Page 78 of Twice
“You OK?” I mumbled when she came back to bed.
“I thought I was done with morning sickness,” she said.
She groaned through the next few hours. I felt her forehead, which was hot. She said she had a migraine.
By sunrise, I was feeling it, too. I was sweaty and ran to the bathroom several times.
“I bet it was that food,” I said, emerging from the toilet. Gianna lay in bed with a cold rag on her head.
“My stomach really hurts,” she whined.
“Mine, too,” I said.
I later learned we both had food poisoning. But our consequences weren’t equal. Gianna’s abdominal pain grew worse. By evening, it was so bad, I insisted she go to the hospital. In the emergency room, she threw up again, and the first doctor who saw her, a young Vietnamese physician, immediately sought out a senior staffer. An older doctor came in, checked Gianna over, then said a few words which I didn’t understand.
Suddenly everyone was moving quickly and Gianna was being wheeled into an operating room, because the baby, they informed us, had no heartbeat.
?
I will spare you the details of the miscarriage, Boss, except to say we entered the hospital as expectant parents and we left as something else, unexpectant, if that’s a word, not just of a child but, in time, of a certain happiness. We seemed to cross into a new, barren country, a gray place where dreams were mostly lost causes.
In the days that followed, Gianna was in shock. In the weeks that followed, she was in mourning. As the weeks turned to months, and she read about how food poisoningcan sometimes lead to miscarriage, she got mad. And I became the target of her anger.
“Why did we go to that stupid festival? Whydid you make me go?”
“I didn’t make you go!”
“You did! I told you I wanted to stay home! If I’d have stayed home...”
She didn’t finish. She just cried. And every subsequent time she brought this up, I was stung by the grief of unchangeable circumstances, which is not a feeling I’d known very often. My mother’s death. Wesley. And Yaya. Other than those, pretty much anything that hurt me in life, I had changed. Now, suddenly, with the worst thing that had ever happened between Gianna and me, I was powerless.
Did I think about jumping back to avoid that festival? Of course. But I knew the rules. Our baby had died, which meant no matter what I did, I couldn’t save it. It was going to happen, that day, that time, even if Gianna and I had sat inside a room with the doors locked. I couldn’t watch my wife go through that again.
I wanted to tell her this. To let her know that I would have used whatever power I had to undo things, but this was beyond both of us.
I couldn’t get this across without telling her everything. And it wouldn’t have changed the pain of it. A heaviness fell over our kitchen table, our couch, our bed. We drifted into resentment. When it came time to try again, at first I didn’t want to. Then she pulled away. Months later, when we bothagreed to make the effort, our lovemaking felt more clinical than romantic.
Gianna did get pregnant eventually, twenty months after the first go-around. But she lost the baby again, this time after nine weeks. It happened in the middle of the night. I heard her crying in the bathroom. I got up, but the door was locked.
“Don’t come in here, Alfie,” she sobbed.
And sadly—despite how deep our love had been—that sentence became a theme.Don’t come in here.We locked each other out of our hearts. We spoke. We ate. We slept in the same bed. But a connection had been severed.
A few months later I came home from work and she was silently grilling two lamb chops. No music. No “Hi, Alfie.” Just the dull sizzle from the frying pan. I looked at her in her sweatshirt and pajama bottoms and said, “I’m going to make a sandwich.”
“What about these lamb chops?”
“I don’t want those.”
“I made them for you.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“I don’t care.”
Her voice rose. “You don’tcare?”
