Chapter Nineteen
Ambulances come to Vista View with the frequency and surprise of sunrise, but every arrival is still an event.
If you’re lucky enough to need one in the middle of the night when hearing aids lie dormant on nightstands, you might slip into your carriage unnoticed, but during the day, the sirens act as town crier.
Everyone comes out of their apartments to get the latest news.
And into this melee, the paramedics have to wheel that giant stretcher bed and all its apparatus through the lobby and into the elevators and down your hall and into your home.
Then they have to wheel it out again with you lying there looking vulnerable and miserable and embarrassed so the whole world can peer down at you as you slide by.
Many residents are at least unconscious for this part. I was not that lucky.
When we arrived at the hospital and the ambulance doors opened, the first thing I saw was the roof of the emergency room bay, but the second thing I saw was Dr. Kim’s patient face staring down at me, concerned, but in a warm, professional way rather than a panicked, alarmed one.
“What are you doing here?” I managed to ask, even though I could not manage to sit up. “Are you all right?”
“Am I?”
“You look troubled.”
“I’m worried about you, Pepper.”
“Oh. Yes.” I remembered again. I hadn’t forgotten really. It had just drifted away for a moment. “Am I all right?”
She nodded in a way that made me feel she was sure, though how could she be really? “Heads bleed. It’s the smallest of wounds. You might not even need stitches.”
“And the …” I trailed off. “Did it go?”
Dr. Kim squeezed my hand. “We’ll see. Let’s get you inside.”
She ordered some tests, and then she admitted me. I did not want this. Everyone always says they don’t like hospitals which they needn’t because no one likes hospitals. This is like boldly announcing you don’t like traffic jams. This is like saying, As for me, I dislike being kicked in the shins.
Blessedly, the other bed in the room was empty. Blessedly, I wasn’t hooked up to anything. But machines gathered cattily in the corner like tenth graders on the playground, their blank faces threatening to flicker to life without warning, their wires to tie me down and not let go.
I was to be kept for observation, like one of Moth’s science experiments, so I made my kids leave—I didn’t need any more watching—to go back to work, to be with their own kids, to give me some space. But Moth stayed.
“I’m sorry,” I said the moment we were alone.
He didn’t say, About what? He didn’t say, Shh, rest, it doesn’t matter now. He said, “That you lived and Louisa didn’t? You can’t be sorry about that. I can’t even be sorry about that. And even if I could, and even if you could, it’s not our fault.”
“I’m not sorry because it’s our fault. I’m sorry because you had to find out that way.”
“About what?”
“About the trial. And what it failed to do.”
“And what it did,” he added.
“And what it did,” I agreed.
“I’m sorry too,” he said.
I didn’t say, About what? either. “You have more reason than anyone to err on the side of safe.”
“This is the opposite of safe, love,” he said. Or maybe, “This is the opposite of safe: love.”
Which seemed about right to me, either way. Of course I had no desire to play fast and loose with medical advice, the law, or the lives of my beloveds. But, also of course, playing slow and tight wasn’t really on the table.
“Maybe it’s gone,” I said. “On its own.”
“Maybe.”
“But if not …”
“Tell me, Sarge.”
“What Dr. Blankman said would happen? It’s happening. Alice said it had to be a stealth mission, a secret, no one could know. And now …”
“And now?”
“Now Max says everyone knows. No more secrets. No more stealth.”
“Does it matter?”
I shrugged, but not like I didn’t know. Like I did know and was helpless in the face of it. “Maybe you were right—I made this choice long ago and can’t risk it now. Or maybe Alice was right—we’d all be buried in shit. Or maybe the point is …”
“What?”
“Right without the right to do anything about it doesn’t matter.”
“Or maybe it’s gone,” Moth said.
Then Dr. Kim’s head peeked in through the cracked-open door. “Hi, you two.” She came and stood by the bed and squeezed my foot through the blankets. It was oddly comforting. “How do you feel?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“Well, you’re the expert, but no signs of concussion. Minimal blood loss. No stitches necessary. You’re fine, Pepper.”
“And the …” I couldn’t ask.
“And the,” Dr. Kim agreed.
“It’s still …?”
“It is.”
“But … the bleeding?”
“A little bit of bleeding is perfectly normal.” She dragged a rolling stool over so she could be level with me in the bed, then took a breath before she went on.
“On the one hand, most miscarriages occur in the first trimester, and you’ve got another couple weeks to go.
On the other, risk of miscarriage declines each week you’re pregnant.
And best we can tell, you seem to be having an entirely normal pregnancy, except for one thing. ”
“I’m a million years old?”
“Your advanced age, yes. As you know, I’ve been both confident this pregnancy was a fluke and expecting it to terminate quickly. But I’m becoming less convinced.”
A noise was coming out of my mouth. A moan-groan-sob sort of sound.
“Since I’ve never had a seventy-seven-year-old patient undergo a miscarriage, I’ve been a little concerned about how your body will handle it when this pregnancy terminates.
” Dr. Kim’s calm was starting to tinge at the edges with something that sounded an awful lot like worry.
“Now, however, I am growing increasingly concerned about what will happen if it does not.”
Hospitals are terrible places, but you have conversations there you would never have in a restaurant or running to the grocery store to pick up milk or at home.
At home, you’d decide to watch a movie instead or fix a snack or tell a story.
Or play backgammon. At the hospital, everything is stark, boiled down, the terror either already in the room with you or just outside, leaning casually against a wall in the hallway and giving you a wink that says, Close the door all you want, hon—you and I both know I can walk through it any moment anyway.
“What would we do?” was how Moth opened after Dr. Kim left, after she said what she said. He didn’t sound despairing. He sounded careful. Deliberate. Almost curious.
“Have a baby,” I said. I didn’t mean give birth to a baby. I meant we’d have one. We’d have a baby and then a toddler and then a little kid and then a bigger one and eventually an adult. If I kept being pregnant now, that was what we would do.
“I have never had one before”—neutral, quiet, fact-stating, though of course I knew that—“so I can’t say for sure, but I think having a baby might be okay.”
“By definition,” I replied. I remembered when we found out I was pregnant with Darcy.
It was July and a million degrees. We had just moved to Austin, because Roger had landed a tenure-track job in the psychology department at the university.
We had left home, left our families, left the city—the city—for a sort of weird college town, left the wet edge of the country for its dusty bottom.
We’d known all along the academic job market meant we wouldn’t get to choose where we’d land, but knowing it wasn’t the same as having it happen.
I’d just secured a teaching job for the school year, and we were still in a crappy student rental, shopping for something permanent, when I found out I was pregnant. We knew we wanted children … someday. But the timing brought on waves of nausea that had nothing to do with morning sickness.
“Oh, that’s how it always is,” my mother chuckled over the phone. “When it’s least convenient. When you decide to wait a little. When you think next winter might be better. That’s when you get pregnant.”
“God, why?”
“Because it’s a good first lesson in parenting. It won’t be convenient. It won’t accommodate you. And for the rest of your days, your schedule will be shot all to shit.” You see what I mean about Brooklyn vocabulary. “That’s when it always happens—when you least expect it.”
I would give anything for an extra afternoon with my mom, just a few hours to tell her the million things I have to tell her, but surely first would be what an understatement “when you least expect it” was proving to be.
Roger and I had made do, joyfully, blessedly, but we’d had no choice. Instead we had a baby. There was nothing it could be but okay.
That’s not what Moth meant, though, not really.
He didn’t mean okay like okay. He meant okay like surprising but also kind of great, only he didn’t want to say so since I was so unhappy and bleeding from the head.
“In some ways, maybe old age is a good time of life to become a father.” He was leaving me out of it for the moment, I could see, in order to admit fewer counterarguments.
“Babies are hard for new parents because they have to work. I’m already retired.
Babies are hard because they wake up every couple hours.
So do I! Babies are hard because they need round-the-clock attention, and young dads have careers and other children and aging parents and hobbies and houses to tend, but I have none of those things.
Babies mean loads of laundry and sterilizing bottles and trips to the shops and nappy changes and they won’t sleep anywhere but in your arms, but my diary is largely empty anyway. It’s kind of a perfect match.”
Where to begin? “Children are exhausting, and we’re already tired. Children are relentless, and we already have to take breaks to make it through the day. Children are fast, and we’re slow. And slowing.”
“You and I maybe, but we don’t live alone. There are hundreds of us at Vista View.”
“All of whom are tired and slow and flagging.”
“Each of whom,” Moth corrected.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning when we need a break, there’ll be a queue down the hall of potential babysitters.
When we’re too knackered to come down to supper, there’ll be a food fight over whose table gets the high chair.
We are each slow on our own, but it would take a while to exhaust a whole building full of people, especially if you were a tiny baby. ”
“It wouldn’t stay tiny forever.” I shook my sore head, impatient. “Soon we wouldn’t be able to pick it up.”
“We’ll get stronger as it grows. Baby weight training.” He flexed his biceps, more symmetrical than Max’s in that they were both so much smaller. “And soon it will be able to walk and won’t need picking up.”
It is sometimes problematic that, in English, the gender-neutral singular pronoun is one we use for things rather than people. But I was grateful we had leave for the moment to keep using “it.”
“I doubt you’re even allowed to have a baby at Vista View,” I said.
“I wouldn’t think anyone at Vista View ever thought there’d be a need to make that rule.”
“It’s a depressing place to grow old,” I went on anyway. “How depressing a place would it be to be young?”
He looked hurt, but I meant depressing except for him. I meant depressing in spite of him, and that was therefore saying something.
“Everything you need is right here—” he started.
“Everything you need is right here,” I interrupted.
But he was undeterred. “Hallways to run along on rainy days, air-conditioned for hot ones. Glass lifts in which to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Trick-or-treating just in front of the building. A dining room that encourages a flexible palate.”
“Or starvation,” I huffed.
“Four hundred grandmas and grandpas—”
“The same age as your parents,” I finished.
But he frowned, thoughtful. “On my very first day of primary school, I had a bit of a dust-up with a strange man on the playground and went home in tears. But when my mum phoned the head of school, he assured her it had only been a kid in year five.”
“Meaning?” I asked again.
“Everyone seems old when you’re young, whether your parents are eighty or twenty. We have wisdom to offer instead of youth. Experience, perspective, unfrazzled free time—”
“How much?” I interrupted, for there was the rub.
“Endless! No job. No other obligations. No—”
“Not endless. Endly. Very, very endly. How many years, how many good years, can we possibly have left? Five? Eight? Eleven? You’re talking about a handful of idle hours instead of armloads of sometimes busy days. This kid could be an orphan before kindergarten. And that’s assuming I survive.”
“You just bumped your head, love.” But he wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I knew he knew what I meant.
But I said it anyway. “Survived pregnancy. Survived childbirth. Survived having an infant. And what would you do if I didn’t? Hard as septuagenarian parenting would be, septuagenarian single-parenting would … Well, I imagine that would also kill you.”
I was crying suddenly. Not crying. Sobbing.
He’d been pacing the room but looked over at my face then arrived immediately by my side, sat on the bed, petted my hair gently, very careful of the bandages.
“You’re right, Sarge. Of course you’re right.
All I’m saying is if we don’t have a choice, we could make the best of this.
New life might yield more new life. It might spread new life around.
I’m saying it will be hard, yes, but not as hard as you’d think, not as hard as we imagine. ”
Which, needless to say, was when it all got quite a bit harder.