window—the jagged shadows and complicated patterns of dark and darker in the jungle-like area behind the house—made her shiver.
“Jay.” She stood at the top of the three steps that led down to the combined dining and living room. With the large windows across the front of the house and shiny white tile floor, you didn’t need a full moon to see that Jay wasn’t there. She clasped her hands together and tried to think where he might be. He couldn’t just disappear. Their car was still in the carport. She’d seen it there when she looked out the kitchen window.
The house was so still and quiet that she felt a momentary sensation of unreality. Then, suddenly, the silence was broken by a strange noise. She ran down the stairs and across the dining room, her bare feet barely touching the white Italian tile.
There it was again. It sounded like someone choking. She dashed across the living room and yanked open the sliding door to the veranda. And there he was, sitting on one of the plastic chairs, his head between his knees, his back heaving, as though he couldn’t breathe.
“Jay!” She hit his back. “What is it?” Was he crying? She’d never seen him actually cry. Tear up maybe, but nothing like this. “Jay.” She rubbed his back and the back of his neck.
