A Spark of Light(78)
Laughing, she lifted a shrimp from her plate and took a bite.
It crunched, which was weird, but then lots of food rich people liked was weird: caviar, paté, raw beef. It wasn’t until she noticed Parker’s parents staring at her that she realized her mistake. She’d never had a shrimp in her life—how was she supposed to know to peel the shell?
“Excuse me,” she muttered, and she fled to the ladies’ room.
She hid there, thinking about telling Parker about the pregnancy test she had taken. If he knew she was pregnant, he would never let her go. She was doing what was best for him. Even if he thought Izzy was what he wanted right now, it was only a matter of time before he decided he’d rather be with someone from the same background as him. Someone who’d eaten shrimp before, for God’s sake.
“Iz?” It was Parker’s voice.
“You’re in the ladies’ room,” she said.
“Am I? Damn.” He paused. “You gonna come out?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No.”
A woman walked into the bathroom and squeaked. “Sorry, can you give us a minute?” Parker asked. Izzy heard the door open, the buzz of the restaurant before it got quiet again. “You know what? I fucking hate shrimp. It’s like eating something prehistoric,” he said. “The point is, I don’t care.”
“I do.” That was it, in a nutshell. “Parker, go back to your parents. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to make this any better.”
“Nothing?” Parker replied.
She heard shuffling and shifting, and then Parker’s hand slipped under the stall door, his fist opening like a blossom to reveal a diamond ring. “Izzy,” he said, “will you marry me?”
—
ONLY ONE OTHER WOMAN HAD been in the recovery room when Joy was brought in. She wore an Ole Miss sweatshirt and pool shoes, and she was crying. “You have a seat in that chair, honey,” Harriet said, flicking a glance at the other patient. She handed Joy a juice box and a packet of Fig Newtons. “You got your azithromycin?” Joy nodded. “Good. You take that as directed. You can also take Motrin or Advil in two hours, but no aspirin, okay? It thins the blood. And here’s a prescription for Sprintec, that’s the birth control you picked, right?”
Joy nodded absently. She couldn’t stop staring at the other woman, who was sobbing so hard that Joy felt rude for intruding on someone’s visible grief. What did it say about Joy, who wasn’t crying? Was this the proof that she had been looking for, that she would have been a lousy mother?
“Will you excuse me a second?” Harriet said, and she went over to the woman’s chair and put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right? Are you in pain?”
The woman shook her head, past speech.
“Are you sad that you had to make this decision?”
Who wasn’t? Joy thought. What hellish tributary of evolution had made reproduction—and all the shit that came with it—the woman’s job? She thought about all the women who had sat in the very chair she was in, and the stories that had brought them here, and how, for one brief chapter, they all intersected. A sisterhood of desperation.
The woman took a Kleenex from a box that Harriet offered her. “Sometimes we have to make choices when we don’t like any of the options,” the nurse said. She drew the woman into an embrace. “You’ve been here long enough. I can get your driver if you’re ready to go.”
A few minutes later the woman was signed out. A boy (he really was no more than that) stood awkwardly beside her as she got up and started to walk down the hall. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off, and Joy watched them until she couldn’t see them anymore, moving in tandem with six fixed inches of distance between them.
Joy put in her earbuds and filled her head with music. Had anyone asked, she would have said she was listening to Beyoncé or Lana Del Rey, but the truth was she was listening to music from The Little Mermaid. At one of her foster homes, she had been given that CD as a birthday gift and had memorized every last word of it. When things got really bad, she used to put the pillow over her head and whisper the lyrics.
Wouldn’t you think I’m a girl, a girl who has everything?
“Miz Joy?” the nurse said. “Let’s get some vitals.” She came and stood beside Joy’s oversize armchair in the recovery room.
Joy let Harriet stick the thermometer into her mouth and Velcro the cuff around her arm. She watched the red numbers blink on the machine, proof that her body, battered as it was, was still functional. “One-ten over seventy-five, and ninety-eight point six,” the nurse said. “Normal.”
Normal.
Nothing was normal.
The whole world had changed.
She had had two hearts, and now she did not.
She had been a mother, and now she was not.
—
GEORGE SAT IN HIS TRUCK, his hands fisted on the steering wheel, going nowhere. The ignition was off, and he had two choices. He could start the engine again and drive back home and pretend he’d never come. Or he could finish what he’d started.
He was breathing heavily, like he’d run here, instead of driving hundreds of miles to distance himself from a truth he couldn’t absorb.