Chapter Three #3
Emily’s nausea came and went as we traveled all those miles.
We fought. She had a couple of crying jags.
We were driving through Missouri when she began spotting.
The doctor we saw at an emergency room in Oklahoma City examined Emily, ordered an ultrasound to be on the safe side, and assured us that a little bleeding during the first trimester was something a lot of women experienced.
“Maybe twenty-five percent. And most go on to deliver healthy babies down the line. So there’s no need to panic, Mom and Dad.
I think everything’s going to be fine.” In the blurry picture he gave us, the fetus looked like a lima bean with an eye.
It was about an inch long, he said. Emily miscarried the next morning about a hundred miles outside of Nashville.
She alternated between crying and sleeping and I tried to comfort her as best I knew how, but it was guesswork; I was in over my head.
She said she didn’t want to see another doctor.
She just knew. All she wanted was to see her mom.
So I fought sleep, pounded Red Bulls, and drove almost nonstop the rest of the way.
Betsy had good news: the cancer had been contained to her breast without having metastasized.
She was solicitous with Emily and, surprisingly, with me, too.
“Do you need a hug?” she asked me when we were alone together in her kitchen.
I hesitated—I didn’t want one because I kept picturing her severed breast on a stainless steel tray.
But I told her I did so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings.
“No bear hugs,” she warned. “I’m still pretty tender there.
” When she put her arms around me, I found myself unable to reciprocate.
Instead of hugging her back, I reached around and gave her some little one-handed pats on her back.
Emily and I were married at the Stonington Town Hall on August the first. Emily’s dad couldn’t get there on short notice, but he mailed us a check and asked us to send pictures.
Emily wore her sleeveless yellow sundress and I wore my lucky plaid shirt, the vest from my one suit, and my least faded jeans.
Our witnesses were Em’s high school friend LeeAnne and her boyfriend.
Both of our mothers were there, my mom still in her waitress uniform because she’d had to dash over from her shift at Newport Creamery.
Betsy was decked out like it was the big church wedding she had wanted her daughter to have.
After the marriage license was signed, she sprang for lunch at the Floodtide, one of those upscale places where they put guys in toques at the carving stations and you get your Caesar salad tossed table side.
No honeymoon; we both had job interviews.
West Vine Street Elementary hired Emily to teach third grade.
That same week, I got my job as a graphic artist at Creative Strategies, a startup agency that was happy to hire me based on my portfolio and the fact that they could lowball me, salary-wise, because I had no degree.
My RISD buddy Matt, the only one I’d stayed in touch with, had graduated, landed a job at Cutwater, one of the big agencies in Manhattan, and sublet an apartment in Brooklyn, where all the cool kids lived.
My job was in working-class Connecticut and I presumed he was making a lot more than me.
But it was a trade-off. I had lucked out at love and Matt hadn’t—not yet, anyway.
Had I not abandoned school to save my relationship, I would probably not be married to Emily.
But I was. I was more in love with her than ever, and if she wasn’t quite as committed to me as I was to her—something I worried about from time to time—it didn’t mean she wasn’t committed.
She was just a little reserved, that was all.
Not aloof like her mother—not by a long shot.
She just held a little something back for herself, that was all. Nothing wrong with that.
We postponed getting pregnant again, telling ourselves that we had plenty of time, and that we both wanted to establish ourselves in our careers first. We needed to be practical, not impetuous or haphazard like the first time, she said.
But fear was involved, too, I think—more so for Emily than for me.
Having had that miscarriage under such difficult circumstances made her gun-shy.
I asked her maybe three or four times if she wanted to talk about it, but she always just shook her head and got quiet.
She still kidded with me, showed me that wise-ass side of her that I’d enjoyed so much during our first summer, but it surfaced less often.
We were fifty-fifty on the household chores and sometimes when I did the laundry and put stuff away, I’d look at that blurry ultrasound photo she kept in her underwear drawer: the tiny lima bean of our nonbaby.
It wasn’t like Emily was hiding it; she knew that I knew it was there.
She just never wanted to discuss it: that traumatic cross-country trip back east.
During the summer of 2014, we rented a cottage up in Truro on the Cape.
It was during that week when Emily told me she thought she was ready to try again.
We stopped using birth control and Em was pregnant by the end of that month.
“If I were you two, I’d start shopping around for one of those double strollers,” Emily’s gynecologist told us the day we went in for the ultrasound.
“What? Are you kidding us?” I said. I started laughing.
When I glanced over at Emily, she looked scared.