Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

Later we get fake tattoos. Ryan gets the Superman logo on his tiny bicep. Cole gets Scooby-Doo. Penny gets a heart with an arrow through it on the back of her hand. I get a yellow and red firebird on the inside of my forearm. Cole falls asleep in his stroller and I push him across the park to the bandstand, while Ryan runs ahead of us. Penny wordlessly wraps her fingers around my elbow as we walk, and when I look at her she looks right back at me, daring me. There has been no time in your life that you wouldn’t have killed for a girl like this to look at you like that. Then she does, and something in you doesn’t respond and you realize that you don’t understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

There’s a local rock band playing loud covers at the bandstand. We find a bench and buy some cotton candy. Ryan nods off on the bench, his head on Penny’s lap. I sit next to her, watching the band while she feeds me wisps of cotton candy. I lean over and kiss her sticky lips. She rests her head on my shoulder. “Can we stay until it gets dark?” she says.

Penny is beautiful. Not smoldering, like Jen, but pretty and sexy and witty and fun. And she has the added distinction of seeming to genuinely like me. Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.

A few minutes later my cell phone rings and it’s Jen. “Something’s wrong,” she says.

“What?”

“The baby. Judd . . . I’m bleeding.”

“What, spotting?”

“More than that.”

“Did you call an ambulance?”

“I called you. Judd, I’m going to lose this one too, aren’t I?”

“Just try to take it easy. Are you still at the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Lie down. I’m calling an ambulance.”

I hang up and dial 911. I’m conscious of Penny listening to me as I give them the salient details. The lady on the other end sounds fat and bored, but I appreciate her gruff efficiency. When I hang up, I look at Penny, still beside me, looking pretty and lost. “I’m sorry. We have to go.”

“So I gathered,” she says, not quite looking at me.

I stand up and fuss with Cole’s stroller while Penny softly wakes up Ryan and stands him up.

“So, your wife is pregnant. It’s yours?”

“Yeah.”

“That seems like a pretty important piece of information to have shared, maybe.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m still processing it myself.” I turn to head toward the park exit, but Penny stays where she is.

“I think I’ll stay,” she says.

“What?”

She shrugs. “Unless you need my help getting them to the car.”

“What? No. That’s fine, but I mean, how will you get home?”

“I’ll call a car service later. It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. There’s nowhere I need to be.”

“Okay. I’ll call you later.”

She shakes her head and smiles sadly. “I don’t think you will, Judd Foxman.” She steps forward and kisses my cheek. “I hope everything turns out okay.”

I look at her, wondering what it is about her that makes me want to simultaneously devote my life to her and get as far away from her as I can possibly get.

“Penny.”

“You have to go.”

Ryan grabs on to the side of the stroller and we start making our way down the wide fairway toward the exit. When I turn around, Penny’s back on the bench, listening to the band, tapping her foot to the beat and looking off toward the bandstand, or maybe past it. I look back every so often to watch her fade into the distance, which, I realize now, is what I’d been doing all along.

Idrop the kids back at Knob’s End, and then Phillip drives me over to the hospital in the Porsche. He drops me off at the emergency room and then goes to find parking. Jen is lying on a gurney behind some curtains, while a resident runs a probe over her belly. I remember this like it was yesterday, the last one to arrive, the tears in Jen’s eyes, her gel-coated stomach bloated with our dead baby. Not again. Please.

“There’s no heartbeat,” she says, and starts to cry.

“The baby’s in a tough spot to get a read,” the resident says. She is a rotund woman with bulging eyes and no discernible lips. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“I’m sorry, Judd,” Jen sobs, reaching out for me. She grabs my hand before I can avoid her and pulls it over her mouth, crying onto it. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. Just try to relax.” I find myself stroking her hair with my free hand. I go to this place where I’m totally present, but I’m also thinking that forty minutes ago I was walking through an amusement park with Penny, holding her hand, kissing the cotton candy off her lips. I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

“I can’t believe this is happening again,” Jen gurgles. Her tears are hot on my fingertips. The resident continues to move the probe around. I can’t believe we’re here doing this again, losing another baby. Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.

“I deserve this,” Jen says. “I do.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“What I did to you . . .” She looks up at me, her features slashed with regret. “I ruined us.”

“Listen!” the resident says sharply. We turn to her, and then we hear it through the static, a fast, rhythmic, robotic swish.

“What’s that?” I say, but of course I know. I’ve done this before.

“It’s your baby’s heartbeat.”

“It sounds so fast,” Jen says.

“To you, maybe,” the resident says. “It sounds just fine to me.”

On the gurney, Jen closes her eyes and cries with relief, still clinging to my hand. With my free hand, I wipe away my own tears before she can see them.

“So why was she bleeding?” I say.

“It could be any number of benign reasons. I’ve paged the ob-gyn on call. Someone will be down in a minute. But the baby doesn’t seem to be in any distress.”

“Wait,” I say when she lifts the probe off Jen. “Can we listen for another minute?”

The resident flashes a kind, lipless smile and pulls out some kind of canvas belt gadget from a drawer and wraps it around Jen’s belly. Then she leaves, and it’s just Jen and me, listening to the frantic, throbbing heartbeat of our unborn child. She looks at me with shining wet eyes and smiles. “That’s our baby,” she says, beaming.

“He sounds nervous.”

She laughs. “Wouldn’t you be?”

We listen for a little longer. Beat, swish, beat, swish, beat, swish.

“Judd,” Jen says, not quite looking at me. “We can do this, right?”

And this is where I stop regretting the way things should have been the first time I heard my baby’s heartbeat. This is where I surrender to the magic of it all, the karmic appropriateness of becoming a father right now, when I’ve just lost my own. And maybe I do feel something; it’s hard to say, because we’ve only just begun to try the moment on for size when the curtains fly open and Wade steps in, effectively murdering the moment and all the ones to follow.

THE LAST TIME I saw Wade, I attacked him with an office chair. The time before that, I jammed a lit cheesecake up his ass and almost burned his balls off. So it’s understandable that his first reaction upon seeing me is to flinch and assume a defensive posture. He stands in the doorway looking uncertainly at me, then moves past me self-consciously to approach Jen on the gurney. “You okay, babe?” he says. There are guys who can pull off “babe.” I’m not one of them. Wade is, and I mean that in the worst possible way. I start scanning the shelves for sharp objects. “I got here as fast as I could. My GPS messed me up.”