Page 44 of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
“It’s all right,” the woman says.
Annie touches her belly. It happened without planning. She and Walt were still living in the basement, their relationship running on inertia, a lack of better options making it easier to continue than quit.
Then one day, feeling unusually fatigued, Annie went to the campus clinic. She thought she had the flu. They took a blood test. The next day she went back.
“Well, it’s not the flu,” a doctor began.
She spent the rest of the day hiding in the library, one hand on her stomach, the other clutching a tissue.Pregnant?she thought. She felt too depressed to move. Only when a janitor nudged her to say, “We’re closing,” did she rise and drag herself home.
The talk with Walt was less than satisfying. After laughing nervously, then unleashing a stream of curses, hestomped up and down the steps for half an hour. He finally agreed to marry Annie for the sake of the child.
“Before I start showing,” Annie insisted.
“Yeah, all right,” Walt said.
The next month, they went to a courthouse (as Lorraine and Jerry had done decades earlier) and signed some papers. Two weeks later, they made it official.
Walt told his father.
Annie told no one.
Like her mother, Annie was facing unintended parenthood. Like her mother, she had a husband who was less than enthused. At times, Annie wished Lorraine were still alive. She wanted to ask her what to expect. But most of the time, she was glad her mother wasn’t there to see this. Annie couldn’t bear the disappointment. Certainly not the “Didn’t I warn you to be careful?” that she knew she would hear. Annie had become the embodiment of all of her mother’s phobias, a foolish daughter who wasn’t mindful enough and now had the obstetrician’s phone number on a sticky note in her father-in-law’s basement.
Walt became docile, like a scolded puppy. He said little when he came home at night, opting instead to watch hours of television, his body slumped so deeply into the couch he resembled another cushion. Annie did not react.What was the point? She had come to believe that living with a man was more about tolerance than romance, and marriage was just another letdown along the way.
***
Now, back at the doctor’s office, the old woman holding the door gives Annie a smile.
“How far along?”
“Seven months.”
“Won’t be long now.”
Annie nods.
“Well, good luck,” the woman says.
Annie walks away. She hasn’t felt luck in a very long time.
That night, Annie skips dinner. She decides to assemble a plastic bookcase from IKEA. As she twists, Annie feels a sharp pain in her abdomen. It doubles her over.
“Oh, no...” she moans. “No... no... Walt!”
Walt races her to the hospital. He leaves the car by the emergency entrance. The next thing Annie knows, she is on a gurney, rolling through a hallway.
The baby comes just after midnight: a tiny boy, weighing less than three pounds. Annie doesn’t see him until hours later, inside an incubator in the neonatal intensivecare unit. The premature birth means the child’s lungs have not fully developed. “We need to help him breathe,” a doctor says.
Annie sits in a blue hospital gown, staring at the incubator. Is she really a mother now? She can’t even touch her child. There are tubes to feed and medicate him, white tape that crosses his pinkish cheeks to hold a breathing device in place, and an oh-so-small blue cap over his head and ears, to keep him warm. Annie feels locked out. The apparatus is handling everything.
As day turns to night and night again to day, she sits, unmoving, through a parade of doctors, nurses, and hospital staff.
“Do you want to call anyone?” a nurse asks.
“No.”
“Do you want some coffee?”
