Chapter 12 #2
Mark released her shoulders to ease around her and sit by the fire to see her face. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, you weren’t there, so you wouldn’t understand, would you?” Her voice came sharp as a slap.
Mark flinched, leaning against the warm marble stones of the hearth.
Ellen groaned and put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. You being there wouldn’t have changed anything. Constance still wouldn’t have lived.”
Mark had no idea what to say. “I’m sorry you were alone.”
“I wasn’t alone.” Ellen gave him a look he couldn’t interpret. “My mother was there, a horrible doctor, and Mother’s maid. It was…not quite the gathering I would’ve chosen.”
“I’m glad you had good medical care,” Mark said awkwardly, wishing someone would hand him a script for this conversation.
Ellen snorted. “Fuck that doctor.”
It always amused Mark to hear language from dockworkers come out of Ellen’s sweet, rosebud mouth, but this time his lips didn’t twitch. “What was the matter with him?”
“I had no idea what I was doing. I should’ve had a midwife.
” She sighed again. “I don’t know if that would’ve made a difference.
Playing the what if game almost cost me my sanity that first year, so I try not to go back to it.
And I know there are excellent male doctors who care about their female patients, like Dr. Tarnier, but most of them…
I’m never going back to a male doctor for any of my female issues ever again.
Ever.” Ellen set her jaw, glaring at Mark. “Do you know what he did?”
Mark shook his head.
“I knew something was wrong. I knew it, but I was only nineteen and didn’t know how to stand up for myself.
I trusted he was the expert. He told me it was all in my head, I was being hysterical.
And after Constance was born, gray and curled in that tight ball and so, so small and I screamed and screamed…
” Her voice trailed off. “Well, he came back to visit the next day to see if I was healing properly. And I asked him what to do. I was so lost, I was convinced none of it was happening, surely it was a sick joke and someone would pull a healthy baby out of a black bag and tease me.” Her voice shook.
“So I asked him, ‘what do I do now?’ and he paused on his way out the door, looked at me sick and lying in my bed, and said, ‘These things happen. Rest a couple of months and have another baby. It’ll cheer you up.’”
Mark sucked in a breath.
“I didn’t even react to it. I wasn’t even offended until the next day, when I realized what he’d said.” Ellen’s lip curled in disgust. “Cheer me up, like I was a child who’d dropped an ice cream cone. And these things happen? How the fuck was that supposed to make me feel better?”
Mark couldn’t breathe. “I would’ve hit him for you. I should’ve been there for that.”
“My mother tried her best to care for me. Your mother stopped by a few times, too. I wasn’t exactly good company. I think eventually people decided I wished to grieve alone and tried to respect those wishes.”
“Is that what you wanted?”
Ellen shrugged helplessly. “I wanted my baby alive. I didn’t want anything else in the world.”
Mark rubbed the heel of his hands in his eyes, grief for her coursing through him. “I understand why you’d never want another obstetrician near you.”
“I never plan on having another child, so that won’t be a problem.” Ellen was calm, a practiced calm she’d had eight years to perfect.
He hesitated. “I still don’t understand. I mean, I do—you don’t want to live through that again. I wouldn’t, either. But…surely, stillbirth rates are low? Don’t many women go on to have healthy babies?”
Ellen turned on him, fierce and furious. “Are you pressuring me into having more children? Are you trying to brush away the worst thing that’s ever happened to me—to both of us?”
“No!” Mark was horrified. “No, I’m sorry! That’s not what I’m doing. I know so little about obstetrics, I truly don’t know.”
Ellen glared down at him. “Some women do go on to have healthy, alive children. Some do not.”
Mark still didn’t understand, but he wasn’t going to push.
Ellen laughed mirthlessly. “That doctor was my worst experience during my grief. But my second, well, that was you.”
Mark felt like a candle guttered out. “Oh?” he barely managed to say.
“About three and a half months after the funeral, I got a bouquet of flowers.”
He knew where this was going, but he still didn’t understand what he’d done wrong. He kept silent.
“I received plenty of flowers and cards, of course, but this was particularly late.” Ellen was an ice queen now, eyes like shards of a glacier. “A dozen white roses, with a few purple hyacinths. In a porcelain purple vase.”
Mark felt like a gnat.
“I despise the color purple. You should’ve known that.
And yet you got me a simple bouquet with a color I dislike in a vase I dislike.
At first, I thought the gesture was sweet.
And then I saw your name on the envelope.
” Ellen’s face was carved ice. All their previous intimacy and friendship was wiped away by her memory of this.
“And I thought to myself, finally, my husband deigns to write me a letter.”
Mark remembered this part all too well. He opened his mouth to defend himself, then shut it. This was about Ellen, about her grief and loneliness and despair. About her desire for comfort and support that had failed to come when and how she needed it.
“And instead of a letter, what do I get? Six words. Six little words, burned into my brain for eternity.” Ellen shook her head. “You know, I didn’t hate you before that. I was confused and heartbroken by you leaving, yes, but I didn’t hate you.”
Mark closed his eyes under the assault. What could he say? She was right.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Ellen mimicked. “That’s what you wrote to the mother of your child. Your dead child. Who you never even met.”
“I see,” Mark said unsteadily, removing his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I…I understand why you hate me so.”
Ellen buried her face in both her hands. “I don’t hate you. Not when you are so supportive of my work and you gave me the locket and the frame.” She parted her fingers. “Why did you have to be so horrible then, and why are you so wonderful now?”
Mark wanted to fall at her feet and beg for forgiveness.
He wanted to protest and explain his side of the story.
He wanted so many things. He took a shaky breath.
“I don’t know what to say. I can apologize for what I did—indeed, I do apologize—but it doesn’t erase the damage I did.
I can promise to be better, to never leave you like that again, but you don’t want promises, only action.
I can give you time to think things through if you want, or I can stick by you like a barnacle. Just say the word.”
Ellen dropped her hands, letting her elbows rest on her knees and her forearms fall. Her lips twitched. “I threw the vase.”
“Good.”
“I think I might’ve screamed. I was so angry. It frightened my mother, who couldn’t get more than a whisper out of me for months. It shattered on the corner of the mantle. Left a chip in the wood, too.”
Mark imagined it, her hair in disarray, her entire body vibrating with fury, shattered porcelain and scattered roses at her feet. “Good.” He sighed, looking at the woman he loved, the woman he’d broken. “What do you want to do?”
He meant about their relationship, about how to move forward or backward, but Ellen stood and said, “I want to take a bath, eat supper in my room, and if I’m feeling up to it, I’ll still go to the opera. I haven’t seen Luke in ages and it would be nice.”
Mark nodded silently. “Whatever you wish.” He watched as she left his study, wishing yet again he could go back and do it all over again.