43. Lily
LILY
I've heard a thousand heartbeats through a stethoscope. Exactly one of them ever put a grown man on the floor.
I came all the way back at about four in the morning, in a bay at the end of a hallway in Rhinelander. There was a forced air blanket over me and warmed fluid going into the back of my left hand. A core probe was telling anybody who cared that I'd got myself up to ninety-five point two.
I know exactly how that room works. I've run that room.
There's a particular indignity in being the patient in a place you could staff.
I knew the pump on the warming unit by its noise.
I knew the nurse was going to say my name twice before she touched me, and she did.
I knew what the number on that probe meant, and I knew what it had meant four hours before.
So I lay there under all that hot air and did the one thing I've never in my life persuaded a patient to do. I did nothing whatsoever.
Sacha was in the chair.
Somebody had found him a shirt two sizes too big and a hospital blanket he hadn't put over himself.
His hair was still wet at the back. There was a graze along one forearm that nobody had touched.
His hands were on his knees. He was looking at me with the flat attention of a man who has been awake so long that the looking is the only thing still running.
"How long have you been sitting there?"
"You were in the ambulance for fifty minutes and here for five hours."
"That's not what I asked you."
"I have not sat down anywhere else," he said.
I worked my hand out from under that blanket, which took some doing, and he had hold of it before it cleared the edge.
"Your hands are warm," I said.
"They are yours now. Take them."
That's what that man says at four in the morning, when nobody has slept and he's got nothing left to keep the door shut with. I've decided to write every one of them down and keep them.
A nurse came through at half past four to swap a bag and read the monitor. She was about my age, and she read my face the way you read a chart somebody has already briefed you on.
"You're the one off the lake."
"News gets around fast up here."
"Marge Kowalczyk is my aunt's neighbor and she has telephoned this desk four times since midnight.
" She hung the new bag with the flat competence I recognized from about a hundred night shifts.
"She wants you to know the coffee urn is going home with her and not with the church hall, and that she has your bag. "
"Tell her thank you."
"I'll tell her you're pink and you're arguing, and she'll take that better than thank you.
" She checked the probe reading and made a small approving noise.
"Doctor Halvorsen is asleep in the family room in a chair.
We offered him a bed. He said he would take one when you were his problem and not mine. "
Sacha didn't say anything to that, but something in his shoulders came down an inch.
Halvorsen came in at ten past nine with his glasses pushed up on his head and a portable ultrasound cart squeaking along ahead of him. He didn't open with a speech, and I have loved him for it ever since.
"Good morning. How much do you know?"
"Everything," I said.
"Then you know why I'm not going to make you any promises before I look."
"You have nothing to promise yet, and I would think less of you if you tried."
"Say it out loud for the man in the chair, because he's been asking the wrong questions all night and I've been giving him the wrong answers."
I looked at Sacha and got the worst thirty seconds of the whole business over with.
"Cold water doesn't do anything to a pregnancy this early on its own," I said.
"There is no mechanism. Nineteen days is a cluster of cells with its own blood supply and it doesn't care about my core temperature the way I care about it.
What can end it is what has already happened to my body, and mostly it's what has happened to my hormones.
So he's going to look, and he's going to find one of three things, and only one of them is good news. "
"Two of them are good news," Halvorsen said. "You nurses are all built the same way. Every one of you goes straight to the worst column."
"Name the second one, then."
"The second is that it may be far too early to see anything whatever. That tells us nothing, and nothing is not the same as bad." He put his glasses down on his nose. "Lie flat, hands off your abdomen, and let me be tedious."
Then he turned the screen away from me.
I didn't expect that to be the worst part of the morning, and it was. I've turned a screen away from a hundred people and I was always kind about it. Until that morning I had no idea what it is to lie on your back in a paper gown, watching a man's eyes instead of the picture.
Sacha stood up.
"Sit down," Halvorsen said, without looking away from the monitor.
"I would like to see it."
"You would like to see something you cannot read, on a day when you have not slept, over the shoulder of a man who is concentrating. Sit down."
He sat down. He took my hand and he put his other one flat on the rail of that bed, and I watched his knuckles go white and then go whiter.
It went on for four minutes. I've sat with families in corridors, and I have never known four minutes go by that slowly.
"All right," Halvorsen said at last, and he pushed the screen a quarter turn toward us. "I am going to give you the good part and the hard part in one breath, so listen to both of them."
"Go on."
"There is a sac. It is where it belongs, it is intact, and there is no bleeding anywhere I can see." He tapped the screen with a pen, not a finger, because he is that generation. "Nothing about this looks like a pregnancy that has stopped."
Something went out of me all at once, and my eyes went, and I heard Sacha breathe out beside me for what may have been the first time since the ice.
"That is the good part," Halvorsen said.
"Here is the hard part. It is small, and it is early, and there is no heartbeat to find yet, and there is not going to be one for another two weeks or so.
I am not going to pretend I can tell you today.
Anybody who tells you they can is selling you something. "
"So it is two weeks."
"Twelve of them. I have written the date on your card." He turned the machine off. "You are going to hate every one, and I cannot help you with that either."
I've spent my whole working life at the other end of that sentence. I've delivered the kind version of it in nine hospitals, and I always privately believed that people who couldn't stand the waiting were simply not trying hard enough.
I would like to apologize to all of them.
We stayed in Cutter's Hollow for those twelve days.
It turned out we had nowhere else in the world to be, and Doris Lindqvist has a back bedroom with a quilt her mother made and wouldn't hear one word about money.
Tank slept across the doorway of that room every night, and he took the posting entirely seriously.
There isn't much to set down about that fortnight, for two reasons. The first is that nothing happened, and nothing happening was the entire point. The second is that Sacha handled it in a way I've never seen a man handle anything, and it deserves its own paragraph.
He built things.
He rehung Doris's storm door, and that door had not shut properly in nine years.
He replaced two boards on the diner's back step and wouldn't take the money, so Marge fed him and he couldn't refuse that either.
He went out to Earl's and did something to the plow's hydraulics that Earl has since described to at least forty people.
On the fourth day I came down and found him at the kitchen table with the whole of a broken humidifier laid out on newspaper in about ninety pieces, sorted.
"You have never used a humidifier in your life."
"It was on the porch," he said. "It has been sitting out there since the autumn."
"Sacha, put it down for a minute."
"I cannot fix the thing I want to fix." He didn't look up from the newspaper. "So I am fixing what there is."
I sat down across from him and we didn't talk about it for a while, and then I told him the number, because he hadn't asked me for it once and I knew exactly why.
"It's about one in five at this stage," I said, "and that is one in five for everybody. It has nothing to do with the lake or the cold or anything you did or didn't do."
"I did not ask."
"You've been not-asking so hard I can hear it from upstairs."
He turned a small plastic gear over twice in his fingers.
"One in five," he said.
"That also means four in five. I need you to hold both of those at the same time, and I know it is not a thing you are good at."
"I am learning a great many things I am not good at." He set the gear down in its row. "Now tell me the other thing, the one you have not said yet."
He is impossible. There's no hiding anything from that man, and I've stopped trying, and it's one of a dozen reasons I intend to marry him.
"If it's gone," I said, "I want to hear it from Halvorsen and not from you reading his face. You'll know before he says it. You always do. Let me have the four seconds."
"You will have them," he said. "I will keep my face empty."
"You'll fail."
"I have never once failed at that," said Sacha Volkov, and it was the first thing that had made either of us laugh since the lake.
The first time I ever sat in Halvorsen's front room he told me he had not treated anybody on purpose since the town clinic shut for good. Neither of us has mentioned that sentence since, and I have no intention of being the one who brings it up.
His front room has the license on the wall and a hand-lettered board out on the porch post. As of that winter it also has a refurbished ultrasound machine.
It came up on a truck from Milwaukee with no paperwork anybody has ever explained to me.
I have my suspicions about who paid for it and I'm not going to investigate them.
He had me on that table at eight in the morning on the day he had written down. He knew perfectly well that neither of us had slept, and he saw no reason on earth to make us wait until the afternoon.
Sacha stood at the end of that table with his hand around my ankle. That is where he had ended up on his own, and I let him stay.
"We will use the same rules as before," Halvorsen said. "I look first and I talk second."
"Look faster."
"Everybody says that." He set the probe down, shifted it a fraction, and then stopped moving it altogether.
Then he did the one thing no doctor should ever do to a nurse, and I forgave him for it inside a second. He smiled before he spoke.
"Well now, would you look at that," Halvorsen said.
He turned the screen the whole way around.
There was no mistaking what was on that screen.
I have pointed at that same flicker on other people's screens with a pen in my hand and the calm voice switched on, and not one bit of it helped me in that room.
It was the size of a grain of rice and it had a heart the size of nothing and that heart was going like something wound too tight.
"That is a hundred and fifty-two," he said, "and a hundred and fifty-two is precisely where I want it.
Measurements put you at six weeks and three days, which is exactly where your own arithmetic put you.
I have been doing this since before you were born and almost nobody's arithmetic is ever that good.
Now hold still. I am going to let you hear it. "
He reached over and turned the sound up.
I've listened to more of those than I could count. I've listened at three in the morning with cold coffee on a trolley behind me and my mind already in the next room. I'd heard the sound so often that the word for it had gone dead in my mouth, the way any word dies if you say it enough.
I'd never once heard my own.
"I know that's normal," I said. "It does not sound normal."
"It is supposed to gallop at this stage.
That one is running like it has somewhere to be.
" He was watching the screen and he was enjoying himself now, and he had earned it.
"I will tell you something, and you may take it as a professional assessment.
That baby has been through a blizzard, a gunfight, a night in a lodge with an arms dealer, and a swim in a frozen lake, all before anybody could see it without a machine.
Forty years I have been doing this. That is the toughest patient I have ever had. Takes after the mother."
I was crying by then and laughing at the same time, which is a thing your body will absolutely let you do.
"Put that on the birth announcement," I said.
"I will write it out for you in longhand."
Then I looked for Sacha, because he had stopped touching my ankle, and I couldn't find him at the end of the table.
He was against the wall.
He had gone back two steps and put his shoulders flat on Halvorsen's wallpaper, and his hand had come up over his mouth, and he wasn't making any sound at all.
I saw the whole of it happen. Three years of that man's discipline came apart in a country doctor's front room, one piece at a time, with nothing left anywhere to hold any of it.
That sound went straight past every wall he had ever built.
It found the middle of him and told him he was going to be somebody's father.
"Sacha," I said. "Come here and put your hand on me and listen to it properly."
He tried. He got about half a step and his knees stopped being interested.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, fast and strong and certain, the strongest sound I have ever heard. And Sacha Volkov, the man who fixes everything and lets himself feel nothing, slid down the wall to the floor and wept like the whole frozen world had finally cracked open and let the spring in.