motion, rock it back and forth a few times. For C. and me it wasn’t like that. It was a clean, swift break – a thunderclap. Intense and awful and over in seconds.
Liar, I thought. Oh, you liar. It wasn’t a thunderclap, it wasn’t even a breakup, I just told you I wanted some time!
Then, less than three months later, my father died.
I went back and forth with the telephone in my hand, her number still first on my speed-dial. Call her? Don’t call her? Was she my ex or my friend?
In the end I opted for her friendship. And later, when a houseful of mourners picked over deli trays in my mother’s kitchen, I opted for more
And now, three months later, I am still mourning my father, but I’m feeling as if I’m over C., truly and completely. I know what real sadness is now. I can explore it every night like a kid who’s lost a tooth and can’t stop tonguing the pulpy, wounded, empty space where the tooth once was.
Except now she’s pregnant.
And I don’t know whether she’s set out to trick me or trap me, whether I’m even the father, whether she’s pregnant at all.
“Oh, this is unbelievable,” I announced to Broad Street at large. “This is fucking unbelievable!”
And, the thing is, I’m too chicken to ask.
It’s your choice, I imagine I say with my silence. Your call, your game, your move. I manage to silence the part of me that wonders, that wants to know how she chose: whether she went to the clinic on Locust Street and marched past the protestors with their pictures of bloody dead babies; whether she did it in a doctors’ office, whether she went with a friend, or a new lover, or alone. Or whether she’s marching around her home-town right now with a belly as big as a beachball and books full of baby names.
I don’t ask, or call. I don’t send a check, or a letter, or even a card. I’m done, empty, dried out and cried out. There’s nothing left for her or for a baby if there is one.
When I let myself think about it I get furious at myself (how could I have been so dumb?) and furious at her (how could she have let me?). But I try not to let myself think of it too much. I wake up, work out, go to the office, and go through the motions, try to keep the tip of my tongue away from that hole in my smile. But deep down I know that I can only postpone this so long, that even my cowardice can’t stave off the inevitable. Somewhere in my desk, tucked in a notebook and locked in a drawer, there’s a letter with my name on it.
“You’re late!” the head nurse scolded, and smiled at me to show she didn’t mean it. I had the copy of Moxie curled up like I meant to smack a dog with it. “Here,” I said, handing it off. She barely spared it a glance. “I don’t read this stuff,” she said. “It’s worthless.”
“I agree,” I said, heading toward the nursery.
“There’s someone here to see you,” she said.
I walked to the nursery and sure enough, there was a woman standing at my window, the window in front of Joy’s Isolette. I could see short, impeccably coiffed gray hair, an elegant black pantsuit, a platinum diamond tennis bracelet around one wrist. A light whiff of Allure was in the air, her freshly polished fingernails glittered under the fluorescent lights. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey had put together just the right ensemble for going to visit her son’s illegitimate premature firstborn.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
Audrey gasped and took two giant steps backward. Her face went two shades paler than her Estee Lauder foundation.
“Cannie!” she said, and pressed one hand against her chest. “I… you scared me.”
I stared at her, saying nothing, as her eyes moved over me, unbelieving.
“You’re so thin,” she finally said.
I looked down and observed with not much interest that this was true. All that walking, all that plotting, my only food a snatched bite of bagel or banana and cup after cup of bitter black coffee, because the taste matched the way I felt inside. My refrigerator held bottles of breast milk and nothing else. I couldn’t remember the last time I sat down and ate a meal. I could see the bones in my face, the jut of my hipbones. In pro-file, I was Jessica Rabbit: nonexistent butt, flat belly, improbable bosom, thanks to the milk. If you didn’t get close enough to notice that my hair was dirty and matted, that I had giant black circles under my eyes and that, most likely, I smelled bad, I was an actual babe.
The irony had not been lost on me: After a lifetime of obsession, of calorie counting, Weight Watching, and StairMastering, I’d found a way to shed those unwanted pounds forever! To free myself of flab and cellulite! To get the body I’d always wanted! I should market this, I thought hysterically. The Placenta Abruptio Emergency Hysterectomy Premature and Possibly Brain-Damaged Baby Diet. I’d make a fortune.
Audrey fingered her bracelet nervously. “I guess you’re wondering…,” she began. I said nothing, knowing exactly how hard this was for her. Knowing, and not giving a damn. A part of me wanted to see her twist in the wind like this, to struggle for the words. A part of me wanted her to suffer.
“Bruce says you won’t speak to him.”
“Bruce had a chance to speak to me,” I told her. “I wrote and told him I was pregnant. He never called.”
Her lips trembled. “He never told me,” she whispered, half to herself. “Cannie, he is so sorry about what happened.”
I snorted, so loud I was afraid I’d bother the babies. “Bruce is a day late and a dollar short.”
She bit her lip, twirling the bracelet. “He wants to do the right thing.”
“Which would be what?” I asked. “Having his girlfriend refrain from any more attempts on my baby’s life?”
“He said that was an accident,” she whispered.
I rolled my eyes.
“He wants to do the right thing,” she repeated. “He wants to help out”
“I don’t need money,” I said, deliberately crude, spelling it out. “Not his or yours, either. I sold my screenplay.”
Her face lit up, so glad that we were on a happy subject. “Honey, that’s wonderful!”
I said nothing, hoping she’d fall apart in the face of my silence. But Audrey was braver than I’d given her credit for.
“Could I see the baby?” she asked.
I shrugged and stabbed one finger at the window. Joy was in the center of the nursery. She looked less like an angry grapefruit; more like a cantaloupe, perhaps, but still tiny, still frail, still with the science-fiction-looking ventilator attached to her face more often than not. The chart at the end of her glass crib read “Joy Leah Shapiro.” She was wearing just a diaper, plus pink and white striped socks and a little pink hat with a pompom on top. I’d brought the nurses my stash, and every morning they made sure that Joy got a different hat. She was far and away the best chapeau’d baby in all of the NICU.
“Joy Leah,” whispered Audrey. “Is she… did you name her after my husband?”
I nodded once, swallowing hard around the lump in my throat. I can give her this much, I thought. After all, she wasn’t the one who ignored me, who didn’t call me, who had caused me to fall into a sink and almost lose my baby.
“Will she be all right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably. They say probably. She’s still small,
