When the Lights Go Out(80)

I could help him.

I could take a single one off his hands.

Just one child.

“Just to offer my congratulations to Miranda and then I’ll go?” I begged—and even I could hear the desperation in my voice—but Joe shook his head, and I felt like a child then, like a five-year-old child who’d just been told no.

Joe said that he’d pass my message along to Miranda and then he turned to go without me. He walked quickly on purpose, faster than my legs could go, and I felt the dismissal a thousandfold then. I was being brushed off, given the cold shoulder as if I carried a stigma on my sleeve.

The stigma of infertility, the stigma of miscarriage, the stigma of a woman whose husband was in the process of divorcing her.

I blinked and Joe was gone, disappeared down the hall and around the corner where I couldn’t see him anymore, and immediately the headache returned, the palpitations, the sweat. The hospital walls began closing in on me as in a room nearby a lady, deep in the throes of labor, screamed, and instead of feeling sympathy for her, I felt a surge of jealousy and spite.

Oh, how I wanted to be the one screaming in the throes of labor pain! How I wanted to feel a baby inside me, wedging itself headfirst to get out. How I wanted to feel that baby press between my legs, to feel it crown as doctors and nurses gathered around telling me to push. Push!

My feet crept toward her room with instinct, setting my hand on the doorknob and turning it, opening it just a sliver so that I could see in. There was far too much happening inside the room for anyone to hear the door squeak. I stood in the doorway, inching a foot back so no one would see. A Peeping Tom. The door wasn’t open and yet it was ajar, not quite closed tight, and through the crack I saw her laid out on her back, gasping from pain. I saw her gather handfuls of blanket in her hands and squeeze, pushing to get that baby out. I heard her scream, this throaty, guttural scream, crude and uninhibited as a nurse on either side told her to push. “Push!” Her husband stroked her sweaty hair, brushing it out of her eyes. Between her legs was a shock of black and there I stared, wondering just where exactly she ended and the baby began as she pushed again, holding her breath—as I, in turn, held mine, parting my legs ever so and pushing too—bearing down, and this time, as she pushed, a baby came spilling out of her insides, covered in mucous, and the room was filled with a sudden rapturous bliss.

The door slammed shut in my face.

Someone had seen me.

I ran away, out of labor and delivery.

I was due back at my desk in just a moment. Soon the other women in billing would wonder where I had gone, and why I wasn’t yet back from lunch. They would tell our manager. I would be given a scolding.

But I couldn’t go back to billing at that moment.

I needed to get away.

I got behind the wheel of my car and I drove and drove.

I drove to the chophouse, needing to see Aaron, desperate suddenly to see him, for him to hold me in his arms, to stroke my hair and tell me everything would be all right. If I’m being honest, I was scared of the person I was, scared of the person I’d become. I was quite terrified, if Aaron didn’t put a stop to it, of what I might do. My thoughts were scattered, sown like seeds in my mind, and there was no telling which ideas would bloom, the sensible ones like going home and putting myself to bed, or the misguided ones where I return to the hospital and force myself into Joe and Miranda’s room, screaming like a lunatic, demanding that they give me their child.

I left the car parked haphazardly across parallel lines on the street outside, nearly a block from the chophouse. Parking in town was never easy to come by. I stepped from the car, my ankle giving on me as it sunk deep into a crater on the street. I shook it off, kept moving, feeling the ligaments beneath my shoes begin to ache and swell.

It had begun to rain outside, the sky darkening. The restaurants, the gift shops, the galleries that lined the street radiated light. They beamed from the inside out, while outside people scattered like roaches in daylight, hiding under canopies and slipping inside stores, seeking shelter, huddled in throngs beneath ample-size golf umbrellas, clutching one another, laughing.

But not me.

I made my way to the chophouse alone, fully intent on going inside. On speaking to Aaron. On begging him to help me, on pleading with him to take me back. I was desperate. What else could I do? The rain came pouring down, permeating my skin, so that I could feel it inside my bones. I hurried past people tucked warmly, drily beneath their umbrellas, no one offering to share. The rib of a passing umbrella poked me in the shoulder, but no apology came thereafter, as if it was my fault, as if it was my shoulder’s fault for getting in the way of this man’s umbrella.

I closed in on the chophouse, smelling that scent that always followed Aaron home and into bed with us, that coiled around us while we slept. Grease, Worcestershire sauce, the flesh of meat.

But before stepping inside, I caught a fleck of Aaron through the restaurant window, seeing his face through the small partition that separates the kitchen from the dining room. A flyspeck only, but in that flyspeck, there was a lightness about him, a nimbleness, a radiance to his skin. Rain streaked down the window, but I peered past it, watching as a smile danced on the edges of Aaron’s face. In the very same fleck some other man made a wisecrack, I could only assume, because then Aaron was laughing, laughing!, the edges of his lips reaching upward to the sky like he hadn’t done in years. Aaron was laughing and it was beautiful to see, an openmouthed laugh, nothing curbed or restrained about it, and I saw in Aaron’s eyes a felicity that I hadn’t seen in quite some time. Never did he press his hand to his mouth to hide the smile, but rather chuckled with all of his might.