Ron Rash - Chemistry and Other Stories

Across the room a woman holds her front teeth in the palm of her hand. She stares at them as if they were a bad throw of the dice. The man who brought her through the emergency room door leans his cheek against her swollen face. “You know I love you,” he whispers. Her hand tightens around the teeth. A red drool is all she can get out before clamping her mouth shut, leaning her head back against the wall. The man yanks a soiled handkerchief from his back pocket. He wets the cloth with his spit and wipes blood from her mouth and chin.

I turn to see if Mary is watching, but her eyes are closed, her lips moving. For a moment I think she is praying, but she is doing what we learned at our Lamaze classes, counting to ten, then exhaling, slow and steady. Her hand presses her belly, as if the spread fingers might somehow hold inside what’s been there four months. I place my hand over hers, wanting to believe the weight of another hand might make a difference to the baby, to Mary. She takes away my hand, and I remember what she said as we sped here, the road coiling around the black silence of Lake Jocassee where this night began one afternoon four months ago.

“It’s our baby, not just yours,” I’d said when she wouldn’t answer my questions.

“Not yet,” Mary had said. “Not until it’s born. Only then is it ours.”

A big man dressed in jeans and a black, long-sleeved dress shirt shoulders through the door. His right hand is swollen like a snakebite, the knuckles scraped raw. The receptionist, a gray-haired woman in a white nursing uniform, has disappeared. When she comes back she shoves a clipboard through a hole in the bottom of the glass that separates her from the circle of metal folding-back chairs filled with varying degrees of misfortune. The man clutches the wrist below the damaged hand and raises it.

“Can’t, ma’am. It’s broken.”

The gray-haired woman pulls the clipboard back to her side, places her pencil on the first line.

“Name,” she says, not even looking at him.

I don’t hear his name. I’m thinking eleven months back to another night, July, not June, but a night like this, muggy, loud with tree frogs and crickets. I’m thinking about how I’d woke in the dark and Mary was crying. A nightmare, I thought, and pulled her to me and felt what was too sticky to be sweat staining her skin. I touched a damp finger to my tongue and tasted blood.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“The baby,” she said.

So we dressed and came here and sat in maybe these same two chairs and waited to be told what we already knew. The doctor said Mary should stay overnight and they gave her a blue pill, and when the pill had done its work I drove home and pulled the sheets off the bed only to find the blood had soaked onto the mattress pad. So I pulled it off too and saw on the mattress a black spot like a water stain. Maybe it was lack of sleep, but for a moment I was convinced it had gone through the mattress and would cover the whole room if I didn’t contain it. I jerked the mattress off. Through the box springs I saw there was no blood on the floor.

I bundled up the sheets and mattress pad and carried them into the backyard. I dragged the mattress out there too, then soaked everything with lighter fluid and listened to the crackle of the fire, the tree frogs and crickets and a far-off owl. I was back at the hospital by first light.

Mary didn’t speak on the drive home. I let her wrap herself in silence. I pulled around to the back so she wouldn’t have but a few steps. She saw the charred mattress, the wisps of smoke that rose toward a sky that promised a day without rain.

“You think it’s that simple,” she said.

The man with the broken hand sits down next to the entrance. I look at my watch — seventeen minutes since we came in. I step up to the window, bend to speak through the hole in the glass, but the woman is gone. The door at the back of her office is half open. I see that it leads to the other emergency room, the one where they carry you in on a stretcher. The receptionist finally comes back, leaves the door cracked behind her.

“We have to see the doctor now,” I tell her. “My wife may be having a miscarriage. Please,” I say.

“Just a few minutes more and the doctor will be free,” she says. “There’s two boys next door.” The woman nods toward the room she has just come from. “They’ve been in a car wreck. Those boys are in bad shape.”

“My wife’s in bad shape too,” I say. “The baby is.”

“I understand,” she says.

I sit back down.

“Just a few more minutes,” I tell Mary. “It won’t be long.”

Mary looks at me but says nothing.

“She’s a cold bitch, ain’t she?” the man next to the door says tome.

“What?” I say, hoping I heard wrong, because if I didn’t I know this conversation will end with an exchange of fists.

He nods toward the receptionist’s glassed-in cubicle.

“I say she’s a cold one.”

I look up to see if the receptionist has heard, but she’s gone. The phone rings.

“They give them enough breaks,” the man next to the door says. “Damn if I don’t think I’ll put me in a application here. Where I work they won’t let you go to the bathroom but once a shift.”

“Where you work?” asks the man with the woman holding the teeth.

“Hamrick Mill.”

The man nods at the woman beside him.

“Her brother worked there a few months. He said they’d treat you like a dog if you’d let them. He wouldn’t put up with that so they fired him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Billy Goins.”

“Don’t remember him.”

“Like I said, he wasn’t there but a couple of months.”

The woman stares at the teeth in her hand.

“Is that your wife?”

“Yes.”

The woman doesn’t look up. It’s as if she’s deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she’s like the Cambodian women I’ve read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that’s what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off a part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope.

“What happened to her?” The moment he speaks the man with the hurt hand seems to realize the answer. “I mean she’s going to be okay, isn’t she?”

“Accident,” the husband answers. He places his arm around his wife’s hunched shoulders. “She’s going to be fine.”

The door that leads into the examining rooms opens halfway. An intern, probably not even thirty, grips the door’s edge with both hands and leans his head in as if afraid to come among us. He glances at the couple across the room and then at Mary and me.

“Mrs. Triplett?” he asks, looking at Mary.

Mary keeps her hand on her belly as I ease her to her feet. I walk her to where the doctor holds the door open.

“You stay here,” she says. “I don’t want you with me. Not until I know.”

I start to speak.

“No,” Mary says, her voice rising. “You stay here.”

So I do. The others have been listening. When I sit back down, the man by the door picks up a tattered Sports Afield with his good hand and stares at the cover. The man with the woman takes a jackknife from his pocket and pares his nails. His wife is the only one who looks at me.

I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes, think about the day four months back that brought Mary and me to this place, one of those late February days you get around here, a kind of miracle when the sky opens up deep and blue and the temperature rises into the seventies. It’s more than weather a couple of weeks ahead of schedule. There’s no wind like there is in March or early April. It’s like you’ve leapfrogged two months. All that’s missing are the dogwood blossoms.