Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  Far out at sea a fishing boat bobbed, its masts and shrouds flashing like a code, the sun glancing off at such a low angle that sometimes the boat seemed to disappear from sight. It could be an illusion, the boat, just as Carter’s love had been an illusion. Joanna had been a fool—or had been fooled. For in her deepest heart she’d believed that the love between her and Carter was real and would never vanish. Even though she’d never admitted it to herself, the entire time she was running away from Carter, she secretly thought he was going to find her. Claim her. She’d believed he would be the one person in all her life who would say: you belong to me. I belong to you. Now she walked down the beach toward the water, illusionless, in defeat, and achingly alone.

  Far out on the water the fishing boat rose and fell on the waves, flickering and vanishing in the bright light as the huge white sun sank lower on the horizon. It made her dizzy to watch the rocking boat. Really, she was in terrible pain, terrible, terrible pain, pain of such intimacy she was ashamed. Sinking to her knees, she wailed, and toppled over, a great useless balloon of a thing. Her cries were lost in the roar of the surf.

  How long she lay in the sand she didn’t know, but when she looked up, the sun was lower; the fishing boat was really gone. It was colder. She was still in pain. She tried to push herself up and an arrow of agony shot through her body, and she yelped like a wounded beast.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Oh, body, no.” For something was wrong. Something was going on, and the pain was relentless.

  “Madaket!”

  She didn’t think she could stand. She knew she had to get back to the house. She tried to crawl.

  “Madaket!”

  Between flashes of pain she inched her way up the beach, away from the ocean’s roar.

  “Madaket!”

  This could not be happening to her. She had been so careful, so prepared. She was healthy, she’d taken good care of herself—the pain folded her in on herself relentlessly, and she collapsed on the sand, moaning, her arms hugging her belly. When it retreated, sinking back like a tide, she lifted her head and yelled as loudly as she could.

  “Madaket!”

  Wolf came running down the beach, wagging his tail, whimpering, eyes fraught with worry.

  “Get Madaket,” Joanna begged.

  Finally she saw Madaket running down the path to her, her black hair flying up behind her like wings. Madaket sank to her knees, cradling Joanna’s head in her arms.

  “I’m here. I’m going to call the doctor. You’ll be all right.” But there were tears in her eyes. Then everything went dark.

  She opened her eyes to see Gardner and Madaket and Wolf all crowded around her. A blanket had been thrown over her, and the satin trim brushed her chin. Beneath her the sand was gritty and cool. The sun was almost gone. She felt her belly contract with the mute stony hardness of a shelled creature.

  “Gardner! What’s happening?” she asked.

  “You’ve started labor,” Gardner told her. Gently he massaged her hands. The last of the light seemed to catch in his blond curls, giving him a halo. He smelled of mint.

  “An ambulance is on the way.”

  “My babies—”

  “They’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

  “But it’s too early!”

  “I know. But we can slow it down. Maybe stop it.”

  “Gardner—” she implored in a whisper, and he bent close to her. “I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be. I’m here.”

  “The ambulance,” Madaket cried, and Joanna heard the sand rasp as Madaket spurted up the path to the drive. A few minutes later she returned with two young men.

  Gardner rose. “Joanna, they’re here with the stretcher. Relax. They know what they’re doing.”

  With a gentle, professional speed, Joanna was lifted onto the stretcher. Closing her eyes against a wave of pain, she inhaled a potpourri of good male odors: garlic, beer, sweat, clean clothes, soap. Normal, healthy life. They strapped her in. Madaket took one hand and Gardner took the other.

  “Oh, Madaket,” Joanna moaned. “I hurt.”

  Madaket looked at Gardner. “Can’t you do anything?”

  “We need to get her into the hospital. Then we’ll see.”

  Joanna felt herself being carried like some sort of pagan flesh offering through the fresh air, Wolf circling the group and whining, the last streaks of sunlight dimming above her. With Gardner and Madaket holding her hands, her terror faded into a quiet anxiety. Her stomach hardened, seeming to rise to a point, and she felt staked down by it, the hub of an inexorable wheel.

  As she was slid into the ambulance, she was so frightened she cried out.

  “Gardner, can Madaket ride with me?”

  “She’ll follow in the Jeep. I’ll be with you, Joanna.” Gardner stepped into the mechanical cave. The door slammed with a metallic finality. A light flicked on above her, exposing a cargo of instruments, masks, canisters, and rubber hoses.

  “I hate all this,” she said.

  Gardner held her hands. “It’s new to you, that’s all. And this stuff is all just necessary equipment.” He stopped talking to time her contraction, then launched into an anecdote. “The first twins I ever delivered …”

  Joanna listened to Gardner, not really hearing him, but comforted by his presence. He was trying to assuage her fears, and she was grateful to him. They arrived at the hospital; she could tell by the lights and the way the ambulance slowed. Joanna’s heart skidded with a sudden fear. The back doors of the ambulance opened. She grasped Gardner’s hands.

  “I’m so frightened,” she whispered.

  “You’ll be fine,” he told her. He shouted orders to the ambulance attendants. Then he stepped back and Joanna was lifted out into the night.

  In the hospital, for at least an hour, people fussed over her helpless body, taking off her clothes, draping her in a hospital gown, poking and pricking her, squeezing cold gel on her belly. Madaket had been asked to wait in the hall, and from time to time Joanna could see her black hair as she hovered near the doorway.

  Gardner returned to the room, garbed in white. He stood at the end of her bed, talking in a low voice to the nurses. He bent over Joanna and listened to her belly, felt her pulse. His hands were strong and clean and efficient.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Like the bride of Frankenstein,” Joanna told him, glaring down at the number of tubes and attachments protruding from her body.

  Gardner smiled and perched on the side of her bed. “Here’s the situation. You’re in preterm labor, but we’re getting that under control. That IV in your left arm is Terbutaline, which will slow and we hope stop your labor. But it will also make you feel a little jittery, and it will speed up your pulse, so if you notice that, don’t worry. We’ve also injected you with betamethasone, which will help your babies’ lungs mature.”

  “—my babies—”

  “—are both all right. We’re going to keep the fetal monitor on you so we can chart their heartbeats. We’ve got two strong heartbeats, so your babies are just fine. But your blood pressure’s high and you’ve got a little toxemia, so we need to keep an eye on that. We took some blood so we can check on some things, and we’re running a test to check for protein in your urine. You’ve got a catheter in right now. For the next day or so, I want you to have complete bed rest. And no food, in case you end up going into labor anyway. That IV on your left arm is just sugar water and saline to keep your system in shape.”

  “Are my babies in danger?”

  “I don’t think so. But we want to give them every extra day we can to develop before they’re born. The best thing you can do for them now is just to rest.”

  “Can Madaket stay with me?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t feel so alone here.”

  “All right, then. We’ll put her down as your closest relative. And of course if you need anything, or feel anything that worries you, just press this b
utton.”

  “How long will I be in here?”

  Gardner shrugged. “We’ll see. A few days to start with until we’re sure everything’s under control. We’ll take it a day at a time. For now, the best thing you can do is rest.”

  Joanna dutifully closed her eyes. She heard Madaket come into the room, and when the young woman pulled a chair close to the bed and sank into it, Joanna breathed a sigh of relief and sank into sleep.

  Twenty

  Joanna lay flat on her back in her hospital room, wired and monitored and charted like some sort of volcanic mound about to erupt. The tubes, needles, IV bags, and all the other shining technological apparatus of lifesaving frightened her at first, yet soon became oddly comforting, reminding her of the cables, meters, microphones, and equipment used in taping Fabulous Homes. The hard part for her was simply lying there, a thing, helpless as she drifted in her fate.

  During the first five days of her stay, friends came often to visit, Pat or June or Claude, bringing with them fresh air and flowers, but her reaction to even those gentle excitements caused her blood pressure to rise and the nurses to fuss and scowl. Madaket’s presence seemed to soothe her, or at least not to elevate her monitors, so Madaket stayed in the room almost constantly, slipping home to tend the animals when June or Pat came in. Madaket read to her, brushed her hair, or sometimes only sat next to her, watching television. When Joanna woke at night, she found it a great comfort and companionship that Madaket was always there, sleeping on a cot provided by the hospital. When Joanna opened her eyes and looked at Madaket’s sleeping form, the young woman would awaken, too, immediately alert, concerned.

  “Joanna, are you all right?” Her eyes would gleam in the dark.

  “I’m fine,” Joanna would answer, and they’d both snuggle back into their covers. Madaket would fall back asleep. Joanna could hear the soft rustle of her breathing.

  Quietly Joanna would run her hands over her abdomen. The Chorus Girl would kick and the Swimmer roll in reply. Sometimes she envisioned the future: her babies toddling on the beach, the ocean rippling and gleaming in front of them, her perfect house rising behind them like a shield. The Chorus Girl would be a handful: rebellious, difficult, energetic, and obstinate. She would like to dress up in Joanna’s clothes, pretending she was a queen. The Swimmer would be tranquil and poetic, a musical child. He would play with miniature knights and dragons, castles and steeds; he would play piano and baseball and he would swim in the water like a dolphin. Together the three of them would learn to sail.

  Many hours Joanna simply slept, but in the long deep center of the nights she found herself awake, and after reassuring Madaket, and watching Madaket fall back asleep, Joanna would lie staring at the moon-yellow glow of light levitating over the clean swirled linoleum floor of the hallway. She closed her eyes when the nurses came in on their rounds, not wanting to worry them or obligate them to stay to chat with her, and often as these women came near her to check a monitor or tuck in a bit of blanket, the whispering puff of air, scented with perfume and clean womanly flesh, and the exquisitely light sense of an intelligent presence and of concerned, concentrated caring would pass over her just like the gentle brushing of the sleeve of her mother’s quilted peach-hued satin robe had so long ago. Then she would remember being very young, and physically small, so little that her mother could carry her, and did carry her, up the stairs of strange houses and into strange bedrooms. In those days Joanna was allowed to begin her night’s sleep in her mother’s bed, her face pressed into the familiar scent and feel of her mother’s nightgown. Later her mother would come up and move Joanna to another bed, sometimes one in the same room, sometimes in another room, and then she would gently tuck Joanna in with much the same tender vigilance that these nurses showed. Had her own mother loved her with the ferocity Joanna felt for these unborn babies? She must have, Joanna decided, to give up her figure and its seductive powers for nine months and then to take her with her everywhere she traveled.

  She had never stayed with her father when she was very small, only when she was a big girl, seven or eight, and by then they were unaccustomed to each other’s presence and touch and always slightly embarrassed and even wary of each other. Her father had not been a demonstrative man. When after an absence of nine months he greeted her as she stepped off a plane in New York, he never reached for her or hugged her. He said only, “Hello, Joanna. How nice to see you again.”

  Some of his girlfriends were friendly, some were even maternal toward Joanna, but by then Joanna knew better than to let herself grow fond of any of her father’s women. He was never with any one for very long, and it took all of Joanna’s emotional resources simply to keep up with the turbulence of her mother’s life. She always arrived at her father’s new place stunned and exhausted, with no reserves left over for investing emotions in women she would know only briefly in her life. The later women complained to Joanna’s father that Joanna was cold; Joanna heard what they said as she pretended to sleep, curled in a guest room or on a pull-out sofa. “She’s always been that way,” her father replied, and at first this made Joanna want to rise up from her temporary bed, wrap a blanket around her like a protective cape, and rush in to confront her father and force him to take back his words. She was not cold! She had never been cold! In her heart she boiled with emotions, anger and love and fear and longing, oh, such a deep wide tearing desire to have her father just once in his life look down at her and say, “My daughter. My beautiful child.”

  She never confronted her father. She knew too well in advance that nothing would be gained. She knew this because she’d overheard so many scenes very much like the one about which she fantasized played out between her father and one of his furiously frustrated women. “What do you want?” they would cry, or “What can I do?” “Must you go out tonight?” was the first sign; when Joanna heard a woman ask her father that, and heard her father reply with scarcely smothered fury, “I’m sorry, but I do have to meet with the hospital administrator, I never have time during the day, I’m always seeing patients or operating, if this is too difficult for you, I’ll simply have to move out, I’ve never lied to you, I’ve always told you my work must come first with me—these people, if you could only see these poor damaged people, faces scarred by fire or birth, you wouldn’t begrudge me a few hours by myself in a hospital conference room with a bunch of bald-headed old bureaucrats.” “He’s lying,” Joanna wanted to say to the woman; “he’s meeting someone else, a nurse perhaps, or a former patient, believe me, I know.” But she would never tell on her father. What good would it have done? She would instead be especially agreeable when her father’s woman offered to take her out to a movie or shopping. She would tell the woman how pretty she was.

  Joanna had known that her father was an unusual man, a man with an enormous ego and voracious sexual needs. She knew other men stayed married and faithful; she saw these men occasionally; some were married to her mother’s friends. But she didn’t count on having such a man, a man both faithful and desirable, appear in her life. She had vowed to herself at an early age not to make the mistake of expecting such a miracle to happen to her.

  Although Joanna had slept with men before Carter, and had even been fond of or infatuated with some of them, not until Carter had she felt that deep pull and tug of connection which she thought was love. Sometimes as they lay together in bed, legs entwined, bodies joined at the groin, lips swollen with kissing and wet with saliva, hands locked, every finger interlaced, they would look in each other’s eyes with such honesty and shamelessness that Joanna would feel that the two of them were one, one radiant creature, joined eternally, two halves of a whole. This proud, profoundly intimate, certain love flowed in a warm dazzling liquid rush through her veins and into the smallest, most secret places of her body and soul.

  Had it been false? Did Carter’s present rejection of all they had together obliterate the past?

  No. The world moved on, and love between two people was after all only
another kind of activity within the world. The sea might wash over a rock, but that did not mean that the rock had not once been there, was not somehow still deeply there, however hidden by salt water. Her parents had not loved each other long, but they had loved each other once, and here she was. Carter did not love her now, but he had loved her once, she believed that, and here were these living children within her. And she was strong enough to go ahead, to love her children, to be, all by herself, enough for them. She would not let the present cold cancel out past heat—the process could be reversed, she could bring warmth to what had once been chilled and shadowed. Had she not spent the past few months restoring the luster and life and dignity to her house? All by herself she’d found and paid for and restored that wonderful house, and she would inhabit it with her babies, she would live there in the present, and plan and look toward the future, and that was more than sufficient, that was everything. Time and death and darkness would eventually come for them all and dark moments and despair would wash over them as it did in the lives of all people, but she would live with her babies in her house, in their shelter, in their rock, and when the black tide of life swept over them, she would pull shut the curtains and light a fire and read her children stories, until the dark retreated and she could open her curtains and open her windows and once again let in fresh air and light.

  Now as she lay in the hospital, feeling beneath the dome of her body her babies move, but move less than usual, feeling her blood pressure rise with worry, she thought endlessly about these things. Her thoughts ran incessantly, engraving themselves into her very heart. As her babies moved within the vault of her body, she determined to be faithful to these children in a way her parents had never been faithful to her. She would love these babies, she would endure for them. She would close her eyes and hold very still so that the nausea would not well up within her. She would not, and did not, tell Gardner that she was growing daily more nauseated, that she could not swallow food but dumped it down the toilet or into flower vases, that she often felt faint and dizzy even when lying down. She willed herself to be all right. She demanded of herself, she demanded of the universe, that these two babies, so little to ask after all, in a world overpopulated with children, that these two babies live and thrive and be born out of her body and into her arms and her life.