Seven Minutes to Noon (11 page)

“Lady, lady!” he called to her.

Alice looked up at the bus. The driver, a stout woman with short, metallic red hair, was eyeing her fiercely through the broad windshield.

“Lady!”

The man was now walking toward her. Was he deranged? Alice didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t even sure what had happened. As he approached, she saw that his eyes were strikingly white around soupy brown pupils.

“Just take some deep breaths and calm yourself down,” he told her. “Do it now, lady. One, two, three.” He breathed for her, showing her how, and for lack of a better plan she followed his direction. She felt the hard sheen of panic begin to ease off her. Her mind loosened. His face was now all the way up to her open window.

“You know something, lady? Twenty years I drove a city bus. Retired. One time I did the same thing you just did. Let me give you some advice.”

But what exactly had she done? All she knew was that for one brief moment, she had escaped. Maybe her brain had shut down. She didn’t know.

“Every time you get ready to make a turn, check and check again until your strategy meets up with reality. You can’t get too familiar with the one-way streets around here. Always make
sure.
You hear me?”

Horns were blaring behind the bus. Alice could see the stream of cars backing slowly down Union Street toward Clinton, trying to reverse into the flow of traffic. She took one more deep breath and got out of the car.

Now, shading her eyes against the glare, she saw the one-way sign pointed in the opposite direction. So she had tried to turn the wrong way onto a one-way street. Glare or not, she should have known better; she
knew
these streets. She had vacated reality at just the wrong moment.

“Holy lord!” the man exclaimed. “When you due?”

“December.” Alice touched her belly; the babies felt still and heavy inside her. “Before the holidays.”

The bus driver had descended to the street and was now shaking her head at Alice and the man. Faces had gathered in the bus’s windshield, staring at her. Voices spilled from the bus onto the street.

“Get a driver’s license!”

“You’re making me late!”

“Wear your glasses when you drive!”

Alice had never felt so foolish. She stepped forward to the bus driver.

“I’m sorry. It was my fault. I turned the wrong way. I take full responsibility.”

The woman seemed shocked by Alice’s lack of argument. This was New York City. This was
Brooklyn.
A pregnant woman with no fight was just not someone you could argue with. The driver shook her head again and turned to assess the damage. Alice joined her as if they
were comrades in the same assault. A long dent had buckled the passenger’s side door of Alice’s car. The bus was unscathed except for a heavy rubber bumper that was hanging partly off, but nothing was broken.

“That dent was already there,” Alice lied; the dent was
her
fault.

“Oo-we,” the man said, shaking his head at her.

Alice followed the bus driver onto the bus, aware of all the agitated eyes on her. She turned to the passengers and repeated what she had told the driver. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I’m sorry if I made you late.” She could feel the deflation, as if the bus itself had lowered hydraulically to let on a disabled person. It had. It had let on Alice, one badly damaged soul.

The bus driver took down all of Alice’s license, registration and insurance information. She continued to apologize and the driver continued to nod and say nothing, but Alice felt her compliance was appreciated. She couldn’t fight this. It
was
her fault. Then something else happened, something even more unexpected than the accident or the retired evangelical bus driver who had sprung to her aid. One by one, some of the passengers began to forgive her.

“I did that before. Twice.”

“Don’t worry honey. You’re human.”

“Take care of that baby, okay?”

“Don’t worry about us. We’ll just catch the next bus.”

Alice nodded and looked into the eyes of every stranger who spoke to her. Even the ones who didn’t, who held on to their resentment for the delay, eyeing her sullenly. She shrank from none of them.

Finally she got back into her car and the man, her savior, stepped into traffic to pause it while she backed up and pulled out. She drove slowly and carefully down Court Street, turned on Degraw, and parked the car back in the lot.

She was terrified of the car now, of the day, of what she may have done. She speed-dialed her obstetrician’s office, explained that she had been in a minor accident,
and was told to come in right away. Then she called Mike and waited for him to come get her. Eyes squeezed shut, she prayed to any god that would listen. Begging for the well-being of her babies.

Alice climbed into the passenger’s side of Mike’s black pickup truck. Thick slabs of oak were strapped onto the uncovered back.

“What happened?” The engine was revving but Mike didn’t drive. A streak of black grease ran haphazardly from his wrist halfway to his elbow, stopping abruptly. “Are you okay?”

Alice nodded, pulling the seat belt as long as it could go and buckling herself in. The truth was she didn’t know if she was okay. She was afraid to speak; they had lost an unborn child once before; she was twice a mother now; she should have known not to take any risks.

“Dr. Matteo’s waiting for me,” Alice said, stilling her voice against a strong undercurrent of distress.

“What
happened
?”

She waited until he began to drive. She wanted to get there, not talk. As they wove through the quiet morning streets of their neighborhood, she explained. Mike listened, his forehead taut, but he said nothing until she had finished. Then he reached out to gently touch her knee before sliding the stick shift into a higher gear for a green-light cruise along Clinton Street.

“I could have gotten your mother from the airport,” was all he said before they fell to silence. They both knew that. Alice had
wanted
to go. She shouldn’t have. It was that simple.

Dr. Sally Matteo’s waiting room at Long Island College
Hospital on Amity Street, where she kept morning hours once a week, was packed. Alice sat with Mike in a pair of unoccupied chairs. The dry warmth of his hand locked into hers had an almost narcotic effect on her, making her calm, sleepy.

They kept quiet in the high chatter of the crowded waiting room. It was a different crowd from the Pierrepont Street office where Alice always went for her scheduled appointments. Here the faces were darker,
people of color,
a description that always made her think of the red patent-leather Mary Janes she had insisted on wearing to parties as a little girl instead of the white ones she despised. She realized instantly that this was a different Brooklyn from the one where she lived. There were two Brooklyns and they were superimposed over each other, sometimes contradicting, sometimes obliterating each other, rarely in agreement. Here, girls and boys didn’t get many choices, people didn’t live in renovated brownstones or buy hand-sculpted pewter knobs. Here, poverty simmered on the streets, a breeding ground for common tragedies that were not reported by the media. Here, naivety like hers — to have expected so much from a greedy world — would be laughed at, ought to be laughed at. She saw herself white, shimmering, vacant in a sea of color. Pale and fading.

She couldn’t help hating herself, though she couldn’t say exactly why. It was just that Lauren was
gone
and she was still here. It made no sense at all. And what about Ivy? Was she alive? Was anyone caring for her?

Alice rubbed her eyes and exhaled.

Mike put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her close to him and kissed her lightly on the side of her head.

“We should call your mother,” he said.

“Right.” Alice dialed Lizzie’s cell number and listened to the slightly too-loud voice intone: “Lizzie Taylor here. I’m probably out buying diamonds. Leave a message.” She was nineteen when she married Alice’s father, Richard
Taylor, and had eagerly taken his name, transforming herself from Elizabeth Liptutz to Elizabeth Taylor with one gold ring.

“Better take a cab from the airport, Mom. I can’t come,” Alice said. “Everything’s all right. But take a cab and I’ll meet you at home.” She regretted saying everything was all right. It would only trigger her mother’s antenna since it was so clearly untrue.

A nurse appeared and brought them into an empty examination room. Alice was told to undress while they waited for Dr. Matteo, who arrived quickly. Mike sat in a chair against the wall at Alice’s side as she lay on the paper-covered padded bench. The doctor leaned over her, searching her eyes, checking for signs of concussion.

“I’m okay,” Alice said. “I think.”

“Let’s just find out.”

Dr. Matteo was an elegantly handsome woman who had once outlined her complicated lineage to Alice as Puerto Rican, Greek, Irish, French, Spanish, “and a few drops of Native American.” She was a true, rainbow-blooded American and a vintage New Yorker. The night Alice was in labor with Peter, Dr. Matteo had charged into the delivery room in a sleeveless black gown with a red-satin-lined black cape flung over her shoulders. She had been at the opera, and had been beeped for an emergency that had been contained. “I heard you were here,” she told Alice and Mike, then left the room, returning a few minutes later in her green surgical garb to take over the show.

Up close, Alice noticed the soft pucker of skin around the doctor’s mouth and realized she had rarely seen her without a smile.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Dr. Matteo said in a calm yet studied tone. “You got in an accident?”

“It was my fault,” Alice said, though here the statement had a different effect than on the bus. Dr. Matteo’s expression of concern broadened, pulling the lines farther across her face.

“Kids in school?”

What she was asking, of course, was if Nell and Peter had been with her in the car.

“Yes,” Alice answered. “I wasn’t going very fast. There really wasn’t any damage except a little bit to the car.”

“Wiggle back a little, okay?”

Alice inched back on the bench, her feet high in the dreaded stirrups, and held her breath as the doctor gently examined her, feeling and listening and peering. Her stethoscope searched the expanse of Alice’s stomach. Then she asked the nurse to bring in the ultrasound machine.

“Did you hear their heartbeats?” Alice asked.

“Shh,” was all Dr. Mateo said.

Alice closed her eyes and let the paper gown fall open. She heard the scrape of Mike’s chair as he arranged himself at a better angle to view the screen. The doctor squeezed cold gel onto Alice’s abdomen and smeared it around with the plastic-covered ultrasound wand. The nurse meanwhile switched on the machine and set the program to the correct attributes. She typed in the date and Alice’s name. Then she pressed a button and nodded.

Dr. Matteo slowly moved the goopy wand over Alice’s tummy, her attention fixed on the screen, which the nurse had swiveled toward her. She continued to shift the wand over the vaporous forms of the twins. The doctor remained thoughtful as she searched for heartbeats. Alice wanted these babies, had wanted them every day since the initial shock of twins had worn off. She could not be deterred from wanting them, even knowing all the work that lay ahead of her, because she also knew of the expansion of love that came with the bargain. And now, as the cold, gelatinous wand roamed her skin, she
needed
these babies as much as she wanted them. She needed their hope and their promise, needed to see their eyes smile at her for the first time, to feel their
tiny hands squeeze her fingers. It was
their
forgiveness she needed most of all; the forgiveness implicit in the fact of their life.

“Yes, the babies are fine,” Dr. Matteo said. “But you are not.”

Alice breathed in those words,
the babies are fine.
She looked at Mike and they shared a smile at the reprieve.

“I can’t sleep anymore,” Alice said. “I shouldn’t have been driving at all.”

“How long haven’t you been sleeping?”

“The last three nights. And I’ve been feeling sick, which is new for me.”

“You’re also a little dehydrated,” Dr. Matteo said. “Your amniotic fluid needs to be maintained. Have you been thirsty in this heat, not drinking enough?”

Alice didn’t know. Maybe she had been thirsty. Thirsty and hungry along with sick and tired. Maybe her body’s revolt these last few days had been stronger than she had even noticed. Strong enough to shut down her brain today, midtraffic, and steer her into a wrong turn.

“We lost a close friend of ours this week,” Mike said. He explained everything that had happened since Friday. Dr. Matteo listened gravely.

“Yes, I heard about that, but I didn’t know the woman was your friend. I’m sorry.”

“Lauren was my sister.” Alice began to cry. “Like a real sister.”

Dr. Matteo scrawled a prescription, tore it off the pad and handed it to Alice.

“You take this tonight and get into bed. Let’s start by sleeping; then we’ll see about the nausea.”

“Sleeping pills?” Alice looked at the doctor’s black scribble on the small white page. “Is this safe?”

“Perfectly safe. It’s very mild. It’ll make you and your babies sleepy, that’s all. But for you, Alice, it could make all the difference.”

As Alice’s eyes focused, elements of the scribble became decipherable. The doctor was right; she was delirious
and had to sleep. She would take just one pill, she decided, then put them aside unless she really needed them again.

Dr. Matteo tucked Alice’s file folder under her arm. “Alice, your job is to rest. Mike, you’re on duty tonight, dinner, kids, everything.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.” Mike took the prescription out of Alice’s hand, folding it with a sharp edge down the middle and slipping it into his T-shirt pocket. Beneath the stripe of grease on his forearm, Alice now noticed a thick, pulsing vein.

“My mother’s coming today.” Alice struggled to sitting and pulled the paper gown closed over her swollen middle. “She loves to take over.”