You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [80]
Then we were back in the long stone hallways trying to find our way out.
Just before walking into the day, we sat together on a low bench. I kissed her forehead.
“I’m happy,” she said, looking at me with her flashing eyes.
We took separate taxis back to school, where she returned to class and I returned to work.
MARIE
He looked terrible—pale and exhausted with such dark circles under his eyes. God he was thin. He crossed the street and kissed me and held me tightly. It was the first time we’d touched out in the open. We were in front of the station with all the taxis in a row, their lights on.
Then we were in the back and the taxi was moving. He didn’t say anything so I told the driver where to go. I thought, I’ve never really heard him speak French. And then I felt as if I might take care of him. I tried to imagine what it would be like to introduce him to my parents.
When we stopped in front of the hospital there was a part of me that was happy to be there. Maybe that’s disgusting. The idea that I’d have been happy, that anything that morning would have brought me pleasure. But it wouldn’t be true to say otherwise. Amid the fear, the nausea, I was there with him. Just the two of us. We sat in that dreary waiting room holding hands. There were other couples there, people around, but he still kept his arm around me the whole time. I mean like he didn’t care who knew. I think I’d have waited forever with his arm around me like that.
Anyway, I’d taken the first pill the night before. It had already started.
Eventually they called us. Inside there was another couple. She was miserable. She cried and cried but I shut her out. I didn’t want her there and all that noise was making me crazy. I sat at the table and pretended to read whatever book I had with me. But what I was really doing was hypnotizing myself. I stared at a point and focused on it until I disappeared into myself, until everything inside me slowed down.
I felt humiliated wearing those horrible pads under my sweatpants, sitting with him in that terrible room with that crying girl. So I wished myself away. Stare at the wall and vanish.
If nothing else, we had that in common, I think, our ability to disappear.
He kept touching my hand and asking me if I was O.K., but even he started to get on my nerves. I wanted to be absolutely alone or to lose consciousness, to have the thing happen and wake up in his bed. But on the other hand, I was sure that once it was over, he’d leave me.
Then I kept seeing the baby’s face. I mean this face I’d imagined for it. Clear. There was a photograph in his apartment of him as a baby with his mother holding him. They were sitting on the beach and his mom, who was so beautiful, was holding him in her arms and he had these big eyes and he was wearing a little white cotton sun hat. And that’s what I imagined our baby looked like. Would look like. And no matter how focused I became, no matter how hard I tried to disappear, it was that face that kept bringing me back. I knew it was dead already or dying. I mean I knew that it wasn’t a baby, that it wasn’t really formed. Still, I kept imagining it struggling inside me. I kept seeing it reaching out for me. And all the time I’m sitting there thinking of its little hands and that pretty round face and he’s holding my hand saying, Do you need anything, Marie? Are you O.K., Marie? Does it hurt? And I’m thinking, Yes, it hurts. I want to say, Yes, it hurts, Yes. I want to say, I keep seeing the baby and it looks just like you in that photograph in your apartment with your pretty mother and I don’t really want to kill it. I want to have it. I want to have it and live with you, the three of us together for the rest of our lives.
But I don’t say a thing, I just sit there pretending to be fine, pretending to read.
I don’t know how much time passed. Hours I think. And then I started to feel dizzy and feverish. I thought I might vomit. I stood up and as I did a shock of pain went through me hard and my knees nearly gave out. He was looking at me holding my hand sitting