Clown Girl - Monica Drake [101]
Rex stopped walking. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Nita, tell me. Where are you staying that you can’t brush your teeth?”
We were close enough to the house. I pointed down the street. Rex squinted again, like he needed glasses. “That’s Herman’s,” he said finally.
“No, the ambulance.”
“The prop room?”
I nodded. Our own little chapiteau, the mobile circus.
He started walking again, faster this time, without his arm around me. “So you’re pregnant, drunk, and living in our car.” He looked up at the sky, “It’s great to be home.” It wasn’t the home-coming I’d expected, not at all.
I had to run a few steps to catch up with him. “I’m not drunk,” I said. I reached for his arm. He jerked away.
“You act drunk.”
I reached again and said, “I’m just happy you’re here. I can’t believe it.” I was shaking, I was that happy. I trailed along behind Rex and tried to snag his arm. He shook me off. “And there’s another thing, Rex. I’m not pregnant. There’s no baby. I lost it.” I imagined I’d look into his eyes and talk about it, not blurt the news out like a bad lunch. But there it was. He stopped. I bumped into him.
He said, “You ‘lost’ our baby?”
I nodded again. “Two weeks ago.”
His eyes, green flecked with brown like a winter pond, were paler in the sun. “But we saw its heartbeat,” he said.
That little black-and-white pulse on the ultrasound, the shrimp-curl of a head and body, the heartbeat of Rex and me alive in one creature, our future.
“I know.” My eyes grew blurry. I couldn’t open my mouth, couldn’t speak.
Rex wrapped a big hand around my head and pulled me into his chest. He petted my hair. I breathed in his skin, his sweat. Rex. We walked without talking. When we got the ambulance, he climbed in alongside me. I rearranged costumes and moved piles to make room.
He said, “Tell me what happened.”
I said, “You’re the only person I wanted to tell.”
When he kissed me, his lips were everything I remembered, all of Rex in that kiss. His eyes were on me. The heat of his hands.
“It was awful. I was working a car-lot opening. Good money,” I said, like I had to defend the gig, even though this time Rex didn’t even flinch at the kind of clown work. And it would’ve been good money, if I got through without an ambulance bill.
“I didn’t know anything, I’ve never been pregnant before, but that day I had cramps so bad I had to sit on a curb. Right away, the first second, somebody yelled, ‘Hey, the clown’s sitting down,’ and they called the manager out of his office.”
Rex unbuttoned my shirt. I let the satin fall away. The ambulance was golden where light crept in around the shades.
“It was a nightmare, Rex.” I leaned into his hands.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry you had to go through that.”
“It gets worse,” I said. “When I stood up, I felt something like a lot of blood, and freaked, thought I was going to faint, made a beeline to the bathroom. I dripped blood on the white showroom floor. I had to get out of this leotard, and my hair was a big pile on my head, and my makeup was a mess.”
Rex put his arms around me. I couldn’t get enough. “I had a rash, maybe from wearing makeup in the heat, I don’t know—but I was sweating and there were all these blood clots, like big lumps of brown Jell-O, and I didn’t know what they were. I put them on a paper towel, thought they might be the baby. In the hospital they said they were just big blood clots. Somebody called an ambulance.”
“You should’ve called me,” he said.
I had called him, about a hundred times. But now I shrugged and said, “There was nothing you could do. They gave me what they called a ‘procedure.’ A ‘D&C,’ they call it.”
Rex didn’t even say anything about how we couldn’t afford the hospital bill. He leaned his chin against my shoulder. I said, “They kept calling our baby the ‘product of conception.’ That’s what the D&C was for—to get rid of the product of conception.” I put my hand in his hand and spread out his fingers. His hands were cracked. He pressed into my bare back. I twisted, and tugged at his T-shirt. “Let me feel your skin,” I said.