It was a chicken. A nightmare about a chicken. I slowly release the air from my lungs.
Until I feel it. The heavy wetness, sticky between my thighs, and I forget all about the dream and the tinfoil and the chicken, and a wail escapes my lips, this time ringing out loud and clear into the air.
* * *
“Mia, what is it?” Harrison says, his voice groggy, his hand groping for my shoulder and gently squeezing.
The thin blanket on top of me is heavy, oppressive, so I throw it off and lay my hands gently on my cramping belly. “I’m losing it.”
“What?” I hear the click of his bedside lamp and light floods the room, temporarily blinds me. Harrison slides his glasses on and his gaze travels the length of me. His eyes widen, alarmed.
“Mia!” he shouts. I glance down and all I can see is the bright scarlet fanning out onto the sheets on either side of me. I know bleeding is part of the miscarriage process, but it’s more—a lot more—than the spotting from the previous two losses.
“Oh my god—there’s so much,” Harrison says.
I jerk my head to him, even though he verbalized what I was thinking. “Seriously, Harrison?”
“What?” he says, standing up, but never taking his eyes off my body.
“You’re a doctor. You’re a doctor!”
“I know!” he says and rushes to the dresser. I let out a grunt of pain and clutch my stomach, feeling another gush of blood dampen the already saturated sheet beneath me.
“But Jesus,” Harrison says as he reaches my side, gripping an old T-shirt in his fist. “You’re my wife!”
The contraction passes and he puts his hand behind me, gently guiding me up, and then hands me the shirt. “Here, hold this down there. We’re going to the hospital.”
He scoops me up, and strangely, I flash to our wedding day when he spontaneously lifted me into his arms after the kiss, marching us back down the dirt-trodden path, grinning back like a fool at everyone cheering for us. Now, he rushes me to the car, grabbing his keys from the cardboard box in the foyer on his way, gently depositing me in the passenger side of his Infiniti, ignoring my shouts to take my car. “It’s older—I’ll ruin the leather in yours!”
The car is silent for the twenty-minute drive to Fordham, aside from my intervals of moaning brought on by a mix of the painful contractions and my overwhelming grief.
When we pull up in the emergency lane of the hospital, Harrison runs over to my side and lifts me back into his arms, hurriedly walking through the sliding glass doors into the fluorescent-bright waiting room. I turn away from the lights and bury my head into his neck.
I hear the exchange between him and the night nurse on duty as if I’m listening to a TV show.
“Dr. Graydon?” she says, recognizing him.
Harrison stops walking and without preamble announces: “My wife. She’s having a miscarriage.”
And at the word, I let out a sob against his collarbone and press the hot wet of my tears into his skin.
Chapter 4
Harrison doesn’t cry.
I learned this a month after we moved in together, when he came home early from a shift at the hospital only to find me crossed-legged on the floor, my cheeks wet with tears.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, rushing to my side.
“Nothing,” I said, taking a deep breath and swiping under my eyes with my fingertips. “It’s this song.” I pointed at the air, filled with the sounds of Peter Cetera and Cher harmonizing: “Two angels who’ve been rescued from the fall.”
He paused. “You’re crying over a song?”
I shook my head no. “It’s the movie!”
“What movie?”
“Chances Are. This is the song playing at the end when Cybill Shepherd walks down the aisle to Ryan O’Neal, and Robert Downey Jr. leans over and says, ‘There’s something I have to tell you. I’m in love with Miranda.’ And Ryan looks at him and says—” I teared up again and couldn’t finish.
Harrison looked at me warily. “Are you being serious right now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re crying because a song reminded you of a scene in a movie that no one has heard of.”
“Chances Are is a classic!”
“Is it?” He cocked an eyebrow, unable to wipe the grin off his face.
“Stop making fun of me. I’m an artist. I’m sensitive.”
He laughed. “No, there’s sensitive and then there’s this. I don’t even know what to call this.”
“C’mon, don’t you ever just need a good cry?”
“No,” he said without hesitation. “I don’t cry.”
I would have thought he was being contrary but for the sincerity on his face. It stopped me short. “What do you mean? Like, ever?”
“Nope.”
“That can’t be true—not even when you lose a patient?”
“Nope.”
“When’s the last time you cried?”
He pondered the question. “Ita’s funeral,” he said, telling me he was eleven when his grandmother died. He remembered his mom fingering a rosary, muttering prayers in Spanish. His uncle walking a cartoonishly large ornate gold cross down the aisle of the church. And his dad tweaking his ear when, out of nowhere, a sob overcame him, shaking him to his core. “Be a man,” his dad whispered, thumping his chest lightly with his fist.
“That’s awful,” I said, my heart breaking for eleven-year-old Harrison.
He shrugged. “No,” he said. “What’s awful is this song. Is that Cher? You hate Cher.”
Dry-eyed, Harrison’s currently sitting on a hard chair next to me, holding a Michael Crichton paperback open with his right hand, while his left gently rubs the inside of my wrist, absentmindedly tracing the small black tattoo with the pads of his fingers.
It’s been four days since that night in the hospital. Since the nurse swiftly removed the blood-soaked disposable pads from beneath me, patted my knee and said, “The hard part’s over,” and I realized the “hard part” was our baby. Four days since Harrison assured me it wasn’t my fault—“There’s nothing we could have done”—and I only half believed him.
And now, in the waiting room of an OB/GYN office for a postmiscarriage checkup, I feel like a soldier in a field of visual landmines. Nowhere is safe to look. Not the black-and-white photos of cherubic babies on every single wall, or the rounded bellies protruding from proud mothers-to-be, all glowing and puffed up with their success of carrying a baby nearly to term—I can’t even look the receptionist in the eye, not wanting to see either her pity or judgment of my slack belly.