My Year of Meats (36 page)

Nurse Tomoko found the note crumpled in the wastebasket under the bed. She looked up at the sleeping woman and smiled with grim satisfaction. She knew what the letter said. She had carried it around in her pocket, after all, and had read it earlier that day. Quietly and efficiently she replaced the IV bag on the hanging end of the unit; she must have brushed ever so lightly against Akiko’s arm, but it was enough to make Akiko gasp in her sleep, roll her head to one side, and utter a groan that wrung Nurse Tomoko’s heart. She studied the woman’s battered face: the lip was split and had started to heal; the fading bleed of yellow, green, and blue skin that ringed both eyes told of older battles, as did the thin white scar above her brow. Nurse Tomoko had undressed Akiko when she was admitted. She knew there were other bruises, had stood next to the doctor as he examined the dull green-ocher rings forming around the points of impact on Akiko’s slight body. Akiko groaned again, as though suffering under this scrutiny. Tomoko sighed and placed her cool palm on Akiko’s brow. The weight of the hand seemed to calm her; her bruised features relaxed again as she drifted back into a deep, blank sleep.

When I came to the first time, all I could comprehend was the lurching of the van and the sound of the rocks spit up by the tires hitting the underside of the chassis. The second time, it was Suzuki’s big moon face, and he smiled and it was warm, so I fell back asleep. The third time, I stayed conscious. The boys had laid me out on the narrow seat of the van and Dave was tearing along the county roads and Suzuki was cradling my head in his lap and Oh had wedged himself between the seats, holding me as still as possible. My face was feeling odd and sticky, so I scratched it, and that’s when I saw that my hand was caked with blood and the other one too, and not just my hand but my whole arm, in fact my entire body had been drenched in blood, and so I started to scream. And Suzuki held me down and explained that it wasn’t mine, that I’d fallen on the slaughterhouse floor, into the lake of blood, and by this time I was crying, and every time I wiped my eyes the tears were bloody too. My clothes were drenched and sticky and my jeans had grown stiff, and this scared me even more, because it was hard to move my legs.

And then we were at the emergency room. Dave carried me in his arms, and when the first nurse saw me her eyes widened and she said, “Oh God!” until Dave explained about the blood. Then the doctor examined my head while the nurses undressed me, and as they were pulling off my bloody jeans I had a sudden moment of searing clarity. “My baby!” I cried out, and they all just sort of stopped what they were doing and stared at me, and then I passed out again.

And then I was lying in a hospital bed in a clean gown, and the blood was gone and no one was there, but the late-afternoon sun was shining through the window and I could hear the activity of the ward beyond the door. And then I realized I wasn’t alone after all, that Bunny Dunn was standing by the window, her cotton candy hair glowing like a halo, backlit by the sun. She turned just then, saw that I was awake, and smiled.

“Mornin’,” she said.

“Is it morning?”

“Nope. It’s afternoon.” Bunny came over and stood next to my bed.

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Couple of hours.”

“Am I okay?”

“Yup. Nothing to worry about. Just a small fracture and a concussion, but the doctor wants to keep an eye on you for a couple of days.”

Suddenly my head started to throb, as though catching up with this information. “How did you ... ?”

“Dave called me. He thought ... Well, the boys didn’t know ...” She stopped, unsure of what to say next, how much to tell me, how much I remembered, and the throbbing expanded to fill her silence and turned into dread. Icy, it coursed down through my gut and into my groin.

“They thought maybe you’d feel better if there was a woman here with you,” Bunny concluded.

“It’s the baby ... ?” I looked at her, and she met my gaze and held it, firmly.

“Yes.”

“It’s gone?”

“Yes.”

I turned my head away. I couldn’t look at her. As I stared up at the ceiling, the tears collected behind my eyes, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe for the pressure of them.

“Jane, the doctor said something real important.”

I could barely hear her. Inside my head, the pressure had plugged my ears.

“Are you listening? Jane, you gotta listen.”

I shook my head. “Please.” I ground my teeth around the words. “Go away.”

But Bunny persisted. “No, you gotta hear this first. You’re blamin’ yourself, but it’s not your fault.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I spit. “Of course it is.”

“No. There wasn’t nothing you could do. The doc said the fetus had ... well, it had stopped growing. The miscarriage woulda happened sooner or later. Do you understand? It wasn’t just the accident. The pregnancy couldn’t have come to term.”

“What do you mean, it stopped growing?”

“Well ... it was dead.”

“Dead?”

The tears just started then, trickling down the sides of my face, and I started to cough up these great hacking sobs from the depth of my empty belly. Bunny leaned over the bed and took my fractured head and cradled it against her chest, and I let her. Let her comfort me like I’ve never been comforted before, certainly not on the bony breast of my cool, dispassionate Ma. I cried on and on, fed by the reservoir of all my dread made real. My thwarted progeny. My poor hope. I had robbed it of viability by my lack of conviction. Of course it was my fault. It was all my fault.

“I wanted the baby ... ,” I gasped.

“Of course you did,” Bunny murmured into the top of my head. “Everybody wants their baby....”

“No. You don’t get it.” I pulled away from her, bitter, despairing, determined to make her understand. “It’s my fault that the baby’s dead. I didn’t have to do this shoot. I could’ve stopped. But I didn’t. I went to the feed shed and touched the medicines. I knew better....”

Bunny was confused but resolute. “But none of that’s what caused the miscarriage.”

“Of course it is, don’t you see?” I cried. “Maybe not one thing, but a combination—”

“Jane, it ain’t got nothing to do with the feed shed or medicines, either. It was already dead, Jane. Doc said it probably died several days ago, maybe even a week.”

“A week?” I choked. It was horrible, made me shudder, then I started to laugh. I’d been carrying my dead baby around inside me for a week, and I never knew. Bunny released me, stepped back, stared.

“You see?” I think I was screaming the words. “So much for my maternal instincts! Never even knew my baby was dead, and it was right here inside me! Great mother, huh?” I started to weep again. “You see, it is my fault. I didn’t care enough, right from the start. I even thought about having an abortion. If I had just stopped working, stopped everything else ... I should have thought just of the baby, but I didn’t. I let things slide ... and now ...”

Bunny wrapped me in her arms again. “It ain’t your fault,” she whispered, cradling me, “but I know what you’re sayin’. It’s hard to make things stop once they’ve gotten goin’.” Her voice was far away. “Things you’d never even believe could ever happen just start seemin’ as normal as pie. Well, maybe not normal, but still you accept it. Like Rosie ... You just get used to it. Until something happens, that is, that wakes you up and makes you see different. That’s what happened when you all showed up. I saw her with your eyes, and everything looked different. Wrong.”

She relaxed her hold and laid my head back on the pillow. Looking down at my face, she stroked my forehead the way I’d seen her stroke Rose’s. “I ain’t never been brave,” she said, then she laughed. “Here I am, talking about myself when I’m supposed to be comforting you. But I wanted to tell you this because it’s something I just figured out. After you left the house last night I was thinkin’ back, and I realized that I ain’t never really ever made a single decision in my life, you know. Just kinda drifted from one thing to the next, following the direction these darn things pointed me in, you know?” She cupped her breasts in her hands and looked down at them ruefully. “The pageants, the strip clubs, John ... On the whole, I’ve been darn lucky. But last night? Well, it was like I finally made a choice, talkin’ for the camera, and it felt good. Like I was takin’ a stand.”

She reached out and took my hand and held it. “So I guess what I’m sayin’ is that some things are your fault and some things ain‘t, and the ones that ain’t, well, you oughtn’t waste your time tryin’ to blame yourself for those. But the other ones, the ones you can control? Those ones are different. You gotta do something about those.... I’m gonna get to the bottom of this thing with Rosie. Thanks to you.”

She smiled, grimly, and I tried to smile back but I couldn’t, so I squeezed her hand instead. Good for her. But it didn’t change the way I felt about me.

On her way out the door, she stopped and turned around.

“One other thing ... ?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Gale wanted ... well, he said he was sorry about what happened.”

“But that I’m a bitch and I got what was coming to me, right?”

Bunny looked away. “Yeah, well ...” She paused, then walked back toward the bed and leaned over close. “Last night he came out to the house to talk to me. About Rosie. First time he’s said a civil word to me, far as I can recall. He told me what you said to him, but that he’s never, you know, done that to Rosie. Not in a dirty way.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I guess I believe him. He was real upset about it, and Rose thinks the world of him, after all.”

“That’s good, Bunny.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a prick, Bunny.”

“Yeah.”

 

 

Soon after she left, Suzuki poked his head in, followed by Oh and Dave. They’d been waiting outside in the lobby. Suzuki and Oh were oddly formal. They knew about the miscarriage, but of course they were too polite to mention it. I was glad. I didn’t want to talk about it. Dave sensed this, and while he gave me a searching look, he too refrained from saying anything. It was awkward. They stayed only a short while, and then they left to pick up Ueno at the airport.

I must have drifted back to sleep then, because when I woke it was dark in my room, except for a rectangle of fluorescent light that shone through a small window cut into the door. During the day, the corridor beyond had been full of noise and activity, but now the entire ward was still, blanketed by a kind of tentative night that waited for a sudden scream, a hemorrhage, a death, to shatter its rest. Pain returned, like a pulse or a heartbeat. Sometimes it feels as if the mind has fingers, and in this lull of sound and light and motion, I let mine probe—gently, tentatively—at the pain’s source. Trying to locate the exact moment—
When did it happen, when did I let it die?—I
forced myself to sink through the chronology of the past few days, peeling back layers of event, certain that the instant would reveal itself, undeniably. How could I not know? But no matter how hard I tried, I could not remember. I could not break through the jumble of chaotic fragments: the bleeding cattle and the bloody meat, the farmer’s rage, the mother’s stupor, and the child’s disfigured and unnatural grace. Trapped by these images, I caught myself trying to edit them, to put them in an order that made sense, and all the while, I was waiting, listening to the hush outside my room and the noises of the ward, straining toward a sense of imminent disaster.

So when it came, I was surprised only at the shape the realization took, not at its coming.

I had been planning to send all the footage we’d shot back to New York before Ueno arrived, so he couldn’t get his hands on it. Now he would demand to see everything, and once he’d seen Rosie’s deformed body and Bunny’s tragic interview, he would confiscate the tapes or, worse, destroy them. I felt for my watch on the table beside me. It was three in the morning. I called the motel and left an urgent message for Suzuki, but I realized it was too late. Ueno would not have wasted any time. He had already seen the tapes. There was nothing I could do. I started to cry. All this for nothing.

Eventually I slept again, and I dreamed about the slaughtered cow, hanging upside down, her life ebbing out of her as she rotated slowly. In my dream I saw her legs move in tandem, like she was running, and I realized she was dreaming of an endless green pasture at the edge of death, where she could gallop away and graze forever.

 

 

In the morning, I called Suzuki again, but the crew had left the motel. I called Sloan. He wasn’t home, so I left him a message to call the hospital. Then the doctor came. He was young, looked middle-aged. He stood away from my bed and squinted at the chart, keeping it at arm’s length too.

“How’s the head feeling this morning? Any pain?”

I was confused. I couldn’t answer. I had forgotten all about my head.

“No,” I finally said. “My head is fine. Where is my baby? Can I see it?”

The doctor took another step backward. “No. The fetus was removed yesterday.”

“I know that. I want to see it. Where did you put it?”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. All the products of conception are immediately incinerated.”

“Oh.”

“Now, don’t you worry about that,” he said, switching demeanor and trying out an avuncular tone. “You’re an attractive young woman, and there’s plenty of time to try again. Just think how much fun that will be!”

I didn’t understand what he was saying. And then I did.

“Oh. You mean sex.”

He consulted the chart again. “Yes, well, I’ve ordered a D and C for you this morning to make sure everything’s all spick-and-span inside and nothing got left behind—”

“You mean, like an arm or something?”

This time he ignored me completely. He made a note on the chart and approached the foot of the bed to hang it back up. When he was close, I tried again.