Тэд Уильямс - The War of the Flowers

Who else should he call? How could you lose a baby — his baby, too, he had to keep reminding himself, half his, not just Catherine's — and not tell anyone? Had it really come down to this, thirty years old and nobody in his life who he needed or wanted to talk to about the miscarriage?

Where are my friends? I used to have people around me all the time . But who were they, those people? It had seemed exciting at the time — the girls who had flocked to his gigs, the guys who had wanted to manage him — but now he could hardly remember any of them. Friends? No, just people, and people didn't seem as interested in him these days.

He wound up calling his mother, although he hadn't spoken to her since just after the beginning of February. It seemed unfair, to wait four weeks or so and then call up to deliver this sort of news, but he didn't know what else to do.

She answered before the second ring, as usual. It was unnerving, the way she always did that — as though she was never out of arm's reach of the phone. Surely her life wasn't that empty since Dad had died? It wasn't like the two of them had been party monsters or anything in the first place.

"Hi, Mom."

"Hello, Theo." Nothing else, no " It's been a long time ," or " How are you ?"

"I just… I've got some bad news, Mom. Catherine lost the baby."

The pause was long even by Anna Vilmos standards. "That's very sad, Theo. I'm sorry to hear it."

"She had a miscarriage. I came home and found her on the bathroom floor. It was pretty awful. Blood everywhere." He realized he was telling it already like a story, not like something that had really happened to him. "She's okay, but I think she's pretty depressed."

"What was the cause, Theo? They must know."

They . Mom always talked about the people in power, any kind of power, as if they were a single all-knowing, all-powerful group. "No, actually they don't. It was just kind of… kind of a spontaneous thing. They're doing tests, but they don't know yet."

"So sad." And that seemed to be the end of the conversation. Theo tried to recall what he'd thought when he called, what he had expected, if it had been anything more than a sort of filial duty — look, Mom, here's what's gone wrong in my life this month .

It would have been a real baby , he thought suddenly. As real as me. As real as you, Mom. It's not just a "so sad ." But he didn't say it.

"Your uncle Harold is going to be in town next month." His father's younger brother was a retail executive who lived in Southern California. He had taken on himself the role of family patriarch when Theo's dad died, which meant that he called Theo's mom on Christmas Eve, and once or twice a year when he flew up to San Francisco on some other business he took her out to dinner at the Sizzler. "He would like to see you."

"Yeah, well, I'll call you about that, maybe we can set something up." How quickly it had turned into the kind of interaction they always had, dry, faintly guilt-ridden. Theo wanted to say something different, wanted to stop the whole thing and ask her what she really felt, no, what he was supposed to feel about the terrible thing that had happened to him, but it was useless. It was as though they had to force their words across some medium less rich than normal air, so that only the simplest, most mundane things could pass from side to side without disappearing into the empty stillness.

A quick and unclinging good-bye from his mother and Theo was alone with himself again. He called the hospital, wondering if Catherine was by herself and needed company. Laney picked up the phone and told him in a fairly cool manner that Cat was sleeping, that he didn't need to hurry over.

"I took the day off work tomorrow, too," she said. "I'll be here." It sounded more like a threat to him than a favor to Cat.

"How is she?"

"How do you think?"

"Hey, Jesus, Laney, you're acting like I pushed her down the stairs or something. This was my child, too."

"I know that, Theo."

"Don't you think I wish I was there when it happened? But I still couldn't have done anything about it. The doctor said so."

"Nobody's blaming you, Theo."

But it sure didn't sound like that.

He stood in the living room after he had hung up, staring at the clutter untouched since the night before, the residue of normal lives suddenly interrupted by disaster and entombed like Pompeü. She had been sitting just there, watching television when the really bad cramps came. She had bumped the table getting up — a glass was still lying on the floor, a ghost-stain of spilled diet cola visible on the shaggy, seen-better-days carpet. Was there blood before she reached the bathroom? He started to follow her track, then caught himself. It was too sick, too horrible. Like examining a murder scene.

Only three hours of sleep, but he was buzzing like he was full of bad speed. He turned the television on. The images were meaningless.

Where did my life go? How could something so small — it wasn't even really a baby yet, whatever she says — how could it change everything so much ? But what kind of life was it, really, when you were only alive playing music, but you couldn't ever seem to find the right place to do that, the right people to do it with?

Things came too easy for you , his mother had told him in a resigned way a few years back. You were so good at things when you were a little boy, the teachers made so much of you. That's why you never developed any ambition .

Right now he needed to find something, anything, to keep himself busy. He wished Johnny were around so he could bum a cigarette off him, several of them, sit and smoke and drink cold beers and talk about bullshit that didn't matter. But he couldn't bear to call him and have to explain this weird, miserable thing, not right now.

Cat's face was so pale… ! Like it was her heart that came out of her, not a little dead baby.

He stood up and moved into their bedroom. They had boxes of things stacked there, waiting until he cleared out the spare bedroom — his practice room, as he sometimes called it, although he could count on one hand the times he'd actually spent in there with his guitar. The practice room was going to be the baby's room, and all those things would be the baby's things. Would have been. Now she wouldn't want to see them when she came back, the first few symbolic baby-clothes purchases, the books and stuffed toys she had picked up at a garage sale.

" It doesn't count if you buy it used ," she had told him, only half-joking. Or maybe not joking at all. " It doesn't jinx the baby ."

But it had. Or something had — Theo felt like he had been the jinx, somehow, although he couldn't say why, was drenched in guilt that he couldn't explain, like a mysterious stain on his clothes. In any case, here he was and there stood three big grocery-store boxes full of things that would make her cry when she got home. He could do something with them — that would be something useful he could manage. He could put them in the garage where she wouldn't have to see them right away, wouldn't have to walk in on her first day home and find a cute little stuffed dog looking back at her with button eyes.

It wasn't all that easy to find a place for the baby things in the garage, where Theo's boxes of secondhand science-fiction books and other miscellaneous crap stood in tottering piles like the ruins of an ancient city, where unused exercise equipment and unbuilt packaged bookshelves left so little room for Cat's car that once the warm weather came for good she wouldn't even attempt the difficult task of parking in there again until late autumn, at which point all the new crap that had found its way in during the summer would have to be relocated so the car would fit in the garage again.