It was just after nine o’clock in the morning. Ada could hear a number of starlings outside the hospital window, whistling, dive-bombing an old pizza crust.
“Sorry?” Ada asked the doctor. That was what people said when someone was dead, and here was Ada, lying on the gurney, perfectly alive.
Did she want to see the baby’s body before the morgue took it away?
Should they call someone, a husband or a boyfriend perhaps?
The doctor rolled his lips, and as he did, a frantic candy striper with perfect timing came running down the hall of the hospital, yelling, “We’re under attack! Dear lord!” The voice drew the doctor out of the room.
Ada waited alone. The asbestos ceiling stared back at her.
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god!” another voice passing by in the hallway said. Ada climbed off the gurney. She held tightly on to her now empty belly and the gauze padding the doctor had put inside her. In the hall people were crying, men and women, cardiologists. People were in pain. She watched them pass. Their breathing was labored, their eyes in shock. It came as a surprise to Ada that all these people should understand how the body of one childless mother is too small a place to hold so much grief. Ada’s misery was general and spreading through the hospital, down the corridor, out the emergency doors, and across Rhode Island, across the nation. “My baby,” Ada said. Hugs were being offered to techs, patients, administrators on the verge of collapse, everyone weeping for her miscarriage. People huddled around the televisions as if the anchors were going to instruct them in grief management. “Coming up. How to make death stop hurting us. Stay tuned.” One nurse held his head in his hands, rocking. Ada walked out into the hall, clasping her gown shut. She stopped to stroke the back of the nurse’s head. “I was her mother,” she told him, and then repeated her claim on all this grief. “I was her mother.”
*
Ada doesn’t lift the end table. She opens the slider onto the lanai and steps outside. In the storm it’s hard to look up for long without losing her balance. The rain drenches her clothes, smelling of salt and people. Maybe Chuck’s shed will come flying through the sky and land on top of her, leaving just her feet sticking out from under like some crushed witch who won’t ever have to tell herself the truth.
The water has dampened Ada’s clothes, camouflaging her with the oncoming night, darkening the difference between Ada and every other small thing lost in the hurricane.
The water covers her feet, creeps up her shins. The hurricane above her, big as night. The ground shifting below. Ada stands in the storm. One by one, millions of miniature universes pass her by in the flood, remnants of time and shell and silica. They disappear underneath the house in Florida, no us, no them, but all, each one, going down together.
LOVE MACHINE
Once upon a time two men lived at the bottom of a nuclear missile silo. They were barely men, just out of their teens, yet their job required them to push the button when it came time for nuclear apocalypse. Really there are no buttons. They used the word “button” so civilians, friends, could visualize what they were doing in the missile silo. In actuality, each man would have to insert his own key and turn it. Together they would decide whether or not to destroy the world.
Wayne and Dwight paid attention in alternating shifts, ready to wake the other if the signal to act ever came. They were not allowed to leave the missile silo, and so each night and each day—the sixteen-inch poured-concrete walls made it hard to tell which—they slept locked underground, not too far from the huge hole that cradled a massive warhead loaded and aimed.
When Wayne and Dwight were both awake they either played Nerf basketball on a small court they’d rigged in the control room or shot the bull. They’d discussed the moment they were waiting for. They had decided they would do their duty. They would turn their keys and end the world. But then they would forsake the canned provisions stocked to survive the months after the apocalypse safe in the silo. They thought instead they would turn their keys, open the hatch, climb up to the surface of the earth as she died.
Having settled on that plan allowed Dwight to ask Wayne the big questions, like “Why do you think we’re here?” or “Do you believe in God?” or “What are you most afraid of?” Wayne always tried his best to answer Dwight’s questions but sometimes he didn’t know what to say and the two men would listen to the quiet clicks and whirls that the control console made inside their silo.
The call never came. The keys remained on chains around their necks, never sinking into the dark keyholes that Wayne had spent hours, days, and weeks studying. And then their time in the military was up and then Dwight and Wayne drifted apart as people will. But Wayne remembered.
On their last night in the silo they’d opened up a bottle of sparkling cider to celebrate the end of their orders. Soon they would be seeing the sun again on a regular basis. They would see other people as well, and, while it was a little frightening to leave their secured zone after two years together, they both tried to smile and concentrate on the good that would come from returning to the surface. Dwight and Wayne were close that night in a way Wayne’s not been able to recall since, as if there were a small man in Wayne’s brain who remembers exactly what happened that last night down in the silo, but whenever Wayne tries to remember for himself the little man says, “Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
What Wayne remembers is that there’s no way for two men in America who love each other, but who are not lovers, to touch or even talk about love outside of a gambling win or a sporting event.
This was after ROTC, before the FBI, and now, from time to time, Wayne misses Dwight. He misses having a friend to share the long hours with, to share the waiting. Wayne thinks about Dwight and the Cold War while stuck in a van on an FBI stakeout in the forests of Montana.