“They said no. They said I need to have everything checked out as soon as possible. I already waited to schedule it until after you got here. I didn’t want to go alone.”
They went that morning to a tall shining tower of a hospital. “The VFK American Hospital” read the sign in front. “American hospital? What does that mean?” Miranda asked.
“It’s for medical tourists mainly. The Turkish doctor I saw already told me to follow up here. He said only they would be willing to help me.”
Inside was just like any other hospital, except maybe the staff was nicer. Everyone treated you the way a hotel clerk would. And all you had to do was show your visa. Her visa, Danielle explained, expired a very long time ago. But each time she thought about going home to the states to renew it, she realized she would be leaving Omar. So she didn’t. Luckily, the marriage paperwork overrode the visa requirements. But the nurse at the check-in desk examined each document as if looking for some hole. She even held one paper up to the light to check for a watermark.
“It’s all there,” Danielle said. She drummed the diamond ring on the counter playing her fingers along an imaginary piano.
Finally, the nurse spoke. “Payment,” she said flatly.
Danielle pushed the American Express card across the counter. The nurse bundled up the papers and gave them back without even photocopying them.
“Whoa,” Danielle said under her breath as the nurse stepped away to run the credit card. “I was worried about that.”
“Why?”
“I could go to jail for being here without the proper visa. And the doctor said I couldn’t travel with this condition, and Omar can’t leave Istanbul right now because of his job. He’s about to be promoted. So getting married was really our only option.”
“At the last minute.”
“Yes, at the last minute.”
“In a Muslim ceremony that would kill your Methodist parents, God rest their souls.”
“Muslim? I knew I was forgetting to tell you something. I’m so sorry!”
“Sorry about what? I don’t care that you are marrying a Muslim. I’m a little mad that Omar made such a big deal out of it and refused to tell his family about you guys, but he is really upset and doing the right thing now, so I am letting him slide some.”
“Wait, Randa, wait. Get this—they aren’t Muslim. They’re Christian. Syriac Christian.”
“Then why on earth did Omar never want to talk about it? Why all the secrecy?”
Danielle scooted to bring her chair closer to Miranda. The squeak of the chair on the polished linoleum floor startled the nurse behind her desk.
“He will be with you shortly,” she said.
Danielle leaned into Miranda’s ear. “You really can’t talk about it here. It’s like, not accepted. It’s like the reverse of home. And all this time, he thought I wouldn’t understand. That I wasn’t really Christian because I didn’t go to church.”
“You never told him about your dad being a minister after he retired from the phone company?”
“It’s not like I kept up with going to church after my parents passed away. It was always the last place I wanted to be.”
“Well, aren’t you two peas in a pod?”
“Yes,” Danielle said. A smile settled across her face, the smile of a bride, a smile that extended past the gloom of this hospital waiting room. Then a man with a very dark tan and wearing a white lab coat called her name.
Both women popped up quickly, but before they could reach the door the man had already disappeared down the long corridor. They followed after him, struggling to keep up. Finally, he stopped at an open door and swept his arm out to usher them inside. The room was blank except for the ultrasound machine, the table, and a chair on the opposite side of the room. He motioned to Miranda to take the chair, leaving her seated behind his back.
“Please,” he said, flipping open the chart. “Miss Townsend, take a seat on the table—they’ve explained this to you before, correct?”
“Yes,” Danielle said. “I had an appointment last week at the health center. They told me I must come here immediately, that my condition was not good. They said this needed immediate attention.”
“And that she couldn’t fly back to the States,” Miranda added.
Danielle’s voice caught in her throat. “They did send the paperwork to you?” she asked. “They said they would.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. He made some notes on the chart. “You are married?” he asked.
“No, well, not yet, tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” He spoke this flatly letting his gaze fall to the diamond on her left hand. “You know this man a long time?”
“Ten years. He would have come today, but I didn’t want to worry him before the wedding.”
“Have you slept with him?”
Miranda stood up and crossed the room, standing next to Danielle. “Doctor, respectfully, why does this matter?”
“Ah, it matters,” he said again. He pressed several buttons on the machine. “While this starts, I will leave the room; please undress from the waist down.” Then he turned and left the room, the door closing like a clap of thunder behind him.
“Dani, maybe you should come home anyway. I don’t like this.”
“It’s okay; it’s just different here. People have different ideas. This is just like an American hospital. It should be okay.”
“Should be? Really?”
“Miranda, listen, I can’t leave. My life is here. Tomorrow, Omar and I will be married, and then this kind of thing will die down some. He’ll come to the appointments and the sexist old men can talk to him the way they like. I don’t mind. If I am with him, I don’t care about the rest of them.”
“How can you say that?”
“How can you still love Scott?”
“I never said I loved him.”
“You don’t wait six years for someone you just like,” Danielle said, as the doctor pushed back through the door, this time with a nurse; she wore a regular set of scrubs with a floral headscarf pinned neatly back. She took the probe from the machine, lubricated it and handed it to the doctor.
“Lie back,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”
The monitor sprung to life with the gray swirls and lines on the screen ebbing and flowing like waves. The nurse adjusted the sound level. An even thumping filled the room.
“Wow,” Miranda said, “Listen to your heart.”
“It’s not her heart,” the doctor said. “It’s the baby’s.”
C H A P T E R
DANIELLE WASN’T DYING. She didn’t have cancer. She had a baby.
“A baby,” Danielle said. “A baby.”
“It’s not a tumor,” Miranda said.
“Four months.”
“You’re due in May. That’s good. You miss being pregnant in the summer.”
“But a baby. I don’t think I can breathe.” Danielle bent forward and placed her hands on her knees.
“You’re breathing. Stop it. How will you tell Omar? What will you tell his parents?”
“Omar!” Danielle shouted, her voice carrying over the parking lot. “You tell Omar. Call him.”
“I can’t tell him.”
“Yes, you can. Do this for me.”
“I’m not telling him. I’ll call, but you are telling him.”
Miranda reached into her purse for her phone. She hadn’t turned it on once since she arrived the day before. Just as she went to dial Omar’s number, the battery died. “I don’t have any battery left. Give me yours. I’ll use that.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Don’t have it?”
“I don’t carry it, and I can’t have it when I’m teaching my classes—they’re strict about that.”
“Well, you need it now. You have to tell him.”
Danielle pursed her lips together. “Can’t it wait?”
“Wait? Aren’t you excited? Don’t you want him to know?”
“I thou
ght I was dying. Omar thought I was dying. What if he doesn’t really want to marry me? What if it is just a big mistake?”
“But you’re pregnant. With his baby! Doesn’t that kind of make marriage seem like a good idea? Don’t you love him?”
“The baby I can handle. I’ve always wanted to be a mother. But, Randa, what if he doesn’t love me? What if he just felt sorry for me because I was sick?”
“Dani, don’t be like this. You know he does.”
“Yeah, I’ve known that for ten years. Ten years!” Again her voice boomed out over the sea of cars. “And he never once even tried to propose. I thought surely after I moved to Turkey. I thought after I met his family. I thought after his great-grandmother passed away, and everyone relaxed a little. I thought after I had my own apartment. After he had his own apartment. But none of this mattered. He didn’t want to marry me, Randa. Not until we thought I was sick. What does that say?”
“Fine. You win, okay, can we go someplace to talk about this? Someplace that’s not a parking lot?”
“Sure, sure. Get in the car.”
Danielle kept her eyes forward and both hands on the wheel as she steered them through the streets of Istanbul. She turned the radio up loud, and music in what Miranda could only assume was Turkish poured through the speakers. Miranda studied her friend; this girl she’d known almost all of her life was about to be a mother, a wife. It all seemed like a fairy story where some magic delivered the beautiful woman from danger and waltzed her into true love’s path. How was this even possible? Real life didn’t work like that. As much as she wanted to believe, to think that something like Christmas magic or fairy tales could be true, Miranda knew magic didn’t exist like that, not really anyway. You needed to plan for things. Especially for being a mother! Miranda remembered her own mother, how prepared she was for anything. Once, Miranda got in trouble in the third grade for something small like not turning in her math homework. When she returned home from school, she found her desk in the living room where the television used to be. Her mother, completely non-plussed, who normally would be in court at that hour, pointed to the desk and the list of rules she had taped to the wall in front of it. The list was short; homework first, it read. The television had been moved to her parents’ bedroom. She didn’t see a cartoon again until her mom got sick, and Miranda would snuggle next to her in their bed. But even then, even on her worst days, she checked Miranda’s homework. Her mother never resorted to the-atrics or threats; she simply had a plan—and Miranda knew she had better follow it. It felt like she gathered all the books about being a mother and studied them just in case, long before Miranda entered the world. In order to be a mom, you needed logic, an even temper, and a plan.
But something about this one moment defied all logic and plans. A baby. Danielle was having a baby. She wasn’t going to die.
“It’s really a miracle,” she shouted over a pop ballad.
Danielle turned toward her. The smile started across her face again. “It really is, isn’t it?”
They parked outside the entrance to Gulhane Park. Miranda recognized it from pictures Danielle had sent of the tall evenly planted trees on either side of the wide stone path. “We’re supposed to do wedding pictures here tomorrow. Everyone does it,” Danielle said. They took the path to the left and walked quickly to keep away from other people on their constitutionals.
Miranda watched the people; she expected more passersby in traditional Muslim dress, and while a few women walked by in headscarves, it was really no different than Central Park. The more they walked, the more she could see why her friend chose not to leave this place. “You like it here,” Miranda said.
Danielle looked up. “What do you mean?”
“You seem at home here. Relaxed.”
“Relaxed? Really? Right now? I am anything but relaxed. From cancer to mom in one doctor’s appointment, and it didn’t even involve getting laid.”
Miranda chortled loudly enough that a passing couple turned to stare at her. “Stop making me laugh. I’m trying to be serious here. We should be serious, right?”
“Why?”
“You’re getting married; you’re having a baby.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe married, baby, yes. Like I said. We were only doing it because I was sick.”
“That’s bullshit. You’ve been together ten years. You moved to Turkey to be with him.”
“Near him. We don’t even live together. We can’t even figure out whose apartment to keep after the wedding.”
“That won’t matter after the baby comes.”
“And how do you know?”
Miranda looked down at her hands. “I don’t. Well, maybe, I do. I just have a feeling, all right? You guys love each other. And now with the baby and all, that should be enough.”
“What storybook did you fall out of, Miranda? When has that been enough? You don’t sound like yourself.”
“Maybe I don’t want to sound like myself, okay? I get it. Lots of people get divorced, lots of marriages suck. But so does being alone. So does letting someone you love go. It can’t hurt to try.”
“Did you just say that?”
“Okay, so maybe that’s not true—but it would hurt either way. Why not risk it?”
“What if he doesn’t love me? I mean really love me. What if it is just because I am the only one around?” Danielle sank onto a park bench. “I know that’s not true. I’m just scared. The cancer thing didn’t scare me. I knew they could fix that. I’m young and healthy or maybe just stupid or something, but I thought, oh, it will be fine. And if it wasn’t, well, I had a good run. With Omar, though, I’ve loved him for so long, I just didn’t think it was possible that he could love me, too. I didn’t think I deserved it.”
“You know you are being crazy, right? How many times did he overstay his student visa to be with you? How many times did he plead with you to come to Turkey and stay? I’m sorry you were both too stupid to talk about religion so you let it get in the way for this long, but maybe the whole ‘you might be dying thing’ was the universe’s way of solving that problem. Maybe God has your back.”
“Like some kind of Greek play where the fates intervene?”
“Yeah, only it’s a Turkish play because, well, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“So are you going to tell him about the baby?”
“Yes.” Danielle drew out the “s” in a long exhale. “But can’t we do something fun first? Just something for us before my entire life changes?”
“Fine, something fun first. But only because I came all the way to see you, and now we really have this awesome thing to celebrate. And I don’t mind keeping it to myself for a bit. I’m going to be an aunt, you know.”
“Really? An aunt. Nice. I hadn’t thought about that. You get to meet my kid. My kid. Hmmm.” Danielle stood and smoothed down the front of her coat. “How about a Turkish bath then? Relaxing, touristy, authentic.”
Miranda quickly stood. “I heard that they can be rough.”
“That’s only if you go old school. I’ll take you someplace modern.”
They slipped into the provided robes at the baths and struggled to keep their voices low and hushed. The waiting room looked like something out of a movie set for the Middle East. Tiny mosaic mirrors dotted the white sandstone walls, and thick woven carpets lined the floor with pillows to sit on. There were low wooden cutwork tables ornately decorated with brass overlays in patterns mimicking those on the wall and warm glass cups of strong mint tea. Shimmering candles lit the room from insets in the walls and on the tables. It felt like a sumptuous paradise, the kind of place you would imagine when you thought of the Turkish empire. An older woman with heavily drawnin eyebrows kept staring up at them from over the top of her magazine. It seemed to be a sort of Vogue magazine with a beautiful cover girl in a pink dress with black overlay and matching pink headscarf. Every time Danielle and Miranda laughed, she snapped
the pages over a little more. But they couldn’t help it. Each was trying to outdo the other with baby names.
“Okay, okay, enough,” Danielle finally said. “Octavia or Octavium, it is.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t, but it will be fun to see Omar’s reaction when I suggest it.”
“I’m looking forward to that—not Omar—but having this. I’d like to settle down. Did I tell you how awesome Scott’s Lynn is? When I’m with her, I realize why people have kids in the first place. There’s something about her that just lights up a room.”
“He isn’t already married, is he?”
“Geesh, you don’t exactly have to be married to have a kid.” Miranda said this a little too loudly.
The eyebrow woman closed her magazine and set it down on her lap. She didn’t hide the fact that she was staring at them now. “Go on,” eyebrow woman said.
But luckily, the attendants saved them. “It is time for your soak. Together, yes?” she asked.
Danielle quickly replied. “Together.”
They were led to an all marble room with a platform in the center. The heat of the room caused sweat to immediately bead up on Miranda’s bow.
“It’s working already,” the attendant said. “Detoxifying. You wait 15 minutes.”
Miranda looked around. “Do we sit here?” She pointed to the platform.
“Yes,” the attendant replied. “You lie down, then I come back and bathe you.” The attendant moved toward the door again, but she stopped and studied Danielle and Miranda. “You’re not pregnant, are you?” she asked looking at Miranda.
“Me, no.” Miranda recoiled thinking about Ronan and the last month, but she couldn’t be pregnant; her cycle assured her of that.
“I am,” Danielle said, loudly and with emphasis. She smiled again, her lips parting wide across her face, her eyes actually glittering.
“Ma’am, I’m afraid you can’t have the treatment today,” the attendant said. “Didn’t you see the sign in the changing room?” She pointed at Miranda. “But you can. Please in there.”
“Thank you,” Miranda said, “but I go where she goes.”
Triple Love Score Page 14
