Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

Emily smiled. Lil seemed exactly like herself. “Josh is here, too,” she said, gesturing toward the door.

“And I’m glad you’re here, too,” Lil told him, rather grandly.

“Actually, I’m going to head out for a minute, “ he told them, with a smile. “I’ll be back in a bit.” And then he was gone, the door shut, and Emily alone with Lil, a prospect that, she realized, rather frightened her.

But before she had time to contemplate this, Lil had thrown her arms around her again. “You look amazing !” she said. “I love your glasses. Why do you never wear them?”

“Well, they’re really only for distance—”

“God, I love them. The color of the frames really makes your eyes look really blue.”

“Thanks. But—” She paused, unsure how to ask Lil what happened. “How are you? Tuck told me—”

“I’m okay,” snapped Lil, as if it was strange of Emily to ask the question. Emily nodded and said nothing. “I’m much better than last night. Emily, it was such a nightmare . Would you believe they just left me in this, like, weird room alone after the D and C?” She paused and gave Emily a questioning look. “Tuck told you what happened?” Emily nodded. “It’s just been so awful. I kept thinking it was a mistake, that I wasn’t really miscarrying. You know, we’ve been trying for so long.”

“I know,” said Emily. Actually, Lil had never told her this, though Emily had guessed it; they had all guessed it. “I’m so sorry about all this.”

“I just don’t see why it all had to be so awful.” She shook her head sadly. “My doctor was supposed to meet us here. That’s why we came all the way up here. But she got stuck in traffic, so they made us wait forever. And then, finally, they were like, ‘We can’t wait any longer. We have to do it right now! You’re running the risk of infection! You could die!’ And so I was completely terrified.”

“Why do doctors do that?” asked Emily.

“I don’t know,” said Lil. “I guess they’re thinking of the worst-case scenario. I mean, maybe they were right. Maybe I could have died.”

“I guess,” said Emily.

“It was scary,” Lil told her. “All of it. I was half awake—they give you this twilight sleep stuff—and I could kind of feel it, like a tugging. And afterward, they put me in this room—I guess it was the recovery room—and they just left me. I sort of fell asleep and when I woke up, my entire body was in spasms . It was just unbelievable. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was like”—she closed her eyes for a moment, searching for the right words—“a pair of jaws inside me snapping open and shut. I really, literally , thought I was going to die.”

“Oh, Lil! How awful!”

“I felt like an animal. I heard this horrible moaning and was thinking, ‘Make it stop’—and then I realized it was me .”

“But someone eventually came in to check on you, right? And brought you painkillers?”

Lil nodded. “And I was still in sort of a daze, like half asleep, and couldn’t figure out how to signal a nurse or a doctor or how to get Tuck. Eventually, a nurse heard me and came in. She asked me what was wrong and all I could say was, ‘It hurts. It hurts.’ And would you believe, she said, ‘Most people are fine after a D and C.’”

“Oh my God,” said Emily. “That’s insane.”

“I know! I’ve never had one before! How am I supposed to know how most people react afterward? And why should it matter to me? Then she said, ‘The doctor has to see you before I can give you anything.’ It was almost as though she thought I was lying! I’m writhing in pain and she’s yelling at me. She left for a while longer and then a man came in—the doctor, I guess—and had me sit up. I was actually feeling a little better—until I sat up. And I couldn’t help myself, I started moaning again—it was so embarrassing. And he just said, ‘Your uterus is contracting. That’s all it is. There’s nothing wrong. Sometimes it hurts for a while afterward.’”

“And he gave you pain medication?” Emily could and could not believe this. Some of the doctors she’d met through Josh were shockingly callous. And the nurses were worse. Bitter. Resentful. Some of them, at least.

“Yeah. He gave me a pill. And I fell asleep again. But this is the worst part.” She bit her lip from the inside and furrowed her brow. “When I woke up, there was somebody else in the room, a woman. She was asleep and this man was standing there stro—” Her voice broke and tears began to creep into her eyes. “He was stroking her hair and whispering to her and holding her hand. And all this time I’d thought Tuck hadn’t come in because he wasn’t allowed to. But he was , he was , and he just didn’t want to.”

A sob escaped her throat—a small, defeated sound—and she laid her head in her hands, her back hunched into a C shape. “Maybe he didn’t know,” Emily suggested, in a soft voice. It was very possible, actually. “The doctors in the ER are so busy. They might not have even told him where you were.”

Lil looked up. The whites of her eyes were a terrifying, mottled red. “He could have asked.”

“Yes,” said Emily, and sat down beside her friend on the bed, smoothing stray tentacles of her hair, which, she saw, was threaded with gray.

But Lil squirmed in her grasp. “I’m fine,” she said, twisting her neck as if to crack it. “I guess he didn’t tell you that it was his idea for me to come here.”

“To New York Hospital?”

“No!” Lil shook her head impatiently. “ Here . He told the doctor that I was hysterical. And that I refused to come home with him. He said I’d been acting strange and depressed for days, since I started to miscarry. And that he’d been worried about me since September eleventh. And that he thought I was going to try to kill myself. Me!”

“Oh my God.” This was worse than she’d thought. But then, maybe he really had been worried about her. Hadn’t Lil retreated from all of them in recent months? Wasn’t that, in and of itself, a sign of depression? “And he told you he told the doctor that?”

Lil let out a little snort. “The doctor told me!” That seems weird , thought Emily, resolving to ask Josh about it. “He asked if it was true and I said sort of, in a way, that I’d been very sad, but I didn’t think I was depressed . But then I said—and this was probably a mistake—that maybe I was depressed. That I didn’t actually know because I wasn’t sure what depression meant anyway and I thought it was all a bogus term invented by Pfizer and Eli Lilly.” Emily laughed. She could just see one of the humorless residents dutifully scribbling Lil’s comment on her chart. “Later, when he brought the psychiatrist in, I heard him say that I was hostile and paranoid. He had, like, woken me up to talk to me—and he wanted me to be, you know, friendly ?”

“I know,” Emily told her. “I know. It’s ridiculous.” The two women sat there for a moment, looking out the window, which faced the spare brick buildings of Seventieth Street. This was, Emily realized, the first time she’d been inside a patient’s room at the clinic. It didn’t look quite as she expected. There were, for example, no bars on the windows. She supposed they were fused shut and made of some sort of dense, unbreakable glass. A fat pigeon warbled and thrummed on the stone sill, swelling his gray chest. “That looks like Thermos,” said Lil, sitting up to get a better look.

“Dave’s, um, cat?”

“Yes, look.” Lil pointed to the pigeon and smiled. “The way it’s all puffy.”