Fury (34 page)

“I'm on my way home from work,” I hear her say. “I'll meet you at Marlborough Hospital.”

“But we're on our way to Emerson,” my sister says while she angles the car around a turn.

My mother begins to shout in broiling disbelief. “Emerson Hospital?! That's twice the distance! You know how to get to Marlborough!
You know!
Don't you remember?! You've been there!”

“Fine!” My sister yields. “We'll go to Marlborough, then!”

She grazes the CD changer in a sulky jab for the blinker, and the car suddenly fills with the weathered voice of a folk album Eamon had loaned my dad. “Easy to forget the things we need,” the singer, Martha Scanlan, mewls. “Easy to stumble around mostly blind.”

In England, it's 2:00 A.M., the bad news hour, and I pray I'll leave the hospital with bed-rest orders alone. I hope there'll be no urgent need for urgent calls.

My mother is already waiting in the emergency room when we arrive, wearing the red polo shirt her department store mandates as uniform. After I fill out my insurance forms and have a name tag braceleted to my wrist, I take the seat my mother and sister have saved for me between them.

The ward is busy with Friday night suicide attempts. We hear paramedics shout out their varied genres. “Sleeping pills!” they call. “Exsanguination!” “Carbon monoxide poisoning!”

Behind a glass booth, the intake nurse tells me to wait right where I am; she'll be ready for me shortly.

“I'm before you,” a man turns and snarls at me. His face has a rawboned severity. Some ultimatum shines in his eyes.

“Yes, I'm aware of that. And thank you, sir,” I shoot back at high volume. Then I turn to my sister, muttering, “I mean, I'm just sitting here, quietly waiting my turn, aren't I? What the hell? Really, what an asshole.”

This gets my mother going on one of her snarling, cross-armed dressing-downs. “I want to warn you against this kind of . . .” She stops to choose the right word. “. . .
unnecessary anger
when you're dealing with the hospital staff,” she chides. “It's only going to make the situation more difficult for everyone involved.”

I tell her I haven't breathed a word of dissent or criticism to anyone in blue hospital scrubs. I ask if she
really
means to tell me decorum is her primary concern at the moment. “What is this?” I ask her. “High tea at the Ritz? An afternoon at the races?

“Who did you come to the hospital to ‘support'?” I demand brattily. “Me or the doctors? Me or the other people in the waiting room?” When she treats me like a disobedient child I never fail to turn into one.

“Can you even respect the fact that I'm frightened? Or are you more concerned about the way it reflects on you in a room full of absolute strangers?”

“You're frightened, fine,” she says, with a harshness that contradicts her words. “But you shouldn't be fearful.”

“What are you talking about?!” My voices cuts through the hush like a gunshot, and a man who is bleeding profusely from the hand rubbernecks to watch our dysfunction. “‘Frightened' and ‘fearful' are synonymous! As far as the English language is concerned, they mean the same fucking thing! Besides, who are you to tell me which emotions are acceptable for me to feel?”

My sister jumps in to take our mother's defense. “What Mom means is—”

I hate the way this happens anytime I disagree with my mother. A bystander interjects like her interpreter, as though we speak different tongues altogether.

I decide I don't need to hear any more. “I
know
what she means!” I tell my sister. As far as I'm concerned, if there is any difference whatsoever between those two near equivalent terms, it's that “frightened” means
afraid
while “fearful” means
showing
that I am afraid.

I tell my mother that I've gone most of my life denying my emotions for the sake of etiquette and diplomacy. But I won't do it tonight. Tonight I'm entitled to wear everything—grief, fury, panic—on my oft-referenced sleeve.

I'm distracted for a moment by the intake nurse who beckons for the man who reproached me. Through the booth's glass partition, I can hear him describe his symptoms to her (“voices that won't go away”) and what's brought them on (“PCP and mescaline”).

My mother examines my profile as though waiting for some further reaction. “So, I hear you're blaming your father,” she says, in a voice that seems to come not from her throat but from her spleen. “For what? Not babying you? Not lifting every moving box? So you're pregnant, so what!? You're not fragile unless your pregnancy's fragile!”

My sister chimes in to say, “It's wrong of you to blame Dad. Blaming your miscarriage on somebody else, I just think that's bad karma.”

It's all happening exactly the way my dream foretold: I'm begging my mother to acknowledge what I'm feeling or, at the very least, give me the space to feel. My mom is visibly threatened and attempting to shut me up. And my sister is leaping violently to my mother's defense, either because she needs our parents' approval as much as I do or maybe, just maybe, because if I finally admit the truth about my childhood it might shatter the fictions she tells herself about hers.

I'm consumed by a lonely indignation. A stunned pessimism. I've never been more relieved than I am when the intake nurse calls my name. I leave my mom and sister puffing their cheeks and debating what the hell my problem is.

The intake nurse is a carelessly glamorous woman, all humane blue eyes and ponytailed black hair. She has an air of competence and compassion. There's no bad news on her face as she listens to my ailments. No foredoom in the way she scribbles in my chart.

“Is this your first pregnancy?” she asks, while she nooses a blood pressure monitor around my arm.

I tell her, between breath-squelching tears, that it is.

I can't contain my trembling fidgets. I quiver and shudder, vibrating like someone's put a quarter in my chair. I scan her desk for something to focus on when tears well up and blur my vision. Now that I'm emoting, I'm mortified. I'm still so uncomfortable in anguish apparent.

The nurse looks me deeply in the eyes. “I know this is upsetting,” she says, with a maternal squeeze of my hand. “But we don't know anything yet. Nothing's definitive. The best thing you can do is breathe deep, stay calm, and help your body relax.”

I lie for two hours on a hospital cot while a courier drives my blood work to the obstetricians' lab at UMass Memorial. The room has a morgue chill. The wall is decorated with heart defibrillators and instructions for disposing of hazardous waste. As I wait I remember all the times in the past when I've compared the process of writing a book to birthing a baby. Even the word is the same. You “deliver” a manuscript the same way you would a baby. Maybe I've been stupid to think I could bring a baby into the world when I still can't seem to finish my book.

The intake nurse reenters to ask me if I want her to send in my family.

“I know this might sound funny, but I'd kind of prefer if you didn't. It's easier to stay calm here, alone.”

The woman gives me an honest, uncalculating look. “Oh, honey,” she says. “Are you having a hard time at home?”

What is it that shows on my face? What in particular compels the pretty woman to embrace me in a tender, heart-to-heart hug? I feel like a traitor leaning on this woman the way other people might lean on their family. But I want access to her optimism. As it stands, she's the only one who's told me that these things sometimes happen and my pregnancy could still be okay.

After we disentwine, she agrees to let me hole up on my own for a short while longer. I lie, side facing and naked beneath my hospital gown. I hold my lower belly (where I'm still nowhere close to showing) with my free hand, the one that isn't anchored to an IV tube.

Allow me just one more moment like that. Alone I can be still pregnant and stupidly optimistic. It is only in the writing of this that I can commune with the part of me who was, as my sister said, accruing lungs, eyelids, knee joints, and the sweet genesis of little fingers and toes. I can still propose all the bargains to the God of my youth, a thug I'm not convinced I believe in but still manage to fear and loathe in my most private moments.

Beneath the partition I catch a glimpse of the doctors as they slalom by in their green rubber clogs. Phones sing. Ambulances whoop as they usher in the drunk, the gunshot, the heart-stopped, and the car-crunched. Under the ether of denial, I block out all emergencies, even my own. When I can't think of any Buddhist mantras to use in relaxation, I turn to baby names, going through each by letter. I curl, fetally, in an imitation of the person I'll never see on an ultrasound screen.

And then, all at once, I am sitting upright and telling my sister, in no uncertain terms, to please get the fuck out.

She's trotted in, arms laden with snacks she's pulled out of some vending machine, saying, “It finally occurred to me that I could ask them to come in. I thought it was going to be an issue? I thought I was going to have to persuade them. But then the nurse just brought me right back to see you. I couldn't believe how easy it was.”

I watch her collapse into the doctor's wheeling chair and cross her blue-jeaned legs at the knees. She tucks her hands into the marsupial pouch of one of those oversize sweatshirts she favors and begins to hum a bar of something from the radio charts.

And it's cool, it really is. How can I fault the nurses? But my sister and I quickly renew the same fight I escaped upon intake. She accuses me, again, of slandering my parents. She says something about how tonight's neither the time nor the place for my mother and I to debate our disparate anger philosophies.