Maybe in Another Life (24 page)

I’m
awake by eleven, when he comes in. I’m prepared for him to make a joke about me being nocturnal or something, but he doesn’t. He just says, “Hello.”

“Hi,” I say.

He looks down at my chart. “So you’re going to be taking off pretty soon,” he says.

“Yeah. I guess I’m just too healthy for this place.”

“A blessing if I’ve ever heard one.” He gives me a perfunctory smile and then checks my blood pressure.

“Would you want to help me practice standing?” I ask. “I want to show you how well I’m doing. I stood up almost entirely on my own this morning.”

“I have a lot of patients to get to, so I don’t think so,” he says. He doesn’t even look at me.

“Henry? What is going on with you?”

He looks up.

“Henry?”

“I’m being switched to days on another floor. You’ll have a nice woman, Marlene, taking care of you for the remaining nights that you’re here.” He pulls the cuff off my arm and steps back from me.

“Oh,” I say. “OK.” I feel rejected, somehow. Rebuffed. “Can you still stop by just to say hi?”

“Hannah,” Henry says. His voice is now more somber, more serious. “I shouldn’t have been so . . . friendly with you. That is my fault. We can’t keep joking around and goofing off.”

“OK,” I say. “I get it.”

“Our relationship has to stay professional.”

“OK.”

“It’s nothing personal.” The phrase hangs there in the air.

I thought this
was
personal. Which I guess is the problem.

“I should go,” he says.

“Henry, c’mon.” I find myself getting emotional; I hear my
voice cracking. I try desperately to get it under control. I know that letting him know how badly I want to see him again will only serve to push him further away. I know that. But sometimes you can’t help but show the things you feel. Sometimes, despite how hard you try to fight your feelings, they show up in the glassiness of your eyes, the downward turn of your lips, the shakiness of your voice, and the lump in your throat. “We’re friends,” I say.

He stops where he is. He walks toward me. The look on his face is gentle and compassionate. I don’t want gentle and compassionate. I am so goddamn sick of gentle and compassionate. “Hannah,” he says.

“Don’t,” I say. “I get it. I’m sorry.”

He looks at me and sighs.

“I probably misinterpreted everything,” I say finally.

“OK,” he says. And then he leaves. He actually leaves. He just turns on his heels and walks out the door.

I don’t fall asleep, even though I’m tired. It’s not that I can’t fall asleep. I think I can. But I keep hoping he will check on me.

At two a.m., a woman in pale blue scrubs comes in and introduces herself as Marlene. “I’ll be taking care of you at night from here on out,” she says. “I’m surprised you’re awake!”

“Yeah,” I say somberly. “Well, I slept all afternoon.”

She smiles kindly and leaves me be. I close my eyes and tell myself to go to sleep.

Henry’s not coming. There’s no reason to wait up.

You know what? I don’t think I misinterpreted a goddamn thing.

I
like
him. I like being around him. I like being near him. I
like the way he smells and the way he never shaves down to the skin. I like the way his voice is sort of rocky and deep. I like his passion for his job. I like how good he is at it. I just like him. The way you like people when you like them. How he makes me laugh when I least expect it. How my legs don’t hurt as much when he’s looking directly at me.

Or . . . I don’t know. Maybe that’s all nursing stuff. Maybe he makes everyone feel that way.

I turn off my side light and close my eyes.

Dr. Winters said earlier today that I might try to walk tomorrow.

I try to focus on that.

If I can survive being hit by a car, I will get over having a crush on my night nurse.

Hearts are just like legs, I guess. They mend.

I
t’s not yours,” I tell Ethan. He knows this, of course, based on timing alone. But I have to make it crystal clear.

“It could be, though, right?” he asks me. “I mean, maybe last week . . .”

I shake my head. “I’m eleven weeks. It’s not yours.”

“Whose is it?”

I breathe in and then out. That’s all I have to do. In and then out. The rest is optional. “His name is Michael. He and I dated in New York. I thought it was more serious than it was. He and I were careless toward the end. He doesn’t want another child.”

“Another child?”

“He’s married, with two children,” I tell him.

He sighs loudly, as if he can’t quite believe what I’m saying. “Did you know he had a family?”

“It’s sort of hard to explain,” I say. “I didn’t know at first. For a long time, I assumed I was the only one he was with. But then I should have known better and, let’s just say, I . . . made some mistakes.”

“And now he doesn’t care that you’re pregnant?” Ethan stands up, furious. His emotions are just starting to set in, reality just starting to grab on to him. It’s easier for him to be mad at Michael than it is to be mad at me or at the situation. So I let him, for a moment.

“He doesn’t want the baby,” I say. “And that’s his right.” I
believe in a man’s decision not to have a baby as much as I believe in a woman’s.

“And you’re just going to let this asshole treat you like this?”

“He doesn’t want the baby. I do. I’m prepared to go it alone.”

That word, the word
alone
, brings him back down to earth. “What does this mean for us?” he asks.

“Well,” I say, “that’s up to you.”

He looks at me. His eyes find mine and hold on. And then he looks away. He looks down at his hands, which are placed firmly on his knees. “Are you asking me to be someone’s father?”

“No,” I say to him. “But I’m also not going to tell you that this doesn’t change things. I’m pregnant. And if you’re going to be with me, that means you’ll be going through this with me. My body will be going through a lot. I’ll have mood swings. When it gets time to have the baby, I’ll be scared and confused and in pain. And then, once the baby is born, there will be a child in my life, at all times. If you want to be with me, you’ll be with my child.”

He listens, but he doesn’t speak.

“I know you didn’t ask for any of this,” I say.

“Yeah, you can say that again,” he snaps. He looks at me with remorse.

“But I wanted you to know so you could make a decision about your future.”

“Our future,” he says.

“I guess,” I say. “Yeah.”

“What do you want?” he asks.

Oh, boy. How do I even begin to answer that question? “I want my baby to be healthy and happy and have a safe, stable childhood.” I suppose that’s the only thing I know for sure.

“And us?”

“I don’t want to
lose you. I think you and I really have something, that this is the beginning of something with huge potential for us . . . But I would never want to put you in the position to do something you aren’t ready for.”

“This is a lot,” he says. “To process.”

“I know,” I say. “You should take all the time you need.” I stand up, ready to leave, ready to give him time to think.

He stops me. “You’re really ready to be a single mother?”

“No,” I say. “But this is the way life has worked out. And I’m embracing it.”

“But I mean, this could be a mistake,” he says. “What if you just made a mistake one night with this guy? Are you ready to live with the consequences of that for your entire life? Do I have to live with the consequences of that for mine?”

I sit back down. “I have to think that there is a method to all of this madness,” I tell Ethan. “That there is a larger plan out there. Everything happens for a reason. Isn’t that what they say? I met Michael, and I fell in love with him, even though I can clearly see now that he wasn’t who I thought he was. And one night, everything happened just so, and I got pregnant. And maybe it’s because I’m supposed to have this baby. That’s how I’m choosing to look at it.”

“And if I can’t do it? If I’m not ready to take all of this on?”

“I suppose it would follow that if you and I come to a place we can’t get past, then we aren’t meant to be. Right? Then we aren’t right for each other. I mean, I think I have to believe that life will work out the way it needs to. If everything that happens in the world is just a result of chance and there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, that’s just too chaotic for me to handle. I’d have to go around questioning every decision I’ve
ever made, every decision I will ever make. If our fate is determined with every step we take . . . it’s too exhausting. I’d prefer to believe that things happen as they are meant to happen.”

“So you and I finally have the timing worked out, we can finally be together, be what we suspected we always were. And in the middle of that, it turns out you’re pregnant with another man’s baby, and you’re saying
que será será
?”

I want to cry. I want to scream and shout. I want to beg him to stay with me during all of this. I want to tell him how scared I am, how much I feel I need him. I want to tell him how the night I reconnected with him, the night we spent together, was the first time I’ve felt at ease in years. But I don’t. Because it will only drag this thing out further. It will only make things worse. “Yeah.
Que será ser
á
. That’s what I’m saying.”

I get up and walk out into the living room. He follows me. I can smell dinner. I wish, just for a moment, that I hadn’t told him. Right now, we’d be in his bedroom.

And then I think, if I’m wishing for things, maybe I should wish that I’m not pregnant at all. Or that it’s his baby. Or that I never left Los Angeles. Or that Ethan and I never broke up.

But I wonder how different my world would be if any of those things had happened. You can’t change just one part, can you? When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can’t just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too. Better just to stay in the now and focus on what you can do better in the future.

“Ethan,” I tell him, “the minute I saw you again, I just knew that you and I were . . . I mean, I’m pretty sure you and I are . . .”

“Don’t,” he says. “Just . . . not right now, OK?”

“OK. I’ll
leave you with your
sopa seca
.” I smile tenderly and then open the door to leave. He sees me out and shuts the door.

When I get to the last step, he calls my name. I turn around.

He’s standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at me. “I love you,” he says. “I don’t think I ever really stopped.”

I wonder if I’ll be able to make it to my car before I burst into tears, before I cease to be a human being and become just a puddle with big boobs and a high bun.

“I was going to tell you that tonight,” Ethan says. “Before all of this.”

“And now?” I say.

He gives me a bittersweet smile. “I still love you,” he says. “I’ve always loved you. I might never stop.”

His gaze falls to the ground, and then he looks back up at me. “I just thought you should know now . . . in case . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t want to say the words, and he knows I don’t want to hear them.

“I love you, too,” I say, looking up at him. “So now you know. Just in case.”

L
uckily for everyone involved, my physical therapist is not my type.

“OK, Ms. Martin,” he says. “We are—”

“Ted, just call me Hannah.”

“Right, Hannah,” Ted says. “Today we’re going to work on standing with a walker.”

“Sounds easy enough.” I say it because that’s what I normally say to everything, not because it actually sounds easy enough. At this stage in my life, it sounds quite hard.

He puts my feet on the floor. That part I’ve gotten good at. Then he puts the walker in front of me. He pulls me up onto him, resting my arms and chest on his shoulders. He is bearing my weight.

“Slowly, just try to ease the weight onto your right foot,” he says. I hang on to him but try to back off just a little. My knees buckle.

“Slow,” he says. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

“I don’t know if you should be using running terms to someone who can’t walk,” I tell him.

But he doesn’t spit something back at me. Instead, he just smiles. “Good point, Ms. Martin.”

When people are nice and sincere and they don’t fire back with smart-ass remarks, it makes my harmless sarcastic words seem downright rude.

“I was just joking,” I tell him, immediately trying to take it back. “Use all the sports analogies you want.”

“Will do,” he says.

Dr. Winters comes in to check on us. “Looking good,” she says.

I’m half standing up in a hospital gown and white knee socks, leaning over a grown man, with my hands on a walker. The last thing I am is “looking good.” But I decide to say only nice things, because I don’t feel that Dr. Winters and Ted the physical therapist are up for my level of sarcasm. This is why I need Henry.

Dr. Winters starts asking questions directly to Ted. They are talking about me and yet ignoring me. It’s like when I was little and my mom’s friends would come over and say something like “Well, isn’t she precious” or “Look at how cute she is!” and I always wanted to say, “I’m right here!”

Ted moves slightly, pushing more of my weight onto my own feet. I don’t feel as if I have balance, per se, but I can handle it.

“Actually, Ted,” I say, “can you . . .” I gesture at the walker, asking him to bring it right in front of me, which he does. I shimmy off him and put both arms on the walker. I’m holding myself up. I don’t have my hands on a single person.

Dr. Winters actually claps. As if I’m learning how to crawl.

There is only so long you can be condescended to before you want to jump out of your skin.

“Let me know when you want to sit back down, Ms. Martin,” Ted says.

“Hannah!” I say. “I said call me Hannah!” My voice is rough and unkind. Ted doesn’t flinch.

“Ted, why don’t you leave Hannah and me alone for a minute?” Dr. Winters says.

I’m still standing with the walker on my own. But no one is cheering anymore.