Miranda
“Why do you think she and Lincoln have gotten it so wrong?” Tom asked when she returned from visiting her sister in August. “They obviously love each other, and haven’t been able to stay away from each other.”
This baby, who would be half Tom, was a fresh start.
“I think Lincoln has manipulated her from day one,” she replied, choosing her words so that they didn’t open up more discussion.
“He is not a good man, Tom, and as terrible as this experience is for her, I think it’s finally, finally done between them and she can get on with her life. She knows I’ll always be here for her.”
Tom and Emilio, aided and abetted by Joan, wouldn’t let her any farther than the lab. She wasn’t allowed into the vines in the heat, and she certainly wasn’t allowed to lift anything. Secretly she didn’t mind, and she absolutely loved Tom’s foot rubs on days she’d had to stand for many hours.
Everything was going so well.
Which was why, in October, in her fifth month, when she started bleeding while making dinner with Tom, it was such a shock.
She didn’t remember much of what happened after that. Tom put her in the car, and she couldn’t look at the blooming stain on her unbuttoned jeans. It was too scary.
Almost as soon as they got to the hospital, they gave her a medication that made her relaxed but fuzzy headed, and Tom and the doctors and everyone else seemed to be far away even though they were right there with her.
Touching her, talking to her and about her.
It was like one of those dreams where you try to scream and can’t.
The next thing she knew she was waking up in a hospital bed where Tom was perched on the edge holding her hand. She knew what had happened as soon as she saw his face.
When she started crying, he lay down in the bed with her, and they cried together.
Despite his closeness and solidarity, his whispers of reassurance that they could try again, she didn’t feel closer to him.
Instead, she felt like a balloon at the end of a string that he held, straining to float away.
She went home to Hartley after the hospital, not to Tom’s place.
Home. In the bedroom where she’d worried and cried and celebrated her whole life, she cried and slept and watched television, and reread a bunch of novels from a small shelf in her room.
Well, she read the words. She didn’t absorb much of their meaning.
Winnie called a few times, and even though both of them were now in the worst kind of pain, Miranda couldn’t bring herself to speak with her sister.
She sent Tom away, too. After one of his visits, she heard her mother say quietly, “She just needs time. She is the strongest of us all.”
Even the crush couldn’t rouse her.
She didn’t feel strong anymore. If she hadn’t been strong enough for the baby, how strong could she possibly be?
But it made a kind of sense. She hadn’t been strong enough to save her father, either. Or Winnie. It had been pure hubris to believe that this baby could ever bring her the life she hadn’t been able to give her father or sister.
For the first time, she thought she understood her sister. Her whole life, Winnie had been told to be something other than what she was, which was a writer and artist, and she’d suffered in that space between what she wanted to be and what she was expected to be.
Miranda was expected to be strong, and she’d accepted that heavy mantle until now.
Everyone was giving her a break. For the time being. When would they expect her to don it once more? How would they react if she could no longer bear its weight? Could she be more like Winnie, whom she suddenly saw as strong instead of weak for following her heart and her dreams?
Maybe this loss was trying to set her own life on a different course?