Chapter 36 1995
In the waiting room are two women who look like her. Susan studies their faces. One has a longer nose, one is younger. They both look nervous and she tells herself: you’ll be okay. She looks up to the ceiling, counts the tiles, tries to hang on to a sense of control.
When she walks in, a man (older, mustache) is busying himself with some papers.
Would you mind taking your clothes off? She’s done this before, it’s nothing to her, remember Al, the first time, how unthinking?
But hasn’t her body changed, become more vulnerable, less her own?
Slowly, she folds up her shirt, facing the wall, buying herself time before she has to face him.
The words do not make sense coming out of the doctor’s mouth. They are words for another woman. They do not apply to her, to the organ that grew her children. Quite far advanced, normally a compliment, something she never was in school. We’ll have to act fast.
Her husband in the waiting room. There had been so much blood they thought—could it have been possible?
—she had been pregnant again, she had lost it.
The flood had made her nauseous, and she had vomited too.
None of it made any sense, and more than that, the pain, the ruined pants, blood still caked in the fault lines of her palms. She has been asked a question and realizes she is supposed to give an answer, but nothing is entering other than the surreal way the clock on the wall is still moving, hands still falling steadily forward.
She nods, and Al’s body is around her, her face in his chest, both of them moving with heavy, frightened sobs. Where are the children? Safe, fine, with his mother. It’s not real, she says. You’re going to be okay, he says. We’re going to fight this.
What is next? The dismantling of her broken pieces, the removal of rot?
Only yesterday she had opened a sweet potato, peeled the perfect orange exterior, and chopped in to find that the core was liquid and wrong.
None of it is fair. Her husband’s attention, his mind connects perfectly with hers for a moment and even in the terror they pass strength between them.
They reach inside each other to find something solid.
They hold each other’s gaze like it’s the only safe place to look.
When they arrive home, she can’t get out of the car.
Her insides are still so cramped up with failure, with the exodus, and she cannot face them.
So Al brings the children to the car, straps them into their car seats.
He is talking about practical things, about whether or not they are going to McDonald’s or Friendly’s for takeaway.
He is acting with a numbness she never before understood as a strength.
She can hardly look at their beautiful, beaming faces—she cannot break in front of them.
She cannot let them watch her go to pieces. Look! How much time have you wasted?
They ask to listen to the Disney CD and Al humors them even though the songs make him insane, and the two of them look out the windshield and try not to cry while the kids scream “Hakuna Matata” at the top of their lungs. Susan places her hand on her husband’s hand and tries to catch her breath.
I have this, she thinks. Thank God I have this.
When they get home, Al takes the kids into their room, and she calls Mark Flowers. “I can’t do this anymore,” she says. “You have to kill me.”