Just the Nicest Couple(61)

The safe unlocks. I open the door and reach my hand in, feeling blindly inside for the gun.

I come up empty.

Jake’s gun isn’t in the safe.

Jake, wherever he is, has his gun.



CHRISTIAN


The next day, I meet Lily in the afternoon for an appointment with the obstetrician. There was blood in her underpants—just a little, from what she said—but enough that my heart stopped when Lily called me at work to tell me. “The doctor said it’s probably nothing, just spotting,” Lily told me, over the phone, but I could tell from the quiver in her voice that she didn’t believe it, that she repeated the doctor’s words just to soothe herself and me. She said, “The doctor said it’s not uncommon to spot during the first trimester,” which I know, I’ve read practically all the websites on pregnancy, but blood in her underpants has always proven disastrous.

“What time is the appointment?”

“One.”

“That’s the soonest she can get you in?” I’d asked, wanting to go now. It was ten in the morning when she called. There is nothing worse than waiting, than not knowing. From that moment on, I knew I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything today but the baby.

“Yes,” Lily had said.

Lily has now made it to ten weeks in the pregnancy. That’s about as far as we’ve ever gotten. The second trimester draws near. That second trimester is a major milestone in that the baby’s odds of survival will drastically increase because the majority of miscarriages happen during those first thirteen weeks. It’s not foolproof. Miscarriages can happen at any time, and we’re still three weeks away from reaching that critical stage. Anything can happen. Anything can go wrong. Lily may have already lost this baby.

Her stress these last few weeks has been high, especially after the unexpected visit from the cop last night. I kissed her hard after he’d left. I took her in my arms and pressed my lips to hers and said, “That was amazing, Lily. You are fucking amazing.” I couldn’t help myself. I was impressed with her quick thinking. But it didn’t come without consequences, because Lily felt guilty as hell afterward for what she said or for what she implied about Nina.

There is no actual evidence that stress leads to miscarriage, but doctors don’t know everything.

I’m running late to the appointment. The client meeting I was in ran over, and then there was an accident on the expressway. Traffic was backed up for miles. It’s eight minutes after one now. I park my car and run into the building.

Lily is already on the exam table when a nurse lets me into the room with her. She has her back to me. She turns and smiles. Lily wears her own red shirt, but she’s naked from the waist down, draped with a paper sheet over her lap. She’s one of the few people in the world who could ever look gorgeous sitting under sterile fluorescent lights with a paper sheet covering her lower half. Lily is radiant. “Hey,” she says. She takes my breath away when she smiles.

“Hey. Sorry I’m late.” I walk into the room and close the door quietly behind myself. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing,” she says. “You’re not late. The doctor hasn’t been in.”

I come to Lily. I pull her into me, kissing her on the side of the head. I hold her close. “Any more blood?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“That’s good, right? How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” she says. “Just nauseated. And tired.”

I release her. I take a seat on one of the chairs, opposite the exam table. I can see on Lily’s face that she’s tired. I heard her this morning in the bathroom. She was throwing up. It’s not that I want Lily to be sick, but it had come as a relief at the time, as if her being nauseated meant that everything was okay with the baby. It’s not a guarantee, because a few hours later, when we were both at work, she saw blood. And last time, even after she miscarried, Lily continued to have morning sickness because of the hormones still in her body. It was a double whammy. As if the miscarriage or the morning sickness wasn’t bad enough on its own, she had both.

I feel relieved to see Lily. She looks better than I imagined, and I think if the amount of blood on her underpants this morning was anything like times before, she’d look worse than this.

There’s a knock on the door. The doctor comes in. The doctor is a woman. Lily likes her, a lot. I do too. She’s been through quite a bit with us and wants us to have a baby almost as much as Lily and I want to have a baby. The last miscarriage, she cried. When we came back months later, pregnant again, she looked about as split as I felt. What were we doing? At what point did we just give up and quit?

The doctor says hi to me, but she focuses her attention on Lily. Today she wants to first try and listen to the baby’s heartbeat with a fetal Doppler. The last time we were here, a couple weeks ago, we heard it with the transvaginal ultrasound, which we can do again if necessary, but the Doppler might pick it up and save Lily the discomfort. “Ten weeks is about the soonest a heartbeat can be detected with the fetal Doppler,” the doctor says, “so please don’t panic if we don’t hear it at first.”

She has Lily lie flat on the table. I rise from my chair and go to stand beside Lily, at her head, holding on to her hand.

I smile benevolently at Lily as the doctor lifts the hem of her shirt to her ribs. Lily’s abdomen is flat and it’s hard to believe there could be another life in there, a life that we made. The doctor spreads a glob of gel on her lower abdomen. She turns the volume on the Doppler to high, and then runs the probe across Lily’s skin. I hold my breath. Everyone in the room holds their breath. The heartbeat is supposed to sound something like the clippety-clop of horse hooves. I don’t hear it. As the seconds go by, the air leaves the room. It gets harder and harder to breathe.