Rachel folds the afghan. “Your mother-in-law certainly chose unusual colors. How she must treasure you to have given you this. I envy you.”
“Believe me, there’s nothing to envy.”
“A decent mother-in-law a thousand miles away? A loyal and loving husband by your side …?”
Annie keeps silent. She pictures Baby Girl Stevens-Strauss, her blue-veined eyelids, her fuzz of hair. She thinks of this fresh new hell she’s hiding from her dearest friend. She ducks her head. At least, she realizes, with a perverse relief, she’s not going to leave behind a motherless kid.
Rachel reaches for her, pulls her into her arms. “I’m such an idiot. How could I have …?” She pauses, choosing her words. “You must realize there are specialists in complicated pregnancies. There might be something …”
“I got pregnant. I managed to carry one baby to term.”
“Why not at least try? Who can discount the miracles of modern medicine? According to that fount of wisdom, People magazine, women who’ve been told they can’t have children are having them all over the place. These days, thirty-seven is not too late.”
But it is too late, Annie tells herself. After four miscarriages and a dead baby, wasn’t the universe telling her something? If you break your leg multiple times skiing, you give up skiing. A no-brainer. And even if it wasn’t too late, she knew she could never take a chance on another stillborn. “Enough!” she cautions Rachel. “I’m sure that you in the helping professions think I should have worked through my grief by now, should have moved on to acceptance—”
“I think no such thing.”
“—and yet if Sam and I accept what happened, achieve, as you say, closure, then we have really lost our baby, have broken our connection with her.”
Rachel hugs her tighter. “I know, Annie. I know.” Rachel also knows not to mention, as she once did, that studies of childless couples show they are much happier than those with offspring underfoot.
* * *
As soon as Rachel leaves, Annie clears the tea things and dumps them in the sink. Without bothering to rinse the dishes or wrap the leftover lemon, she hurries upstairs to the computer. Should she Google metastatic lung disease? She remembers how the obstetrician, after her third miscarriage, warned her away from the Internet. “You don’t have the context for all the misleading information you’ll pick up,” the doctor cautioned. “You’ll just get upset.”
The last thing she needs is to be more upset than she already is. She takes a deep breath. Is it shallow? Raspy? She can only imagine the other symptoms waiting online, in line, for her to discover and, Sam-style, claim as her own. How easy it would be to succumb to medical students’ disease. Not that the reality isn’t dire enough. Instead, she’ll take charge of her life. She’ll take charge of Sam’s life.
She taps the keyboard. In seconds, hundreds of links appear. She scrolls through them. A Mourner’s Handbook tops Healing Steps for Gay Widowers, followed by A Short History of Grief, The Groom’s Instruction Manual, Sex Made Easy, A Dating Guide for Widows packaged with A Dating Guide for Widowers in a two-for-one deal, The March Toward Happiness, a zillion varieties of How to Lose Weight. She dismisses Tools for the End of Life in favor of The Right Way to Use a Meat Cleaver, a possible tax-deductible purchase for a person in the food-service industry.
Her eyes glaze. She turns off the computer.
Downstairs, she assumes her usual position on the sofa. During the one hour that Rachel occupied this same spot, Annie learned a few crucial things from her best friend: Sam can be trained. Rachel envies Annie’s marriage. Rachel is a woman in need of a man. There are guidebooks out there, guidebooks to everything.
She decides to take a nap. Is fatigue one of the warning signs? Even under this sword of Damocles, she has to admit that there are still pleasures to be found—a good friend, hot tea, a snowy day, a cozy sofa—and comfort in having come up with a plan. She drifts off as titles clamber across her mind like so many counted sheep: Instructions for Sam, To My Husband, How to Do Everything I Did, In the Likely Event of …
And then, at last, there it is: Life Minus Me: A User’s Guide.
Chapter Six
Annie’s in the Samwich kitchen chopping onions when the phone rings. Megan, whose job it is to write down the takeout orders, shouts from the front counter, loud enough to be heard over the gabbing customers and the regulars who monopolize the same three tables every day. “Annie, it’s for you. Dr. Buckley’s office calling.”
Of course Sam’s heard this. The whole town has heard this. Why not blare it over the loudspeaker at the high school football field? Annie picks up the extension next to the refrigerator. “I’m at work,” she hisses into the receiver, her eyes streaming from the onions.
“Duh,” says Carolyn Connelly, Dr. Buckley’s receptionist. “I left a ton of messages on your voice mail at home.”
Annie is all too aware of those messages. She’s been hurrying back early or stopping by her house midafternoon to erase every single one of them before Sam notices the blinking red light and presses play. Not that he usually notices. “I can’t talk now,” Annie says.
“Doc made me promise to keep you on the line until he can speak to you himself. If I don’t, my job will be toast.”
“I seriously doubt that.” Annie scoops the mound of onion peels into the garbage bin. “I’ve got work to do. Customers waiting. Really.”
“Hold on a sec. He’s just finishing with some drug company dude.”
“Whoops, smoke’s pouring out of the oven. Sorry,” Annie says, and hangs up the phone.
Sam walks back into the kitchen. He’s wearing one of the white aprons left by the Pillsbury Doughboys tied twice around his un-doughboy waist. Slashes of special Paul Bunyan sauce crisscross his heart.
She points. “That’s got to go.”
He looks down. “Gee, I hadn’t even noticed this mess.”
She hands him a clean starched and ironed apron from the freshly laundered pile. “Someone might post a photo on our fan page. For the sake of our public, we have to make a good impression.”
He laughs. “Let’s face it, our particular public could not care less.”
“Then the health inspectors.” She helps him into the new apron, double-looping the strings and fashioning them into a natty bow.
He undoes the bow, leaving knotted streamers. “Too metrosexual,” he protests. “So?” he asks. “Dr. Buckley’s office called? Here at work?”
“Probably figured that’s the best place to find me.” She pinches her nostrils. “It’s about my sinuses.”
“That’s a relief,” he says. “A relief it’s not allergies. Remember when I thought I was allergic to tree nuts?” He studies her. “Everything all right?”
“Fine.”
“Your nose is red; your eyes are watering.”
“I’ve been chopping onions.”
“Maybe that’s a chore we should farm out to Megan.”
“Great idea.” She finds a Kleenex and blows her nose. “Can you spare me for half an hour? I want to get to the dry cleaners before noon.”