Mr. Peanut (16 page)

“You have to sit down, sir,” the attendant snapped. “You have to take your seat
right now.”

“My wife’s in there.”

“It’s very dangerous for you to be in the aisle.”

“She’s pregnant. Please, let me get her back to her seat.”

The vibration seemed to intensify. A child was crying.

“I need you to hurry,” she said.

He knocked on the door, interrupted by a prodigious rumble and pitch. What, exactly, made all this noise? Was it the wind? His wonder that a machine so complex could take such punishment and still function amazed any inkling of fear out of his system. He knocked on the door again and called loudly to Alice. When she didn’t answer, he knocked harder and shouted her name. He could hear something inside. She was saying something back to him now.

“Alice,” he said, “are you all right?”

He put his ear to the door; she was speaking.

“Alice,” he said, “let me get you back to your seat.”

The plane fell yet again and for a moment he was weightless, his whole mass drifting toward his head like the bubble in a tilted level, his soles rising just above the floor; then he landed. Both flight attendants had sat back, their eyes closed, each gripping the buckle of her belt’s clasp like the harness in an amusement ride. One of them was exhaling, her lips pursed, pushing steady breaths out,
one, two, three
. He heard his wife cry out from behind the doors. She was beyond embarrassment, he thought, so perhaps he should be too. She’d given herself over to panic.

“Alice!” He shook the door handle. “Just let me get you to your seat.”

The latch snapped and David folded open the door. And when he did, the lavatory light went out and Alice was sitting there in the dark on top of the toilet, sobbing. Her arms, skirt, and blouse were covered in blood, as if something had exploded in her lap. And splayed out in the crèche of her two hands was a newborn, though it looked more like some rendering of a starved alien. Its large eyes were barely shut, its mouth pulled open by the dangling weight of its head. It was a boy, covered in yellow paste and blood smears, trailing the umbilical cord between its spindly legs—a boy who bore a shocking resemblance to David himself.

“Please,” she cried, holding the baby toward him as if in offering. “Put him back!”

•    •    •

Two doctors who happened to be on board set up a treatment area in the flight attendants’ station, the curtains drawn closed while they worked. It was a makeshift bed of seat cushions and blankets and pillows on which they laid them, the dead boy swaddled in hand towels from first class and at rest now on Alice’s chest. The young oncologist—Nina Chen—had asked David if he wanted to cut the umbilical cord, and he couldn’t bring himself to say no, though immediately afterward he went lightheaded, and Chen had him sit against the wall with his head propped between his legs. The older doctor, a pathologist named Solomon Green, had removed Alice’s clothes and cleaned her off. There were bloody rags everywhere, which both doctors picked up and bagged without compunction. They had managed Alice’s shock, and Green was now taking her vitals. She was conscious, running a fingertip along her still baby’s cheek and talking to him as if he were alive, oblivious to all else around her, speaking so softly that he couldn’t hear the words over the whine of engine noise, now that they’d finally found better air. She seemed radioactive with grief. David could feel her unspeakable anguish pressing against his internal organs and beaming through the whole plane.

Chen took him outside the curtains. “Your wife is stable,” she said. “She doesn’t seem to have suffered excessive bleeding.”

“Thank you.”

“Does she have a carry-on bag?”

“Yes.”

“Are there any clothes in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please check. It would be good to change her before we land.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I was going to give her a sedative. Is she allergic to any medication?”

“No.”

“Are you?”

“No,” David said. “I don’t … I don’t want to take anything.” He looked at her. “Don’t make me take anything.”

She smiled weakly and touched his arm. “I’m going to go back in and see how she is.”

“Do you know what happened?”

Chen shook her head. “No, I couldn’t say.”

“Not a single idea?”

“It would be irresponsible for me to guess.”

As she turned, he stopped her again. “What … ” he said. “What do we do with him?”

Chen squinted and shook her head. “You mean the child?”

“Yes”

“Let her be with him for now,” she said. “Just let her hold him.”

Thankfully, Alice’s carry-on had a dress in it. He also took out some clean underwear, and as he put her bag back, he could feel everyone in the cabin looking at him. The old woman who’d questioned him during the storm put a hand on his elbow, and when he turned she asked if his wife was all right. And what if she wasn’t, David thought. What would you have me say? She took his hand—this complete stranger, so thin she couldn’t weigh more than eighty-five pounds, the frames of her glasses seeming to extend beyond the perimeter of her face—and pulled him toward her. Kneeling down, David hated her for foisting this sympathy on him.

She clasped her other hand over his. “I have two daughters,” she said, “but I miscarried twice. It’s God’s way. It means your child was never to be of this world. It means He needed it in Heaven.”

But he
was
of this world, David thought. He thanked her, then went back to sit with Alice, down the aisle every passenger staring at him with an expression of unabashed fascination. He wanted to curse them all.

Chen and Green were standing outside the curtains talking, and when David approached they gently pulled them open. Alice hadn’t shifted from her position and was still holding the baby in her arms and talking to him, nodding her head and cooing, rocking the body softly. She seemed delusional, so utterly remote, so out of his reach, that it was like seeing through the wrong end of a telescope. He wanted to ask the doctors about her behavior, but his own horror was overwhelming enough and he didn’t want to add to it by learning anything new. And then Alice spoke.

“I know we’d talked about Henry, but now that I see him I like the name David better.”

When she stared at the small form, he felt as if he’d lost her permanently.

Then she looked up. “Do you want to hold him?”

He did not.

“He looks like you,” she said, and smiled as she held him out.

The body was so small—the size of a Coke bottle—that it seemed unnecessary to use both hands. Shaking, David got to his knees at the foot of her pallet and took the child, afraid he might drop him, might press too hard on his little body and somehow defile it, and afraid that if he looked at him he might turn to stone. He crossed his legs, holding the bundle before
him, and there in the circular fold, the baby’s face was frozen midwhisper or midkiss, his skin pink, venous, nearly paper-thin, the body as small as a G.I. Joe. He already had a small patch of black hair. The limbs were still, yet David couldn’t help reaching into the swaddling to take one of his hands between thumb and forefinger, the small specks of his nails distinct when he pinched the hand lightly. He went on to look at the feet—the bones ship-in-a-bottle miraculous, the toes curled delicately—before carefully tucking the leg back into the swaddling. It seemed he was watching himself from above as he did all of this. What was the point of all this biological work? All these cells upon cells duplicating over and over again in this act of creation? In every aspect of proportion and disproportion he could see how as yet unmade the baby was. Was there any salvation or comfort in seeing this? He examined the face once more to be sure. The resemblance was uncanny, but he couldn’t connect himself to it. This was more like some remarkably strange animal at the zoo.

Out of nowhere, Alice said, “We’re going to lay him to rest here.” Then she waved a hand vaguely, as if to indicate the air.

Through the two squares of the ambulance window, Honolulu seemed to David no different from any other city in America, no island paradise, just another web-weave of overpass and underpass, of highways coursing past dilapidated buildings and streets without pedestrians. His face, his whole outer being, was like a shell. He rested his hand on Alice’s leg but wouldn’t look at her—at them. If he did, he feared he might disintegrate. From the airport they passed along a waterfront full of giant cranes and navy ships—it reminded him of Baltimore—and then onto the freeway, David realizing afterward that it was Pearl Harbor.

Fifteen minutes into their trip, however, the landscape changed and he spotted homes built into the lush mountainside around him, with bare black rock peeking out from them, the houses nestled into the trees white and rectangular, two-level, oddly plain, their wide windows seeming to catch the light of the brilliant blue sky, all of them oriented toward the Pacific sparkling off to his right. Though hardly mansions, they evoked an impossible luxury of hillside, altitude, ocean view, and a breeze that freshened the spirit just to see, all that and the owners’ belief that what they deserved in life could, coupled with determination, become
real
. Something so simple: I will live in Hawaii and see the ocean every day. The people who lived here must be smarter than me, David thought. They understood themselves well enough that they’d made such a life possible.
He patted Alice’s leg, glanced at her and the child, then turned away again. My God. He wanted to apologize to her. To confess a crime. She lay holding their child and was still so utterly remote. Coming over a rise, looking past the paramedic through the windshield, he saw a giant hull of rock sloped at its tip like a scimitar, humped at its peak with a nape like some breeching sea creature, and then a whole land mass came into view, extending beyond the stacked towers and white beachfront hotels of downtown Waikiki that stood in elemental chiaroscuro—the prow of Oahu. That mountain, he realized, was the iconic Diamond Head, its slopes carved with runnels like dried clay a giant cat had gouged, the rock above unscathed and uninhabitable, so ancient compared to the man-made structures along the coast that it seemed wholly new and beautiful. Again David could make out houses built around the base, glinting like piled diamonds beneath low clouds that were as tall as mountains themselves. And he thought his own imagination for life had somehow failed him. It was so beautiful here it shamed you. And then it occurred to him that given what had happened to them, his wife lying next to him on a gurney with their dead baby, even now he was thinking the wrong thing.

He wanted to say something to Alice, but after gathering the courage and then looking at the two of them he was still afraid to speak. “What hospital are you taking us to?” he asked the paramedic.

The man was a native, heavyset, with skin the color of caramel, his long ink-black hair tied back in a pony tail. “Kaiser Permanente,” he said. As if it made any difference.

Upon arrival, the doctors took his wife to run some tests, and the child went with her. He wasn’t told how long she’d be gone, so in a daze he took a seat in the waiting room and stared at the television, his mind adrift. The local news reporters somehow looked the same. Anchorman, weatherman, sportscaster: all shades of different races but a universal type. Suddenly sure this was a dream, struggling for several moments to breathe, he thought of Alice’s story of choking. So much hope in the telling, he thought, even in a saga of such loneliness. Their conversation had been meant to exorcise misfortune such as this. It had been, he realized, a gathering before a leap of faith, kind of a long prayer. And he was sure his one bad thought—
It doesn’t matter
—had broken it. He wanted to confess this to his wife. If he did, he knew she’d cast him out forever, which he deserved. But she’d be purged of him, therefore safe. Exhaustion suddenly overwhelmed him and he slept again—for how long he didn’t know. He hadn’t set his watch, and when he woke he had no idea what time it was; he looked for a clock, though by the brightness and angle of the sun out the windows
he guessed it was morning. It struck him that their luggage was still at the airport, and that he’d forgotten Alice’s carry-on bag. What was wrong with him that he couldn’t think on her behalf?

And he was starving. Tired as he was, the idea of food became an obsession. How long had it been since he’d eaten? If he could fill his stomach, he might find some peace and sleep more easily. But where? And how long would he have to wait? He thought he should book a hotel room but then remembered he’d already reserved one at the Mandarin. He was here for work, after all. Work? Nothing was as it should be. And he suddenly felt certain that every single step in their traveling from New York to Oahu, every single word they’d spoken and act they’d committed leading up to now had been for the express purpose of their child dying.

“Are you Mr. Pepin?”

“Yes.”

The doctor standing before him was Indian, tall and thin fingered, with a long, regal nose.

“I’m Dr. Ahmed,” he said, “the attending OB. May we talk?”

“Yes.”

The waiting room was empty, so the doctor sat down next to him.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said. “Are you holding up?”

“How is Alice?”

“She’s stable. The doctors on the plane did an excellent job.”

David nodded. His hands, at rest on his thighs, felt as if they might float up above his head, so he put them between his legs and used his knees to trap them.

“We got some results back,” the doctor said. “Your wife’s pregnancy was interrupted by a disorder called thrombophilia. It’s a clotting disorder. Quite common, I’m afraid. Nearly one in five women suffer from it. Do you understand how clotting works?”

David shook his head.

“When tissue is injured, red blood cells and platelets stick together to scab over a wound. They pile on an injury and seal it.” He laid the palm of one hand over the top of his other. “Unfortunately, the disorder causes what you might call incorrect clotting, or a kind of misrecognition. Your wife’s body treated her pregnancy as an injury. Clots embedded in her uterus, sheared off the placenta”—he brushed his palm over the top of his hand as if lighting a match—“and this led to her miscarriage.”