Rain Outside the Clinic

Dess

The text from Joelle arrived at 7:52 on Thursday morning, in the middle of a bus shelter on Wickenden Street, in the sort of rain that had stopped falling and started arriving sideways.

Joelle: i am SO sorry

Joelle: I'm stuck. we have a stat c-section and Marcy's out sick and the other girl is in the OR and I physically cannot leave this floor. I tried. I begged. Dr. Okonkwo said "Baptiste, I will have you arrested." I'm so sorry sweetheart

Joelle: I'm going to throw up from guilt

Joelle: you can reschedule. it's not an emergency. we can do next week

Dess read it twice with her umbrella tucked under her chin and her free hand clamped around her purse, while a bus the color of a dishrag sloshed past and covered her left leg to the knee in gray water.

She was thirteen weeks and one day. She had eaten four saltines, a banana, and half a bowl of oatmeal. She had been told by three separate websites that the nuchal translucency scan was a "routine, non-invasive, reassuring" part of the first trimester, and by a fourth, which she'd regretted opening, that it was "the screening at which the most heartbreaking discoveries are made."

She did not want to reschedule. If she rescheduled, she'd spend a week lying awake running probabilities.

Dess: Don't be silly. Go save the baby. I'll be fine.

Joelle: you hate going alone

Dess: I don't hate it. I just don't enjoy it.

Joelle: DESS

Dess: It's an ultrasound. I did the last one on my own for four minutes before you showed up. I can lie on a table.

Joelle: you're a liar and I love you and I'm sending you a hug in text form 🫂

Joelle: call me the second you're out. I'll have my phone in my bra

Dess put the phone away.

She walked the last four blocks to the hospital with her chin down and her umbrella at a defensive angle and a steady, dull, unreasoning flutter in her stomach that had nothing to do with the baby. It was only a scan. It was the same room, the same table, the same patient lavender woman with the gel. She knew exactly what was going to happen. She had made a list.

One, she told herself, as the revolving doors of St. Brendan's spat her into the warm bright lobby, you are going to lie down. Two, you are going to watch the screen. Three, a stranger is going to tell you what's wrong or what isn't. And four, you are going to hear it by yourself.

Her eyes stung.

That was absurd. She'd heard worse by herself. She had heard her mother's voice crack on a Sunday night over the phone. She had heard a manager say we're restructuring. She had once, at fourteen, heard a man named Gary say, in the next room, to a woman she loved, either she goes or I do.

The elevator opened. She stepped in. The doors closed.

And in the polished steel, in her own wavering reflection, a thirty-year-old woman in a damp blue coat looked back at her with an expression of such naked, sudden, appalling loneliness that Dess almost laughed.

Oh, she thought. Oh, no. You want somebody to be here.

She hated it.

She hated it more than the rain, more than the bus, more than the spreadsheet with its tab called If No. She had built a whole life on not wanting this, on being a person who did not need the arm of another person, and now, on the third floor of a hospital, in an elevator that smelled of floor polish and disinfectant, she wanted a hand to hold so badly that her palms hurt.

She took out her phone.

She did not intend to. She would have sworn it. Her thumb simply went to the one contact she had saved under three letters, T.W., and the words arrived on the screen one at a time, like strangers asking to be let in.

Rule 2 is suspended for one hour. St. Brendan's, Women's Pavilion, third floor. 8:30. I'm having a scan. I do not want a speech, a gesture, or a basket. You may wait outside. You may not come in.

She read it.

She deleted it.

She wrote it again. She hit send before she could think, and put the phone in her pocket, and the elevator opened on the third floor with a cheerful ding.

…

The waiting room of the Women's Health Pavilion was full of couples.

She tried not to notice. She sat in the corner chair, by the rubber plant and the stack of Parents magazines, and looked at her knees. There were seven pairs in the room, she counted. A tall man in a Red Sox cap with his arm around a visibly queasy young woman. A middle-aged couple holding hands in an unembarrassed, tangled, long-practiced way. Two women in matching sweaters, one of whom was crying quietly and the other of whom was holding a packet of tissues at the ready like a pit crew. A very young father, perhaps twenty, in a hoodie, jiggling his foot, with an expression of such stricken terror that Dess wanted to hand him a sandwich.

Nobody looked at her.

They were, she saw, not unkind. They were simply busy. They were all absorbed in the small hot private universe of their own two people, and there was no more room in them for a woman by herself than there was in a lifeboat. She felt a sudden, vicious, entirely unreasonable resentment of every one of them.

Her phone buzzed against her leg.

T.W.: I am at the corner of Gano and Dyer. I have been here since seven forty. I did not follow you. I came the moment I saw the light go on in your kitchen, and I have been standing in a bus shelter for fifty minutes, so that if you needed me, I would not be late.

T.W.: I will wait wherever you tell me. I shall not enter. I shall not speak to anyone.

T.W.: I have an umbrella.

She stared at the screen.

Fifty minutes, she thought. He's been out there fifty minutes. In this.

She typed: You've been standing in a bus shelter since seven forty on the off chance I'd text?

The reply came at once.

T.W.: Yes.

T.W.: I was not certain you would. I thought it likely that you would not. But I judged it the correct place to be.

T.W.: I find that I am not able to calculate the odds on this one.

She laughed, wetly, behind her hand. The man in the Red Sox cap glanced up and looked away.

Dess: Come to the entrance on Pavilion Drive. Not the main lobby. There's a vestibule with a vending machine. Stand there. I'll text when I'm done.

T.W.: Thank you.

T.W.: Is there anything I may bring you?

Dess: RULE 3. No food.

T.W.: I meant only: is there anything you require. A phone charger. A pen. A scarf.

Dess: I require a man who is quiet and stays where he's put.

T.W.: Then I shall be very quiet and stay where I'm put.

T.W.: I have a talent for it.

…

"Odessa Rourke?"

The woman who put her head around the door was not Denise. She was fiftyish, tall, with cropped gray hair and an enormous, dry, unexcited face that looked as if it had seen the whole of human reproduction and found it, on balance, fine. She wore green scrubs and a long white coat, and her badge read IMOGEN PRATT, MD, and she held a clipboard in one hand and a banana in the other.

"Dr. Pratt," said Dess.

"Imogen. Come in. Eat this."

"I'm sorry?"

"The banana." Pratt held it out. "You've got low blood sugar. I can tell by the way you're standing. You look like a woman who had a rice cake for breakfast and a sense of dread for lunch."

Dess took the banana. She was, she realized, extremely hungry.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Peel it. And don't tell the dietitians; they'll say it's sugary." Pratt held the door. "Joelle called. She says you're alone this morning."

"I'm fine."

"I'm sure you are. I've known Joelle Baptiste six years, and she's never once been wrong about a person's courage and never once been right about their need for company." She ushered Dess down the hall. "She said to be gentle. She said you'd pretend not to care."

"I do not pretend."

"You are doing it right now. You're chewing that banana like it's a legal brief." Pratt pushed open a door. "In here. Hop up. I'm going to do the scan myself today, because Denise is out with the flu, and I'm better at it anyway, and I like to see the first-trimester kids. They're the most honest. They haven't learned to lie yet."

…

The room was the same, and not the same.

It was dimmer. Quieter. The rain drummed on a single high window, steady, hypnotic, like a hand on a drum. On the screen above the table, the grainy gray field hung waiting. Pratt moved about the room with the unhurried economy of a woman who had performed this very procedure eleven thousand times and did not intend to rush the eleven-thousand-and-first.

"Lie back. Shirt up. That's it. This will be cold."

It was.

Dess stared at the ceiling. A different tile this time. No rabbit. She counted anyway. Nine across.

"Now, I'll tell you what I'm doing as I go. I'll narrate. That way, you won't spend the whole time looking at my face for clues." The wand moved. "I'm going to look first at the overall shape, which is the part that makes mothers weep. Then I'll measure the length, from crown to rump. Then the back of the neck, which is the whole purpose of this appointment. We're looking for a little pocket of fluid. If it's thin, wonderful. If it's thick, we talk. And at no point, Odessa, will I say anything to you in a tone of voice that isn't the tone of voice I'm using now."

"Which is?"

"Boring."

"That's very reassuring."

"I've been told it's my best quality."

Dess closed her eyes. She heard the click of the keyboard, the soft squelch of the gel, the patient hum of the machine.

"Oh," said Pratt.

It was a very small sound.

Dess's eyes flew open.

"What?"

"Nothing. Look."

She turned her head.

On the screen, where the bean had been, where for three weeks there had been a dim pale shape in a gray sea, there was now, quite unmistakably, a baby.

It was tiny and perfect and faintly ridiculous. It had a head too large for its body. It had, in profile, a high, rounded forehead and a nose like a button and a chin that thrust forward with an air of impudent determination, and it was, God help her, moving. One of its legs kicked out. An arm flapped. A pair of minuscule fingers opened and closed in the dark, and it turned its whole body in a slow somersault, with the lazy unconcern of a swimmer in a warm pool, and came to rest with its back against the curve of the wall.

Dess made a noise.

"Hello," said Dr. Pratt, calmly. "Look at that. Healthy as a horse, and rude with it. That's a good strong heartbeat. That's a fine skull. That's a spine like a string of pearls." She tapped the keyboard. "And that, if you'll look, is the back of the neck. Measurement of one point four millimeters."

"Is that good?"

"That's excellent. Anything under three is excellent. You're at under a half of that." She clicked a second image. "I'll order the blood test to complete the picture, but frankly, between us, I'd put the odds at about the same as the odds you'll be struck by lightning on the way home."

"Is that— Is that low or high?"

"Low, Odessa. It's low. It's very low. It means your baby is fine."

The words did not enter her at once.

They hung in the air, gentle, warm, ordinary, a verdict delivered in a voice no more excited than a bank teller's. Fine. She turned the word over. She tried it. And then, with a sudden vertiginous drop, as if the floor of the room had been removed, she understood that the thing she had been holding for thirteen weeks, the thing she'd been carrying in her ribs like a stone, was simply no longer there.

She began to cry.

It was not graceful. It was fierce, loud, snotty, hiccuping crying, the crying of a child who has been lost in a store and found. She put both hands over her face and wept into her palms. The paper crackled beneath her. The gel ran down her ribs. Dr. Pratt, without a word, set down the wand, and handed her a box of tissues, and sat down on the rolling stool, and waited, with her hands clasped between her knees, like a woman at a bus stop.

"Better?" she said at last.

"No."

"Good. Keep going."

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't you dare. In thirty years, I have never once seen a woman lie on that table and cry at a bad result. Not in the first minute. It's always the good ones." Pratt handed her another tissue. "It's because you've been braced. When the thing you're braced against doesn't come, the body doesn't know what to do with all that readiness."

"I thought—"

"I know what you thought."

"I thought it'd be something wrong. I thought—" She gulped. "I've been so careful. I've been so, so careful, and I thought, nobody gets to be this lucky. It's against the rules. There's a ledger."

"Is there?"

"There's always a ledger. You give, and you get, and it balances. I gave a lot for this. I gave three years. And I haven't paid yet. And I thought, they're going to send me the bill."

Pratt considered this.

"I'm a doctor," she said. "Not a priest. I don't have a lot of views on whether the universe keeps accounts. But I'll tell you what I have observed in a long career. The people who are sure they'll be punished for good news are almost always people who've been punished for very little." She smiled, a dry sudden curve. "Your baby is fine, Odessa. I would not lie to you about a thing like that. You have my word. And if the cosmos wants to present a bill, it can present it to me. I have a very good lawyer."

Dess laughed, sobbing.

"I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Nothing's wrong with you. You're thirteen weeks pregnant and you're by yourself." The doctor tilted her head. "Is there anyone you'd like me to call?"

"My friend's in surgery."

"Anyone else?"

"My mother's an hour away."

"Anyone else."

Dess lowered the tissue.

Dr. Pratt was looking at her with a perfectly bland and entirely knowing expression, the kind of look a woman gives another woman across a crowded room when the first has just said I'm fine for the eighth time.

"There's a man in the vestibule," said Dess.

"Is there."

"He's not— He's nobody. He's a neighbor. He's a— It's a long story." Her face was hot. "He's been standing in a bus shelter since seven forty. I told him he could wait outside."

"I see."

"I told him not to come in."

"I see."

"I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"Because you're a woman who needs to say a thing aloud before she can decide about it." Pratt rolled the stool back an inch. "Would you like him to come in?"

"No."

"All right."

"No. Definitely not. It's— That would be a violation of three separate—" Dess stopped. She pressed the tissue to her mouth. On the screen, the baby had turned again, and was drifting, one hand drawn up toward its face in a gesture of exquisite, absent-minded vanity. "It's his brother's. It's his brother's baby. I never— I don't know what he is. I don't know if he gets to see."

"Does he want to?"

"He's never asked."

"That's not what I asked."

Dess shut her eyes.

He stood in the rain, she thought. He sat in a bus shelter for fifty minutes in case I should need a hand, and when I did, he said 'I find that I am not able to calculate the odds.'

He said, "I shall be very quiet and stay where I'm put."

"Yes," she said. "He wants to."

"Then I'd say he should."

"Dr. Pratt—"

"I have two minutes before my next patient. It's no trouble." Pratt rose. She went to the door and opened it. "I'll tell the nurse. You sit there and blow your nose."

…

He came in like a man entering a cathedral in his stockinged feet.

He took off his hat in the door. He had not worn a hat in the street, she noticed; it was, in fact, the paper hat from the vending machine, which the nurse had given him in error. He held it in both hands. His coat was drenched. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and the shoulders of his dark suit were black with rain, and a line of cold water ran steadily down the side of his neck into his collar. He was white to the lips. He had a smear of something, mud or ink, on his left cheek.

He stopped two feet inside the door.

"Ms. Rourke."

"Dess."

"Dess." He swallowed. "I was told— The nurse said I might— I wish to be clear that I did not ask."

"I know you didn't."

"I will leave at once if—"

"Come here."

He crossed the room. His shoes squeaked. He stopped at the foot of the table, tall and dripping, and stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes fixed with rigid, almost military resolve on the ceiling.

"Theron," said Dr. Pratt, from the doorway, in the tone of a woman who knew the whole story and had decided to enjoy it, "you may look at the screen."

"Thank you."

"I mean now."

"Yes, Doctor."

He looked.

Dess, watching his face, saw the exact moment it happened.

She would remember it for the rest of her life. She saw his eyes find the screen, the gray field, the small bright figure turning in the dark. She saw him not understand, and then understand; she saw his lips part; she saw the color, what little there was left, go out of him, as water goes out of sand. His hands came out from behind his back. They hung open at his sides. The left one was shaking so hard that she heard his cuff tap against his hip.

He did not say anything for a very long time.

On the screen, the baby stretched, yawned, or did something very like it, and put one tiny fist up to its mouth.

"That's the head," said Dr. Pratt, gently. "And the arms. And you can see the profile there. The forehead, and the nose. The chin."

"The chin," said Theron.

It was a whisper.

"It has— Forgive me." He took a step closer. His voice shook. "It has a chin that goes forward. Like that. Like a— there was a photograph. When he was two. He was in a high chair, and he'd gotten hold of a spoon, and he was looking at the camera with that—" He stopped. His throat worked. "He had that exact expression. That insolence. That chin."

"Kit's?" said Dess.

"Yes."

"That's Kit's chin."

"It's— I'm not— I know it's not possible. I know it's a trick of the light. It is thirteen weeks old, it is an outline. Everything looks like everything." He was talking faster, in short, broken, formal gasps. "But I have looked at that photograph perhaps four hundred times. And I would stake my life that I know what I am looking at."

Pratt cleared her throat. "It is, of course, a profile of a seven-centimeter fetus, and any resemblance is a matter of—"

"Doctor," said Dess.

"Yes?"

"Please don't."

Pratt looked at her. At him. At the screen. And, with the quiet graciousness of a woman who has seen that particular expression on a thousand faces, she inclined her head.

"No," she said. "You're quite right. It's got the chin. Congratulations."

Theron put out a hand.

He did not touch the screen. He held it a few inches in front of it, in the air, with the fingers slightly spread, as a man holds his hand toward a fire. The light from the monitor lay across his knuckles, gray and flickering. The tremor ran through them like a current.

"Hello," he said, hoarsely.

The baby turned over.

"I'm—" He stopped. "I am your—" He stopped again. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I am. It hasn't been established."

"Uncle," said Dess.

He turned.

She had not planned to say it. It came out of her mouth, thick with crying, as plainly as the word for water. She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist and met his eyes.

"You're the uncle," she said. "That's what you are. It's the only thing that's been established. I'm establishing it now. You can say it."

He stared at her.

For a moment she thought he might fall. His knees seemed to sag; he put out a hand and caught the edge of the table. His face, in the cold blue light, was suddenly very young, and very old, and wholly undefended.

"Hello," said Theron Wexcombe, to the screen, in a voice that broke clean in the middle. "I'm your uncle."

The baby, with the serene indifference of the unborn, did a slow backward somersault.

Dess, lying on a paper-covered table with her shirt rucked up and gel drying on her ribs, laughed and cried at once, and held out her hand. She hadn't known she would do it. It simply went out toward him, palm up, in the dim.

He looked at it.

He did not take it. He bowed his head, and put his own cold wet trembling hand behind his back, and clasped it hard in the other, as though it were something that might go off.

"Not yet," he said, very low. "I haven't been asked twice."

She almost cried again.

"Fine," she said, and withdrew her hand. "But I want it noted that I asked."

"It's noted."

"Don't make me ask a third time."

"I'll try to be worth it," said Theron.

…

It was still raining when they came out.

She stood in the vestibule of the Pavilion, with the vending machine humming at her elbow and the glass doors streaming and the whole gray city smudged beyond them like a watercolor left out in the weather. She was holding two copies of a small black-and-white photograph. He stood beside her, a respectful distance off, with his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets and the paper hat still, absurdly, in his fist.

"You can put that down," said Dess.

He looked at it. He seemed to see it for the first time.

"I believe it came with the nurse," he said.

"I believe you've been wearing it."

"For about four minutes. In the hall."

She snorted. "You wore a paper hat in front of the entire third floor."

"Several people were very kind about it."

"I bet they were."

"A man in a Red Sox cap told me I looked 'real distinguished.'"

She was laughing again. It was becoming a problem. She leaned against the vending machine and put her hand to her ribs, and he looked at her, and in the gloom of the vestibule, with the rain on the glass and the light of the machine falling blue over his wet face, something moved in the set of his mouth.

"Your friend," he said. "Miss Baptiste. Is she—"

"Still in the OR. She texted. Nine-pound boy. Mom and baby are fine. Joelle's going to cry about it for a week."

"I'm glad."

"You'd like her. She'd hate you."

"I'd be honored."

"She'd say you were a menace."

"I am one. By design." He turned his face to the rain. "Dess. I want to say—"

"Don't."

"I only wish to—"

"Theron." She dried her eyes. "I told you at the start. No speeches. You've been standing in a bus shelter for two hours, and a hospital cafeteria is thirty feet from here, and if I don't put something hot into you in the next five minutes, you are going to catch pneumonia, and I'll have to explain to Mrs. Ferreira."

"I am quite warm."

"Your lips are blue."

"That's an optical effect."

"It's the vending machine." She took his sleeve. "Come on."

"Dess—"

"This is not a gesture. It is a medical intervention. I'm a pregnant woman and I need someone to carry my tea."

She led him, by the cuff, across the lobby and down a corridor and into the cafeteria, a bright, noisy, cheerful, appalling room that smelled of reheated pasta and burnt coffee, where a nurse in pink scrubs was arguing with a man over the last blueberry muffin. She sat him at a table by the window. She got him a cup of tea and a tuna sandwich and a bag of pretzels, and put them in front of him with the air of a woman disarming a bomb.

"Eat."

"I don't—"

"Eat. That's an order."

He ate.

He ate with great concentration and perfect manners, his back as straight as a ruler, taking small neat bites and chewing each one with the grave deliberation of a man performing a delicate surgical procedure. She sat across from him with her hands around a cup and watched. Halfway through the sandwich, a small color came back to his face. By the end of it his shoulders had dropped half an inch.

"Better?" she said.

"Yes."

"Good."

"Thank you."

"It's a sandwich, Theron."

"It's not the sandwich." He put down the last crust. "It's that you told me what to do."

She blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"I find," said Theron, "that I have been giving myself orders for twelve years, and for five weeks I've been giving them to my mother, and I'm extremely tired of the sound of my own voice." The corner of his mouth lifted. "It is a great relief to be bossed about."

"You are disturbing."

"I've been told."

She looked at him over her teacup. She looked at the damp, uncombed hair, and the ink smudge on his cheek, and the hands, now folded neatly in front of him on the table, one steady and the other not.

Then she opened her purse, took out one of the small black-and-white photographs, and slid it across the formica.

"For the wallet," she said. "Or the map. Or whatever."

He looked at it.

He did not touch it. He sat very still, with his eyes on the grainy gray image and the small white arrow that pointed to a chin.

"Dess—"

"It's not a gesture."

"It is the largest gesture anyone has ever made in my direction."

"It's a photocopy." Her voice was not quite steady. "I printed three. It's got a spare. Don't make it a thing."

He picked it up. He held it between thumb and forefinger, by the very edges, as if it were a feather that might break, and turned it to the light, and studied it for a long, long time. Then he took out his wallet, a battered black leather thing she could tell had been used for twenty years, and opened it, and placed the photograph inside, behind his driver's license, and closed it, and put it in his pocket.

He put his hand over the pocket.

"I shall keep it," he said, "in the place where I keep the things that are not mine."

She felt something in her chest give way.

"I think," she said carefully, "that that's one of the only true things you've said all day."

"Yes."

"Which means it's also the saddest."

"I'm afraid so."

Outside, the rain was easing. A thin gray light had begun to break at the edge of the window, and somewhere down the corridor, a baby had started to cry, a thin furious newborn wail, high and cracked and indignant, rising from the maternity ward like a small bright banner. Theron lifted his head.

"Nine pounds," he said.

"What?"

"The boy. Your friend's patient. You said nine pounds."

"Yes."

"That is a very large child."

"It's the average of the very large."

He considered this gravely. "I hope," he said, "that ours is smaller."

Ours.

He heard it a half second after she did. His face went blank. His mouth opened, and closed, and a slow, dark, horrified flush crept up from his collar to his hairline.

"The baby," he said. "That is— I mean yours. Naturally. Not— I did not intend a possessive. It was a slip. A lapse of grammar."

"Theron."

"It will not occur again."

"Theron."

"Yes."

"Drink your tea."

He drank his tea.

She picked up her own cup, and looked out the window at the rain, and did not look at him, and did not say anything for a long while. After some time she said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, "It's fine. It's a slip. People say it."

"I am aware."

"Nobody's counting."

"I am," he said quietly. "I'm afraid I always am."

She turned her head. Their eyes met across the formica table, in the bad light, in the smell of tuna and burnt coffee, and neither of them said anything at all.

It was Dess who looked away first.

She felt, with perfect clarity, that something had been set down in the room between them, small and warm and breakable, like an egg; and that neither of them had the slightest idea what to do with it.

On the page in her head, the one with the two columns, she wrote one line, and did not know under which heading it belonged.

He said ours.