The regret in her face deepens into resentment. My initial impression of her background is probably correct: her parents must be criminals or drug users or alcoholics, rude, abusive jerks who made her childhood truly miserable. I should be gleeful, and yet I feel sorry for her. I, too, had a miserable childhood.
“My father had anger issues. Bad anger issues,” Laurel says. “Whenever I’d hear him coming home, his car grinding to a halt on the gravel outside our trailer, I’d duck under my bedcovers and pretend to be asleep. Day or night, it didn’t matter. The slightest thing would send him screaming, throwing things, and punching holes in the trailer walls. My mother, she had her problems too, but at least she wasn’t a yeller.”
I pat her hand, shake my head, expressing more sympathy than is probably prudent, but I can’t help myself. I don’t know how it happens, but we start talking, and ten minutes later I realize I’m actually enjoying the conversation. She’s a mere child with few people in her life she can talk to, and once she starts talking, she can’t stop. Once I scrape beyond her hard-edged veneer, I find she’s shy and smart but full of self-doubt, which likely owes to her troubled upbringing. She tells me more of her plans to be a counselor for at-risk girls, but she worries about the difficulty of the grad courses she’ll need to take to make this happen.
“I’m not a do-gooder. But I want to be a do-gooder. Does that make sense?” Laurel says. “I want to be a great mom. All my rich classmates at Ethan Allen always talked about the altruistic need to ‘give back.’ That’s what I want to do too.”
“So why don’t you?”
She turns silent, avoids my eyes, her lips sad little things conveying introspection and the fear of failure. “I haven’t yet told Jimmy about my plan. It’ll take years of study—grad school, training courses, professional certification requirements—and it hurts knowing how far away I am from getting where I need to be.”
“Bah! Don’t let your fears dissuade you from enrolling in these courses. You got a 3.85 GPA at a very good private liberal arts college. How hard could grad school be for someone as smart as you?”
“Thank you,” Laurel says. A moment later, she looks at me with cheerful eyes. “Thank you for saying that.”
For several seconds, neither of us says a word, and again I sense she’s feeling awkward and angry at my presence.
“You asked how my episiotomy was healing.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not healing well,” Laurel says.
I’m astounded by Laurel’s candor, but I also realize I helped draw her out with my sympathetic touch and the commiseration I demonstrated when listening to her talk about her parents. James firmly adheres to the old proverb that you catch more flies with honey, but until this particular fly flew into my web, I hadn’t put much faith in that way of thinking.
“Last night, doctors came by to examine me. I could barely lift my legs for them, and when I did, their reactions told me something wasn’t right. It hurt just trying to do what they said. ‘What is it?’ I kept asking, but they wouldn’t answer me. It’s not like I could see what they were doing. They talked among themselves, all of them. And it’s like, let’s not tell the sick girl anything. More doctors were paged. They wheeled me into an examination room where the lights were hot and bright, and I felt queasy inside because of how they were moving me around. Prodding me. Pushing me down there as if I were Play-Doh. Nurses promised they’d look after Zerena—‘In the event something happens,’ they said, which made me think I was at risk of dying. I panicked. I felt scatterbrained, dead-dog stupid. My temperature spiked at one hundred and five. An infection, they finally said, had set in. Which explains why I woke up still connected to this IV unit.”
Doctors had performed the episiotomy on Laurel because, due to a miscalculation, they believed Anne Elise would be so abnormally large as to cause extensive vaginal tearing if delivered normally. I cringe as Laurel describes the procedure performed upon her. In the doctors’ rush to perform the episiotomy, the mediolateral incision from the vaginal opening through to the perineum was deeper than it ought to have been and not cut at the right angle, and hence, the doctors had difficulty suturing it properly after delivering Anne Elise. That an infection set in this quickly isn’t good.
“I wish the doctors could make me better, like, right away,” Laurel says. “I’ve hardly been able to stay awake for an hour straight since yesterday.”
Sympathy, like hatred, is another of the weaknesses my father disdained. Laurel was needlessly and clumsily cut open. Anne Elise isn’t abnormally large, meaning there was no justification to perform the procedure. More care should have been given to making the incision and more thought given to prevent its infection. Had this happened to me, I’d phone my lawyers to initiate malpractice suits, but Laurel, in debt up to her bloodshot eyeballs, has no lawyers to plead for redress. All she has is the pain of the episiotomy. And pus.
“Laurel, forgive me for asking, but are you able to pay all the hospital bills?”
“Jimmy will take care of everything.”
“He will?” I can’t imagine James, perpetually strapped for cash because of his harebrained investment schemes and ballooning credit card debt, has the wherewithal to foot what could grow into a mid-five-figure hospital bill by the time Laurel’s discharged. “Don’t you have health insurance of your own?”
“Nope. I used to have Obamacare, but I missed the open-enrollment period this year. Then I quit my job—”
“When did you quit your job?” As far as I knew, Laurel worked as a waitress at a moderately well reviewed Italian restaurant off Dupont Circle.
“I quit my job months ago.”
While we talk, Anne Elise nurses on her mother’s milk. Laurel lifts her to her shoulder and pats Anne Elise’s back. The baby’s sweet-smelling milk breath washes all over me. When Anne Elise burps, Laurel sighs with satisfaction. She shifts Anne Elise from one shoulder to the other, elicits a second burp, and then lowers her back to her other breast.
“She can drink so much,” Laurel says, flicking back her head and displaying an amount of pride that’s good to see. “All I have to do is sit back and heal and take care of Zerena. I can do this.”
“But the hospital, the medical costs,” I say, my mind racing back to the practicalities. Rather than opting for a more economical room or sharing a room with other new moms, Laurel’s installed in a private room furnished with leather-upholstered sitting chairs and a state-of-the-art 4K widescreen television. “Aren’t you worried about where the money will come from? Doesn’t that concern you?”
“Jimmy will take care of everything.”
“Have you asked him?”
“Why would I need to do that?”
Laurel must think James is made of money, a knight who’ll rescue her from her money woes. He’s a smooth-talking master of outward appearances and genteel manners who, in the fine tailored dark suits I buy him, dresses the part of a well-to-do financial strategist. He hasn’t even brought her flowers. Laurel hasn’t caught on to James’s bifurcations: to the risk-averse clients with whom he has a fiduciary responsibility, he’s an astute and upstanding advisor who never fails to paddle toward the cautious side of the financial rivers. And yet James is nothing if not reckless when managing his own affairs.