“Maybe you can give us a hand?” Dr. Brown said to Peter.
Just like that, Claire was on her side, Peter’s strong hands keeping her still. She felt the needle go in, and within no time that same floaty feeling filled her. She thought her whole body might lift right off the bed and float away. The idea appealed to her. She could float out that window, through the snow, all the way back to Virginia.
“It’s already working,” the doctor said, his voice sounding far off in Claire’s ears.
“She’ll start talking about Remington in no time,” Peter said.
“Rifles?” Dr. Brown asked.
“The artist. She likes this sculpture of his . . .”
Claire stopped listening. Her mind was doing that thing, ping-ponging from one thought to another, unable to settle on any one thing. She had been considering naming the baby Caroline, like Caroline Kennedy, if it was a girl. She got to choose the girl names and Peter got to choose the boy names, that’s what they’d decided. No. That’s what Peter had decided, Claire thought.
Peter was laughing again.
“She’s obsessed with the Kennedys,” he said.
Had she spoken out loud?
“The whole country is,” Dr. Brown said. “I’m a Nixon man myself.”
More reason to not like him, Claire decided. A Nixon man.
“Hold still now,” the nurse said, her mouth close to Claire’s face. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Claire answered. Her tongue felt thick, like she had wool in her mouth.
Through half-opened eyes, Claire watched the doctor put a stethoscope around his neck and place the ends in his ears. Unlike a regular stethoscope, this one had a funny little thing attached to it. Somehow her hospital johnny was lifted and Claire saw the beautiful rise of her belly. The doctor had that attachment on it, and he lifted one finger to keep everyone silent.
Claire struggled to keep her eyes open. She tried as hard as she could to focus. When she’d given birth to Kathy, they had knocked her out completely. She’d gone from searing pain to blackness to opening her eyes and a nurse holding up a tiny baby wrapped in a pink blanket. She’d missed the birth altogether. But she wouldn’t miss this. She wanted to remember every detail.
Dr. Brown kept moving the little piece, lifting his finger, closing his eyes, and listening hard. Again and again, until he’d covered the entire landscape of Claire’s belly. Then he dropped the ends of the stethoscope from his ears and glanced up at Peter.
“We’ll send her for the fluoroscopy, just to be sure,” he said.
“Sure?” Claire asked.
“By this time tomorrow,” Dr. Brown told her gently, “this will all be behind you.”
She had to call Miles, Claire thought as two orderlies appeared out of thin air and began to wheel her out of the room and down the corridor. She had to tell him about their baby. He would come and stop them. He wouldn’t let this happen.
“Excuse me,” Claire said. “I need to make a call.”
“Sure you do, honey,” one of the orderlies said, not unkindly.
“You see, the father of my baby is in Alexandria, Virginia. At an inauguration party. I have the number.”
“She’s high as a kite,” the orderly said.
“Poor thing,” the other one said. “It’s better this way.”
“Maybe you could make the call for me?” Claire asked them.
They were in an elevator, going down.
“703-337-5180. That’s my friend Dot’s number. She’s having the party.”
The elevator doors slid open and the gurney bumped out and down another corridor.
“You’ll need to ask for Miles Sullivan,” she said. “Have you got that?”
“Uh-huh. Miles Sullivan.”
Claire’s mind drifted again. Were they in the basement? Wasn’t that where the morgue was? Had she actually died at some point?
“Am I alive?” she asked.
“You are indeed.”
At some point, she must have fallen asleep because when she managed to open her eyes again, she was back in the elevator going up.
“Did you call Dot? Did you find him?” she asked.
But her words came out garbled. She tried again. But somehow she couldn’t speak any clearer.
Back in the room, the nurse was waiting with an IV all set up.
Dr. Brown was nowhere in sight.
“It’s best not to think about what’s happening,” the nurse told Claire.
But how could she think about anything else?
The clock on the wall with its white face and big black numbers said nine-thirty. Claire’s head hurt from the drugs and from where she’d cracked it. She struggled to keep her eyes opened, focusing on that clock.
Peter dozed in the chair beside her, a newspaper on his lap.
As if she’d spoken, he jumped awake.
“It’s done,” he said softly.
A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun, Claire thought, remembering her eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Bailey, with her cat-eye glasses and white hair tinged an odd blue-violet. What was the noun for IT?