There was a louder sound then, a sob, and Brett and I bolted up the stairs and started opening doors until we found Ally curled up on a double bed in a dreary, drape-shrouded room, her hair sprawled in a tangle across sheets and blankets and pillows that were a single gray hue in the lightless room.
Brett sat gently on the edge of the bed and lay a white-gloved hand on shoulders so thin they ought to have belonged to a young girl. After a moment, she smoothed Ally's hair from her face, tucked it gently behind her ear, stroked her cheek. “Ally, what happened?” she said.
Ally's shoulders shook soundlessly.
“What's wrong?” Brett insisted, but so kindly that I wondered how this came so naturally to her. “Has something happened to Jim?” she said. “Or to Carrie?”
I sat at Ally's feet and put my hand on the blanket over her calves, trying to echo Brett's ease. We sat there for the longest time, Ally sobbing silently, a tissue buried in her fist, unused. I tried to imagine how long she must have lain like this; there must have been twenty tissues scattered across the carpet, and the basket was full. I imagined Jim—whom I'd never met—picking them up and loading them in the basket, torn between not wanting to leave her that morning and having to get to a court appearance that his job depended on.
“Did something happen to Carrie?” Brett said again, gentle but insistent. “Tell us.”
Ally shook her head.
“Was it the baby?” I guessed.
That awful sob again.
“You lost the baby,” I whispered.
Brett stayed with Ally while I slipped out to tell Kath and Linda—they wanted to come, too, but we thought that might be too much for Ally, and anyway, someone had to stay with the kids.
When I returned to Ally's house, I put a kettle on for tea. No Lipton's in Ally's cabinet, nothing remotely resembling a tea bag, but there was a copper teapot inlaid with silver at the handle and spout, and on the shelf beside it two cylindrical containers made of thin wood. The first one I opened smelled of spices: cloves and ginger and something else I couldn't identify, maybe a whole bunch of different things. But the other container held a dark, powdery substance that, though it looked finer than tea leaves, did smell like tea.
By the time I came back to the room with the steaming cup, Brett had gotten Ally to sit up. She was leaning against a pile of pillows, and the light on her nightstand was on now, raising the room from dreary colorlessness to chalky blue. I handed Brett the tea, discreetly picked up the tissues, added them to the pile in the basket, and sat back down at the end of the bed.
Brett was trying to be soothing, saying that sometimes a miscarriage happens because there is something wrong with the baby, maybe it was for the best.
Ally's face crumpled in on itself like a dying leaf. “But I always lose my babies. A year ago Easter, and the summer before that, and now.”
From Brett's kicked-in expression, I saw she was having as much trouble absorbing this as I was. Three miscarriages in as many years. She set the tea on the nightstand. “But you have Carrie, Ally.”
Ally choked back another sob, her chin sinking into her soft neck, her face even paler than usual. She closed her eyes, her lids red at the edges and a weak and veiny blue.
Brett mouthed to me, “It happened Sunday.”
“I'm sorry,” Ally said. “I'm sorry. It's just that . . .”
“There, there,” Brett soothed, setting her hand on Ally's. “There, there.”
“It's just that the baby is there, he's my baby, he's my son, I can feel him inside me, and I know . . . somehow I know all about him almost, I know him, I can feel his needs, I can feel him saying ‘Take care of me, oh please take care of me’ just in the way I can't even smell fish and I can't get enough meat and I have to sleep and sleep and sleep. Then I don't, somehow, I don't take care of him. I want to and I try to, I try to do everything so right but I don't and he . . .”
And he dies, I thought. The word she can't say. Her baby dies inside her. He starts dying inside her and she knows it, and there is the awful rushing to the hospital, and the pain, the wrenching of her gut, and the doctors and the nurses and the sterile instruments and then nothing, just emptiness.
“I wake up every morning and there's this moment of . . . of possibility,” Ally whispered. “Of maybe it's just a nightmare and the baby is fine.”
Brett tilted her head up, blinking back tears. “I know. Getting out of bed is . . . impossible sometimes,” she said so gently I was sure she did know, and I wondered again what had happened to Brett, why she wore her gloves, why she never offered a word of explanation, why none of us ever dared ask.