“My wife’s in labor!” Adam announced, as he burst through the ER’s electric doors. I trailed a few steps behind, leaning on Jordana for support. “She’s thirty-six weeks and needs to be seen immediately.”
Who is that? I thought, as I took in the tornado that had once resembled my husband. He spoke so quickly and so authoritatively, I barely recognized him.
“Well, there’s an expectant dad,” Jordana snickered.
A woman in green scrubs jumped out from behind the reception desk with a wheelchair, and a moment later I was seated and being rolled down a long hallway, Adam and Jordana trotting along beside me. When we arrived at a private triage room, Jor-dana put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be out here if you need me,” she said with a kind smile.
I waved in thanks as the door closed behind us. A nurse eased me out of the wheelchair and handed over a gown. I undressed, Adam helped me onto to the exam table, and I lay back atop the crinkly white paper as he settled onto a rolling stool. The only sound in the room was the scratch of his pen against the clipboard as he filled out insurance forms. I turned toward the wall and bit my lip. Tears trickled down my face and landed on the table’s exposed vinyl padding. It had been only seven minutes since the nurse had left the room, but it seemed like seven years until there was another knock on the door.
“Come in,” Adam said, and a youthful, copper-toned blond woman in a perfectly pressed white coat walked into the room.
“Hello there. I’m Kira Sharofsky . . . uh, excuse me, Dr. Kira Sharofsky,” she said, running her finger over the MD on her badge. Ah, it’s July, I thought, recalling that the universal start of the hospital residency year was July 1. Damn, I hope she knows what she’s doing.
“So, Holly. I’m told you’ve been having some pains. Can you describe what’s going on?”
“Well, I got up to pee around four thirty this morning, which is common, but this time I had some cramping, which is not,” I babbled. “I figured, Hey, I’m not home, I’m moving around a lot, I’m eating slightly different foods—maybe my body’s reacting to being on vacation . . . I mean, if you can even call it that, ’cause let me tell you, this hasn’t exactly been a stress-free getaway, but better safe than sorry, right? So I paged my doctor and thought for sure he’d just tell me it’s nothing, but instead he asked when the last time was that I felt the baby move, and”—I burst into tears—“ I couldn’t remember! For months I recorded every flutter, but I was so distracted this weekend, I forgot to pay attention! The one time . . .” I sobbed and turned to Adam. “I’m so sorry!”
Adam had lost all color in his face, and the poor newbie resident appeared shell-shocked.
“Well then,” she said, handing me a tissue. “We’ll do a check of the baby’s heart rate ASAP. Once that’s squared away, we’ll try and figure out the cramping issue. I’m gonna go grab the heart rate monitor from down the hall. Be right back.” I nodded, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Adam reach for his book of psalms from my purse.
Please, God, let this child be healthy; let me be healthy, I thought, as the door closed behind the doctor.
This scenario—me on an exam table, Adam seated beside me, doing the only useful thing he knew to do: pray—was all too familiar. With over a decade of failed infertility treatments under our belts, the exam rooms, the doctors, the crinkly white paper, and even the scent of the antibacterial soaps were all fraught with disappointment and failure. After eight and a half months of positive, happy visits and feeling like a normal pregnant woman, I thought those days of fear were behind me. But there I was, back at the start of what felt like the ultimate marathon, as if the past eight months of joy had been merely a dream.
“Adam,” I whispered, my arm shaking as I extended it to him. He grabbed it and rolled toward me on the stool. “Is this my fault?” I asked, my voice cracking.
He rose and kissed my forehead repeatedly, hovering over me like he had in the car, but this time, I welcomed it. “It’s not your fault,” he said softly. “First of all, we don’t even know what we’re dealing with here. But even if something is not right, how could it possibly be your fault?”
“I went to Babies ‘R’ Us,” I sobbed again. “On Shabbos! I thought I was doing a good thing by being with Becca and supporting her. But maybe I—”
“Stop. You didn’t create this scare. You did what you felt you needed to do in the moment. You were a good friend. Okay, so you broke Shabbos one time in what, two decades? And it was not for some frivolous reason; it was for someone who is sick.”
I felt a cramp on my side after he said the word sick.
“We are human beings, Hol. We’re not infallible. You tested the waters. You made a mistake. Okay! So you won’t do it again.”
I took a deep breath. “But what if it wasn’t a mistake?”
Adam shook his head in confusion. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow—”
“Knock, knock. I’m back,” Dr. Sharofsky said. She was holding up an external fetal monitor like a prize. “Would you mind lifting up your gown, please?”
I closed my eyes as she squirted gel onto the probe. I couldn’t bear to watch. I knew that the mental calisthenics involved in trying to decode a medical professional’s flat facial expression while performing an exam could be more detrimental to my psyche than the result itself.
I could feel Adam come near and his fingers stroking my hair as Dr. Sharofsky glided the probe across my abdomen. His breath was warm against my ear where he whispered, “I love you,” over and over, as an endless sentence, until it resembled the continuous swish-swish-swish sound of his prayers. And then suddenly he stopped and pulled away.
My eyes shot open. Adam was standing beside Dr. Sharofsky, looking down at the fetal monitor, which, I now noticed, was beeping steadily and strongly.
“Awesome sauce,” Dr. Sharofsky muttered with detectable relief, as if she were reassuring herself it would all be okay. She held up the screen with a flashing heart as proof.
“Baruch Hashem!” Adam cried out, thanking God in Hebrew.
She cocked her head, looking befuddled by Adam’s declaration, and then performed a quick internal exam to see if I was dilated, which, thankfully, I was not.
“This is all great news, but I’d still like to monitor you for a wee bit longer just to be on the safe side, given the cramping you experienced. As you know, your age makes you a high-risk pregnancy. And given the stress you say you’ve had over the last few days, plus the heat outside, you may be more strained and less hydrated than usual. I’d like to run an IV to kick up your fluids, and then, as long as you’re stable, we’ll get you outta here. ’Kay?”
I nodded and averted my eyes as she inserted a needle into my arm and hooked me up to a bag of clear liquid. As soon as she was finished and had exited the room, Adam and I looked at each other and both exhaled. “I guess I’m already a bad mom. My child is literally attached to me, and I didn’t bother to check in and see if it was moving!”
Adam laughed. “I have absolutely no doubt you will be the best mother in the world. I’ve known that since the day we met.”
“I don’t know about that. I still have so many questions.”
“No one has all the answers. We’ll figure it out as we go.”
“You can’t do that with everything. Some things need to be ironed out in advance.”
“What needs ironing?”
I sighed. Are we really going to have this conversation now? I thought. “Well, education, for one. Should we send the kid to yeshiva, like all the kids where we live? Or something a little more contemporary, like a day school or a modern Orthodox yeshiva? I know public school is probably off the table, but I loved PS 188 as a kid. There was nothing wrong with the way you and I were raised. We turned out just fine. Should I keep going?”
I didn’t wait for his response. I knew I was rambling, just the way I had with Dr. Sharofsky when we’d arrived, but every unresolved issue that had been chipping away at my conscience and nudging
for a resolution came pouring out of me on that exam table.
“And how about summer camp? Will we enroll in Jewish summer camp or try a nondenominational camp to get a more multicultural experience if he or she is in a yeshiva for ten months of the year? And then what about eating out of the house? Ever since we came back from Israel, we have eaten only at kosher restaurants. I know it seems totally foreign at this point, especially given the fact that I’m the poster woman for maintaining a kosher diet while being a successful international executive, but what if we start eating vegetarian meals at mainstream public restaurants? Do we want our kid to grow up eating only at kosher establishments? And if that’s the case, should we move? Because then we’ll sort of be pariahs in Crown Heights, right? I mean, maybe we should look at houses on Long Island—somewhere a little more modern but still religious. But, forget education, housing, and kashrut—we haven’t even figured out how we want to name the baby! Do you want to name the baby according to my family’s tradition of naming after the dead or your family’s custom of naming after the living?”
Adam smiled, grabbed a tissue from the dispenser on the wall, and gently wiped the snot running from my nostrils.
“Do you remember the night we first kissed, in Tel Aviv?” he said, his face just inches from mine. His voice downshifted into that slow, mellifluous tone that never ceased to captivate me.
“Adam, I’m serious! These are real issues we need to talk about. This is not the time to reminisce about—”
“Holly, look at me,” he said, his timbre intimate and sexy. “Do you remember what I said to you after that kiss when we sat together on the plane and flew back to New York?”
I nodded.
“I told you that the trees we planted in the Jewish National Fund forest weren’t the only roots we planted on our tour. Even though we were thousands of feet above the ground, I had a feeling you and I were planting our own roots. Do you remember me saying that?”
I nodded again.
“Over the last twenty-something years, our roots have grown in ways I think neither one of us ever expected. Right?”
“Mmm-hmm . . .”
“We’ve changed the way we dress. The way we eat. The way we live. You’re a role model not only to observant Jewish women, but to all women around the world, and I’m still your delivery boy.”
I smiled.
“Our lives are completely different than they were when we started on this journey,” he continued. “So if the branches of our tree twist and turn a little more and new buds form, I’m okay making adjustments, as long as we grow together. This is the tree of our life.”
I reached for his hand.
“We’ll figure it all out. I promise. You’re the most important thing in the world to me. We need to be honest and do what feels right—that’s what I whispered in your ear when we came home from Israel. It’s what I’m promising again now.”
Just then, we heard a light tapping on the exam room door.
“Yes?” Adam called out.
Jordana poked her head around the edge of the frame. “Hey,” she said softly. “They told me it was okay to come back here. You up for a visitor?”
“Of course,” I said. “Please.”
She pulled up a chair and squeezed my foot. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay. Better. Heard a heartbeat, thank God. No verdict on the cause of the cramping, though. They’re still watching me.”
“All right. Better safe than sorry,” she said. “I know so many women who have gone to the hospital, only to be sent home. My friend Andrea was sitting in the audience at her husband’s business school graduation when she thought her water broke. He took off the cap and gown, and they went to the hospital—but it turns out he missed his commencement because Andrea peed in her pants.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“And I also have a friend who was convinced she was having gas pains, and the baby ended up falling into her pajama bottoms.”
“No way,” Adam exclaimed.
“Yup, it’s true. She just sat there in her apartment with the baby attached to her until the paramedics got there. Anyway, my point is, I’m glad we came.”
“Me too,” I said. “Listen, don’t feel like you need to wait around for us to be released. I know you have a brunch to host. We can take a taxi back to your house.”
“Are you kidding me? You’re giving me a rare opportunity to bask in the glory of being anal and organized! The table is set. The food is prepared. All I have to do is take the platters out of the refrigerator. Plus, it’s only seven fifteen! Everyone is still sleeping. We’ll be back before they wake up; they won’t even know we were gone.”
The way she regaled us with stories of her friends’ deliveries in an attempt to offer peace of mind reminded me of her charm. It made me miss our friendship. I wondered if now, twenty-plus years after I stole her first love, we could officially move on.
“Thank you for coming, Jordana,” I said, and took her hand in mine. “I appreciate it.”
She seemed startled for a moment, and turned to look at Adam and then back at me. But when we both smiled, she did, too.
For the next hour, Adam and I heard tales about Jordana’s job at the Legal Aid Society; about her sons, AJ and Matthew; and about the rewarding work she had done with the Innocence Project, where she had worked as part of a legal team to help exonerate a man who had been imprisoned for decades. Over the years, we had received the major Jordana headlines from Becca, but it was good to get the details straight from the source.
“You know, there’s one thing I’d always wondered about you,” I said. “How did you end up a defense attorney? I could see prosecution or juvenile justice, but criminal defense?”
She laughed. “Sixth grade. You were there. The moment of origin was when Ms. Kelly accused me of cheating off David Lieberman during an exam. I sneezed and turned my head so snot wouldn’t splatter all over the test, but because I’d perfected the silent sneeze, Ms. Kelly just saw my head facing David’s desk. I was sent to the principal’s office to plead my case. I won, and from then on I was hooked on defending the underdog.”
“Really? So your life’s course was charted with a single accusation. One moment changed everything.”
“I guess so,” she said, and smiled.
“That happened to me when we came home from our trip to Israel. It was just one second, but I knew what Adam whispered in my ear would alter our lives forever.”
Jordana gasped, and her face fell from a pleasant and hopeful demeanor to one of shock and hurt. Her porcelain skin turned fuchsia, and Adam’s eyebrows arched in surprise. It took me a few seconds to register what had happened. In the ease of the moment, I had forgotten to whom I was speaking. Our conversation with Jordana was so effortless and smooth, I was no longer on guard and had not edited out the history of our love triangle.
“Oh my gosh.” I leaned my head back onto the thin exam-table pillow. “I’m so sorry, Jordana. I didn’t mean to bring that up. That was so stupid and insensitive of me. I’m so embarrassed. I didn’t think. Please accept my apology. If I could rewind and take that back, I would.”
Adam’s face, buried inside the pages of his book of psalms, reddened as well. I was on my own with this one.
“Well,” Jordana said with a chuckle, “I guess now we’re even.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember when you and Adam showed up late to Becca’s twenty-first birthday party and announced your engagement?”
I laughed. “Of course.”
“Remember what I did?”
“No . . .”
“Are you kidding? You don’t remember? To this very day, every time I replay that scene in my head, my face flushes in embarrassment. It’s one of the moments in my life that I would do over if I could.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad if I don’t remember.”
“You were standing with a whole bunch of Adam’s friends—the ones I used to hang out with
when we dated. I walked over to congratulate you, and they all fell silent. All eyes were on me, watching to see what I would say. It was awful. I was so self-conscious, but I wanted to do the right thing and wish you both well before I left the party. But somehow I froze and my mind blanked. So I grabbed your left hand, and, in the most annoyingly nasal imitation of my mother’s New York accent, I said, ‘Sooo, let me see the ring . . .’ I told you it was beautiful, to wear it in good health, that Adam was a great guy and I wished you a love that continued to be sui generis. I meant every word. But when I smiled and waved goodbye to everyone, no one smiled or waved back to me. I could feel them staring as I walked away, like I was this pathetic, Latin-obsessed freak who couldn’t resist a mental snapshot of the ring that might have been hers.”
“Oh, Jordana, I’m so sorry! I remember you being gracious, but that whole night was such a blur for me. I honestly don’t recall any of those details.”
At some point during my conversation with Jordana, Adam had repositioned his chair away from us so that he faced a corner of the room. Given his shukkling and swish-swishing prayer sounds, he had successfully managed to stay quiet and isolate himself.
“If it’s any consolation,” I added, “I never liked those friends of his anyway. We haven’t seen them since our wedding.”
“Can we make a deal?” she said. “I’ll absolve you if you absolve me.”
“Deal!” I said. “Although I think I got the better end of that, since I have no recollection of any wrongdoing. By the way, what is sui generis? I’ve never heard that before.”
“It means one of a kind. Unique. Special.” Jordana looked at the tile floor for a second, and then back to me with a smile. “You guys were a sui generis couple from day one.”
I was about to tell Jordana how I’d missed our friendship and how glad I was to be airing out our years of tension, but then Dr. Sharofsky returned to the room.
“How you feeling, Holly?” Dr. Sharofsky asked.
“Much better, thank you.”
“Wonderful. Then I’ll set you free and get the discharge papers ready. But promise me you’ll keep drinking water. You need to stay hydrated, and I’d like you to check in with your ob-gyn when you get home this week. All right?”
The Cast Page 24
