The detective hesitates, then says, almost shyly, “So the hurt. It’s bad?”
I stall for a few beats. How much of myself to reveal? The detective isn’t looking at me; she is giving me some privacy. “Almost terminal,” I say, finally, echoing words I’d spoken to a mother and father only two hours earlier. I put the toad down and the minute it is released from my arms it shrills its high wail. The children adore this; they think it signifies the power of their love. Only I know it doesn’t feed on love but pain.
26
Helen
IT’S ABOUT TO STORM OUTSIDE, the wind blowing so hard against the sliding doors to the living room that I fear the glass is going to crack. The palm trees edging the property whip back and forth on their slender trunks. The clouds have yet to break, however—there’s not a drop of moisture in the air. A dry despair to the landscape.
I’ve never thought of myself as an insomniac despite the fact that I rarely get more than four or five hours of sleep. I stay up late and wake early. Rather, I tell myself I don’t need much sleep. I’ve simply got too many things to do to waste precious time unconscious. When John was with me, we’d go to bed together, then, after he was safely snoring—he was a terrible snorer—I’d quietly leave the bedroom to read my journals or do paperwork. Whatever my marriage did to me, it didn’t change my sense of urgency that there is work to be done, data to absorb, knowledge to acquire.
But since John’s death I’ve been ghosting at night in a different kind of way. Not able to sleep even three hours, yet not being productive with the extra time, either. The urgency not to waste a moment completely dissipated. There are still sick children’s charts to review, journal articles to read and write, as many emails to sort through, prioritize, and answer. Only now I am realizing that all these years I’ve worked my way into exhaustion out of fear. Fear of the void that only sleep or work can fill and which stretches out in front of me now. The nighttime has turned into a deep empty vessel that I must fill drop by drop.
I sit in the armchair, John’s favorite, the one he would drag onto the balcony. The curtains are open. Light from the window illuminates the palm trees and their contortions in the wind. Beyond them, inky blackness.
I stand, and walk to the kitchen to make myself a cup of hot water—I don’t even bother steeping a tea bag in it, my inability to taste grows worse in times of stress. I sip it as I move to my office, sit down at my laptop, open a patient’s file, then leave it there. I go back to the armchair, calculating probabilities, couching the odds, wondering whether to get dressed and make a trip to the twenty-four-hour Rite Aid on Mulholland. Back to the kitchen for another cup of hot water. Then to the bathroom for the twentieth time this evening, staring at the white stick lying on the counter, at the pink plus sign displayed at one end of it.
I go to my computer, and click to the manufacturer’s website again, to the FAQs, looking for the chance that the birth control pills I have been taking every day since I met John could fail. The label was very clear. Less than 1 out of 100 women will get pregnant each year if they always take the pill each day as directed. That should be reassuring, except for one word. Always. I read the next sentence. About 9 out of 100 women will get pregnant each year if they don’t always take the pill each day as directed. Don’t always. Don’t now being the operative word.
As a physician, I understand the importance of the words, as directed. And from my own medical studies know that this means taking the pill at the same time every day. Which I always had done. Except once. One inexplicable day when I left the house without turning the wheel around and popping out the little pink pill. Thinking of John arriving that morning for his twice-monthly stint. Looking forward to seeing him in my ward, where he had agreed to consult for a child with a benign but disfiguring facial tumor. I realized about halfway through my rounds that I had forgotten. So I took the pill that evening when John and I finally got home after dinner out. Assuming that what every medical intern would recommend is good advice—take a missed medication within twelve hours and you are probably all right. Probably. Compared to always.
I’ve seen so many test results that spelled death for a child, and now to have one that means life.
But a surprise this isn’t. I’ve always been regular, can predict my period almost to the hour every twenty-eight days, since I was fourteen. So I’ve known for almost two months. I knew the week before John’s last visit in late April. Yet I said nothing, and put off taking the test. Deniability. Isn’t that what lawyers call it? After all, that last weekend John was here, I didn’t officially know, so I couldn’t tell him. Now I do. And the landscape has altered, is full of strange eruptions and abruptions. I may as well be on the far side of the moon for how it relates to life as I have always known it.
27