“This is too soon,” Harry said. He reached down to take her elbows, as if to pull her to her feet. She shook her head. His hands jumped away from her.
“Ambulance,” she said again. She showed him her left hand, the blood on her fingertips. “Please.”
Chapter Four
AFTER TEN MINUTES in the emergency room, Lacey was wheeled into a semiprivate room in Labor and Delivery. Pink and blue balloons floated above the doorknobs in the hall, each announcing someone else’s baby. She waited for a long time and no one came to tell her if her baby was alive or dead. If only she had her phone so she could call Eric—even if she had the phone, the battery was probably drained; she was forever forgetting to plug it in. It made Eric so impatient with her; he was always waiting for her to call, or trying to call her. Where was he? She closed her eyes and whispered to the baby, “Hold on, hold on,” and still the blood trickled, sticky and slow.
The door opened. “The cut’s closed up on its own,” Lacey said without opening her eyes. “There’s no point stitching it now.” They’d brought her into this room and left her here, surrounded by other people’s happy balloons, and didn’t care enough to come in with so much as a stethoscope, let alone an ultrasound. It was so unfair, and she was all alone; she needed help and no one cared. Not even Harry had come with her, and where was Eric? Her underwear was soaked through, and every time she touched it, the blood was still warm and fresh.
“Lacey, what did you do to yourself?” Eric, at last. “All you had to do was sit there in the shade. I wasn’t gone for fifteen minutes, and I come back and there’s the window broken, blood all over the floor, anything could have happened, I had no idea.”
“You shouldn’t have left me.”
“I was only gone a minute. Just to get my temper under control. My parents used to fight about money. They went on for hours, shouting, breaking things. I don’t want to be them.”
“Then you can’t leave. You have to stay and talk to me.”
He sat on the bed and lowered his face to hers, kissed her forehead, her eyelids, and her mouth. His face was wet. He was crying, right out in the open, defenseless. “Lacey, can you ever forgive me? I am so sorry.”
It terrified her, the way Eric could turn like this. He dropped everything all at once, all his competence, his confidence, everything that made him right, and gave her his naked heart, a thing she was afraid to see, let alone touch. No one else had ever seen him like this—and now, when she didn’t know if the baby was dead or alive, now she had to comfort him. She knew he needed more, but she couldn’t make herself speak.
His face sank into her neck and he lifted her shoulders into a dense, trembling embrace. “I was so scared,” he whispered into her skin. “I thought you were dead, I thought the baby was dead.”
And he assumed the baby was fine, that she’d taken care of everything while he was out soothing his own hurt feelings. “Nobody’s looked at the baby yet,” she said. “Nobody’s told me anything.”
He pushed himself off the bed. “They haven’t looked? Are you still bleeding?”
“I can’t tell.” Her voice cracked, and she closed her mouth hard. As the blood dried, her skin tightened and itched. She didn’t want to touch whatever was happening under the sheet, fearing to find something more than blood—a tiny curled body, already cooling in the mess. No; her fingers imagined it, but she shut her mind. She wanted a doctor. Someone who would tell her quickly, as quickly as the pregnancy test: yes or no.
“I’ll be right back,” Eric said.
He returned in four minutes with ultrasound machine and doctor in tow, a dry small woman with pearl earrings and the cleanest hands Lacey had ever seen, fingernails like bleached shells, palms pure white. “Let’s look at you, Mrs. Miszlak,” she said. The gel was cold, and the doctor slid the wand over Lacey’s belly and said brightly, “There’s the heartbeat.”
“Are you sure?” Lacey couldn’t let go of the fear so easily. The doctor touched a panel on the machine, and the heartbeat sounded through the speakers, a quick watery hush-hush, hush-hush. Lacey cried without noise, weak in relief, pressing the backs of her hands against her cheekbones.
Eric sank into a chair. “Thank God.”
“You want to know what you’re having?” They nodded. She slid the ultrasound wand over Lacey. “Definitely a boy.” It looked like a star map to Lacey, a sweep of cloudy constellations, gray in a black sky. “There’s his profile. Look at that pretty face. Now, about this bleeding.”