Great With Child

by Sonia Taitz

  “What are you saying? What do you mean by ‘the only way that matters’?”

  “Guess!”

  “You mean—are you referring to the truth or something?”

  Abigail struggled to remember the guest lecture on moral philosophy she had attended one afternoon at law school. By the time the speaker had finished, she had had no idea what the truth was, or if it even existed. That was what law school did to you. It cleared your truth meter. Tabula rasa was what was needed: A blank page to fill as suited the needs of the current case at hand. A page on which “right” and good” were sentimental words, used sincerely by only lesser, mushier minds.

  “Never mind, you’ll get it sooner or later. It’ll come to you,” said Mrs. MacAdam.

  “Come on, Cora-Lee! Teatime!” she shouted to her paid companion, who was standing quietly outside all the while. With that, Cora-Lee came in, nodded quickly to Abigail, and escorted her boss back to her new red Jaguar. Abigail followed, turning back before she could see Mrs. MacAdam being lifted from the wheelchair into the car. She preferred not to see her look so vulnerable. Evelyn MacAdam was right. Abigail didn’t hate her at all.

  Shortly afterward, Tim and Abigail enjoyed lunch on a terrace that grandly overlooked the sea. As they ate, thieving blackbirds darted over the empty plates on neighboring tables. Sitting on the rims, they would snatch at crumbs of rich cake, morsels of potatoes au gratin, then fly up to the eaves. Their cries, short and jealous, mingled with the whoosh of the soft turquoise waves. Tim sat cool and crisp in a white linen shirt, his hair ruffled and lifted by the breeze.

  “Either you really are one gorgeous guy, or you’re finally starting to grow on me,” said Abigail.

  “Is it me you want or just my food?”

  It was true: Abigail had finished her main course, sea bass with mango and ginger, and was looking with interest at Tim’s pasta with julienned squash. He pushed it closer to her and picked up a goblet of ice water.

  “Enjoy,” he said. “And by the way,” he added, “you look pretty good yourself.” Abigail had browned beautifully in Grenada. Tim wanted to kiss her plump mulberry lips.

  “I feel good, too,” she said, pausing. “I think we can go home soon.” Noticing his disappointment, she added, “I know it’s hard, Tim. You just got here, and we’re both unwinding. But I can’t justify my expenses much longer. My research here is as complete as it needs to be,” she said, looking for the waiter to bring the desserts. “And don’t forget, you need to be back for that computer thing on Saturday.”

  “I could miss one session. The kids love to get a break from me.”

  The idea of missing a session at work would have shocked Abigail before she had gone down to Grenada. But she was beginning to change. She could relax, if Tim wanted. She owed him that much. What father figure would the baby have had, if he hadn’t come along?

  “We don’t have to go right away,” she conceded. “But do you mind if I check with the airlines and see if they can get us a couple of tickets for tomorrow night?”

  “No, I guess I don’t mind.”

  A steel band began to play on the beach beyond them. The notes reverberated, blurred, jangled, as the melodies moved forward.

  A waitress finally brought a selection of sorbets to the table.

  “You know, I wonder if you’ll ever really slow down,” said Tim, with a bit of an edge. “I mean, I get that you want to cut your work short, but under the circumstances—I mean you dragging me down a long way for such a short crisis—how considerate is that? And how much time have you spent with me, anyway?”

  Abigail heard the resentment in Tim’s voice. She guessed it was related to not only the length of their stay but the quality of it. She had insisted on separate rooms, and they had not become lovers, even in this sensuous paradise. She knew that women in her condition did not always refuse male advances, and Abigail’s doctor had never cautioned her otherwise. But Abigail felt that she couldn’t yet, and that Tim was beginning to resent it.

  “Well, let’s enjoy the time we have, OK?”

  “OK,” he said grumpily. “But I’d really enjoy grabbing you and smashing my lips on yours.”

  “Mmm,” she smiled. “Try this.” Abigail sampled the mango sorbet, a tiny dab on her spoon, slipping into and out of her mouth. She was thinking about having something more filling with the ices—maybe a slab of that coconut cake over there? She was feeling excessive, and liking it.

  “Why don’t you feed me some of those ices,” said Tim. Abigail complied as he bent his head forward. Then, leaning over, his lips cold, he kissed her. A waitress, passing by with some coconut cookies, laughed appreciatively. Abigail’s mouth was streaked with gloss and sorbet, and she wiped it. He pulled her back and messed up her mouth again. He was the best kisser in the world, and they both knew it.

  Their eyes met.

  “Hey—what do you say you come up to my room?” she said, as though it were an original idea.

  “Why do you think I flew down here?” said Tim, his voice cracking. “All I wanted was to be closer to you.”

  Tim came into her room, and they were closer than ever—as close as two people can physically be—several times that night, and once the next morning. And though she was carrying a child, another man’s child, Abigail’s body responded as though she and Tim were made for each other. In Grenada, an island in the middle of a sighing sea, she went just a bit out of her mind.

  14

  The flight back was delayed for hours, giving Abigail a chance to brood about her fear of airplanes. (Was there an unclaimed bag? A loose rivet? A leak in the hydraulics?) Tim tried to distract her, telling Abigail about all the times he’d flown back and forth between the United States and the Dominican Republic when he was a boy.

  Abigail’s contracted mood seemed to shrug off the help he was offering. Tim’s arm went around her shoulder, and her muscles tightened, resisting. Just yesterday, she had let him make love to her over and over; her body had been loose, fluid, fluent. She’d melted in his arms like hot wax. What’s wrong with me? she thought, as he slowly took his arm away. If I were Tim, I’d be losing patience. But it was hard to relax on a plane. She’d never been able to.

  What she needed, Abigail thought, was a good, strong tranquilizer. Without it, fears rattled every nerve. But pills could harm the baby. Abigail wondered: Did nerves like buzz saws also harm the baby? The books didn’t address that question. They assumed that mothers, and mothers-to-be, had the appropriate bovine temperament to handle life’s greatest surprises.

  The airplane took off just as the island sun began to set. Midway into the journey, as Abigail was beginning to relax into the darkness, the sky was pierced with arrows of gleaming greenish light. A thunderstorm.

  “I knew it,” thought Abigail, at her worst and taking it personally. She felt adulterous for having slept with Tim (though Richard couldn’t know, nor would he care). The physical union was different from what it had been with Richard, who had been so tender with her. With Tim, Abigail had felt as though she had been expertly blasted to outer space, upside-down and weightless, screaming. Tim was sui generis; he was a sex genius, a carnival ride. The kind you’d get addicted to, your body in one place, your true self in another.

  So now God was trying to take her plane down and really separate her body and her soul, she thought ruefully. And the puzzling thing was: despite her current funk, Abigail was desperate to live. Suddenly, she wanted the baby born and seeing her, holding her, damp from heaven and testifying to permanent trust. She wanted to feel God’s good side. Too often, she had felt the other, the side that broke hearts and killed off hope. This storm was an example of how little He might care.

  But divine grudge was unlikely, Abigail reasoned, trying to be mature and professional. In her work, she dealt with aviation disasters every day. Most of them, terrorism aside, occurred in small planes, charters, and fly-by-night (literally) companies. She was in a 747, and Tim had insisted on their switchin
g from the local airline to a more established one. But even on the lesser airlines, hydraulics and engine problems rarely doomed a monster carrier. And bumpy flights, particularly on this route, were par for the course. Abigail forced her mind to explain the true (scientific) sources of choppy air, parsing subjective horror into facts and statistics.

  Turbulence is a reflection of the air’s movement. It is analogous to the rocking of the ocean’s waves, to the bumps in a road, she told herself. It’s actually like a cradle rocking in the sky. So God had a rough hand sometimes; so what? Did that mean the cradle would fall?

  But what about the thunderstorm? Had she ever worked on a case where the plane had been hit by lightning? No. But she remembered something she read in a fear-of-flying book she’d once hurriedly read through in the bookstore (she couldn’t be seen to own such a book): “The plane’s engines are powerful, and even if all four were hit by lightning—a near impossibility—the plane could, theoretically, coast to a landing.”

  Theoretically wasn’t good enough right now. Abigail had never heard of a 747 coasting to a landing after losing total engine power. Could a plane “coast” down from thirty thousand feet? Abigail’s mouth became dry. She realized how little she knew about planes, how much less she knew about the essence of catastrophe. But she did know that if God felt like letting millions die in a war, thousands in a flood, landslide, or bad mosquito-bite epidemic, so it was. When it came to “acts of God”—the term lawyers gave to disasters—there were no clever alibis, nor even the meekest apology. Lawyers took off their glasses, rubbed their weak eyes, and looked blindly out into the void. And for once they kept their Maalox mouths shut.

  But God, Abigail thought, nearly crying about it, why do you bother making people in the first place? She rubbed her stomach. Remember him? Look, he feels my adrenaline. He’s bouncing around like a cat in a bag. Are you planning some mean trick on this wee little kitten? As her baby kicked and writhed in the turbulence, Abigail pitied his mortal state for the first time as she perceived the true fragility of her own, and everyone’s.

  “Did you say something, sweetie?” said Tim, who was all this time sitting by her side, headphones on. He was calmly reading a programming manual and jotting a note here and there.

  “Aren’t you scared?” said Abigail, taking his hand and squeezing it.

  Tim looked outside as though he hadn’t noticed the storm before.

  “Oh,” he said, sliding his headphones off. “Well, that’s not so great, but I’m sure the pilot knows what to do. Go higher, go lower, go faster, go through it.”

  “You’re so trusting,” said Abigail. “Hasn’t anything scary ever happened to you?”

  Before Tim could respond, the plane hit a large air pocket and plunged, shutting off her mind. A few people screamed as the plane lost altitude. It fell for only a few seconds, maybe five or six. When it regained its equilibrium, the captain got on the PA system and chuckled, then cleared his throat to say:

  “Well, ah hah, that was a pretty bad little bump back there, and I hope you’re all OK. Ah, I think I’m gonna keep the seatbelt sign on from here on, because as you probably detected, there’s a little bit of storm activity on the right there. I’ll get back to you in a little bit, when it’s clearer, and then I hope it’ll be a bit smoother all the way to New York.”

  Abigail found it hard to listen to him. She was engaged in staring at the lightning still streaking around outside. Its antic motion disputed the calm in the captain’s manly voice.

  Tim said, “Do you want to ask me if I was scared just then?”

  “No, Tim, I—I have to be quiet for a little while now, or I might vomit.”

  “Just close your eyes and relax,” said Tim. Abigail closed her eyes and leaned back. She tried to breathe deeply as flashes passed light through her lids. Pink, white, yellow, and then blackness. And more blackness. Yes, staying dark, wonderfully. The storm was slowly, slowly ending. Abigail began to feel safer.

  Seatbelts unlatched, trays came down, and long lines formed for the bathrooms. Abigail, who badly needed to pee, began to navigate her way down the aisle to the nearest toilet. Though the lightning had stopped, there was still some turbulence, and the plane was shaking. First, Abigail dropped into the lap of a man to her left, and then, when she had finally gotten off it, a violent lurch threw her at an opened tray on the opposite side of the plane. The tray caught her on her right flank as she fell. A can of cola spilled onto a woman’s pale linen suit. The woman screamed.

  Abigail felt a sharp pain, as though she’d been stabbed from within. As she got up, she was surprised to see the line parting to let her through. Locking the door inside the cubicle, Abigail saw the blood drenching her skirt, dripping down her legs. For a moment she stared. Then she sat back down and noticed a button with a flight attendant shape on it. She pushed it. There was little pain now. They were about thirty minutes from the airport.

  Abigail heard a knock at the door.

  “Did you call for help?”

  Abigail rose up a little from the toilet and let a woman in uniform come in.

  “What’s wrong?” the flight attendant said perfunctorily.

  Then she looked down and saw all the blood.

  “What’s going on, hon?” she said, taking in the fact that Abigail was pregnant.

  “I fell a minute ago and I think I hurt myself.”

  “Let me make a quick call and I’ll be right back,” said the woman.

  Returning to the bathroom, she gave Abigail two thick sanitary pads.

  “What month are you in?”

  “Late seventh, early eighth.”

  The flight attendant was in her forties. “I’ve got a bunch of kids myself,” said the woman. “By the time you’ve had your third, it’ll be like getting your hair trimmed.”

  “Really?”

  “And some women make a big deal about that, too, don’t they?” The attendant’s own hair was short, thick, and straight. She opened the bathroom door and helped Abigail, whose bottom was now securely bundled, over to a row of unoccupied seats in the rear of the plane. She lifted up the armrests, and Abigail lay down, curling up into fetal position.

  “Could you cover me, please?” she said, beginning to feel better.

  “Sure.” The woman went to the back and pulled out a blanket and pillow. Then she lifted Abigail’s head and tucked the pillow under it. As Abigail lay back again, the flight attendant smoothed the blanket over her.

  “OK now?” she said.

  “Could you stay with me until we land?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” She sat down next to Abigail. “See, now,” she said, “it’s a good thing they’ve got some of us old hands on the plane. Some of the young ones, twenty-three, twenty-four, they’d be in as much as a panic as you were. Age before beauty, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Abigail peacefully. She closed her eyes. When you needed a kind heart, or some wisdom around you, beauty was very overrated.

  When Tim came back to see what had happened to her, he found Abigail asleep.

  “What’s going on?” he worriedly asked the flight attendant.

  “She had a slight tear back here, probably some kind of placenta problem, some bleeding. My sister’s a labor nurse. Usually heals up just fine. Eighth month, huh? Wow—you’re nearly there. We’re gonna land at LaGuardia in about ten minutes, and I’ve called ahead to the hospital to admit her. Long Island Jewish. They’ve got a good obstetrics and neonatal. Don’t want to take any chances, right?”

  Birthing classes notwithstanding, Tim had a hard time associating himself with the actual, imminent appearance of a newborn baby. And though he loved children, this talk of blood and placentas was alienating, like having to kill, gut, and de-feather your own chicken before you could eat it. He tried some Lamaze breathing.

  “Hon, you all right?” said the flight attendant, looking at the man hyperventilating. “You’d better sit down, huh? Yeah, that’s right, go over and sit on the oth
er side of your wife, there. You’ll feel better in a minute.”

  Tim made his way over to the other end of the row and sat down. His eyes were closed, and he was taking long breaths through his nose.

  “Want some ice water? Some Coke?”

  He shook his head.

  “Hey, hon, OK, alrighty, now, just put your head between your legs. You’re looking green around the gills. Not Irish, are you?”

  He shook his head violently.

  “Just a little joke. Green and all. We’ll be landing in a little while.”

  Tim complied. With his head between his legs, his mind calmed down. The woman passed him a bag and Tim breathed slowly into it. Whenever his thoughts returned to scenes of bloody birth, he brought them back to the paper bag on his mouth. He puffed in and out, the way he had learned in the birthing class.

  They landed safely. When the flight attendant roused her, Abigail was surprised to find herself peacefully snug on an airplane, of all places. And there was Tim at her side, looking at her with such worry in his eyes. The woman helped Abigail sit up and said, “You and your husband are getting out first. They’re all gonna stay seated until you come out. There’s gonna be a stretcher to keep you nice and comfy. Don’t want you to be hurt again, right? How you feeling, hon?”

  “Pretty good,” said Abigail, trying to sit up more fully and get the big picture. She wasn’t used to being treated this way, “playing the invalid,” as her father would call it. But there was a crampy feeling in the bottom of her groin, and a continuous sense of dripping. Abigail did not resist as the attendant gently but firmly pushed her back against the seat cushions.

  “Do I have to wait a long time?”

  “There’s gonna be some emergency people getting on in a couple of minutes. We’re still gonna taxi a little to meet up with them, OK, hon? So just relax and you’ll be off the plane in no time.”

  “I really feel a lot better,” said Abigail. “Do you think I can go to my own doctor—he’s on Park and Ninety-Third?”