Liberty or Death (28 page)

"Go away," I said.

He didn't. He sat down beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. I forget and remember, forget and remember, what these guys' lives are like. There's a lot of tension and a lot of boredom, and a whole lot of seeing people who aren't at their best. Like me, right now. As a culture, we tend to be resentful of cops. I know I am, even though I love one. But when the chips are down, when things get bad and stress or shock or injury cause us to have trouble thinking for ourselves, cops are great to have around. It's one of their specialties—thinking for us when we're not at our best. I was not at my best; I was cruising, full speed ahead, toward my worst.

After a while, I began to relax against him. Only then did he ask more questions. "Why are you holding your abdomen like that? Are you sick? Does something hurt?"

My throat felt tight. If I spoke, I knew I
would cry. I tried for a minimalist answer. "It's all going to hell." Like I hadn't known that until now.

Jack stood a few feet away, watching us closely, arms folded across his chest. He looked sick, like someone had just forced him to eat something awful. Like he understood what was happening and was as devastated as I was that there was nothing that could be done about it. And like he thought it was all his fault. That made two of us. I knew it was all my fault. That though I had tried to be careful, I must have brought this on myself though something I'd done. That all this stress which felt like too much for me really had been too much for the baby.

Roland hugged me tighter—a hug that said he wasn't going anywhere, that he'd be there as long as I needed him. He smoothed back my hair and studied my face intently. My Andre surrogate. "What's going to hell?" he asked.

There was another intense, cramping pain, the kind that makes you wonder whether to throw up or just die. Women never die from cramps, though. We just long to. I bit my lip. Soon I would need to curl up and writhe, which was hard with an audience. So was moaning. Men are great at moaning and groaning, but they don't watch it with equanimity.

"Roland..." I strove to keep my voice normal. "I just need to be by myself for a while. That's all. It was a shock... that room where Paulette died... thinking about Andre... about the things they do." Something occurred to me then. What Jack hadn't wanted to tell me. What too many people in town knew or suspected. What all those strange looks had been about.

"This isn't just about setting Jed Harding free, is it? For both sides. It's about what happened to Pelletier and Paulette. The militia stuff is half bullshit. And Andre wasn't just a convenient victim." It seemed like I had dozens of questions all at once. "Do you think Harding did it?" Impossible for me to see the man I'd met doing what I imagined had happened in that house. Roland shrugged. That was a cop thing, too. Take all the information you can get; give as little as possible. So I answered my own question. Sometimes even if you can't get a phrase or a sentence, you can get a nod or a shake of the head. "You think Harding knows something about it?" I got a nod.

"But he won't talk about it?" Another nod.

"But you don't think he did it?" But this again got no response. "Was Andre working on it? On the murder?" All I got was a flicker of his eyes I took as a yes. Some kind of yes. Yes for Pelletier, but had they even known about Paulette? They knew now. They must have known then. With rumors all over town, someone must have talked. And they'd been all over, looking for clues about what happened to Pelletier. Had Andre learned something? Was that why they'd taken him, because of what he knew, or was close to knowing, and not to trade for Harding? But they seemed so set on getting Harding out. What was that all about?

I hated being treated like a mushroom. Maybe they'd thought I'd be safer this way, but ignorance sure wasn't bliss. Neither, in this case, would knowledge be. This felt like a no-win situation. And I liked to win. So did the rest of them.

It was a warm night but I was shivering. I couldn't think about what was happening in Merchantville anymore. I could only think about what was happening to me.

He touched my hand and repeated his own question. "Thea, what's the matter? Something is wrong. Your face is pale and your skin is clammy."

I looked down at my hands, one pressed tightly against my body, the other curled up in my lap in a fist so tight my knuckles were white. "I think I'm losing the baby."

Roland put his other arm around me and pulled me gently against his chest, one hand making slow, comforting circles on my back while he murmured "I'm so sorry" into my hair. I rested my head on his shoulder, feeling unbearably sad.

Suddenly, Jack jumped into manic action. He got a blanket from the trunk, opened the car door, and gestured toward me wildly. "Come on!" he said. "Come on. Hurry. We've got to get you to a hospital. Maybe it's not too late."

I was in no shape to argue although I knew it
was
too late. I was in awful pain now—steady, vicious cramps and bleeding. The worst pain, though, was psychic. This wasn't some fetus, some distant creature who would be developing into a child. This baby was real. It even had a name, or names. Andre had already begun talking to it, crooning silly little French lullabies into an imaginary microphone just below my navel. We already loved this child, our accident. We'd heard the heart beat, holding our breaths as the doctor held a monitor against me and the steady little beat filled the room.

We hurtled through the night—I had no idea where we were—at speeds that made my earlier driving seem tame. I guess Jack had had the long course. Patrick Dunne sat in front with Jack. Roland came behind with my car. I sat in the back, bracing myself against the rocking, turning, and shifting, tossed around like a piece of flotsam on the sea of life. A shipwrecked castaway in some comfortless country where nothing was safe or familiar.

We arrived at the hospital, stopped outside the emergency entrance with a wrenching jerk, and then Jack threw the door open and grabbed my arm. "Come on," he urged. "We're here."

We were nowhere. At least, I was nowhere. A nobody in nowhere land. A woman coming apart. I wanted to crawl into a dark corner and pull the blanket over my head. If I had to do this in company, I wanted to do it with a tribe of wailing women, with mourning and ceremony and rituals. What I got was a skinny, bored orderly in soiled scrubs offering me a wheelchair ride. I got Jack bellowing for help at the top of his lungs. I got Patrick Dunne trailing along in our wake looking like he wished he were anywhere else on earth. I knew just how he felt.

Anyone would think, from the amount of time I spent there, that I liked hospitals. That they didn't connect to all my worst nightmares and send me into a state of almost paralytic fear. This was crazy. Utterly crazy. I was traveling on a gurney now, holding Jack's hand, as he filled a graying, bearlike man in on what was happening, babbling in a most uncoplike manner all of his fears of what was happening and his hope that the baby could be saved. Standing in for Andre. Being his best man. Except that it was my pain and my loss, I might have been a spectator. Occasionally, the doctor asked me a question. I suppose I answered them, since he gave what sounded like satisfied grunts. I was draped in sheets and poked and probed. Then he raised his head and looked at me.

He had a big head with maniac tufts of graying hair, a jowly, worn-out face. He shook his head sadly. "I'm sorry."

Jack's hand tightened around mine and he made a sound that was suspiciously like a sob. "I'm sorry," the doctor said again. "There's nothing I can do. We're going to take you into the operating room and do a D and C. Theoretically, you could go home and let the process finish naturally, but there are so many risks involved." He mumbled a litany of risks and patted my arm. "Listen, it's not your fault. These things happen. Miscarriages are much more common than most people think."

Then, as if he wasn't sure I understood, he stopped patting and gripped my arm, gently but firmly, leaning in to make eye contact. " Don't beat up on yourself. Doing too much aerobics, or working too hard, or taking a long bike ride, even getting the living daylights scared out of you—they don't cause miscarriages. It's not something you did. You have to believe that."

I wasn't crying. I wasn't going to cry. It was only that my eyes had sprung some leaks. I wanted Andre here. The hurt was bigger than I was, expanding and filling me, pressing on my heart and my lungs, filling me with a terrible ache. Closing my throat. Would I always lose everything I loved?

His fingers slackened. He lifted his hand and stepped away. "You'll be fine. And don't worry. You'll be pregnant again in no time."

By whom?
I thought.
Oh, dear God, by whom?
I meant to be brave. Strong and stoic and self-contained. I meant to be a model patient. I meant to keep my shattered heart and hopes to myself until I was alone when I could sob into my pillow and wing my abject apologies to Andre, wherever he was. But the doctor's words severed the fragile bonds which held me together. As Mason or Oliver or Claudine, our son or daughter, our first child, fought to make a painful escape from my body, my tears escaped as well, followed by sobs almost as wrenching as the pain.

The doctor took Jack by the arm and moved him away from me for a conference. I didn't see why they moved away. He didn't bother to lower his voice. "Your wife's having a hard time with this. Some women do. She's going to be fine. Just fine. But I suggest we start her on some Valium right away. It'll make things easier and it helps them forget."

Helps them forget? Them? He might look like a worn old teddy bear, he might have tried to be kind and reassuring, but deep down, he was a pig. A know-nothing. He could give me a whole lakeful of Valium and I'd never forget one grim, ugly minute of the last week. Besides, since when did Jack Leonard start making my decisions for me? Right now, apparently, since the nurse, at his nod, swabbed my arm and stabbed me with a needle without asking or explaining.

Yessirree, I loved the way cops could take over when I was incapacitated. Only I didn't think I was. Or I hadn't been. But it was too late now. The Valium flowed in, pacifying me and stunning me, turning me into a human vegetable. Inert. Indifferent. Shattered but too tranquilized to pick up the pieces, sitting numbly beside myself, watching the action with bemused detachment. People came and went, shifting me here and there. Stuff was done. The situation was "handled." The baby that wasn't to be made its escape.

Somewhere in the night, one prisoner lay dreaming of his lost child. Another, in a jail cell, stared at a picture drawn with markers and fell asleep dreaming of his wounded child. In Merchantville, a small blond boy clutched a stuffed rabbit and dreamed of fishing with his father. A small soul winged its way to heaven. Safe within my chest, the pieces of my broken heart shifted and jostled and longed to be rejoined.

 

 

 

Chapter 19

 

I went home wearing a set of surgical scrubs, a sickly green that matched my complexion, a cluster of drugs in my purse, a list of possible complications to watch out for on file in my worn-out brain, with hard copy for backup. When I announced I was going back to Merchantville, I expected a fight I didn't have the energy for. I was going back only to work breakfast, so as not to leave Theresa in the lurch, and then quit and pack my stuff. I can be weird about follow-through sometimes. Jack didn't argue at all. If anything, he was more visibly upset than I. He drove me most of the way, pulling over just outside of town. He patted me awkwardly on the shoulder, got into Roland's car, and they faded back into the darkness.

I drove the rest of the way alone, feeling disembodied and surreal as I crept down Main Street into the silent town. Nothing about the world looked benign anymore. The shrubs were black and menacing, the shadows outside the circle of streetlights sinister. I was back only because I was such a slave of duty, and because, in my drugged and weary state, my brain's only working synapse had closed on the idea of continuity. Closure. Besides, it was a bed, and boy did I need a bed. In my exhausted state, I couldn't formulate any alternative scenario.

I had traveled a long way since my feisty and determined start this morning. Then I had been going to shake up the world. Now I had no plan. Not to sleep or to cry. Not where I would go with my pathetic little undercover investigation. Not even how I'd eventually get upstairs. Too many things had gone wrong. There had been too much death and disappointment, too many ugly things, too many losses, and none of it had brought me any closer to Andre. Without him or the baby, nothing mattered.

By the time I got to Theresa's, I recognized the folly of my situation. I was dead on my feet, or rather, since I was sitting not standing, dead on my whatnot. I parked behind the restaurant, next to my faithful Dumpster, and lay down on the seat. The prospect of climbing stairs was daunting. I was too tired to get out of the car and walk the twenty feet or so to my bed and too depressed to think about anything beyond falling over. I'd been reamed physically and spiritually and left raw and bleeding. I would lie down and close my eyes and I didn't much care what happened after that. Someone else could type "the end" at the bottom of this page of my life.