All Dressed Up (26 page)

He shook his
head, eyes closed.

“Mom, you
haven’t had lunch and it’s three o’clock,” Sarah reminded her.

“Let me wait
until he’s settled, and we’ll go together.”

Emma came back
in time to hear this plan and she nodded. “It’s fine. I’ll stay
with him. Charlie’s coming in.”

“I don’t want
Emma,” Billy said, his voice thick in his mouth. He struggled
higher in the bed, leaned forward, and this time a pint or more of
bright green fluid came, the color of wheatgrass at a California
juice bar.

“It shouldn’t
look like this, should it?”

“It’s bile,”
Emma said. Slaps of color had come into her cheeks. Billy’s
rejection still hung in the air. I don’t want Emma. Sarah thought
that maybe if Emma had said, I’ll stay with you, Billy, instead of,
I’ll stay with him, Billy might have been okay with it, might have
swallowed his reluctance instead of speaking it out so bluntly.

They showed
the kidney dish to the nurse, who told them, “That’s bile.”

“Yes, we know
what it is,” Mom said. Her voice shook. “Why is it happening?”

“Should I go
and bring you guys something?” Emma asked, then lowered her voice
to Sarah. “I’m not sure. Does he even want me in the room?”

“He’s a kid,
Em. Don’t be scared of him. Be normal. Not so brittle. Talk to him,
not about him.”

“Oh, shut up,
Sarah!”

“Is it my
fault you’ve worked yourself up to the point where you need
coaching on this?”

Emma stayed,
looking tight and uncomfortable. Half an hour later, Billy vomited
again, a gush of blood, red and fluid and shocking. Mom burst into
tears and ended up losing three cups of coffee – her own stomach
contents – over the sink in the nurses’ medication room where she
wasn’t supposed to go. One of Billy’s doctors came and Emma looked
at him as if to say, I hope you know more than me.

Sarah yelled
at him, “He’s vomited gallons of juice, and then bile and now it’s
blood! You have to tell us what is going on with him, why he’s
having such a hard time!”

“The blood is
most likely a tear in the esophagus,” the doctor said, with the
incomprehensible coolness of those who’ve seen a lot worse and for
whom this was just another patient. “It’s nothing to worry
about.”

“But what’s
going on? Of course we’re worried. Why is he vomiting?” Like Mom,
she was close to tears.

“It could be a
reaction to the morphine.”

“Yes, that’s
what the nurse said. Why are you being so passive? Will you change
his medication?” She knew she was still yelling too much. You
couldn’t penetrate this surgeon’s bedside manner. He nodded and
went behind the desk at the nurses’ station A short while later the
nurse came out and put a card on the wall behind Billy’s bed
reading “Nil by mouth”.

Brooke Lang
appeared. She wore maroon scrubs and soft-soled white leather shoes
that occasionally squeaked on the floor and she walked with a tired
kind of waddle that suggested she’d just finished her shift.

“I heard about
Billy, poor guy,” she said. “From one of the other nurses. I’m on
the other side of the unit, I just finished. How are you doing, you
sad sack?” She touched his bed, and his arm through the sheet. “Are
they treating you good? You tell me if they don’t, because they’re
friends of mine and I can yell at them.” There was something just
right about her manner, bright and relaxed and tender, all at the
same time.

Sarah felt a
gush of gratitude that brought her tears with it. “He’s been
vomiting, Brooke.” She ripped a wad of tissues from the box beside
Billy’s bed and dabbed her face.

“Oh, yuck,
that, too?”

“Fluids and
bile and blood. The surgeon just about managed to work up a facial
expression when we told him.”

“You’re really
trying to impress everyone, aren’t you, Billy?” He summoned a smile
and Brooke sat down beside him as if these hard green plastic
hospital chairs had been sculpted expressly to fit her comfortable
butt. “I’ll tell you a secret, the food’s not that good anyhow.
Jell-O’s probably the best thing. Especially raspberry.”

She looked at
the new sign behind his bed.

“Oh, they’ve
taken you off that, too? Boy, you are having a fun time! Who’s his
doctor?” she asked Mom, then looked at his chart and answered the
question for herself. “Hermann, he’s good. He wasn’t the one who
did the blip with the laparoscope? No, I didn’t think so.” She put
her arm around Mom’s shoulder and squeezed her. “We’re not too fond
of that guy, are we? Likely to yell at him if we meet him in a
corridor.”

Mom gave a
tearful nod. “Oh-h, yeah!”

“Best if he
stays away. No, Hermann’s good. Apart from the lack of facial
movement, don’t let that get to you. Not such an A-hole as a couple
of ‘em.” She turned her attention to Emma and Sarah. “Did you guys
get my shower invitation?”

“Yes, on
Monday,” Emma said.

Brooke made a
face. “Okay, I know we should have mailed them out sooner.”

“No, no, it’s
fine,” Emma said, too warmly. “You know, people should timetable
these things however they want. There shouldn’t be these rules.
We’ll both be there, won’t we, Sarah?”

“We already
called your friend Nicole with the RSVP,” she agreed.

“We’re both
looking forward to the stripper.”

Brooke’s face
fell. “I don’t think Nicole’s doing a stripper.”

“Well, that’s
good, too.”

“Penis
lollipops, or something. Hey, here’s my cousin.” Brooke sounded
cheerful and ‘smiley’ until she remembered what had happened the
last time Charlie and Emma saw each other, twelve days ago at St
James, and Sarah heard her hiss under her breath, “Oo-kaay, that’s
right, here we go.”

Charlie came
toward Emma like an arrow or a ship.

She felt weak
with relief at the sheer fact of having his body back in the same
space as hers, at having his eyes and his breathing within reach,
especially after Billy’s four-word rejection and Sarah’s helpful
feedback.

He’d listened
to her messages, answered at last by SMS. “I’ll be there.” And he’d
come. Just the fact that he’d come…

But she felt
weak with fear, too, that this reconciliation wouldn’t end up the
way she wanted – that she wouldn’t be able to say the words she
need to say about Billy today, or that if she did say them Charlie
wouldn’t understand what she’d done, or forgive it, that he’d say,
I never signed on for this, Emma.

Forgiveness
wasn’t his best area. Laziness, incompetence, fuzzy principles, he
couldn’t stand those things and rarely let them slide, which was
great when he was on your side about something. She admired his
courage and his upright stance, it made her feel safe, shadowed by
a hero. But when he wasn’t on her side… Not fun at all.

He had such a
highly developed sense of honor himself, such a work ethic, such
clear beliefs. He pulled his weight, people were always asking him
onto committees and teams, and grateful to have him when he said
yes. Emma loved his solidity, his moral spine, but all of this
meant he might easily say I never signed on for this.

At which point
she’d probably want to tell him, That’s great, that means we both
feel the same, because I never signed on for it, either.

Sometimes, she
had to struggle to remember, or feel, or believe, that it had ever
happened at all, Billy’s birth. Was it really her, the person who
had gone through it? She’d spent so long divorcing herself from it,
pushing it away, pushing Billy away and minimizing their contact
and any risk of her caring about him, she had to struggle to bring
back her memories, and even when she did and could make them vivid,
it sometimes felt as if someone else had been playing the role of
Emma then.

She understood
exactly why Billy had said he didn’t want her.

Florida hadn’t
seemed real, ten years ago. After London it was so flat, so
commercial and even in December so warm. The motel suite was more
like a condo, with two levels, two bedrooms, two bathrooms and two
TVs, as well as the motel swimming pool almost at the balcony door.
They could have led quite independent lives, Emma and Mom, sitting
in different rooms watching different TV channels each evening,
never crowding each other for space. But in fact this was maybe the
closest they’d been since Emma’s pre-school years.

Mom didn’t say
a harsh word. “Sometimes I want to,” she admitted once. “But then I
hear it all in Grandma’s voice – “You have no self-discipline” –
and it shuts me right up.” She laughed in a bitter way. “Right
up!”

Emma didn’t
belong in her own body any more. It became distended by a tight,
drum-like belly and voluptuous, tender breasts that she couldn’t
stand to touch. If she ever caught sight of her nakedness in the
mirror it revolted her and she had to turn away.

How did the
rosy nipples that Billy’s father had run his tanned hands over… and
kissed… and sucked… get so huge and dark? They looked out at her
from each breast like a wide, blind eye. She wanted to climb out of
her pregnancy like taking off a fat suit. She wrapped herself in
the baggiest clothes Mom would let her buy, not to hide her
pregnancy from other people but to hide it from herself.

Mom took care
of her. The right doctor, the right diet, the right exercise. The
school principal in Massachusetts sent school work and Emma
completed it to a state of near perfection and sent it back. Mom
never helped her with it but she kept the suite so quiet and
ordered, and came in with enticing, nutritious snacks at exactly
the right intervals and Emma enjoyed the work because while she was
doing it she sometimes forgot about her broken heart and the body
that was no longer hers.

When the baby
moved it felt alien – a colonist, a temporary boarder, a parasite.
She began to say to herself, Nine weeks until I get my body back.
Nine weeks until I can bend and breathe. Then it became eight, then
seven.

She missed
Sarah sometimes, and vaguely took in from Mom that Sarah had
re-considered a dance career and gone back to the international
school. Her main thought was, Will Sarah say anything about the
real reason I left? Will she steal my friends?

Once, Mom had
let slip that leaving Greater Metropolitan had not been entirely
Sarah’s choice. “She’s a beautiful dancer but she has Nanna Dean’s
shoulders and her bust and she can’t just strap that into a
heavy-duty sports bra for ballet.”

Emma went into
premature labor a week after Valentine’s Day. She understood what
was happening better now than she had then. First, she lost her
mucus plug. She could still remember the innocent wipe between her
legs after a pee, and the dragging of the toilet paper against this
foreign, sticky blob. The blob took a ride on the paper and she
could feel the weight of it. She brought the paper around to look
at it in disbelief, a huge, thick streak of mucus like a fat slug.
She felt shaky and sick.

Later that
day, the muscles across her stomach began to gather and tighten
like strong elastic, forceful rather than painful. She didn’t
mention it to Mom, just kind of watched it. Oh, here it is again.
It doesn’t hurt. A bit. It hurts a bit. It’s going. It’s gone.

It stopped
when she lay down and grew stronger when she walked around. She
went to bed and it eased off, but she woke abruptly at two in the
morning to a very different, driving, demanding pain that squeezed
and squeezed and came again just three minutes after it deigned to
let her go.

It seemed like
nothing to do with a baby. It was the giant hand of a torturer,
trying to reach in and pull out her insides. She only woke Mom
because of the fear that she couldn’t endure it and it would kill
her right there in the bed if she didn’t seek help. “Mom?” She
didn’t think it was labor. Surely something had to be wrong. She’d
never imagined such pain.

She went on
thinking this way through Mom driving her to the hospital, through
the wheelchair ride from the E.R. up to the maternity floor,
through stripping and peeing and putting on a gown and being
strapped to a monitor, through the arrival of the preemie crash
cart and the ob/gyn, the pediatrician, and a second nurse.

She kept
expecting them to wheel her into surgery or whip tubes into her or
announce that the baby was in trouble, but the contractions were so
relentless that she never managed to ask if everything was okay or
not, and suddenly she had to start pushing and there was lots of
encouragement and the impossibility of a head fitting through the
brackets of bone between her legs and a slippery little body –
10.09 in the morning, February 22 – and Mom was crying. “Oh, Emma,
oh, Emma, it’s a boy, and he’s just beautiful!”

But then he
didn’t cry or breathe properly so he was whisked away to the crash
cart to be worked on. The pain stopped. There came a chaos of
people asking her to do things. Breathe. Push. Relax. Mom kept
asking, “Is he going to be all right? Is he all right?”

Emma was able
to hold him on her stomach for a few minutes, all wrapped up with
his little oxygen mask on, but then they had to take him away to go
in a preemie crib, and clean her up and get her to her room.
Emptying her bladder for the first time required fifteen minutes of
sitting on the toilet seat with her legs violently shaking, trying
to relax her muscles enough to let urine release from between her
swollen folds. She smelled of blood and felt like an animal, a cow,
lumbering and uncomprehending and enslaved by her body’s
processes.

Mom came and
went between her room and the nursery, giving reports on Billy.

Wait, was he
Billy, yet? Had they named him at this point? Emma had been so
certain it would be a girl and had cool, powerful girl names picked
out. Dakota Scarlett Dean, Billy would have been. She didn’t have
boy names. Was vaguely considering Nathan.