And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  “So I went to the doctor for my regular appointment and I urinated in the cup just like they told me to and put out my arm for my blood pressure, and right away I knew something was wrong, because the nurse took my pressure three times. After two times, she even switched me to a different room to use a different machine, because she couldn’t believe the number she was seeing was correct. And the look on her face, I’ll never forget it. ‘Stay here,’ she said to me, like I was going to go anywhere. The next thing I know the doctor came in the room, looking all worried. He took the pressure again, just to make sure, and he can’t believe it, either. Then he asks, ‘How’s the urine?’ and the nurse, who’s looking kind of panicky, says she’ll check. And once I am alone with the doctor he starts asking me questions about pain in my stomach, head aches, nausea, swelling. I tell him I’ve had it all, but then I’ve been telling him that the whole time, and he always said, ‘Don’t worry.’ Then the nurse comes running back and she doesn’t even look at me, she just says straight to the doctor, ‘Three plus.’ Nobody tells me what that means, but the doctor says, ‘Damnit,’ which I didn’t really appreciate because I am a Christian, but then he looked at me very serious and asked me to lie on my back, they’re going to check the baby’s heartbeat, so I pull up my blouse and lie down and wait. It was always my favorite part, listening to her heart race so fast, like a horse’s hooves.

  “I know the doctor is worried but I’m not. If something was wrong with Melissa, I’d know. I mean, I was her mother. So he started moving that thing that looks like an electric shaver over my belly. And he moves it here and there and I can hear something that sounds like a heartbeat pounding away, but he keeps looking. So finally I say, ‘Isn’t that it?’ and he looks down at me like he’s forgotten I’m even there, and he finally kind of smiles at me in a nice way and says real gentle, ‘No, Kathy, that’s your heartbeat.’ And I am kind of surprised, because he’s so far from my heart down there and we’ve never had that problem before, so I lay back down and wait for him to find Melissa. Finally, he hands the thing to the nurse, who’s looking even sicker now, and leaves the room.

  “Now I am beginning to get a bad feeling, and I ask the nurse what is going on, but she just tells me not to worry, it’s bad for the baby for me to get upset, which seems funny because every thing they’ve done has made me upset. Then the phone rings and the nurse picks it up, and it seems that the doctor has called an ambulance to take me to the hospital, where they are going to do a sonogram to get a good look at Melissa. I ask if I should call my husband, who has just gotten a job as an assistant manager at a Home Depot out by Toluca Lake, and the nurse says that would probably be a good idea. So I got up and they let me use the doctor’s office so I could have some privacy. I make the phone call sitting at his desk where I can see all the pictures of his kids and a few of a black dog. The store pages my husband. It takes a long time, and when he finally got on the phone, I didn’t want to worry him too much, so I told him I’m at the doctor’s office and they want me to go to the hospital. I guess that was the wrong thing to say, because he assumes that I am going into labor and says, ‘Honey, that’s great! I’ll be right there.’ And I am trying to tell him I don’t think it is so great, but then I decide, maybe he’s right. Maybe this is it. So instead of getting sad about it, I decide to get happy. Maybe the good Lord has just decided that we have waited long enough and Melissa is ready to meet her mommy and daddy.

  “At the hospital, I have to wait a long time for the man who does the sonogram to show up. Luckily, my husband, Craig, was there by then, and he was keeping me in good spirits saying, ‘Any minute now,’ and asking if I was in pain and if he should start timing the contractions. I didn’t really have the heart to tell him I wasn’t in pain so I’d say, I think that might have been one every few minutes. Then finally the guy who does the sonograms shows up and they wheel me into a room, and it’s really dark inside, and I am a little surprised that he’s an Oriental man and it’s just him, there’s no nurse or anything else, but I guess it’s okay because my husband is there with me, and he holds my hand, and the man starts moving that thing over my stomach and punching things into a computer. Right away, I can see that Melissa looks different from the last time. She only moves when the man pokes her and her hands look kind of floppy. The man who’s doing the mea surements frowns and I try to catch his eye so he can tell me what’s going on, but he just keeps staring at the screen. And I just figure that’s how it is with Orientals, you never can tell what they’re really thinking, but still I am beginning to feel really bad and then all of the sudden he gets up and says he’ll be back.

  “While I am lying there, I just get a really bad feeling and the only thing that makes me feel better in times like that is the Lord’s Prayer, so I just start saying it out loud. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,’ over and over. I think I had repeated it about twenty times when the door opened, and in comes this older nurse, a black woman, which kind of makes me smile, because the whole hospital is like one big melting pot. And she takes my hand and sits down next to me and asks how am I feeling and would I like a glass of water or a Coke? I say no. I haven’t been drinking Coke ever since I got pregnant. I didn’t think the caffeine would be good for the baby and she nods and says I’ll be a very good mommy someday. And I kind of regret giving her that opening because then the next thing she says is that this child was not meant to be and I start arguing with her right there, saying Melissa was definitely meant to be. I know, because the Lord told me, and I can see she is glad that I am a believer because she’s also wearing a little gold cross around her neck, and she starts saying that the Lord works in mysterious ways and maybe this baby was too good for this world and that is why the Lord sent her straight to heaven, and that’s when it hits me full on in the face. They think Melissa is dead.

  “I didn’t even cry right away. I just swallowed real hard and got very serious and said, ‘What do we do now?’ because I knew they were wrong. I knew she was alive. So I figured we would just deliver her and then everyone will see that she is just fine. I could see the nurse was glad I wasn’t going to fall apart on her right there, though she would have been a good person to fall apart in front of. She had nice hands. Warm and dry and callused, like she had spent her whole life working hard, probably raising plenty of her own babies. I can see why they’d go find her whenever they had bad news. So she tells me she is going to find me a room and get a doctor to talk to me about the next step. And then just to show her that I am not a person without a sense of humor, I tell her, I believe I will have that Coke now, and she smiles and says, ‘Right away.’

  “As soon as she leaves the room, I sit up and tell Craig not to listen to them. Melissa is fine. But I can tell from his face that he is torn apart. It’s like a truck drove over him and all he can keep saying is, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ And I tell him he should pray with me, and I got down on the floor right there and closed my eyes and prayed as hard as I could. A few minutes later, some men came with one of those beds on wheels. I told them I could walk just fine but they said something about insurance regulations, so they wheeled me down a bunch of hallways and I kept my eyes on the lights on the ceiling, thinking that all the people I was passing probably thought I really was sick. And then I was in a room with one of those beds you can adjust up or down and a television on the ceiling, and a doctor finally came to see me. A woman, which was interesting, because all my life I’d only had men doctors, and she started off saying how sorry she was about what had happened, but I waved my hand and told her I didn’t want to talk about it, so she got down to business, telling me there were two ways we could do this, either by inducing delivery with drugs, or a C-section, which she said would be quicker and less trying on me, though the recovery would be longer and I would have a scar for the rest of my life, but it would only be small and I could still wear a bikini if I wanted to. Not that I would ever wear a bikini. I asked her which would be better
for the baby and she looked kind of surprised. ‘Kathy,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t matter anymore.’ And then I asked her what she would do, and she said that under the circumstances, she thought a C-section would be best. So I said okay, and I signed some papers, and she left to get cleaned up.

  “Next thing I know, they wheeled me into a room with a lot of bright lights and strapped my arms down like I was Jesus on the cross, and a young man who looked Jewish told me he was going to give me a shot and then asked me to count backward from ten, and I think I got to four and I was out. When I came to, I was still on the operating table but I couldn’t see anything because they’d set up a big blue tent over my body and all I could feel was a little bit of tugging, and that was when I started to say the Twenty-third Psalm, which I had been saving for just such an occasion: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green…’ And then somehow I knew Melissa was no longer in me, because every body looked at me and I could see a flash of something that was purple, like the color of a bruise, and I tried to move or make a noise, but I couldn’t move anything, and then the next thing I knew I was out again. When I woke up after that I felt strangely pleasant, like I’d had a long, refreshing sleep. Craig told me that was the drugs, and it surprised me because I’ve never taken drugs and somehow I always thought they’d make you feel evil, but these didn’t. They made me feel good. So of course the first thing I said was ‘Where’s Melissa?’ But nobody knew, not the nurses or my husband. One nurse said she’d find out. After about ten minutes nothing happened, so I pressed that button next to my bed with the nurse hat on it. Someone came in my room and I said it again, ‘Where’s Melissa?’ She said, ‘Who’s Melissa?’ and I said, ‘She’s my baby,’ and she said she’d try to find out and that was how it went for about two hours before the doctor came in. I told her I wanted to see Melissa and she said, ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ and I said, ‘Yes, of course I am,’ and she told me it might not be good for me, they were still monitoring my blood pressure and there was a risk of seizure and it wouldn’t be good for me to experience too much stress, but I told her I didn’t care. She could see I was adamant on the topic and wasn’t going to be swayed so she left.

  “About ten minutes later the black nurse who first told me about Melissa came in with a bundle of white blankets. She looked very sad, not like someone who is carrying a baby at all. ‘Here is your precious angel,’ she said, handing me the bundle. Inside was the funniest-looking creature I’d ever seen. It didn’t even look human, more like something from Star Wars, with rubbery purple skin and a little bit of hair on her head. And she was so tiny, not like a baby at all, more like one of those troll dolls they used to sell when I was little. I was so sure that she wasn’t Melissa, I gave her back right away and said there was a mistake. That was when the black lady and my husband looked at each other in that so-called meaningful way. I told everybody I was very tired and I wanted to sleep and they should leave.

  “They both turned to go, but, then I started to panic. What if that really was Melissa? This would be my last and only opportunity to really look at her. So I said, ‘Wait a minute. Just leave her for five minutes.’ The nurse and my husband looked at each other like they didn’t want to do it, but I told them I’d be fine and I guess they realized they didn’t really have a choice, so the nurse brings back the bundle and leaves, but my husband stays and I tell him I just want a few minutes alone with her, so he leaves, too. And then it’s just me and that little-old-man monkey. I could still feel a little warmth of life on her skin. So I unwrapped her and held her head next to my cheek, and her skin is surprisingly soft. Like a baby. And I looked at every single inch of her, from her perfect toes and feet to her tiny fingers, about the size of an inchworm, and that’s when I know that it probably is Melissa and that’s the only time I’m ever going to be able to hold my baby.”

  She had the room in the palm of her hand, that overripe redhead with her embarrassed husband and her bewildered sincerity. Even Sophia. Even the angry man on her right. Even with all her talk of Jesus and the Lord and the Bible, every body wanted to hear what happened next. They wanted to know how she got up the next day and the next and the next. She knew it, too. It was obvious from the way she looked around the room and held her audience’s gaze. She knew she had a story so terrible that nobody could turn away from her, a girl who’d never had the presence or the wit to hold the attention of a room full of people in her life. Even when she got married, she’d been aware of people in the back pew talking among themselves. She could not have anticipated how good it would feel to be the center of all that attention but for the first time since she held that dead child, she felt free, unburdened by the story that had been brewing inside, twisting around her entrails with its feverish desire to be told. Ever since Melissa died, she had wanted to yell at every face in the grocery store, at church, in the hospital, every where she went. Sophia understood. Everybody in the room did. They felt it, too. It was the outrage of the survivor. How dare the world continue so utterly indifferent to their grief?

  “I knew then,” the redhead concluded quietly, “nothing would ever be the same for me again.” If only she had stopped then. If only she could have left them with that one small, bitter truth. But she could not. So she did what she had been taught to do all her life.

  “But I can’t be too sad.” A false smile strained her face. “Because I know Melissa isn’t dead. She’s just gone to heaven. Because on that day, God must have needed another angel.” And then she sat down, leaving behind an embarrassed silence as people contemplated the implausibility of the logic. Why would God do such a thing? Sophia suddenly became aware of the agitation of the man next to her. His hands gripped and ungripped the back of the seat in front of him as he battled some invisible gryphon.

  “God didn’t take Caleb!” he suddenly yelled.

  “Now, Anthony,” Helen stood as if to create a barrier between the troubled man and the young woman. Sophia could see flecks of white spittle coming out of his mouth.

  “The devil took my boy,” Anthony said.

  The redhead opened her mouth as if to offer an argument, but nothing came out. Beside her, the husband was suddenly roused from his torpor, rising to his full height. “Just a minute,” he said, “you can’t talk to my wife like that.” Anthony’s palms opened and closed. Sophia thought of a sea horse furling and unfurling its tail. She suspected that Anthony would welcome violence.

  “Why would God take a little boy?” he asked contemptuously, “because there is no God, there’s only shitty luck, and every body in here has it.” Sophia was inclined to agree.

  Helen spoke in a surprisingly gentle tone. “Anthony, why don’t you give us an update on Caleb?”

  Sophia, and every parent in Los Angeles, remembered the story. More or less. The boy was young, maybe eight or nine. An only child and some kind of a musical prodigy on the cello. Or maybe it was the violin. Usually, his parents walked him to the bus stop, but one day, after much begging, they let him walk alone. All day, his mother worried. At three o’clock, when he didn’t get off the school bus, she called the school. Caleb never made it to class that morning. In the aftermath, every body agreed it had been a terrible chain of events. The school should have called when he didn’t show up, but it was a public school—one of the good ones, but overcrowded and overwhelmed with children who regularly did not show up to school. There was talk of a lawsuit. She could remember Caleb’s face from the extensive coverage on the news—jughead ears, crooked smile, straight brown hair trimmed unfashionably in a bowl cut. Even years later, one occasionally came across a tattered old poster. Have You Seen Me? Caleb’s face asked in each of them, listing an 800 number. The media onslaught had been relentless, driven by his frantic parents, who made nightly appearances on the news. The father was an engineer. The mother worked in health care, or maybe she was a social worker? It seemed impossible that the man on Sophia’s right could be that man.

  “Upd
ate?” Anthony said the word sarcastically. “There’s no fucking update. Caleb left our house at seven forty-six a.m. on a Thursday morning and never returned. No one has seen or heard from him since. And now nobody gives a shit because he’s yesterday’s news.” The redhead Kathy began to cry softly. Her husband took her arms and tried to lift her up. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”

  “Anthony,” Helen said, “I’ve already told you, we can’t have that kind of language in here.”

  The redhead was standing, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her husband was trying to get her to move, but her arms hung lifelessly at her side as she stared at Anthony.

  “I remember Caleb,” she said. “We prayed for him at church.”

  “Yeah? Well, it didn’t work.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Anthony looked away as the husband pulled her down the aisle, past Sophia and Anthony.

  “God loves you,” she said as she passed.

  Anthony shook his head. “Bullshit.” But his voice lacked its earlier fire.

  Sophia could see the meeting was about to break up, so she rose, determined to leave before anybody could approach her. In the back row of the room, she passed two strange-looking men, both of whom stared at her as she passed. She thought they might be a gay couple, as one of them had the fading cartoonishly handsome looks of a comic-book character. Los Angeles was full of men who looked like him, but they tended to live on the other side of town and never bothered to look at people like her. However, this one was openly staring, as if he’d been expecting her a long time. She frowned slightly and looked away. As she passed, he rose from his seat, as if to follow. She quickened her pace. His leaving had to be a coincidence, she told herself.

  “Excuse me,” Harry said to Sophia’s back as she put a hand on the door leading to the parking lot.