Chapter 32
CATE
He got us there in under a minute and I have no memory of the air at all. What I remember is the parking lot lights coming up out of nothing, and him setting me on my feet by the emergency doors, and me grabbing two fistfuls of his shirt because the ground wasn't finished arriving yet.
"Listen," I said. "Right now. Listen."
He went still. That total stillness, the one that isn't a man being quiet, the one where something enormous turns all of itself toward a single point.
"It is there," he said.
"You're sure."
"It is there, Caterina. It is quick, and it is steady, and it has not changed since the house."
And I stood in a hospital parking lot in the last of the afternoon light holding a fallen angel's shirt in both fists and did not believe him.
He told me the truth in the flat voice — the true voice, the one I've staked my life on — and my whole body said: he lied to you on a beach about this exact child, with that exact voice.
"I need a machine," I said. "I'm sorry. I need a machine to tell me."
Something went across his face that I will be paying for the rest of my life.
"Yes," he said, and opened the door for me.
The ultrasound tech had cold hands and a wedding ring she'd taped over with surgical tape, and she talked the entire time about nothing — her daughter's tuition, the parking situation, a wedding she was going to Saturday — and she would not tell me one thing that mattered.
"The doctor will go over everything with you."
"Is there a heartbeat."
"The doctor—"
"I know there's a heartbeat. I'm asking you to say it."
She moved the wand. The screen was angled away from me, gray static with shapes moving in it, and I lay on that table in a paper gown with my hair still wet and watched a stranger's face for information she'd been trained not to give me.
Her eyebrows moved. Just barely. Up, and then level.
"The doctor will be right in," she said, and put her hand on my ankle for one second on her way out, which is how I knew he'd been telling the truth.
A nurse came through with a clipboard and a cardboard cup of water.
"You're at Southampton, hon, in case nobody told you. Your husband carried you into that lobby like the building was on fire."
"He's not my husband."
"Mm." She put the cup in my hand. "He's parked in that hallway like a fire hydrant either way. You want me to move him?"
"No."
And I lay there in a paper gown on crinkling paper and was aware of him through the wall the way you're aware of weather — twelve feet away, facing my door, burning.
I have spent three days building a case against that man and every exhibit is true, and none of it changed the plain animal fact that with him in the hallway I could put my whole attention on the machine, because nothing on this earth was coming through that corridor.
Wanting him and wanting him gone had stopped being opposites somewhere on that bluff.
I didn't have room to fix it. I let both be true and drank the water.
Southampton. Which meant the nearest hospital with a maternity floor. Which meant that somewhere in three days of standing in the dark outside a stone cottage, he had looked it up.
The doctor was forty-something and brisk and had my chart and did not sit down.
"So. First — there's a heartbeat. It's a good strong one."
The room went sideways anyway. Knowing it and hearing a woman with a chart say it are two different things. I heard the cup hit the floor.
"Okay," she said, catching my shoulder, easy, like a woman who has caught a lot of shoulders. "Okay. Breathe. Sit back."
"Sorry."
"Don't be sorry, everybody does that." She sat down on the rolling stool then.
"Here's what we've got. You've had a subchorionic bleed — a small collection of blood between the membrane and the uterine wall.
Common in the first trimester, more common than most people think.
Yours is small. The pregnancy is measuring right on target, the heartbeat is where it should be, and the bleeding has already slowed. "
"So it's fine."
"So it's reassuring," she said, and I want to kiss that woman for the correction, because I would not have believed fine. "Most of these resolve on their own. Some don't. I can't promise you an outcome and I'm not going to."
"What do I do."
"Nothing dramatic. Rest — real rest, off your feet as much as you can manage for a couple of weeks. No lifting. Fluids. Warm. Stay out of the cold and off long walks." She was writing. "How far did you walk today?"
I looked at the wall.
"A mile and a half. In the rain."
She stopped writing.
"In March. In sleet." Her pen went down. She looked at me, and it was not a doctor's look; it was a woman's look, the one that goes around the room, and I watched her decide something. "Ms. Fontana, is there a reason you were walking a mile and a half in the freezing rain?"
The door was open. He was out in the hall — I couldn't see him, but I could feel the shape of him out there, the pressure, the same way you know which room the furnace is in.
"I was trying to get home," I said.
The doctor held my eyes for a second.
"Are you safe where you're staying?"
And there it was. The question they're trained to ask, the one with the whole machinery behind it, and all I had to do was say no.
I sat on that table with my hair wet and my hands shaking, and I thought about it.
I actually thought about it. Because he had taken me.
Because there was a stone house at the end of the island with no lock on the door and no way off the bluff, and a man outside it who had picked me up off a public road and moved me across a state line without asking, and every word of that is true, and none of it fits in a form.
What would I have said. He's not human, he's twenty feet from you, and if you send a deputy out there the deputy comes back with a very confused report and nothing else.
"I'm safe," I said. "I'm not staying there."
She wrote something anyway. Then she tore off the top sheet and handed it to me.
"Pelvic rest, which means what you think it means. Call the number at the top if the bleeding gets heavier, if it turns bright red again, if you get a fever, or if you get cramping that comes in a rhythm. Don't wait to see if it passes. Women wait. Don't."
"Okay."
"And one more thing." She stood, and her voice changed completely. "Do you have someone who can come get you? Someone who isn't the person standing in that hallway?"
"Yes," I said. "I do."
My phone said four percent. I took it out to the alcove by the vending machines where the old payphone housing still hangs on the wall, and I sat on the radiator and called Nina, because four percent is enough for one call if nobody rings long.
She picked up on the first tone. On the first.
"Caterina Anne Fontana—"
"Nina."
"Four days. FOUR DAYS. I have been at your door twice, I have called Sal, I called the shop on Mulberry, I have a list of hospitals in my purse, in my purse, Cate, I wrote it out with a pen. I was going to the precinct tomorrow morning at nine o'clock—"
"Nina, I need you to come get me."
Everything stopped on her end. Everything. I have known that woman since second grade and I have never heard her go that quiet that fast.
"Where are you."
"Southampton Hospital."
"Are you—" Her voice went somewhere I'd never heard it. "Cate. Is the baby—"
"There's a heartbeat. I'm okay. I'm not — Nina, I need to sit down in your car and go home. That's it. That's the whole thing I need."
"Two hours," she said. "Ninety minutes. Do not move. Do not let anybody discharge you until I'm standing in the room."
"You don't have to—"
"Caterina." A car door slammed on her end; she was already outside. "I'm putting Anthony on the kids and I'm getting in the car. Say something so I know you're not alone out there."
I looked up.
He was at the end of the hall, standing where the light didn't reach, hands at his sides, every line of him aimed at the door of my room. He had not tried to come in. He had not tried to explain himself to one person in that building.
A nurse went past him with a cart and looked up, and up, and said, "Sir, there's a waiting room—"
"I am aware."
"There's chairs in it."
"Thank you," he said, and did not move.
"I'm not alone," I said into the phone. "Just come."
He came into the room after she hung up and stopped inside the door.
"They said the same thing you did," I said. "Small bleed. It might resolve. It might not. Rest, warmth, no walking, no lifting, and I have to be somewhere that isn't at the end of a forty-mile road."
He didn't say anything for a moment.
"The heartbeat," he said. "It is faster than yours. Is that—"
"That's normal. She said it's supposed to be about twice."
"Twice." He looked at the floor. "I did not know that. I have heard a great many hearts and I did not know that one."
"Now you know it."
"Now I know it," he said, and something went through him that I couldn't put a name to.
"Nina's coming," I said. "She'll be here in ninety minutes. She's driving me home."
That landed. I saw it land.
"I can have you in your kitchen in four minutes."
"I know."
"Caterina—"
"I know you can." I pulled the blanket up over my knees. "That's not what I need."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"No," he said. "It is not."
Four times in three days he had picked me up and moved me. He was not going to be the thing that moved me home.
"May I come with you," he said.
First time. First time in the whole of it that he asked me anything about where his body would be.
"Yes," I said. "You'll sit in the back."
Nina got there in eighty-one minutes.
I heard her before I saw her.
"—Fontana, F-O-N-T, thirty-four, she came in this afternoon, and I've been driving for an hour and twenty minutes so if you tell me one more time that you can't confirm—"
"Ma'am—"
"Do I look like a ma'am to you? Caterina! CATE!"
"In here!"