Good in Bed

“Baby,” I said. My voice sounded strange and squeaky. Someone stepped out of the shadows. Bruce.

“Hey, Ca

I waved him away with the hand that didn’t have a needle stuck in it. “Not you,” I said. “My baby.”

“I’ll get the doctor,” said my mother.

“No, let me,” said Tanya. The two of them looked at each other, then hustled out of the room as if by mutual agreement. Lucy shot me a quick unreadable look and dashed out behind them. Which left just me and Bruce.

“What happened?” I asked.

Bruce swallowed hard. “I think maybe the doctor better tell you that.”

Now I was starting to remember – the airport, the bathroom, his new girlfriend. Falling. And then blood.

I tried to sit up. Hands eased me back onto the bed.

“What happened?” I demanded, my voice spiraling toward hysteria. “Where am I? Where’s my baby? What happened?”

A face leaned into my line of sight – a doctor, no doubt, in a white coat with the obligatory stethoscope and plastic name tag.

“I see you’re awake!” he said heartily. I scowled at him. “Tell me your name,” he said.

I took a deep breath, suddenly aware that I was hurting. From my belly button on down it felt like I’d been torn open and sewn back together sloppily. My ankle throbbed in time with my heartbeat. “I’m Candace Shapiro,” I began, “and I was pregnant…” My voice caught in my throat. “What happened?” I begged. “Is my baby okay?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “You had what’s known as placenta abruptio,” he began. “Which means that your placenta separated from your uterus all at once. That’s what caused the bleeding… and the premature labor.”

“So my baby…,” I whispered.

The doctor looked somber.

“Your baby was in distress when they brought you in here. We did a cesarean section, but because we didn’t have the fetal monitor in place, we aren’t sure whether she was deprived of oxygen, and if so, for how long.”

He kept talking. Low birth weight. Premature. Underdeveloped lungs. Ventilator. NICU. He told me that my uterus was torn during the delivery, that I was bleeding so badly, they had to take “radical steps.” Radical as in my uterus was now gone. “We hate to have to do this to young women,” he said gravely, “but the circumstances left us no choice.”

He droned on and on about counseling, therapy, adoption, egg harvesting, and surrogates until I wanted to scream, to claw at his throat, to force him to give me the answer to the only question I cared about anymore. I looked at my mother, who bit her lip and looked away as I struggled to sit up. The doctor looked alarmed, and tried to ease me back down onto my back, but I wasn’t going. “My baby,” I said. “Is it a boy or girl?”

“A girl,” he said – reluctantly, I thought.

“Girl,” I repeated, and started to cry. My daughter, I thought, my poor daughter whom I couldn’t keep safe, not even on her way into the world. I looked at my mother, who’d come back and was leaning against the wall, blowing her nose. Bruce put his hand awkwardly on my arm.

“Ca

“Get away from me,” I wept. “Just go.” I wiped my eyes, shoved my matted hair behind my ears, and looked at the doctor. “I want to see my baby.” They eased me into a wheelchair, sore and stitched up, hurting all over, and wheeled me to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I couldn’t go in, they explained, but I could see her through the window. A nurse pointed her out. “There,” she said, gesturing.

I leaned so close my forehead pressed on the glass. She was so small. A wrinkled pink grapefruit. Limbs no bigger than my pinky, hands the size of my thumbnail, a head the size of a smallish nectarine. Tiny eyes squinched shut, a look of outrage on her face. A dusting of black fuzz on top of her head, a nondescript beige-ish hat on top of that. “She weighs almost three pounds,” the nurse who was pushing me said.

Baby, I whispered, and tapped my fingers against the windows, drumming a soft rhythm. She hadn’t been moving, but when I tapped she pinwheeled her arms. Waving at me, I imagined. Hi, baby, I said.

The nurse watched me closely. “You okay?”

“She needs a better hat,” I said. My throat felt thick, clotted with grief, and there were tears ru

The nurse leaned down. “I have to bring you back,” she said.

“Please make them give her a nicer hat,” I repeated. Stupid, stubborn. She didn’t need fashionable headgear, she needed a miracle, and even I could see that.

The nurse bent closer. “Tell me her name,” she said. And sure enough, there was a piece of paper taped to one end of the box. “BABY GIRL SHAPIRO,” it read.

I opened my mouth, not sure what would happen, but when the word came I knew instantly, in my heart, that it was right.

“Joy,” I said. “Her name is Joy.”

When I came back to my room Maxi was there. A quartet of candy-stripers clustered at the door of my room, their faces like blossoms, or balloons packed tight together. Maxi pulled a white curtain close around my bed, shutting them out. She was dressed more soberly than I’d ever seen her – black jeans, black sneakers, a hooded sweatshirt – and she was carrying roses, a ridiculous armload of roses, the kind of garland you’d drape around a prizewi

“I came as soon as I heard,” she said, her face drawn. “Your mother and sister are outside. They’ll only let one of us in at a time.”

She sat beside me and held my hand, the one with the tube in it, and didn’t seem alarmed when I didn’t look at her, or even squeeze back. “Poor Ca

I nodded, brushing tears from my cheeks. “She’s very small,” I managed, and started to sob.

Maxi winced, looking helpless, and dismayed at being helpless.

“Bruce came,” I said, weeping.

“I hope you told him to go to hell,” said Maxi.

“Something like that,” I said. I wiped my non-needled hand across my face and wished for Kleenex. “This is disgusting,” I said, and hiccoughed a sob. “This is really pathetic and disgusting.”

Maxi leaned close, cradling my head in her arm. “Oh, Ca

After Maxi left I slept for a while, curled up on my side. If I had any dreams, I didn’t remember them. And when I woke up Bruce was standing in the doorway.

I blinked and stared at him.

“Can I do anything?” he asked. I just stared, saying nothing. “Ca

“Come closer,” I beckoned. “I don’t bite. Or push,” I added meanly.

Bruce walked toward my bed. He looked pale, edgy, twitchy in his own skin, or maybe just unhappy to be near me again. I could see a sprinkling of blackheads on his nose, standing out in sharp relief, and I could tell from his posture, from the way his hands were crammed in his pockets and how his eyes never left the linoleum, that this was killing him, that he wanted to be anywhere but here. Good, I thought, feeling rage bubble up in my chest. Good. Let him hurt.

He settled himself on the chair next to my bed, looking at me in quick little peeks – the drainage tubes snaking out from beneath my sheet, the I.V. bag hanging beside me. I hoped that he was sickened by it. I hoped that he was scared.

“I can tell you exactly how many days it’s been since we talked,” I said.

Bruce closed his eyes.

“I can tell you exactly what your bedroom looks like, exactly what you said the last time we were together.”