“Yep!” he says, and then he kisses me deeply. “You’re not very good at this game.”
That’s the joke we came up with Sunday night. What would it take to derail this thing between us? What could ruin this great thing we have going?
So far, we’ve established that if I became an Elvis impersonator and insisted that he come to all of my shows, he’d still want to be with me. If I decided to get a pet snake and name it Bartholomew, he’d still want to be with me. Perpetual halitosis, it looks like, isn’t a deterrent, either.
“What if everything I put in the washing machine shrinks?” This one isn’t hypothetical. This one is very real.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says as he moves off me and gets out of bed. “I do my own laundry.”
I lie back down, my head on the pillow. “What if I mispronounce the word coupon all the time?”
“Clearly, that’s fine, because you just mispronounced it.” He picks his jeans up off the floor and pulls them on.
“No, I didn’t!” I say. “ ‘Cue-pawn.’ ”
“It’s ‘coo-pawn.’ ” He slips on his shirt.
“Oh, my God!” I say, sitting upright and outraged. “Please tell me you are joking. Please tell me you don’t say ‘coo-pawn.’ ”
“I can’t tell you that,” he says. “Because it would be a lie.”
“So this is it, then. This is the thing that stands in our way.”
He throws my pants at me. “Sorry, but no. You’ll just have to get over it. If it makes you feel better, we will never use coupons for the rest of our lives, OK?”
I stand up and put my pants on. I leave his shirt on but grab my bra from the floor and slip it on underneath. It’s such a bizarre and uncoordinated thing to do, to put on a bra while you still have a shirt on, that about halfway through, I wonder why I didn’t just take the shirt off to begin with.
“OK,” I say. “If you promise we will never talk about coupons, then fine, we can be together.”
“Thank you,” he says, grabbing his wallet. “Get your shoes on.” I pull my hair down briefly so that I can redo my bun. He stares at me for a moment as it falls. He smiles when I put it back up. “Where are we going?” I ask him. “Why are we leaving the bed?”
“I told you,” he says as he puts on his shoes. “You haven’t had a cinnamon roll in three days.”
I start laughing.
“Hop to it, champ,” he says. He is now fully dressed and ready to go. “I don’t have all day.”
I put on my shoes. “Yes, you do.”
He shrugs. I grab my purse and head out the front door so quickly he has to catch up. By the time we get down to the garage, he’s narrowly in front of me and opens my door.
“You’re quite the gentleman these days,” I say as he gets into the front seat and turns on the car. “I don’t remember all of this chivalry when we were in high school.”
He shrugs again. “I was a teenager,” he says. “I hope I’ve grown since then. Shall we?”
“To the cinnamon rolls!” I say. “Preferably ones with extra icing.”
He smiles and pulls out of the driveway. “Your wish is my command.”
My dad is sitting to my right, holding my hand. My mom is at the foot of the bed, staring at my legs. Sarah is standing by the morphine drip.
Gabby came in with them an hour ago. She’s the only one who looked me in the eye at first. After giving me a hug and telling me she loved me, she said she’d leave us all alone to talk. She promised she’d be back soon. She left so that my family would have some privacy, but I also think she needed some time to pull herself together. I could see as she turned to leave that she was wiping her eyes and sniffling.
I think I am hard to look at.
I can tell that my mom, my dad, and Sarah have been crying on and off today. Their eyes are glassy. They look tired and pale.
I haven’t seen them since Christmas the year before last, and it is jarring to see them in front of me now. They are in the United States. Los Angeles. The four of us, the Martin family, haven’t been together in Los Angeles since I was a junior in high school. Our yearly family reunions have since taken place in their London apartment, a space that Sarah very casually and unironically refers to as a “flat.”
But now they are here in my world, in my country, in a city that once was ours.
“The doctor said you’re going to be able to walk again pretty soon,” Sarah says as she fiddles with the arm of the bed. “Which I guess is good news? I don’t know.” She stops and looks down at the floor. “I don’t know what to say.”
I smile at her.
She’s wearing black jeans and a cream luxe sweater. Her long blond hair is blown dry and straightened. She and I have the same hair color naturally, a deep brown. But I see why she went blond. She looks good blond. I tried it once, but Jesus, did you know you have to go to the salon to get your roots done like every six weeks? Who has that kind of time and money?
Sarah’s twenty-six now. I suppose she might look a bit more like me, have some curves to her, if she wasn’t dancing all day. Instead, she’s muscular and yet somehow willowy. Her posture is so rigid that if you didn’t know her better, you might suspect she was a robot.
She’s the type to do things by the book, the proper way. She likes fancy clothes and fine dining and high art.
For Christmas a few years ago, she got me a Burberry purse. I said thank you and tried really hard not to scuff it up, not to ruin it. But I lost it by March. I felt bad, but I also sort of felt like, Well, what was she thinking giving me a Burberry purse?
“We brought you magazines,” she says now. “The good British ones. I figured if I was in a hospital bed, I’d want the good stuff.”
“I’m . . . we’re just so glad you’re OK,” my mom says. She’s about to start crying again. “You gave us quite a scare,” she adds. My mom’s hair is naturally a dirty blond. Her coloring is lighter than the rest of us.
My dad has jet-black hair, so thick and shiny that I used to say his picture should be on boxes of Just For Men. It wasn’t until I was in college that it occurred to me he was probably using Just For Men. He’s been squeezing my hand since he sat down. He now squeezes it harder for a moment, to second my mom’s statement.
I nod and smile. It’s weird. I feel awkward. I don’t have anything to say to them, and even though I couldn’t really say anything anyway, it seems odd for us all to be sitting here, not speaking to one another.
They are my family, and I love them. But I wouldn’t say we are particularly close. And sometimes, seeing the three of them together, with their similar non-American affectations and their British magazines, I feel like the odd man out.
“I’m sleepy,” I say.
The sound of my voice causes them all to snap to attention.
“Oh, OK,” my mom says. “We will let you sleep.”
My dad gets up and kisses my temple.
“Right? We should leave? And let you sleep? We shouldn’t stay, right? While you’re sleeping?” my mom says as Sarah and my dad start laughing at her.
“Maureen, she’s OK. She can sleep on her own, and we will be in the waiting room whenever she needs us.” My dad winks at me.
I nod.
“I’ll just leave these here,” Sarah says, pulling a stack of magazines out of her bag. She drops them onto the tray by my bed. “Just, you know, if you wake up and you want to look at pictures of Kate Middleton. I mean, that’s what I’d do all day if I could.”
I smile at her.
And they leave.
And I am finally alone.
I was pregnant.
And now I’m not.
I lost a baby I didn’t know existed. I lost a baby I was not planning for and did not want.
How do you mourn something like that? How do you mourn something you never knew you had? Something you never wanted but something real, something important. A life.
My mind rolls back to thinking about when I got pregnant. Rolls back to the times I took a pill later than I meant to or the time one accidentally rolled underneath the bed and I couldn’t find it. I think about when I told Michael we should use a condom as backup for a few days and Michael said he didn’t care. And for some reason, I thought that was OK. I wonder which exact time it was. Which time we made a mistake that made a baby.