Maybe in Another Life (7 page)

“Your breath stinks,” I say, teasing him. I have no doubt that mine smells much the same. After I say it, I put my hand over my mouth. I talk through the spaces between my fingers. “Maybe we should brush our teeth,” I say.

He tries to pull my hand away, and I won’t let him. Instead, I dive under the covers. I am wearing one of his T-shirts and the underwear that I picked up from my suitcase at Gabby’s
yesterday. Other than the trip to her place to grab some stuff, Ethan and I haven’t left his apartment since we got here Saturday night.

He dives under the covers to find me and grabs my hands, holding them away from my own face.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he says.

“Nope,” I say. “No, my breath is too terrible. Free me from your superhuman grip, and let me brush my teeth.”

“Why are you making such a big deal out of this?” he says, laughing, not letting go of me. “You stink. I stink. Let’s stink together.”

I pop my head out of the covers to inhale fresh air, and then I go back under.

“Fine,” I say, and I breathe onto his face.

“Ugh,” he says. “Absolutely revolting.”

“What if my breath smelled this bad every morning? Would you still want to be with me?” I say, teasing him.

“Yep!” he says, and then he kisses me deeply. “You’re not very good at this game.”

That’s the joke we came up with Sunday night. What would it take to derail this thing between us? What could ruin this great thing we have going?

So far, we’ve established that if I became an Elvis impersonator and insisted that he come to all of my shows, he’d still want to be with me. If I decided to get a pet snake and name it Bartholomew, he’d still want to be with me. Perpetual halitosis, it looks like, isn’t a deterrent, either.

“What if everything I put in the washing machine shrinks?” This one isn’t hypothetical. This one is very real.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says as he moves off me and gets out of bed. “I do my own laundry.”

I lie back down, my head on the pillow. “What if I mispronounce the word
coupon
all the time?”

“Clearly, that’s fine, because you just mispronounced it.” He picks his jeans up off the floor and pulls them on.

“No, I didn’t!” I say. “ ‘Cue-pawn.’ ”

“It’s ‘coo-pawn.’ ” He slips on his shirt.

“Oh, my God!” I say, sitting upright and outraged. “Please tell me you are joking. Please tell me you don’t say ‘coo-pawn.’ ”

“I can’t tell you that,” he says. “Because it would be a lie.”

“So this is it, then. This is the thing that stands in our way.”

He throws my pants at me. “Sorry, but no. You’ll just have to get over it. If it makes you feel better, we will never use coupons for the rest of our lives, OK?”

I stand up and put my pants on. I leave his shirt on but grab my bra from the floor and slip it on underneath. It’s such a bizarre and uncoordinated thing to do, to put on a bra while you still have a shirt on, that about halfway through, I wonder why I didn’t just take the shirt off to begin with.

“OK,” I say. “If you promise we will never talk about coupons, then fine, we can be together.”

“Thank you,” he says, grabbing his wallet. “Get your shoes on.” I pull my hair down briefly so that I can redo my bun. He stares at me for a moment as it falls. He smiles when I put it back up. “Where are we going?” I ask him. “Why are we leaving the bed?”

“I told you,” he says as he puts on his shoes. “You haven’t had a cinnamon roll in three days.”

I start laughing.

“Hop to it, champ,” he says. He is now fully dressed and ready to go. “I don’t have all day.”

I put on my shoes. “Yes, you do.”

He shrugs. I grab my purse and head out the front door so quickly he has to catch up. By the time we get down to the garage, he’s narrowly in front of me and opens my door.

“You’re quite the gentleman these days,” I say as he gets into the front seat and turns on the car. “I don’t remember all of this chivalry when we were in high school.”

He shrugs again. “I was a teenager,” he says. “I hope I’ve grown since then. Shall we?”

“To the cinnamon rolls!” I say. “Preferably ones with extra icing.”

He smiles and pulls out of the driveway. “Your wish is my command.”

M
y dad is sitting to my right, holding my hand. My mom is at the foot of the bed, staring at my legs. Sarah is standing by the morphine drip.

Gabby came in with them an hour ago. She’s the only one who looked me in the eye at first. After giving me a hug and telling me she loved me, she said she’d leave us all alone to talk. She promised she’d be back soon. She left so that my family would have some privacy, but I also think she needed some time to pull herself together. I could see as she turned to leave that she was wiping her eyes and sniffling.

I think I am hard to look at.

I can tell that my mom, my dad, and Sarah have been crying on and off today. Their eyes are glassy. They look tired and pale.

I haven’t seen them since Christmas the year before last, and it is jarring to see them in front of me now. They are in the United States. Los Angeles. The four of us, the Martin family, haven’t been together in Los Angeles since I was a junior in high school. Our yearly family reunions have since taken place in their London apartment, a space that Sarah very casually and unironically refers to as a “flat.”

But now they are here in my world, in my country, in a city that once was ours.

“The doctor said you’re going to be able to walk again pretty soon,” Sarah says as she fiddles with the arm of the bed. “Which
I guess is good news? I don’t know.” She stops and looks down at the floor. “I don’t know what to say.”

I smile at her.

She’s wearing black jeans and a cream luxe sweater. Her long blond hair is blown dry and straightened. She and I have the same hair color naturally, a deep brown. But I see why she went blond. She looks good blond. I tried it once, but Jesus, did you know you have to go to the salon to get your roots done like every six weeks? Who has that kind of time and money?

Sarah’s twenty-six now. I suppose she might look a bit more like me, have some curves to her, if she wasn’t dancing all day. Instead, she’s muscular and yet somehow willowy. Her posture is so rigid that if you didn’t know her better, you might suspect she was a robot.

She’s the type to do things by the book, the proper way. She likes fancy clothes and fine dining and high art.

For Christmas a few years ago, she got me a Burberry purse. I said thank you and tried really hard not to scuff it up, not to ruin it. But I lost it by March. I felt bad, but I also sort of felt like,
Well, what was she thinking giving
me
a Burberry purse?

“We brought you magazines,” she says now. “The good British ones. I figured if I was in a hospital bed, I’d want the good stuff.”

“I’m . . . we’re just so glad you’re OK,” my mom says. She’s about to start crying again. “You gave us quite a scare,” she adds. My mom’s hair is naturally a dirty blond. Her coloring is lighter than the rest of us.

My dad has jet-black hair, so thick and shiny that I used to say his picture should be on boxes of Just For Men. It wasn’t until I was in college that it occurred to me he was probably
using
Just For Men. He’s been squeezing my hand since he sat
down. He now squeezes it harder for a moment, to second my mom’s statement.

I nod and smile. It’s weird. I feel awkward. I don’t have anything to say to them, and even though I couldn’t really say anything anyway, it seems odd for us all to be sitting here, not speaking to one another.

They are my family, and I love them. But I wouldn’t say we are particularly close. And sometimes, seeing the three of them together, with their similar non-American affectations and their British magazines, I feel like the odd man out.

“I’m sleepy,” I say.

The sound of my voice causes them all to snap to attention.

“Oh, OK,” my mom says. “We will let you sleep.”

My dad gets up and kisses my temple.

“Right? We should leave? And let you sleep? We shouldn’t stay, right? While you’re sleeping?” my mom says as Sarah and my dad start laughing at her.

“Maureen, she’s OK. She can sleep on her own, and we will be in the waiting room whenever she needs us.” My dad winks at me.

I nod.

“I’ll just leave these here,” Sarah says, pulling a stack of magazines out of her bag. She drops them onto the tray by my bed. “Just, you know, if you wake up and you want to look at pictures of Kate Middleton. I mean, that’s what I’d do all day if I could.”

I smile at her.

And they leave.

And I am finally alone.

I was pregnant.

And now I’m not.

I lost a baby I didn’t know existed. I lost a baby I was not planning for and did not want.

How do you mourn something like that? How do you mourn something you never knew you had? Something you never wanted but something real, something important. A life.

My mind rolls back to thinking about
when
I got pregnant. Rolls back to the times I took a pill later than I meant to or the time one accidentally rolled underneath the bed and I couldn’t find it. I think about when I told Michael we should use a condom as backup for a few days and Michael said he didn’t care. And for some reason, I thought that was OK. I wonder which exact time it was. Which time we made a mistake that made a baby.

A baby that is now gone.

For the first time since waking up, I start crying.

I lost a baby.

I close my eyes and let the emotion wash over me. I listen to what my heart and mind are trying to tell me.

I am relieved and devastated. I am scared. I am angry. I am not sure if any of this is going to be OK.

The tears fall down my face with such force that I cannot possibly catch them all. They make their way to my hospital gown. My nose starts to run. I don’t have the physical capacity to wipe it on my sleeve.

My head hurts from the pressure. I roll toward my pillow and bury my face in the sheets. I can feel them getting wet.

I hear the door open, and I don’t bother to look and see who it is. I know who it is.

She sighs and gets into bed next to me. I don’t turn to see her face. I don’t need to hear her voice. Gabby.

I let it erupt. The fear and the anger and the confusion. The grief and the relief and the disgust.

Someone hit me with their car. Someone ran me over. They
broke my bones, and they severed my arteries, and they killed the baby I didn’t love yet.

Gabby is the only person on the planet I trust to hear my pain.

I howl into the pillow. She holds me tighter.

“Let it out,” she says. “Let it out.”

I breathe so hard that I exhaust myself. I am dizzy with oxygen and anguish.

And then I turn my head toward her. I can see she’s been crying, too.

It makes me feel better somehow. As if she will bear some of the pain for me, as if she can take some of it off my hands.

“Breathe,” she says. She looks me in the eyes and she breathes in slowly and then breathes out slowly. “Breathe,” she says again. “Like me. Come on.”

I don’t understand why she’s saying this to me until I realize that I am not breathing at all. The air is trapped in my chest. I’m holding it in my lungs. And once I realize that’s what I’m doing, I let it go. It spills out of me, as if the dam has broken.

Air comes back in as a gasp. An audible, painful gasp.

And I feel, for maybe the first time since I woke up, alive. I am alive.

I am alive today.

“I was pregnant,” I say, starting to cry again. “Ten weeks.” It is the first real thing I’ve said since I woke up, and I can feel now how much it was tearing up my insides, like a bullet ricocheting in my gut.

Talking isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I think I can talk just fine. But I don’t need to say anything else.

I don’t need to tell Gabby that I didn’t know. I don’t need to tell Gabby that I wouldn’t have been ready for the baby I don’t have.

She already knows. Gabby always knows. And maybe more to the point, she knows there is nothing to say.

So she holds me and listens as I cry. And every couple of minutes, she reminds me to breathe.

And I do. Because I am alive. I may be broken and scared. But I am alive.

E
than and I are circling the block around the café he wants to go to. Despite the fact that it is Tuesday morning and you’d think most people would be working, the street is packed with cars.

“When are you going back to work, by the way?” I ask him. He’s called in sick twice now.

“I’ll go back tomorrow,” he says. “I have some vacation days saved up, so it’s not a problem.”

I don’t want him to go back to work tomorrow, even though, you know, clearly, he should. But . . . I’ve been enjoying this reprieve from the real world. I quite like hiding out in his apartment, living in a cocoon of warm bodies and takeout.

“What if I eat so many cinnamon rolls that I gain four hundred pounds? Then?”

“Then what?” he says. He’s only half listening to me. He’s focused on trying to find a place to park.

“Then would this be over? Would that be a deal breaker?”

He laughs at me. “Try all you want, Hannah,” he says. “But there are no deal breakers here.”

I turn and look out the window. “Oh, I’ll find your weak spot, Mr. Hanover. I will find it if it’s the last thing I do.”

He laughs as we slow to a red light. He looks at me. “I know what it means to miss you,” he says. The light turns green, and
he speeds down the boulevard. “So you’ll have to find a pretty insurmountable problem if I’m going to let you go again.”

I smile at him, even though I’m not sure he can see me. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, smiling.

We finally find a spot relatively close to the café.

“This is why people leave this city, you know,” I say as he squeezes into the spot.

He turns the key and pulls it out of the ignition. He gets out of the car. “You don’t have to tell me that,” he says. “I hate this city every time I circle a block like a vulture.”