His Third Wife

by Grace Octavia

  Thirjane was shaking her index finger again. “No-no-no. You stop yourself right there. You have to let this go. To let him go. He’s not yours to protect. That man has a wife and a child on the way. You let them handle his mess.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my child—because of Tyr—”

  “No, that’s where you’re confused. You need to let him go for Tyrian. Not hold onto him,” Thirjane said. “You move on for him. So he can move on too. You got that boy thinking his parents can still get together, because you won’t move on. You don’t think he knows his mama has one foot still in the water? I think both of you do.”

  “One foot in the water? No, I don’t,” Kerry said. “And he doesn’t either. We’ve moved on. Both of us.”

  Thirjane grinned like a wise woman. “I know what you’re doing. I know how you feel. I’m your mother. You can’t hide anything from me. Not even what you hide from yourself. You still love that man.”

  “No, I don—”

  “All that schooling you have. Talking about how you’re getting back on your feet. Went and cut off all your pretty hair. Joined that yoga studio. The divorce group. And no man in your life yet?”

  “So?”

  Thirjane laughed. “So? That’s not moving on. You’re still young. Still beautiful. You should be remarried already. Dawn, Ethel’s daughter, found someone after her divorce. Married that news anchor. Had two more babies. That’s moving on.”

  “That’s different,” Kerry said. “And I’m not competing with Dawn. I’m living my life how I choose.”

  “I guess you choose to live it alone then,” Thirjane pointed out. “But Jamison sure isn’t. Heard he even slept with that tart Countess Lindsey. And now he’s put a ring on a stripper. Got her pregnant.”

  “You already said that,” Kerry said.

  “And I’ll say it again soon. As many times as my heart pleases. I’m hoping you’ll hear it. Someone needs to.” Thirjane got up from the couch and went to the bar to make herself another drink—without the Coke.

  So many years later, when recalling this night with a friend at a bar in Memphis, Val would remember that the pain started in her right side. It was nine o’clock at night. She was lying in bed and she felt the pain, clear and sharp like a razor blade over her thumb; it flashed through the right side of her body, from back to navel. She rolled over and called Jamison immediately. She just knew to do that. Told him to get in the car and get home faster than he could.

  Jamison would never tell anyone that he didn’t do that. He told Val he was right on his way, but he wasn’t. It actually took him ten more minutes to leave the bar where he was having scotch with the chief. And this was for nothing but a hunch. The cameras were gone. The chief wasn’t talking, agreeing, planning. Jamison kept thinking if he could say the same thing in a new way, maybe, just maybe, he’d get somewhere with the person he’d put in office. But there seemed to be some closed door between them.

  The chief, whose sheer size, both physically and mentally, was bigger than that of any man Jamison had ever known, was talking about wanting to stick to protocol where Ras and his dying project to get scholarships for boys in the hood was concerned. So, Jamison said it in a new way: “What if they took Ras’s name off the project?” It could be the chief’s project. He could be the one to get all the hugs and shine from connecting the feathers of hawks with the earthly beings who watched them fly. Then the giant man who led a force of giant men mentioned not wanting to ruffle someone’s feathers. So, Jamison asked, “Whose feathers?”

  To that, the chief said the kind of thing that ensured little boys outgrew their belief in giants: “I can’t do it. My hands are tied on this.” He jumped up from his half-finished scotch and put the straw fedora he was wearing back over his massive head.

  Jamison simply asked, “Why?”

  The chief, a man Jamison knew had a good heart, smiled and said something that would prove to be the mayor’s greatest teacher: “When you’re in the police academy, you’re taught that the truth you’re seeking is right in front of you. It’s seldom as mysterious as you believe.” He held out one arm to hug Jamison but used his other hand to give him the fraternity handshake. In the embrace, Jamison felt the chief’s fraternity ring stabbing into his gut.

  Val was sitting on the bathroom floor. Shaking. The white sides of her hands were turning blue. Her pink nightgown was warm and sticky and crimson at the bottom. She was saying something to no one. Not even herself. Just a litany of sorrowful syllables that might sound like a cry to someone listening on the other side of the wall.

  Jamison found the bed empty. The sheets stained. He called Val’s name as he stepped into the bathroom. Looked from her sitting there shaking to a mess in the toilet no person should see or recall.

  Val pointed to the toilet. And then there was a mother’s wail. It commanded every sense. Shook the very walls of the house, sent ripples along the concrete sidewalks, set a fire in a forest someplace far away.

  “Oh my God!” Jamison fell to his knees where he was. His tears erupted from someplace old. Erupted from someplace tired. From someplace where nothing was going right. Where an ending could overtake a possibility. A beginning. He cried out in his solitary space in the bathroom beside his wife.

  He didn’t notice that the blue in her palms had overtaken her face until her back was on the tile and a seizure made her head thump against the floor.

  “Val!” Jamison went to her. Gathered her up into his arms like a rag doll and tried to shake her awake from the tossing. “Mama! Mama!” He cried for help, but these echoes were more helpless than the lips that had produced them.

  The doctor on the right side of the hospital bed made a pyramid of Val and Jamison. Val in the bed, her empty stomach covered by cold, crisp white sheets, Jamison on her left side, his head in his hands, his eyes swollen to lemons.

  The doctor was talking like this ending was a beginning. Moving on. Saying something about how this just happens to some people. No one knew why. It just happens. They could try again. There was no harm in trying again. There was no guarantee there’d be another miscarriage. The odds were in their favor.

  “I was fine,” Val said, her eyes fixed on the white sheets. “I felt my baby. My baby was inside of me. My baby was fine.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” the doctor said as delicately as he could. He’d seen things before. Women who never came back from this. Men who left. People who died for the dead. The unborn dead. “There is nothing wrong with you. Nothing wrong with your baby. We’ve run tests. Everything was fine. It just happens sometimes.” This was one of those moments when life made a pupil of science. When men were powerless to protect a woman from her pain.

  Outside, the sun was coming up. New nurses were walking the hallways. New cases. New tears.

  The doctor stood, nodded sympathetically at Jamison and promised he’d return. A nurse would be by shortly. Val needed to get some rest. She’d lost a lot of blood.

  When the doctor was gone, a hand Val had been using to wipe her tears fell against the sheet, palm up, fingers curled.

  Jamison looked at the hand and then at Val.

  She was looking back at him.

  He looked back at the hand. At his hands, wrapped into one another, balled up in anger or fear or sadness. A tear fell and landed on his thumb. He closed his eyes to trim the torrent. He hadn’t stopped crying since the red lights came flashing in front of the house. Every new tear had a different altar, a different reason for gathering. And last was Val.

  Almost as if reaching for a ring buoy while sinking into a sea, Jamison crept his fingers over the bleached fabric and made a tight knot with Val’s hand. He didn’t look at her or say a word. The tears continued to fall.

  With the sun came the press. The hospital was filled with suspicious characters with hidden cameras. Men with tape recorders were asking nurses questions. Why was the mayor there? Why was his wife there? W
as the baby okay?

  The mayor’s personal security staff cleared the hallways, briefed and required a confidentiality statement from every medical professional who’d been on the third floor since 11 PM.

  “You should’ve called me. I should’ve been the first person you called,” Leaf advised Jamison in the hallway outside the room where Val was lying still with her eyes closed.

  “My wife had a miscarriage. I wasn’t exactly thinking about work,” Jamison said. There were still specks of pink blood on the chest of his shirt. If it weren’t for the setting someone might have thought it was a design of some kind.

  “I understand, but there were other options. You didn’t have to call the ambulance. We could’ve taken her someplace else,” Leaf said before lowering his voice a little to be sure Val couldn’t hear him. “I mean, she’d already lost the baby.”

  Standing against the wall, Jamison banged his head back lightly. He heard little of Leaf’s argument. He kept seeing red—in every shade, everywhere. He thought that must be what a broken heart looked like—torn apart inside and out.

  “The press is all over this,” Leaf said.

  “Who’s talking to them?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone? Your neighbors. The ambulance drivers. Who knows. You really should’ve called me. I can’t get in front of a situation if you don’t—”

  Jamison looked up and the red was in his eyes. “Why do you care, man?” he shot. “What is it to you?”

  “What? I’m your assist—” Leaf stumbled back toward the wall behind him as Jamison stepped closer to him with balled fists.

  “No. No. You’re always around. Always in the right place at the right time. There’s something about it—something about you,” Jamison charged with his mother’s accusations, his suspicions, and all the pressure of all the days caving in on his corneas. “Why are you here? Why the fuck are you here, man?”

  He’d cornered Leaf, and the young man, who had suddenly become a boy, was shaking in his alabaster skin.

  “It’s nothing. I’m just doing my job,” Leaf suffered out.

  “Fuck that. Who are you?” Jamison was so close up on Leaf the security guards holding back onlookers on either side of the hallway left their posts to break the pair apart. One got there just in time to stop the mayor from wrapping his hand around Leaf’s blushing throat. “Who are you? Who are you?” Jamison repeated.

  Mrs. Taylor came rushing down the hallway when she heard her son’s cries. She’d been sitting nervous in the waiting room where she’d been sequestered since they arrived at the hospital and the doctors, noting how hysterical Val was, had advised that Jamison ought to be the only person allowed in the room.

  Mrs. Taylor jumped right into the fight.

  “What’s this? You came here to start trouble?” she said to Leaf. “My son is mourning! Can’t you see that? This is no place for you! No place!” She turned to the security guards holding Jamison back. “You let go of my son and remove this man here from this hospital!” She pointed at Leaf. “He does not need to be here. He is stressing my poor son out. And at this time!”

  The guards followed orders from a woman who signed not one of their checks. They released Jamison and escorted Leaf down the empty hallway.

  Mrs. Taylor pulled Jamison into her arms. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay,” she said. “I’m here.”

  When I was five years old, my mother gave me this fat pink doll with short blond curls she got at the dollar store in the mall. It was supposed to be a baby, but my big sister pointed out that it had on blue eye shadow and streaks of lavender blush over the cheeks. I took it up to my room and looked at it. Pulled the clothes off. The paisley bonnet. Slid down a little square of floor fabric that was supposed to be a diaper. I held the doll up and looked at her pink body in the sunlight coming through my bedroom window. I could see right through her. Right through what was supposed to be her belly. Right through what was supposed to be her heart. Her brain. There was nothing inside. She was all a pink shell. But she was mine. My baby. Pink and empty. My mother told me to name her. I never did though. I hid her clothes in my sock drawer and set her on my bed. When my mother asked why she was naked and what I’d done with the clothes, I said she didn’t have a heart so she couldn’t feel the cold and I was saving my clothes for my real baby who could feel the cold. One day after school when I was bored, I cut off all of her cute blond curls and burned them in the backyard behind the shed. When my mother saw her bald head, I explained that my baby was stupid and she didn’t need nice hair because she didn’t know about nice hair. On another day when I was bored, I broke off one of her pink baby arms. On the next day, I broke off the other arm. Then the right leg. Then the left. When my mother saw the armless, legless baby lying on my pillow, she demanded that I put the arms and legs back on. “You’re too young to be doing all this, missy! You’re not ready. Something ain’t right with you.” I couldn’t find the arms and legs, so she popped me on the butt ten times and asked if I could imagine how that baby might feel without her arms and legs. I cried. And when my mother left the bedroom, I grabbed that armless, legless pink baby, my baby, and held her up to the sunlight. She had no heart. No brain. What could she feel? The next thing I remember is getting my sister’s art marker and writing all over my baby’s body. I wasn’t bored. I think I just wanted to make a point. I wrote every curse word I knew. And there were many. Over her forehead, I wrote Broken. I put her back on my bed and went outside to play by myself. When I came back into the house, my mother beat me again. She said I was being ugly and hateful. And that was the very first and very last doll she’d ever buy for me. She said the next baby I’d get would be the one I birthed on my own and she’d see how I treated that one.

  All my life, I’ve only had broken shit. Broken. When it came to me that way. Or I made it that way. Broken. Old books from the thrift store with pages torn out the back. Freshly painted nails with beautiful red lacquer that smudged right after I walk out of the nail salon. Friends with no loyalty. Men with no hearts. A run up the back of my stocking. Rain anytime. And that’s not what hurts. No, the broken thing being there doesn’t hurt. I built up the expectation for it. I learned young that even if it isn’t there, maybe I should find the broken thing. It is coming. For sure. Just like my father, found floating in an old swimming hole. It’s coming. What hurts is forgetting that it’s coming and soon secretly thinking maybe it won’t.

  When I was on the bathroom floor with that toilet filled with red broken things, I realized it was happening because of me. I forgot about the breaking. About how fragile every fucking thing around me is. No matter how hard I try to hold it together, it will fall apart. Even inside of me.

  I should’ve expected it. I couldn’t think Jamison would just suddenly love me. And then our baby would come and he would love the baby. And we would hold our baby up to the sunlight. And see that it had a heart and a brain. And it would stay together. And we would stay together. And never fall into pieces. I couldn’t think that. But I should’ve.

  When I woke up at the hospital, I felt an emptiness that let me know the doctors had sucked every living thing out of me, placed me in a bed, and covered me up in something white. At first, I was still pretending for myself. Maybe they’d saved the baby. I’d given birth in my sleep and my child, no bigger than my hand, was somewhere in a nursery under a blue light with white gauze pads covering her eyes. But I looked at Jamison and knew I had to stop. It was the first time he ever looked sorry for me. His eyelids were low. His lips were somewhere between smiling and frowning. He asked, “What happened?” I was about to tell him I didn’t know, I didn’t remember. But then I started remembering, going back past the bathroom floor and toilet. The wet mattress beneath me. My stomach hurt like someone was cutting me wide open from the inside out with kitchen knives. Walking up to my bedroom. Mrs. Taylor telling me to go lie down if I wasn’t feeling well. My stomach hurting just a little bit—maybe gas. Sitting in the kitchen beside the new frien
d I’d found in a mother-in-law who insisted I eat a second serving of the summer soup she wasn’t eating. Her laugh. A cackle.

  And then I was about to answer Jamison’s question—“What happened?”—I looked at him and saw a hand on his shoulder. Beside my hospital bed where I was lying all hollow was his mother.

  I screamed like a freight train was rolling through the room full speed ahead, “Get her out of here!”

  “Hell”

  There was no funeral for the dead. You can’t bury something with no name or thumb print. Maybe that wasn’t true, but that’s what Val told her mother when she’d called to say she was getting on a bus to Atlanta. “Don’t come, Mama. Ain’t nothing to come for,” she’d said before collapsing into an honest cry Mama Fee never knew could come from her child.

  The spectacle of screams sent a thunder clap through Mama Fee’s soul. She dropped the phone on the bed where she’d been sitting and stood mechanically in a way that made clear she’d disconnected her every sense from the world around her.

  “Mama? Mama?” her little girl was calling through the abandoned phone, but Mama Fee couldn’t hear. Her feet took her to the old mahogany stained chifforobe willed to her from Val’s great-grandmother, a swamp woman who’d had only the wooden clothing cabinet to her name when she’d died in a muddy abyss in a disregarded part of Louisiana struck hard by Hurricane Katrina. There, in the back of the top drawer that creaked and moaned when Mama Fee pulled the handle, was a little silver picture frame buried beneath a cabal of dried flowers with insidious names like the snake lily and devil’s tongue and five candles burnt to puddles of bubbling wax. “Mama? You there? Can you hear me?” Mama Fee uncovered the silver treasure, wiped bits of the dried flowers from the glass covering the picture, and saw traces of an art she’d learned from the swamp woman as a girl—cut out holes where there had once been eyeballs belonging to those who’d meant to harm what was hers.