A sharp pain begins to radiate, this time from my back, sharp enough that it sweeps over me. Whatever air there is dissipates and stylish women on the terrace and in the lavish gardens seem far off, almost photoshopped into a vagueness.
“Are you all right?” Laurie comes to steer me beyond the rosebushes where I’m standing, immobilized. I’m sure I’m answering, yet I can’t hear a sound.
“Elodie!” Another person appears. Reassuring, steely. My mother. “Someone, help Elodie. We need help,” she says.
Next I hear a woman, perhaps from the last row, shout, “Call an ambulance.” Someone puts her hand up, says, “I did.” Another woman says, “I’m a doctor.” Her words are promising—aren’t they? She’s suddenly there, taking my pulse, guiding me onto the grass. I couldn’t be losing this baby, my baby girl. Not this time, not again. Then the bleeding begins—unlike anything I’ve ever known.
CHAPTER 2
ELODIE
I look at James and remember what Aubrey, my younger sister, always says: James is a ten. You married a ten. Aubrey’s imprimatur has no positive effect—things feel imbalanced. I stare at the tiny gold triangle pattern on my hospital gown and then up at the ceiling cracks. Although this is a different room than my last time at South Palm Hospital, the paint, an off-gray dull finish, is identical and splinters in the same places. The single window is sealed and the panes are filmy, while the air-conditioning drones on.
James’s face seems dry and tight and he is pacing. His own level of ambition and investigation won’t allow defeat in any portion of life. He has an MBA from Harvard. He’s the CEO of ANVO, a biotech start-up. He is accustomed to solutions—he is a negotiator, and this isn’t easily negotiable. Instead, he is merely a husband who will pace in his wife’s hospital room after her fourth miscarriage in a row. A pregnancy that was convincing enough that we dared dream of our baby, due in May—in time for summer. He is another man completely from the one who kissed me this morning, when I was wrapped in a towel and he was almost out the door to his office.
“Our baby will be very clever,” he’d declared last night. We were in bed. I was rereading War and Peace and James was reading a book about quantum physics.
“Our baby girl,” I said. News we learned last week and have yet to tell anyone except for my mother and my sister, who so get it. Next week, at the sixteenth-week point, we planned to tell Mimi, James’s mother. He wanted her to know at the same time as my mother, but I had to keep it sacred for as long as possible.
“Every mother deserves to have a daughter,” my mother said when we learned the sex of our baby. James saw how pleased I was when I repeated this to him. Although he might feel that every father deserves a son, especially since he has been fatherless these last twenty years. Who knows what the odds are of having a son? How about just having a child?
“It’s been a long haul,” he said when we were seated at Bice, waiting for our friends the Shieldses and the Harwoods to meet us. “You’re forty, I’m forty-three. I worry about you, your body. Is it fair to have children—for them to have old parents?”
I might have argued that this seemed calculating and that once our new house was finished, many children could live there. That there are plenty of couples having babies at our ages. As if I didn’t know James’s strategic plan from the night that he’d tapped me on the shoulder and introduced himself. It was thirteen years ago at the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central, during a massive train delay. While we waited for hours, we sat at the bar, trading dreams of success and children. We were so young, it was a theorem. Two years later we were married and I thought perhaps we should take care of it at once—have two children in two years. If there was no model time to have a baby, this seemed like a solution. James didn’t like the idea; he said we deserved time as a couple first and we were both trudging ahead with work. Somehow together we let it go. At first I almost kept quiet on purpose. Then when James honed in, there were issues. If only we had done this at the right time in our lives.
Carly Shields and her husband, Wally, were being brought to our table. To the left and to the right, tables were being filled with people we know. Besides, I’ve always gone along with my husband’s logic; I’ve always appreciated it. We share the canvas, paint in the same palette—that’s what James and I do. Later when dinner was over, I decided not to go deeper, knowing this would be my mother’s tact.
“Can we go home? Now? I’m so wiped out. I want to be in my bed.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie, they said you might need to be transfused—they’re monitoring you.”
“A transfusion? But I thought…”
“Let’s not worry about that yet. Can I get you something? Soup, applesauce?”
For the first time since we began the process of starting a family, of trying to do the most natural thing in the world, James seems desolate.
“No, thanks. I’m fine. Nothing. Please, don’t worry,” I say.
I wonder if it is afternoon yet. How the time moves in this hospital reminds me of a long delay at an airport. Hours eked out until your flight takes off.
“Is my mom on her way?”
“She should be.” James frowns at his iPhone. “I got her text.”
Earlier today my mother gave a half smile of approval (she never completely smiles anymore because she says her face has “dropped”). What has happened since then isn’t for her. I ought to do something—fix my braid, which has come undone, find a lipstick. I am terrified of how disappointed my husband is; I dread my family’s view of me.
“A sip of water?” James holds up the Styrofoam cup with a straw in it.
I shake my head. He moves to the window and pauses as a distinctive patter is heard from down the hallway. A clicking of heels against the tile that could produce one of three women—my mother, my mother-in-law, or Dr. Noel. I am hoping it is not Mimi, James’s mother. He must sense this, because his face relaxes when Dr. Samantha Noel appears. For a moment I believe she’ll save me, turn the day around, pledge a full-term pregnancy for me. Her pearls and the neckline of her dress show beneath her crisp white lab coat with her name embroidered across the left breast pocket.
“This almost took, Dr. Noel,” I say. “I was almost in the clear.”
“I know. I know.” Dr. Noel clasps her hands together; her bangle bracelets clink before she lifts the scratchy sheets. “May I take a peek?”
I keep talking. “Well, when this is over, when I’m better, I can try one more time.”
Dr. Noel blanches, pauses. “I’m sorry, Elodie, I don’t think it’s prudent. I’m advising against any more in vitros. I don’t think you should become pregnant again.”
I know that she is speaking to me—her mouth moves in this fixed, tapered way. What she says makes little sense. This has happened before but I have recovered. I tried again, the in vitro took, and I was having a girl.
Dr. Noel is poking around while I’m panicking.
“James? That’s not right. That’s not what we’ll do. It’s not our idea, because…”