We visit her in fall 2011, when the first morning frost of the year is lying heavy on the ground. She sticks an ultrasound wand covered with freezing-cold lube into me to look at my uterus, and she presses down hard on my belly. A screen beside the bed lights up, and Jack and I both stare into my black, empty womb. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it, its sad little moon crater. She presses more and moves her wand and decides that everything looks good. Jack looks at me and smiles—we’re not used to hearing doctors say that anything about me looks good. I see hope on his face again. Then she sends Jack with a stack of magazines to a windowless room, where he ejaculates into a little cup. They test his sperm and it looks good too.
Miss Carol has a plan.
“We’ll try a few months of Clomid. It should help to stimulate ovulation and make it easier for you to conceive,” she says.
She hands me a foil packet of pills and a big instruction booklet, and walks us to the door.
“You’re gonna do great, sugar.” She smiles and squeezes my shoulders in her hands.
Again, the answer is another drug, another medicine, another bunch of tablets that will sit next to my bed with the rest of my collection.
We try the baby pills for three months, but they don’t work. We try a type of artificial insemination called IUI, but it doesn’t work either. The space between us grows even deeper and wider. My desperation grows deeper and wider. The burning in my body is as constant as my pulse, and some days I don’t even know if I could care for the child that I’ve dreamed of for so many years, but I don’t want to give up on her. Motherhood feels like the only thing left for me. When Miss Carol says there’s one more thing that we can try before IVF, I decide to do it.
My mom drives me to the hospital in Baton Rouge early in the morning. The roads are empty and peaceful and the blue of the sky is swallowed by a sunrise that stretches all the way around in violets and magentas and strips of orange. I’m having surgery today. Miss Carol thinks I have something called endometriosis, which means that the uterus lining doesn’t grow where it’s supposed to, making it harder to get pregnant. The only way to be sure I have it is to go in through my tummy and check. When I schedule the surgery, Jack’s in Australia touring with a famous vegetarian pop star and won’t be home for weeks. He doesn’t want me to do it, sit under the gray sky of another frigid forty-four-degree hospital and be put to sleep. I suspect that he doesn’t really want me to have the baby anymore either, but he’s too nice to say it.
My mom pulls into a spot right next to the entrance, another sliding glass door in another imposing brown building, and I take a deep, shuddering breath, preparing myself to revisit Mayo and Baton Rouge General and Vanderbilt and every doctor’s office I’ve ever been to all over again. Jack calls on FaceTime just as I’m getting ready to walk through a set of doors without him for the first time.
“Are you sure you want to do this, babe?”
His face is a concerned, pixelated jigsaw. I look at him frozen on the phone, oceans away from me. Then I think about the baby and how she could heal me, how she could heal us.
“Of course. I’ll be fine.”
And, clinging onto my mom, I walk inside.
When I wake up from surgery, I know that something’s wrong. Hairs on my stomach pull up from my skin as I breathe; there’s a gluey little bandage, but it’s not where it’s supposed to be. I’m in a room surrounded by curtains, just like the one my daddy was in when he died, with an IV taped to the top of my hand. My arms are blotchy and cold. I stretch them out and wish there was someone to grab onto, Jack or my daddy or Lile. The nurse in the corner is busy picking her nails. She looks at me like I’m a thing when she notices my big, open eyes, and lazily, she pages Miss Carol.
My mom’s face is a beacon when she peeks past my curtain a few minutes later. Miss Carol is with her, as is an older, quiet-looking man.
“Do you remember Dr. Fife?” Miss Carol asks, looking excitedly over at the man, then to me and back again. He has the kindest eyes and a big gray Santa beard. I’m so confused. She goes on.
“Sugar, when we went to look at your uterus, we noticed that your appendix was about to burst. We brought Dr. Fife in to perform an emergency appendectomy.”
The man waves at me like we’re old friends, but I’ve never seen him before—he’s a total stranger. He smiles.
“Ruthie, I removed your spleen in 1996 after the car wreck. I recognized you.”
I recognized you.
He recognized me splayed out on a table, eyes closed, absent, big broken husk of a body on display. He probably saw the scars he made and, like everyone else seems to, he probably felt pity. It’s been a long time since I’ve been recognized for anything other than pain.
It’s been such a long time since I’ve been anything other than a thing to pity, a collection of sickness and scars. My mom and Miss Carol and Dr. Fife stand outside the curtain and talk about my care. They laugh about the smallness of the world and how funny life is and what he’s been up to but I stay silent. I can’t stop thinking about what he must have felt when he saw me there on his table again.
I recognized you.
But really, I wasn’t there. My soul was sedated, on holiday from the dreary place it lives.
I recognized you.
I wasn’t even there. I haven’t been for a long time.
I stay in the hospital for the night. I don’t have endometriosis. Miss Carol says that everything looks perfect and that it’s only a matter of time. The part of the hospital I’m in feels more like a museum at night, quiet, calm, and echoey. The nurses who come by speak softly to me, and even though I want to, I can’t sleep. It keeps playing in my head, over and over again:
I recognized you. It consumes me.
Staring up at the ceiling, I whisper-chant it. It swirls inside my head and follows me all the way back to Nashville. I wonder what the doctor saw when he looked at me: a collection of scars, a victim, a lost cause, a burden. Those are the things that I see. The child who loved her daddy, who danced barefoot until dinner and felt safe in her own skin is unrecognizable now. She’s gone.
The stomach pains start in the middle of the night. I’ve been home for two weeks and Jack is here. In the morning he’s leaving for the southeast leg of a US tour and I’m supposed to go with him. I stumble to the bathroom. I don’t have any time to be slow and careful with my body, so my right side is in flames when I crank my limbs out of bed and drag myself across the floor. I sit on the toilet and everything drains from my body. Dr. Fife told me that the antibiotics might make me nauseous, but this is different, it’s food poisoning on steroids, it’s fucking hell. Jack snores away in the bedroom. I could wake him, he would want me to, but I’m tired of being his responsibility. I want to be his wife again. My body spasms for two hours until the sun comes up.
“Babe,” Jack says in the actual morning. He’s about to leave and I’m not going with him because I’m shitting my brains out. “Do you want me to call someone?”
“No! It’s just a bug. I’ll be fine. I can fly and meet you.”
The air in the house smells like sickness, the slow-death perfume of a nursing home or mortuary. I stick my head out from behind the bathroom door and meet Jack’s brown-gravy eyes one more time. I have the fan going so loud that I have to shout.