25. Charly
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Charly
Here’s the problem with being a nurse. You know just enough to scare yourself, and just enough to talk yourself back out of being scared, and you can do both of those things at two in the morning for a week straight without landing anywhere.
It’s been a week since he proposed, and the cramps never turned into anything. They also never went away. They just sort of moved in. Low and dull, there when I wake up, there when I’m trying to fall asleep, like a houseguest who unpacked without asking.
I keep waiting for my period to just start already and end the whole thing.
It doesn’t. What I get instead is spotting, the kind that shows up when it’s not supposed to, and that can mean nothing, or it can mean a lot, and I know exactly which possibilities it could be.
That’s the whole problem. I know all of them.
“You’re doing it again,” Clarence says from the doorway.
I’m folding laundry on the bed, his shirts and my scrubs in two crooked piles, and I didn’t hear him come in. “Doing what?”
“That.” He points at my face. “You just winced and pretended you didn’t.”
“I bent over wrong. I’m fine.”
“You’ve been fine for a week.” He crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed, close, watching me the way he watches everything, like he’s already three questions ahead of me.
“You wince when you stand up. You wince when you sit down. You went to bed at eight last night and you still look tired.”
“Wow. You should be a detective.” I keep my eyes on the shirt in my hands instead of him.
“I’m serious, Charly.” He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, his thumb grazing my jaw on the way down, and the gentleness of it is almost worse than if he’d pushed.
“I know you are. That’s the annoying part.” I fold a shirt that doesn’t need folding, just to give my hands a job. “It’s cramps. Bad ones. It happens. My body’s having a dramatic month, that’s all, it’s catching up to the rest of my life.”
“This doesn’t seem normal, Charly. You’ve had this same cramp for a week. A whole week.” He sits forward. “When have your cramps ever lasted a week?”
“They haven’t. But everything about this year has been weird, so why not my body too.” I take a shirt off the pile and fold it slow. “It’s probably just stress. People’s cycles go crazy from stress all the time, I see it constantly at work.”
“Okay. So why are you so tired all the time? And wincing every time you stand up?”
“That’s probably stress too. Everything’s been a lot lately.”
“Baby.” He reaches over and takes the shirt out of my hands, slow, so I’ve got nothing to do but look at him, and his voice is so soft it almost undoes me.
“I’m not trying to gang up on you. I just hate seeing you like this.
You’ve been hurting all week and brushing me off all week, and I’m asking you to stop for one second and actually tell me. Please.”
I look at him, and he’s not going to let this go, and the worst part is he’s not pushing because he’s scared, he’s pushing because he loves me, which is so much harder to fight.
“It’s just not stopping,” I say finally, quieter.
“That’s the part that’s bugging me. It should’ve stopped by now and it hasn’t, and I keep telling myself it’s nothing, and I’d believe me, except I wouldn’t believe a patient who said the same thing to me.
I’d send her in. I’d be nice about it but I’d send her in. ”
“So go be your own patient.” He runs his thumb over my knuckles. “You just said you’d send her in. So go. Same advice, just for you this time.”
“I know. I know you’re right. I just really didn’t want you to be.”
“I hate being right. It’s a curse.” That gets the smallest smile out of me, and he catches it, presses his advantage, lifts my hand and kisses the back of it.
His own smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Book it. That’s all I’m asking. One appointment.
And if it turns out to be nothing, you get to mock me about it for the rest of our lives, I’ll even help you write the material. ”
“Fine,” I tell him. “I’ll call Monday.”
“Today’s Monday.”
“Then I’ll call today, you menace.” I shove the folded shirt at his chest. “Happy?”
“No. But I will be when you’ve gone.” He catches my wrist before I can pull back and presses a kiss to the inside of it, right over the pulse, and I have to look at the laundry so he won’t see my face do the thing it’s been threatening to do all week.
***
He drives me. I tell him he doesn’t have to, that it’s a routine thing, that grown women go to their own appointments without a chauffeur, and he just keeps driving.
“You don’t have to come in,” I try, in the parking lot.
“I know I don’t have to. I want to.” He puts the car in park and looks at me.
“I’ll be in the waiting room. You go do your thing, you come out, you tell me I worried over nothing, and then I’m buying you the worst, greasiest lunch in this entire city to apologize for being right that you should go. ”
“That sentence didn’t make sense. You can’t apologize for being right.”
“I’ll find a way. I’m very talented.” He squeezes my knee. “Go. I’ll be right here. Closest chair to the door, like always.”
And he is. He takes the chair by the door and picks up a magazine and tells me to go be brave, like it’s nothing, like it’s a teeth cleaning, and I love him so much in that second that it almost covers up how scared I am. Almost.
***
These rooms are always freezing. The gel’s worse. I’m flat on the table with my shirt pushed up, staring at a water stain on the ceiling because it’s easier than looking at the screen.
The doctor is kind. That’s somehow worse.
If she were cold and fast I could match her, nurse to professional, two people reading the same chart.
But she’s gentle, and she keeps her eyes on the screen a beat too long, and she asks her questions in that careful voice we’re all trained to use when we don’t want the patient to hear the answer before we’ve said it.
“You’ve had abdominal surgery before.”
“Yeah. A while back.”
“And you lost a tube.”
“The right one. And there was a cyst, after. They said it was fine.” My voice comes out flat, clinical, the voice I use at work, because it’s the only armor I’ve got in here. “I know how to read a chart. You can just tell me.”
“I know you do. That’s actually the hard part with someone like you.” She keeps her eyes on the screen a second longer. “You already know what I’m looking at.”
“I know what it could be. I’ve been not-thinking about it for a week.”
“Then I won’t insult you.” She turns the screen away, which tells me plenty, and sets her hand on the edge of the table instead of on me, which tells me more. “There’s a fair amount of scarring. More than I’d expect, given your history. It’s affecting more than I’d like.”
“Affecting it how?”
“Charly.” She says my name the way you say it right before you tell someone the truth. “You already know so I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you. There’s damage in here. More than I’d want to see. And I’m not going to sit here and promise you it’s all going to be easy, because it isn’t.”
“Define easy.” I’m still in the work voice. I can’t find the other one in here.
“If you want kids someday, I’m not telling you that you can’t.
That’s not what this is.” She pauses, and the pause is the loudest thing in the room.
“But it’s going to be harder for you than for most people.
Your chances are lower. It might take a long time, years even, and you’d probably need help to get there.
I’d be lying to you if I let you walk out of here thinking it’s a sure thing. I don’t think it is.”
“But not impossible.”
“Not impossible. I’m being careful with that word, both ways. I don’t want to take your hope and I don’t want to promise you something I can’t.” She looks at me for a second. “You’re being very calm about this.”
“I’m always calm. It’s kind of my thing.
” There’s a water stain on the ceiling and I keep my eyes locked on it, because looking at the stain is easier than looking anywhere near the truth she just handed me.
I nod. I just keep nodding, like it’s a job somebody gave me. “It’s good to know. I’d rather know.”
It sounds like someone else saying it. Someone whose chest isn’t quietly caving in.
“It’s a lot to take in,” she says. “You don’t have to react right now. Most people don’t, not in here. It usually catches up with you later.”
“I’m okay. Really.” I sit up a little, the paper crinkling under me. “I’d rather have the truth than the nice version. I do this for a living, remember. I know the nice version doesn’t help anybody.”
She tells me there are options. She tells me this isn’t the end of anything, just a longer road than I planned for. She says a few more nice things and I say a few more calm things back, because I’m good at that part. Thirty years of practice.
Then she’s gone, the door clicks shut, and it’s just me.
The gel’s still cold on my stomach. Nobody wiped it off. I should wipe it off. I don’t.
I can hear the waiting room through the wall.
The little chime when the door opens, a kid asking his mom for a snack.
And I know exactly where Clarence is, because he always grabs the chair closest to the door so he can pop up the second I walk out.
He’s sitting there right now with a magazine he’s not actually reading, all relaxed, waiting for me to come out and roll my eyes and tell him it was nothing so he can say I told you so and take me to lunch.
He asked me to marry him eight days ago. Got down on one knee, hands shaking, meant every word, put a ring on my finger that looks like he reached into my head and pulled it out.
And the first thing I think isn’t I want a baby. It isn’t we’ll figure it out. It isn’t any of the things a better person would think right now.
It’s Rebecca.