love. So I think that maybe even if he was perfect… or, you know, not perfect, but a good fit for me… that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to see it, or I’d have tried to talk myself out of it. Or whatever.”
“Or maybe he wasn’t the right guy for you. They always taught us in medical school, when you hear hoofbeats…”
“… don’t look for zebras.”
He grinned at me. “They said that in your medical school, too?”
I shook my head. “No. My father was a doctor. He used to say that all the time. But I don’t know. I think this might actually be a zebra. I mean, I know how much I miss him, and how awful I felt when I found out he had somebody else, and I think that I blew it… that he was actually supposed to have been the love of my life, my husband.” I swallowed hard, my throat closing around that word. “But now…”
“Now what?”
“I miss him all the time.” I shook my head, disgusted at my own mopiness. “It’s like being haunted or something. And I don’t have the luxury of being haunted right now. I need to think about myself, and the baby, and how I’m going to plan and get ready.”
I looked at him. He’d taken off his glasses and was watching me intently.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
He nodded.
“I need a male perspective. Do you have any children?”
“None that I… I mean, no.”
“See, you were going to say, ‘None that I know of,’ right?”
“I was, but I stopped myself,” he said. “Well, almost.”
“Okay. So no kids. How would you feel, if you’d been with someone, and then you weren’t with her, and she came to you and said, ‘Guess what? I’m having your baby!’ Would you even want to know?”
“If it were me,” he said, thoughtfully. “Well, yes. If it were me I’d want to know. I would want to be a part of the child’s life.”
“Even if you weren’t with the mother anymore?”
“I think children deserve to have two parents involved with them, and who they become, even if the parents live apart. It’s hard enough to grow up in this world. I think kids need all the help they can get.”
That, of course, was not what I’d wanted to hear. What I’d wanted to hear was, You can do this, Cannie! You can go it alone! If I was going to be apart from Bruce – and there was ample evidence that I would – I wanted every assurance that a single parent was a fine and proper thing to be. “So you think I should tell him.”
“If it were me,” he said thoughtfully, “I would want to be told. And no matter what you do, or what he wants, you’re still the one who ultimately gets to decide. What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“He and his mother sue me for custody and try to get the baby for themselves?”
“Wasn’t that on Oprah?” he asked.
“Sally Jessy,” I said. It was getting colder. I pulled the lab coat tight around me.
“Do you know who you remind me of?” he asked.
“If you say Janeane Garofalo, I’ll jump,” I warned him. I was forever getting Janeane Garofalo.
“No,” he said.
“Your mother?” I asked.
“Not my mother.”
“That guy on Jerry Springer who was so fat that the paramedics had to cut a hole in his house to get him out of it?”
He was smiling and trying not to. “Be serious!” he scolded me.
“Okay. Who?”
“My sister.”
“Oh.” I thought about it for a minute. “Is she…” And then I didn’t know what to say. Is she fat? Is she funny? Did she get knocked up by her ex-boyfriend?
“She looked a little bit like you,” he said. He reached out, his fingertip almost brushing my face. “She had cheeks like yours, and a smile like yours.”
I asked the first thing I could think of. “Was she older or younger?”
“She was older,” he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead. “She died when I was nine.”
“Oh.”
“A lot of my patients when they meet me want to know why I got into this line of medicine. I mean, there’s no obvious connection. I’m not a woman, I’ve never had a weight problem…”
“Oh, sure. Rub it in,” I said. “So your sister was… heavy?”
“No, not really. But it made her crazy.” I could only see the side of his face as he smiled. “She was always on these diets… hard-boiled eggs one week, watermelon the next.”
“Did she, um, have an eating disorder?”
“No. Just neuroses about food. She was in a car accident… that’s how she died. I remember my parents were at the hospital, and nobody would tell me for the longest time what was going on. Finally my aunt, my mother’s sister, came to my room and said that Katie was in Heaven, and that I shouldn’t be sad, because Heaven was a wonderful place where you got to do all your favorite things. I used to think that heaven was a place full of Devil Dogs and ice cream and bacon and waffles… all the things that Katie wanted to eat, and would never let herself have.” He turned to face me. “Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
“No. No, actually, that’s kind of how I imagine Heaven myself.” I felt terrible as soon as I’d said it. What if he thought that I was making fun of his poor dead sister?
“You’re Jewish, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I am, too. I mean, I’m half. My father was. But we weren’t raised as anything.” He looked at me curiously. “Do Jews believe in heaven?”
“No… not technically.” I groped for my Hebrew school lessons. “The deal is, you die, and then it’s just… like sleep, I think. There’s no real idea of an afterlife. Just sleep. And then the Messiah comes, and everyone gets to live again.”
“Live in the bodies they had when they were alive?”
“I don’t know. I personally intend to lobby for Heidi Klum’s.”
He laughed a little bit. “Would you…” He turned to face me. “You’re cold.”
I had been shivering a little bit. “No, I’m okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No, it’s fine! I actually like hearing about other people’s, um, lives.” I had almost said “problems,” but I’d caught myself just in time. “This was good.”
But he was already on his feet and three long-legged strides ahead of me, almost to the door. “We should get you inside,” he was muttering. He held the door open. I stepped into the stairwell, but didn’t move, so that when he shut the door he was standing very close to me.
“You were going to ask me something,” I said. “Tell me what it was.”
