“Look at him,” says Elizabeth. “Just look at him.”
The ultrasound technician points out his body parts like it’s a scavenger hunt: a hand, a foot, a knee.
“He’s perfect,” says Elizabeth. “Isn’t he perfect?”
The lights are too bright and I feel a headache building behind my eyes.
“I’ll meet you out there,” I say, and move blindly from the room while Elizabeth calls after me to see what’s the matter. She will be angry that she cannot continue to share this moment with me, for sharing moments, to her, is much more agreeable than experiencing them on her own. If she has a moment all to herself, she must wonder, what is the point?
I emerge into a long corridor and make my way toward the lobby. That sick feeling hasn’t left me, carries my feet down the tiled floor, past multitudes of closed doors behind which anything might be happening. Behind those doors lie rooms where a woman is finding out her baby’s sex, where another might be doubled over with terrible cramps, where someone is getting the worst sort of news. Rooms imbued with the mystery of birth and death. Whatever lives in those rooms remains a secret to me, hidden behind their many doors.
Yet there is something different about the door to my left. All of these other doors are a light, pleasant oak, friendly and neutral, but this one is darker, heavier. The wood is battered and ancient, grained and scuffed. I know this door.
Somehow it has followed me to the hospital. Whether it is just the door or the contents behind it too, I cannot possibly know. Yet how can a locked room suddenly appear in a different place entirely? Do you think I am going crazy? I stop before it, gazing on its impossible provenance, place my palms flat upon the rough surface. It feels the same. Thinking I might hear something, some clue, I lean my ear against it, but there is only silence. My hand finds the dull brass doorknob, but it doesn’t turn. Below it, there is an old-fashioned sort of keyhole; if I only press my eye against it—
“Excuse me, dear. Are you lost?”
I turn to find a middle-aged nurse clutching a clipboard, staring at me beneath raised eyebrows and thick red hair, the dye fading at grayish roots. There is a speck of blood on her blue scrubs, and I find myself fixating upon it, wondering where it came from, wondering if she realizes it is there.
I look back at the door, but now it just looks like any other door here. Did I imagine it?
“No,” I tell her, and continue down the hallway until it opens up into the lobby.
The hospital feels unnaturally now, all white under surreal light, metal fixtures, murmuring televisions hanging from ceilings, torturous-looking wheelchairs, two satisfied women with pregnant bellies reading magazines as they wait their turn.
I have been back home only a year and already the real world feels less real to me, strange and foreign and locked in time. It feels false, shallow. All that matters here is what is happening right now. The births and deaths of the past are irrelevant, as someday the births and deaths of the present will become irrelevant, each receding into the great chasm that lies at the bottom of time. I wonder if they realize this. If then doesn’t matter, then now can’t either, because soon it will become then and all will be the same.
I sit down across from the pregnant women hiding behind their magazines, feeling self-conscious and wishing Elizabeth would hurry up so we can leave this awful place. I don’t know what to do with my hands. There is no magazine rack, so the women must have brought their own, and the television sleeps on, black screened, in the corner. I cross and then uncross my legs. Oh, hurry up, Elizabeth.
Since I do not know the names of the women, I will refer to them by their most defining characteristics: one is blonde and the other is wearing red lipstick. The blonde leans over and whispers to her companion while the other titters, and then they both smile private little smiles, stealing glances at me from the white corners of their eyes. They lean back, rustling the pages of their reading.
I want to ask them what they are giggling about. What could be so funny here? But I have a terrible feeling they are whispering and snickering at me, and there isn’t a thing I can do to find out what it is they’ve found so amusing. I’d like to ask them. Just open my mouth and ask them what exactly they find so funny about my presence. After all, I am the only other person in this lobby.
I wonder if they planned their pregnancies together. How puerile! They have probably done everything together their whole lives. Most likely they spent high school lounging in one another’s bedrooms with their hair hanging down over the side of the bed; daydreaming about the same boys; sharing their deepest secrets, which they never realized are entirely shallow; holding each other’s hair back when one of them got so drunk she had to crouch gargoyle-like over the toilet to vomit; painting each other’s toenails with silly colors; one of them intimately wiping away the other’s tears with her bare fingers after her dog was eaten by a coyote. They will probably grow into old ladies together, their husbands only vaguely aware that they have always come second.
A little girl who cannot be more than four rushes over to the woman with red lips and tugs impatiently on her skirt.
“What is it, darling?”
“I’m bored,” says the little girl in her little-girl voice.
Why bring her here, I wonder. This sterile prison of needles is no place for a child. And all the doors! There are so many doors behind which she might get lost forever. Too many doors for a child, surely.
“You’ll just have to entertain yourself, sweet pea. We’re obliged to wait until the doctor is finished with the other patients.” Her eyeballs roll up in their sockets to glance briefly at me as if to say, Who are you? Are you the one who is holding us up? I quickly look away.
“Here, play with this,” and she hands her an electronic device that looks like a small plastic tablet, which the girl carries away to play on. The women resume paging through their magazines, glancing up every so often, murmuring to one another from the sides of their mouths, looking at me, I know, without really looking, until I can’t stand their little whispered conversation any longer.
I uncross my legs and slap my hands down on my thighs. “Do I know you?”
Their beady eyes latch on to me as their voices die, offended by my abrupt rudeness.
“I’m sure you don’t,” says the blonde.
Somehow the brunt of their direct attention strikes me as worse than the unconfirmed suspicion that they are gossiping about me. If only I could puff myself up and proudly take up an imposing amount of space, but instead I find myself shrinking away into my own body, in danger of shrinking away into nothing.
“I don’t recall seeing you much in town,” adds the woman with red lips. “I suppose that makes you one of those Wakefields?”
She says it without surprise. They must have realized already; they must have been speculating about those Wakefields, the witches, the swamp people, this whole time, knowing who I am by virtue of not recognizing me, for it is true, I do not spend much time in town, I am like a ghost here.
“And what does that make you?” I snap back. “How would you like it if I sat here snickering and whispering about you? As if I had nothing better to do.”
Both women now fix me with looks of such vapid affront that I almost laugh in their faces, but we are interrupted by Elizabeth, enormous and full of easy courage. “Making friends?”