The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  What does it mean to witness

  Before Lainey could reply, she wrote again:

  What should I bring/wear? SO EXCITED!!!!!

  When Lainey and Adam arrived at the city clerk’s office, Margaret was already there, bouncing on her heels on the steps, all but aloft with the celebratory energy Lainey loved her for. A bottle of champagne nosed up from her huge handbag, open on the ground, its handles tied with a bouquet of peach and gold balloons. She held a heap of white flowers in her arms, heavy as a baby when she handed it to Lainey, along with a flower crown that she’d persuaded the shop’s florist to make that morning.

  Lainey wore a deep teal suit that she’d chosen for the television interview, giddy with the secret that she’d get married in it later that day. Margaret fixed the flower crown to her head and the scent was so beautiful that Lainey felt woozy, drugged.

  “It’s tuberose,” Margaret said, removing a gold bobby pin from between her teeth. “Isn’t it intoxicating? I don’t know where Renee got it this time of year, but God, it’s gorgeous. Look at you.” Margaret stood behind her in the mirror, her hands on Lainey’s shoulders.

  Lainey wore bright coral-red lipstick and pearlescent powder along her cheekbones. In her stacked, studded heels, she was not as tall as her friend, but nearer. In the mirror now, she barely noticed Margaret. Her own face was so bright with happiness and anticipation, this was the flower queen form of herself, the best version, the one who believed she might change the world. She could marry Adam and still be and become whatever she liked, his ballast a launching pad for her ambitions rather than a cinder block. This was the way she was supposed to feel on her wedding day, and she vibrated with this rare meeting of what she imagined and what was, the two aligned.

  Margaret showed Evan how to use her fancy camera, and the two of them took turns taking photographs while they waited for Lainey and Adam’s number to be called. Lainey’s favorite photograph from the day comes from this time when they were still waiting, before they were married, though she cherishes those images, too, of their triumphant smiles on the steps, of herself in Adam’s arms, limbs wild, their two suits, both with OWS 1-inch pins on their lapels, Adam’s obscured in part by his boutonniere so that in some photos it just reads OW.

  The best photo is a close-up of their faces, in profile, looking at one another, Lainey on his lap on the brink of a laugh, smile wide, eyes alight, and Adam gazing up at her with a kind of devotion that she needs to look at the photograph some days to feel like she deserves. They wait, scrunched on one seat, for the fabled “rest of their lives” to begin together, to sign a paper that says they intend to love each other as long as they can, until they die, money and bodies and minds by that time, best case, enmeshed and enervated, but before all that, and in the meantime, to kiss in a government office and feel nothing but hope that they might live up to the vows they made that day, all that promise.

  Chapter 35

  Alice had been pregnant on the plane after all. But now, she was not. She was home from work, her one day off that week, riveted to her BabyHub.com TTC message boards, subheading: Loss; subsubheading: Miscarriage; board description beneath: Support without judgment only please in this space—loss at ANY stage of a pregnancy can be crushing and this community acknowledges all pain.

  All pain. They were supposed to be grateful for her miscarriage because it meant she could get pregnant, something they’d had no evidence of before this point. Alice resented the rush to celebrate this shitty silver lining, how everyone found a way to tack it on somehow, to their sorrys, even Kushi repeating it like a mantra that morning on his way to work, after both of them woke fresh with grief, wiping sleep from their eyes and remembering that Alice was not pregnant.

  “Now we know, now we know we can get pregnant, and that’s huge,” he said, and made her strong coffee. “It will happen again.”

  She hated the we men used in this regard, as though they had anything to do with pregnancy. Fertilization, yes, fatherhood, of course, but pregnancy, don’t touch it, how dare you. You didn’t feel sick every day and then sicker, so much sicker, to not feel sick the morning before the bleeding began, your tender breasts unignited, returned in an instant to small, unfeeling sacks of fat. You didn’t dream of bodies vacating your body, whole marching rows of them, fully grown, enormous, their booted heels stomping on your uterus, yes, but your face, too, your whole body, trampled by the weight of this exodus, flattened, demolished.

  Her older sister, Eleanor, who had gotten pregnant the first time she tried, said to Alice on the phone, after Alice surprised herself by blurting out that she’d had a miscarriage, “Oh, I always felt sort of left out of the miscarriage club, really. Like everyone I know has had one and I’d never know what that aspect of womanhood was like. I mean, it’s so common, Alice!”

  Alice knew this was meant to reassure her, but she was stunned silent by how angry it made her instead.

  “Are you there?” Eleanor asked.

  “I’m not,” Alice answered. “I have to go.”

  “You’re so young,” her attending had said when Alice mentioned the miscarriage. This was the miscarriage, not even her miscarriage, about later ones she would begin to feel both less and more possessive, as though she belonged to the miscarriages rather than them to her. “What are you, twenty-seven?”

  “Twenty-six,” Alice had answered. She felt she’d aged a decade in the time since she’d had the miscarriage. How even to mark it—from when she felt the first cramps, saw the bright spots of blood, knew? From the day she stayed up all night, the cramps like a cellar door swinging down in the wrong direction, thump, thump, off its hinges, down a hole. Thump. From when she passed tissue into a toilet the next day, and the day after that, one more piece, golf-ball size, grayish purple, the tissue that was the baby, she knew it, should she have taken it from the toilet bowl with her hands? Should she have buried it? Swallowed it? The doctor flushed it down the toilet, like a goldfish, like waste. The other woman in her, the one ruled by hormones, with the uterus full of named eggs, sat and hugged the bowl, keened, cried, let her tears wash down the toilet bowl, too, at least, let some piece of her crawl in after what she’d lost.

  A complete spontaneous abortion. Lucky, too, that she didn’t have to get a D&C, so much luck to this loss! Where was her confetti, her bouquet of balloons? Congratulations, at least you can get pregnant. Congratulations, at least it was so early. Congratulations, at least you got to experience this pain at home, away from your colleagues’ hands and tools inside your uterus. CONGRATZ!!!!! Margaret’s text had come first, its usual spree of exclamation points, received in the moment after Alice had hit send, so fast Alice hadn’t understood how Margaret had even had enough time to type this stupid version of the word.

  She’d wanted to tell her friends in person, but she couldn’t wait. She needed their happiness, and maybe the other woman, the poet, the psychic, the one with a uterus cobbled together out of petals and jellyfish tentacles, had known she needed it right away because she wouldn’t get it again like this, the next time it would be tempered with worry, offered with fewer exclamation points. CONGRATZ!!!!! You and Kushi are going to be the most amaaaaazing parents!!! had come next, from Margaret, then, What a lucky, lucky baby. The luckiest.

  Margaret was the only one of her friends who might put a cartoon angel graphic below her username on a message board, might call an embryo a baby, give it a name. Alice wished, for the millionth time, that the weirdness after Connecticut could be cleared away, that she could shake her nagging fear that what Margaret had done was a cry for help that they’d barely acknowledged, let alone heard. She was so angry with Margaret, and with the rest of them, their diminishments, their rush to agree that if they’d sat on the edge of that bed and Laurent had leaned over to kiss them, maybe they would have been stunned, too, not gotten up quickly enough, even leaned in, accidentally, instinctually. Lainey had offered this last
, over the phone, during one of the few times they’d managed to address what happened head-on.

  “Instinctively? Those are some fucked-up instincts,” Alice said.

  “Not to him, to the situation. Eyes closed, forgetting. I don’t know.”

  They worked together to try to believe what Margaret told them, but doubt remained. Alice was the only one who hadn’t been drinking or smoking that night, she’d pointed out, and she felt like the way Margaret leaned, the placement of her hand—she couldn’t be sure, she didn’t know anything for certain! She didn’t know. None of them knew. So it was easier to pretend nothing had happened than to try to determine what did. This, at least, Alice understood.

  On her message board, nearly every user had a graph beneath her name, an animation depicting how far along her pregnancy was. A little strip of grass and a bounding puppy dog stationed at six weeks, a spray of wildflowers and a butterfly flapping its wings above thirty-four weeks. On the loss boards, women had additional charts, with a different set of graphics: tiny Tinker Bell angels, of smiley faces with halos, bouncing along in a strip of clouds or a long slice of rainbow, no longer announcing how pregnant they were, but how long they had been living with this loss. Most of these women had already named their babies, even at under twelve weeks, and they would include them among their list of children, distinguished by parentheticals and italics, Gone Too Soon, Angel Since 2007, Here Forever in Our Hearts. Again Alice felt the yank between her scientist, feminist, intellectual self, the self that knew she’d lost only a ball of cells—not yet even as cognizant as an oyster—and the self that had awakened in this process of trying to get pregnant, the self that wished for herself some concrete memorial, even as ephemeral as a graphic on a message board, where she could mark her loss. Where it would be seen, acknowledged, understood. Where it mattered. She’d had to create a profile to use the site, and it predated the pregnancy by more than a year. She’d felt too superstitious to update her page to include the expected due date, but she’d gone to the page where you could add the loss graphic a number of times, scrolled through the options, all of them stupid, reductive: winky cartoons for cataclysmic pain. She wanted one, but she wouldn’t let herself have it. She was fine. She was a doctor, she was not this kind of woman. It had been like an oyster in its texture, too, the thing that she expelled. It, the thing—this is what she and her friends, her colleagues, her ilk, would call it, would think of it as. Until it came from their own bodies, and then it would be a baby, at least in some way, as it was for the women on her board, mourning their Aubreys, their Liams, their Samantha Jades. Who could she and Kushi mourn, never having named this baby, never having let it be more than so much cautious promise, so much terrified hope—the opposite of unbridled, so tentative that Alice worried now that her fear may have been a factor, too, that the baby had been expelled in part because it couldn’t find purchase in her womb: cagey, skittish, used to keeping its own company, booting out even the would-be baby that was its truest wish.

  Was it possible the accident had caused this? She shared a version of this fear with Kushi, made it slightly more logical than it was in her head, said maybe her insides were rearranged in some mysterious way that day, that this was keeping her from getting pregnant and now, from keeping a pregnancy. But her own theory was less that her reproductive organs had been compromised, and more that her whole body was altered on a cellular level that day on the tractor, as sudden as the shove itself, that when she pushed her brother her body said no, the line stops here: the source of this chaos is no place to try to form a new human being.

  Kushi knew that Alice blamed herself for what happened to her brother, but not that she’d shoved him, not that she meant it. She would never tell him. She was trying to become the mother to his children now, and to do this, she was learning, meant to somehow reconcile the women inside her: the scientist and the one who believed that bodies could change as though struck by invisible bolts of emotional lightning, something doctors who studied trauma might validate to some extent, but not in the way that Alice meant it, not in the way she wanted it, like a cartoon graphic blazing on her body, tattooed on her skin: this many days since I tried to kill someone, this many years since I ruined his life. He lives among us still, no angel. No angel herself.

  Chapter 36

  Her roommates didn’t recognize the work it took, to be joyful. They appreciated the results, but not the labor. Margaret knew they sometimes found it tedious, that she was not as bright as they were. But other times they cherished it, how they had so much to teach her. And they were smarter, she could admit, in all the ways they felt mattered most. But there were other kinds of brightness.

  Margaret learned about emotional labor from Kimberly, the therapist she’d begun to see junior year of college, unbeknownst to her roommates, who believed they’d convinced her to get therapy for the first time in the wake of what occurred in Connecticut. Lainey was open about having gone since she was a girl, and she’d been the first person Margaret heard say, “I think everybody should go to therapy,” though Margaret went on to hear many others say it, even said it herself, just to see how it sounded. Margaret would have agreed to anything to keep them from picking at the scab of what they thought they’d seen, what they imagined she’d done, what she had done: kissed Laurent. It wasn’t a lie, what she’d told them, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was that they’d leaned close in the exact same moment, and she had forgotten herself, she had been a girl on the edge of that bed, she was still a girl some days, some moments, and her new analyst, Dr. Lowenstein, in whose office she reclined uncomfortably now, was helping her to understand why.

  “Sometimes profound trauma creates a kind of emotional stalling point, and a person is stuck in some ways at the age they were when the trauma occurred. This is not uncommon in survivors of childhood sexual abuse. . . .”

  Margaret’s nausea kept her from making any sudden moves, but she felt the urge to bolt upright. It was recognition of herself in his words, but also a feeling like she’d discovered the breakthrough clue on one of Lainey’s crime procedurals, and she wished in a way that she could rush into the courtroom, wave it around for her friends: See, it is possible to time travel. It is possible to get trapped in time!

  But her friends didn’t know. There was a moment, after they walked in on her, when she’d thought to blurt it out, her molestation card, never played, this is why I’m broken, but what stopped her, even more than simply not wanting them to know, was her absolute certainty that what had happened between herself and Laurent had nothing to do with what happened to her as a girl. This was true. Even if she allowed that what she had done in Connecticut was wrong, she could not accept that she had hurt Laurent. It had been a kind of love—not even sexual love, but understanding, acceptance, communion—that passed between them; it had been a meeting between two people who felt unseen, seen wrongly, not seen for who they were inside; it had been an offering between them, an assurance. A kiss.

  Dr. Lowenstein didn’t know what happened in Connecticut, and her friends didn’t know what had happened to her as a child. She was split, divided. She rested a hand on her belly.

  The people who knew: her mother; her older sister; the anonymous admissions essay readers, maybe, though she’d been oblique, referred to her hopes of fleeing an “abusive environment”; and Gavin, whom she’d told at the ice cream shop the first summer home from college, when the thought of going back to her mother’s house after work one night felt like a hand around her neck.

  “You could go to the police, still,” Gavin had said. “Or you could let me have a run at him.”

  “Don’t do that. No,” Margaret said. “Don’t make me sorry I told you. I don’t want to talk about it. Ever again.”

  The shop, emptied of customers, felt cavernous, and their voices echoed. She had thought she would have felt unburdened, finally having told someone she knew would believe her: a friend. Bu
t she was inflamed with guilt, on fire with shame. It was as though in telling Gavin she became again a girl who asked for it, deserved it, didn’t know any better, didn’t know how to stop it, didn’t know she was not to blame—hadn’t even known, for too long, it was wrong. Her face had overheated but the room felt freezing, and she’d shivered. Gavin gave her his Missouri State sweatshirt, Boomer the Bear a shield across her chest, and she’d gone home with him that night, moved in with him the following week.

  “You’re a grown woman,” he’d said. “You don’t have to live with your mama anymore.”

  “But I make like nothing at the shop,” Margaret had said, her voice tinged with the same whines children made in line for ice cream when their parents limited their mix-ins.

  “Girl, I know exactly what you make, and it’s fine. You can pay me when you get it. And you will. I know you’re good for it.”

  She knew he meant that she was trustworthy, but she heard it in her head as him telling her that she was good, and this, even more than a place to sleep, was what she needed.

  The last two on her list: Kimberly, and now Dr. Lowenstein. Kimberly had both interrogated and lauded Margaret’s ability to compartmentalize, taught Margaret the word.

  “Compartmentalization can be a survival mechanism for survivors of childhood sexual abuse,” Kimberly had said. Margaret was allowed twenty-six visits per year to Kimberly’s small office, tucked in the basement of the student health center, and it had taken twelve before she’d gotten the courage to tell Kimberly the real reason she’d come.