Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

When Dan came back, he stood in the hallway outside this room, his hands on his hips. “You are something else,” he said, his tone almost admiring.

She stood a few feet away from him, keeping a respectful distance.

“Honey, I love you,” she said. “This is going to happen. There will be a baby.”

“Lisette,” he said. “Do you understand how close I am to completely hating you? Does it even matter to you anymore?”

For the first time, a cold shiver swept all over her, cooling her blood, and she felt faint to her fingertips, even her toes. In all this time she’d never thought that she would lose him. So intent, so focused on the goal, she’d set everything else aside. She had the urge to beg him, to cry, to make him pity her, or to yell at him, but none of that would work with Dan; he’d see it as manipulative and hysterical at once. His personality was rigorous and pure; his strictness undercut her own tendencies toward obsession and intensity, kept her moored. No, melodrama would make the situation worse and then she might lose him forever. Staying calm was the only way to manage him, hoping that he would come back to her in his own time, willing him to forget the price she’d paid and remember instead what she had purchased with it, that golden, shining good, their future.

So she said nothing, and he left her.

When the school year started, he was living in a shabby efficiency next to the hospital. Dan was seen, of course, as a villain — who leaves his wife while she’s pregnant? — and he had to endure this gossiping disapproval on top of everything else. She didn’t speak about him to the people they knew, a silence that was interpreted as high-minded. If she had thought too much about any of this, it would have crushed her. Therefore she thought only about the baby. Her body had to be nurtured; there could be no stress, only good food, sleep, rest. It wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of, but it was in motion. She’d done her body’s bidding and now would do its caretaking, too.

She gave the hospital Dan’s cell phone number, in case of emergency, but she didn’t call him when the contractions started, or when she took a cab to the hospital. By the time the complications started, the doctors talking about breech birth and emergency Cesarians, she was too out of her mind with pain to call him, so it was the nurse who did, telling him to get there as soon as he could.

Lisette, in a horror of sweat and pain, barely recognized his voice. It was so much worse than she’d ever imagined it could be, the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and she sobbed and screamed. It felt like punishment for all the bad things she’d ever done. She didn’t think, Baby, or Help, or Be strong, or Breathe. She just thought, Make it stop. Eventually, she lost consciousness or was sedated, she didn’t know and didn’t care; she only wanted to escape the grasping, evil hands of the pain.

When she woke up, she was alone. Her body, which had been her guide for so long, was numb. Outside the closed door she could hear distant hospital sounds, people walking, garbled announcements, phones ringing. The room smelled somehow musty and antiseptic at the same time. It smelled of sickness and solitude, like a place that had never been aired out. She was so weak she couldn’t move her hand to press the call button. She wondered if Dan was still around, or if he’d never been there and she’d hallucinated his presence. She knew without a doubt she had failed, that the baby was dead and everything she’d sacrificed had been for nothing. The whole experience had been so terrible, there was no chance that anything as fragile as an infant could possibly have survived it. Maybe she was dead too. Maybe this was hell, specially tailored for her particular desires and sins.

Then the door opened and Dan came in, with the baby wrapped in a little blanket. His eyes were red from crying. He placed the bundle in her arms, and she found the strength to hold it without even thinking or trying.

“Oh, baby,” she said, tears running down her face.

“It’s a boy,” Dan said. He pulled up a chair and sat next to her. He put his hands on the bed next to her, not quite touching her leg. “I didn’t know if you had a name picked out.”

She shook her head. The baby was teeny, wrinkled, dark haired, red. She kissed his perfect, impossibly small forehead. Her body recognized him, wanted him close. “He’s so quiet,” she said. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” Dan said. “He was crying before. The nurse is coming in a couple of minutes with a lactation specialist. They’re just giving us a moment together.”

“That’s nice,” she said, still crying, then tore her eyes away from the baby long enough to look at him. “Thank you for being here.”

“You’re welcome.”

They were stiff as strangers.

Reaching over, Dan put his finger inside the blanket and drew out one of the baby’s hands. “Look how tiny,” he said, his voice catching. “It’s amazing.”

“It is,” she said. “It really is.”

The baby opened his mouth and began to wail, and Lisette tried to open her gown but couldn’t quite manage to, with the baby in her arms, so Dan reached over and helped her, both of them unable to stop looking at the boy, whose little mouth was wide open, seeking what he needed.

Dan said softly, “That’s it. There you go.” And he put his hand on the baby’s back, leaning in close to watch.

She knew then that he would come back to her. Because they were a family, and because they had exchanged vows on that wedding day that now seemed so long ago. They hadn’t said: I will ask you for things no person should ask. Or: I will hurt you so much it will suck you dry. What they’d said was: I will love you forever. And every word of it was true.

On the plane, in that dizzy, fitful sleep that feels like slipping underwater, she dreamed that Lucas died. She saw his blue lips, his closed eyes, the damp blond hair plastered to his pale nine-year-old face. He was floating somewhere, and his dark sweatshirt billowed around him like a cloud.

“Luke!” she said out loud, waking herself up.

“He’s fine,” Jason said immediately, from the window seat. And, as always, he was right: her two stepchildren were just across the aisle, their blond heads islanded in headphones, watching the in-flight movie. Molly was laughing at an animated squirrel falling on the ice as it chased a nut. Lucas was scowling. He considered himself above children’s comedy and, as if sensing he was being watched, pulled his hood over his head and slouched down in the seat, his face invisible.

“You okay, Jude?”

“I’m good,” she said. She wasn’t going to tell him about the dream, because it was morbid and bizarre, and because, now that she was shaking the shreds of it from her mind, she thought she knew where it came from. Two rows behind the children, the seats had been removed and a stretcher bolted down there, a blanket and pillow covering the mattress like an empty hotel bed. When Judith, boarding, stared at the stretcher in surprise, the flight attendant explained quickly that it wasn’t being used. A person had been transported from Edinburgh to New York, and now, in the opposite direction, it was being returned. A person, she’d said, and Judith wondered at all the specific meanings this vague term was designed to avoid: patient, victim, corpse. Which was exactly the kind of thought that Jason would smile at and tell her to dismiss. He wasn’t dismissive of her, but he’d been through an agonizing, bitter divorce and had chosen — this was how he put it, on their first date — to look forward, to believe in life and happiness and the future. Judith was drawn to him just as the sun draws you outdoors on a perfect day you can’t bear to waste. Her own divorce had left a permanent smudge on her life, a shadow she couldn’t quite shake; even now, in love and remarried, she often felt it lurking inside and had to tamp it down.