Chapter 93
DOC CALLAWAY RECOMMENDED that Laura fly to Naples for her D&C.
Nothing against the local medical establishment, he said, but the obstetrics team at the Naval Hospital in Agnano did these things all the time.
Laura wasn’t in a great position to make clearheaded decisions, so it was Bobby who ultimately decided to put her on the next MAC flight to Naples.
I don’t know who told Mary Lou what was going on with Laura, but as soon as she learned about the miscarriage, she activated the phone tree, and I got a good look at the way these navy wives took care of one another in times of trouble.
It was Barb Norris who knocked on my door, a couple of hours after Laura and Bobby had left for Olbia, to tell me that Mary Lou was organizing meals and she wanted a group of us to go over to the apartment at nine o’clock the following morning and clean the place from top to bottom.
“Maybe put away some of the baby stuff, if there is any?” Barb said, and I thought of the Moses basket Laura had bought on a recent trip to Castelsardo.
I got to the apartment, on the other side of town, a little early because I had the key and I figured Laura might appreciate me giving the place a once-over before Mary Lou arrived.
I wandered the rooms looking for cast-off underwear or any other embarrassing detritus, but Laura was a much better housekeeper than I was.
In the living room was a small table crowded with framed photographs, and I stood before it for a long time, studying the life Laura and Bobby had built together.
There were photos of their wedding and what I assumed was their honeymoon, which she had told me was in the Poconos, but there were also early photos of them dating—one taken at an arcade and another in a dinghy on what looked like a hot summer day.
I was struck by a photograph she’d framed of the two of them in Munich.
They were standing in Marienplatz, and I realized with a jolt that I was the one who had taken the picture.
They’d been so happy that night, having just made their big announcement.
No one can ever really know what’s going on in another person’s marriage, but I suspected Laura and Bobby’s marriage was a good one.
Certainly, when she’d learned the baby was gone, Bobby was all she had wanted.
I tried to recall a time when I’d wanted Paul in that same primal way, and I couldn’t do it, which made me wonder what I was doing wrong.
I hadn’t even gotten around to framing our wedding photographs.
They lived in the same paper sleeve they’d been in when my aunt picked them up at the drugstore, and only now did it occur to me that I could at the very least put them in an album.
I grabbed a sponge and a can of Vim from under the kitchen sink and headed to the bathroom, where I was up to my elbows in bath suds when I heard a familiar voice behind me. “I thought we said nine?”
I turned to find Mary Lou leaning on the doorframe. She was wearing jeans and an old USC T-shirt, and she’d tied her hair back in a bandanna, which made her look a little younger and a lot less intimidating.
“Oh, hey,” I said. “You did. I just had some time to kill, so I figured I’d get started.”
Mary Lou didn’t acknowledge what I’d said, just nodded in the direction of Laura’s shower curtain. “That thing could stand to be bleached. When you get a sec, will you take it down?”
Mary Lou and I had gotten good at pretending the conversation in my car on the way home from bingo had never happened. When I took the shower curtain into the kitchen, she handed me a bucket and instructed me to mix ten parts water with one part bleach.
While I mixed the solution, Mary Lou began cleaning out the fridge. “It’s like my mother always says,” she said as she checked the expiration date on a container of yogurt, then tossed it in the garbage, “you’ve got to focus on the stuff you can control.”