Chapter 91
THE GUYS HAD BEEN GONE maybe ten minutes when Laura let out a sharp gasp.
“What is it?” I said, but she didn’t answer, just pressed a hand to her stomach.
“Is he moving around?” I asked, thinking she’d felt the baby kick. Laura was fifteen weeks along, but I didn’t know that fifteen weeks was too soon to feel so much as a quickening, much less a full-throttled kick.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, and all of a sudden she stood up, her hand still on her stomach.
I took her around the corner to Guido’s, where I told the guy behind the counter in Italian that she had to use the bathroom. “è urgente.”
He nodded, and we darted toward the back of the bar, where the bathroom was mercifully empty. “I’ll wait out here,” I said as Laura slipped inside.
A few moments later, I heard a desperate sob from the other side of the door, and my heart rose into my throat. I pressed my ear to the door. “Laura?”
All I could hear was her choked breathing.
“Laura? Sweetie? Let me in.”
A few seconds passed, then I heard the slide of a bolt.
I opened the door a crack and slid inside.
The room was tiny—just a toilet and a small sink, with barely enough room for one person, let alone two.
Laura was on the toilet, her gingham dress pulled up around her waist. All of that makeup, which had looked so cute a few minutes ago, was smeared across her face, and as I knelt before her, I saw what she must have seen when she’d sat down—the unmistakable smear of rust in her otherwise white underwear.
“I see,” I said, softly. “Okay.”
“I’m losing the baby,” she sobbed.
“We don’t know that,” I said in a singsong voice I didn’t recognize. “Don’t lots of women have spotting?”
“This isn’t fucking spotting,” she said.
I had never heard Laura say the word fuck. Not once in the ten months I’d known her.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to pull up your pants, and we’re going to get to the hospital as quick as we can. I’m sure there’s something they can do.”
“You mean the clinic?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re going to go to a real hospital for this.”
“But Mary Lou says—”
“Mary Lou doesn’t know everything,” I said, and Laura looked at me like I’d just called Jesus a crank.
I put my hands on her knees and looked straight into her eyes. “Laura, I want you to think hard about who you want dealing with this. A navy doctor who’s delivered zero babies? Or an Italian doctor who’s delivered every baby on this island?”
A tear slipped down her cheek. “The Italian doctor.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We looked for the guys the whole way down the Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, but we didn’t see them.
At the steps where we’d been sitting a few minutes earlier, I got the attention of a matronly woman wearing a witch’s hat.
“Our husbands will be looking for us,” I said in Italian.
“Here. In a few minutes. They’re American, and one looks like this.
” I waved in the general direction of Laura and her Raggedy Ann getup.
“Tell them we went to the hospital. Tell them there’s a problem with the baby. ”
The woman craned her neck, looking behind us. I think she was looking for a baby, but then she saw the way Laura was cradling her stomach and understood. “Glielo dirò,” she said, then to Laura she added, “E pregherò per te.”
“What did she say?” Laura asked as I led her toward the Piazza Comando, where I hoped we’d be able to hail a taxi.
“She said she’s praying for you.”