The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  Hilary squeezed his arm. “I missed you,” she whispered, and he smiled and said, “Me too.”

  *

  Liz showed Hilary to a small pink room at the end of a hallway. In the corner sat a single bed dressed in a frilly rose-colored coverlet and piles of lacy white pillows, like a little girl in her Sunday best. “This is you,” Liz said. “Towels are over there,” and Hilary noticed a stack of pink towels on the nightstand with small white fish embroidered along the seams.

  “How’re you feeling? Are you having any morning sickness? I left work early every day for about eight weeks straight. I considered downing a case of Pepto-Bismol at one point.”

  “I’ve been constantly exhausted, and I’ve had some nausea.” Liz straightened a gauzy pink curtain beside her. “But I’m happy to have it all, since, you know, it took us a while.”

  “Of course.” Hilary searched for something more to say. Was she supposed to apologize for being pregnant? They’d never spent much time together—Hilary didn’t have a sense of what Liz would want to hear right now. “You must be relieved.”

  “In a sense. What about you? Are you nervous for the baby?”

  “A little.”

  Liz opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Will he, the guy, help out?”

  Hilary was surprised by Liz’s boldness. “No, not since he doesn’t know about it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Hilary said, wondering whether she should’ve said so much. “You might not want to tell Jake. He’ll disown me. Actually, why not, go ahead. It’s probably only a matter of time before he does anyway.”

  “Come on, he’s not that bad.”

  “Oh, but he is. Did he ever tell you about the time he caught me breaking into our parents’ liquor cabinet? Yes, I was thirteen, and yes, it was the middle of the day, and yes, my boyfriend at the time was five years older and waiting for me in my bedroom, but Jake, who’d gotten home early from school, lectured me for about two hours on alcoholism and statutory rape. He scared the living hell out of me. Then he made me go to my father that night and tell him everything, and when Dad tried to hide a smile at first, Jake screamed at him that he was a terrible father and that his daughter would probably end up dead on the street one day.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “I’m not!”

  “I know he means well.”

  Hilary looked at Liz, and they both smiled.

  “Okay, maybe not,” Liz said, “but what’s he going to do, make you call the guy who got you pregnant and tell him about it? Who cares what Jake thinks anyway? It’s not his life.”

  “True.”

  “So who is he, this guy?”

  Hilary walked to the bed and sat down. She looked around at the room, crowded now with her bag and one of her mother’s in addition to the bed and dresser, the large hamper, an overstuffed pink chair. “He’s a musician,” she said. She thought of Bill David, of Beatle and Jackie. Then of George and Camille. “And a carpenter. His name is George David.”

  “How come you two aren’t together, you know, together together? How come you don’t want to tell him?”

  “I guess because, I don’t know, I guess because I don’t really want to marry him.”

  “Oh,” Liz said. “Well, that makes sense. I’m sorry to be so nosy. I shouldn’t pry this much. I promise I won’t ask anything else.”

  But Hilary almost admired her sister-in-law for having the courage to be so direct. “I’ll think of some equally probing questions for you and ask them when you least expect it.”

  “Deal.” There was a shuffling in the hallway, and Liz turned to leave. “Make yourself at home, Hil. If you need anything, just ask or help yourself.”

  In a moment, Hilary overheard her and Ellen talking in the hallway about the island (people were buying up all the land) and the rain (whenever would it stop?) and the joys and trials of pregnancy. “You’ll be wonderful parents,” Ellen told Liz.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s easy to imagine this house teeming with children. And you’re a great cook and Jake is the biggest worrywart in the world,” she rattled on. “Really, you two will be the best parents.”

  Hilary wished Daniel would hurry up and arrive so she could tell him what their mother had just said. They could discuss Jake’s extravagant house that looked as if the entire thing had been delivered, furnished, from a catalog. She could tell Daniel about Liz’s surprising candor and ask him about their father’s happiness—what did it mean that he’d needed to bring Babe this weekend? She wondered what Daniel would have to say about it all.

  She hadn’t seen him since a few months after his accident, when she’d flown East. She’d taken the red-eye and arrived first thing Saturday morning, and Brenda picked her up at the airport and drove her right to the hospital. Daniel lay there in bed, a little thinner than when she had seen him last at their grandmother’s funeral. His legs remained, of course, perfectly still beneath the sheets, and Hilary tried to ignore the nervous flutter in her chest when she first saw him. When Brenda left her and Daniel alone to go drop off some film at the lab, Hilary closed the door to his room, pulled a bottle of vodka from her backpack, and she and Daniel took swigs until they found themselves at once laughing and crying about Hilary’s then-boyfriend, an undergraduate at Berkeley who’d serenaded her the night before with his mandolin.

  Hilary couldn’t wait to see her brother again.

  5

  Pronouncements on Motherhood

  The water was choppy and the ride bumpy. Brenda and Vanessa chatted the entire way about the wonders that were Freeman Corcoran and Maine and having a baby (Daniel surmised that the baby’s father had been some sort of one-night stand). Vanessa said that she actually loved raising Esther on her own, and Brenda asked all sorts of questions: “Don’t you ever just want someone else to change her diapers? Do you feel closer to her, do you suppose, being her only parent?”

  “You know, I do. We have our own little world and our own language. I’m the only one who understands what it means when she cries a certain way or when she sticks her thumb in her ear. Freeman tries to translate, but he always thinks she’s hungry. I’m sorry, but only the mom knows the nuances. I’m sure of it. I’m the only one who can make her stop crying right away.” She looked at Daniel’s shoes. “You love them like nothing else. It’s the most bottomless love—you’ll see.”

  Brenda gazed at Esther as Vanessa spoke. Daniel felt the steady tumble of the water beneath them. His stomach began to lurch, and then settled. He glanced up at Vanessa—at her sharp nose, her square jaw, her muscular arms. She was both motherly and fatherly. Though he couldn’t remember being as young as Esther, he did remember the sensation that his mother was the primary thing surrounding him, keeping him safe and whole, a sort of protective balloon. As he grew up and when he left for college and even during grad school, he was to some degree still contained and protected by this sensation that had become a part of his consciousness until—until when? Until the accident, he supposed.

  He reached over and took his wife’s small hand. He felt calmer than he had all day, and he told himself to enjoy this quiet inside. He could have, after all, gotten rankled by Vanessa’s pronouncements on motherhood. He easily could have grown testy about Brenda’s pointed questions.

  The ferry slowed, turned, pulled backward into the slip and finally jerked to a stop. They would soon be free to move forward with the day now, just Daniel and his wife, and as the people around them gathered by the door and swayed on their feet, waiting for the gangplank to be set up, as they inched forward and he pushed himself down the gangplank, his wheels brushing the wooden rails, Brenda behind him, carrying their bags that knocked against his back, and as they headed out into the rain yet again, it was as if nothing at all had wedged between them. They were headed to see his family, and he was ready now, and she was there, his wife of almost a decade, behind him and all was well again.

  Ben
eath a small shelter overlooking a street crowded with stores, Brenda and Vanessa exchanged phone numbers and hugged goodbye. Daniel watched Vanessa squeeze Esther to her chest, hurry across the street through the rain and disappear into a car. He reached in his pocket for Jake’s phone number. “See a phone?” he asked.

  “There’s one.” She pointed across the street to a small group of people standing beneath umbrellas in front of a phone booth. He rushed down the sidewalk, and she stepped behind him yet again to push him faster (had she already forgotten how this had tired her out before?), bouncing him over the cracked pavement, off the curb and onto the street. At one point, she slowed just before a broad puddle. People ran past them, pulling their hoods over their heads. “Bren, I’ve got it.” He set his hands on his wheels, but she said nothing. She quit pushing him and just stood there a moment. Stopped cars hummed beside them, and after another moment she followed him. Once they’d reached the tall curb of the sidewalk, she stopped again and leaned her face toward his. “It’s been too long since the baby moved,” she yelled into his ear.

  “How long?” Daniel curled his hands above his forehead against the rain. He should’ve brought his raincoat. He was sure he’d brought his umbrella, but where was it now? “Listen, do we need to be discussing this out here?”

  “Something’s wrong, Dan. My belly and my back are cramping,” she said. The rain continued, relentless, and seemed to stretch the following minutes into hours. Vanessa reappeared, Esther still in her arms, and when Brenda told her that she thought she needed to go to a hospital, Daniel said she was overreacting—surely she only needed something to eat or drink, or maybe just to rest for a while. But she insisted, and Vanessa herded them down the street a little ways and into the back seat of a rusty car, then helped Daniel into the front. She struggled to get the wheelchair into the trunk as he held Esther on his lap. She wailed and squirmed and kicked in his arms. Daniel turned to see Brenda clutching her stomach and staring at her shoes. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she said to the floor of the car, and then Vanessa slid into the driver’s seat and drove them to a clinic, a small, squat building only a few minutes away.

  In a waiting room near the emergency department, he and Vanessa and Esther watched a doctor hold Brenda’s arm and rub her lower back as he led her down a hallway. He hadn’t seemed to notice that she’d come here with anyone else—he’d looked right past Daniel and Vanessa at first. She should have slowed down—he’d told her twice earlier to slow down and stop rushing. So what if they got a little wet? Anyway, this was surely some kind of stress or exhaustion, and he expected the doctor to give her a glass of water, tell her to relax and send them off. Esther began to wail again and Daniel said, “I can handle it from here. You should just go home.”

  “I’ll stay. I don’t mind,” she said, shifting the baby on her hip. She ran her fingers through Esther’s thin hair. “I want to make sure everything is all right.”

  They remained beside each other, neither saying any more. The waiting room was long and narrow with several orange plastic chairs and a pile of old toys in the corner: a Raggedy Ann doll missing an eye, a jack-in-the-box with a rusty spring sticking out of it, other broken toys that looked as if they were patiently awaiting a doctor. Daniel heard a high-pitched beeping somewhere, but on the whole, it was quiet. Much quieter than a hospital or clinic should be. He tried to think of something to say to Vanessa. He drew her in his head—a thin, short woman made up of lines, holding a big, round baby. Her arms in a circle around Esther. The baby began to cry again, and Vanessa said, “She’s just tired.”

  “You should really go home. If you’d like, I’ll call you later and let you know that everything’s all right. Brenda has your number.”

  Vanessa reluctantly agreed. “Promise you’ll call me. I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” she said, and he agreed. She leaned down to give him a stiff pat on the back, and headed off. Daniel found himself relieved to be alone.

  A short doctor with a gray mustache eventually appeared and Daniel hurried over to him. “I’m Dr. Waller, the OB on call,” the man said, and one half of his mouth smiled nervously. He explained that Brenda had begun to bleed heavily, and that an ultrasound had been done, and unfortunately it appeared that intrauterine demise had occurred.

  “She’s still alive?” Daniel blurted, and Dr. Waller looked at him sideways. “Yes, yes, but because the bleeding hasn’t stopped, and because she’s medically unstable right now, though most likely she’ll be fine in the end, we’ll have to perform a D and C—a dilatation and curettage—to remove the tissue,”

  “Tissue?”

  “Yes, the tissue from the fetus.”

  “The baby.”

  “Yes, the fetus,” Dr. Waller said in a deliberately soft voice, and Daniel asked, “Is the tissue, the fetus, going to be okay?” only then acknowledging the weight forming at the bottom of his throat. “I think I see.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Dr. Waller explained the operation, and that Brenda would soon be anesthetized, but the whole thing wouldn’t take too long.

  “Okay.” The weight rose in Daniel’s throat.

  “If you need anything, just ask one of the nurses. Oh, and Mr. Miller, chances are fairly good that Brenda will be able to conceive again after this. Some people, that’s their first question.” Daniel looked up at the man’s mustache, which poked at his lower lip. “I’ll come find you after the D and C, okay? She’s going to be just fine,” the doctor said, and patted the back of Daniel’s chair. He hurried back down the hallway.

  Daniel looked over at the one-eyed Raggedy Ann and the empty orange chairs lined neatly against the wall. The morning of his accident, he’d decided to stop jogging. His knees had begun to ache when he stepped out of bed. His age had been announcing itself in places he’d never much thought about before, but mostly in his knees. He’d take up something else that’d be easier on him, he decided, maybe swimming or biking. Maybe, he now thought, maybe in the end he’d unwittingly chosen his fate. He’d given up on his knees, and his entire legs—his entire life—had been taken from him. He’d grown ambivalent about being a father and spiteful of Jonathan White, and now their baby had been taken from them. But this was a pointless, suspicious line of thinking, and no one had such control over the future. Really it had been Brenda who’d been pushing him too hard. If she hadn’t been exerting herself, or if they hadn’t been on their way to visit his family, if it hadn’t been raining so hard and she hadn’t had to deal with his wheelchair, his goddamned wheelchair, maybe nothing would have happened.

  He headed to the corner of the room, picked up the Raggedy Ann doll and hugged it to his chest.

  *

  Brenda was groggy when Dr. Waller first brought Daniel to her. Tucked under a thin white sheet, her head lolled to one side when he entered the room. He rushed to her and nearly slammed into her bed as he reached for her hands. “Mm,” she mumbled. An IV tube pierced the underside of one of her wrists, and he could see the small reddish lump like a worm beneath her skin.

  “Bren?” he said, and she murmured something unintelligible.

  The doctor said that although she was stable now, he wanted to keep her here for at least the night, and Daniel asked if he could stay beside her, in the empty bed there. “Of course you can. I’ll just let the nurse know.”

  Daniel sat there, listening to the noise of running water somewhere and waiting for someone to say something else. “So what was the cause?” he finally asked the doctor.

  “We won’t know for some time yet. A sample of the tissue was sent to Pathology down in Portland and they’ll do what they can to find something. It could have been related to the placenta, but really, for most patients, I’m sorry to say it’s indeterminable.”

  Daniel wondered if at an actual hospital better pathologists might be able to determine more. “Could we have the tissue sent elsewhere?”

  “It’s sent to a very reputable lab in Portland,” Dr. Waller said. “Listen, try not
to think about that right now. Your wife will wake up soon and you two will have enough to deal with.”

  “You know,” Daniel said softly, “it wasn’t mine.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The baby. We used a donor.”

  “Oh, well, that makes sense.”

  “I just meant, you know, that maybe it was something to do with the sperm?” He realized he sounded rather desperate.

  “Probably not,” Dr. Waller said, nervously half smiling again. “Again, it’s best not to think too much about that right now. We’ll try to have answers for you soon enough, and again, you’ll need to prepare for the possibility that, well, that maybe there are no answers.”

  Brenda murmured something and Dr. Waller said he’d check in again soon, then left.

  Daniel turned to her and squeezed her shoulder lightly. The corners of her lips were gummy, and he reached for the box of tissue on the table beside her bed.

  “It hurts a little down there,” she whispered.

  “Should I go get a nurse?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’ll probably feel better soon,” he tried.

  She lay still, her eyelids sinking and rising. “Did you tell them, your family?”

  “No, not yet. I wanted to see you first.”