I hang up and dial 911. I’m conscious of Penny listening to me as I give them the salient details. The lady on the other end sounds fat and bored, but I appreciate her gruff efficiency. When I hang up, I look at Penny, still beside me, looking pretty and lost. “I’m sorry. We have to go.”
“So I gathered,” she says, not quite looking at me.
I stand up and fuss with Cole’s stroller while Penny softly wakes up Ryan and stands him up.
“So, your wife is pregnant. It’s yours?”
“Yeah.”
“That seems like a pretty important piece of information to have shared, maybe.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m still processing it myself.” I turn to head toward the park exit, but Penny stays where she is.
“I think I’ll stay,” she says.
“What?”
She shrugs. “Unless you need my help getting them to the car.”
“What? No. That’s fine, but I mean, how will you get home?”
“I’ll call a car service later. It’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. There’s nowhere I need to be.”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.”
She shakes her head and smiles sadly. “I don’t think you will, Judd Foxman.” She steps forward and kisses my cheek. “I hope everything turns out okay.”
I look at her, wondering what it is about her that makes me want to simultaneously devote my life to her and get as far away from her as I can possibly get.
“Penny.”
“You have to go.”
Ryan grabs on to the side of the stroller and we start making our way down the wide fairway toward the exit. When I turn around, Penny’s back on the bench, listening to the band, tapping her foot to the beat and looking off toward the bandstand, or maybe past it. I look back every so often to watch her fade into the distance, which, I realize now, is what I’d been doing all along.
Chapter 38
4:10 p.m.
I
drop the kids back at Knob’s End, and then Phillip drives me over to the hospital in the Porsche. He drops me off at the emergency room and then goes to find parking. Jen is lying on a gurney behind some curtains, while a resident runs a probe over her belly. I remember this like it was yesterday, the last one to arrive, the tears in Jen’s eyes, her gel-coated stomach bloated with our dead baby.
Not again. Please.
“There’s no heartbeat,” she says, and starts to cry.
“The baby’s in a tough spot to get a read,” the resident says. She is a rotund woman with bulging eyes and no discernible lips. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“I’m sorry, Judd,” Jen sobs, reaching out for me. She grabs my hand before I can avoid her and pulls it over her mouth, crying onto it. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Just try to relax.” I find myself stroking her hair with my free hand. I go to this place where I’m totally present, but I’m also thinking that forty minutes ago I was walking through an amusement park with Penny, holding her hand, kissing the cotton candy off her lips. I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.
“I can’t believe this is happening again,” Jen gurgles. Her tears are hot on my fingertips. The resident continues to move the probe around. I can’t believe we’re here doing this again, losing another baby. Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.
“I deserve this,” Jen says. “I do.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“What I did to you . . .” She looks up at me, her features slashed with regret. “I ruined us.”
“Listen!” the resident says sharply. We turn to her, and then we hear it through the static, a fast, rhythmic, robotic swish.
“What’s that?” I say, but of course I know. I’ve done this before.
“It’s your baby’s heartbeat.”
“It sounds so fast,” Jen says.
“To you, maybe,” the resident says. “It sounds just fine to me.”
On the gurney, Jen closes her eyes and cries with relief, still clinging to my hand. With my free hand, I wipe away my own tears before she can see them.
“So why was she bleeding?” I say.
“It could be any number of benign reasons. I’ve paged the ob-gyn on call. Someone will be down in a minute. But the baby doesn’t seem to be in any distress.”
“Wait,” I say when she lifts the probe off Jen. “Can we listen for another minute?”
The resident flashes a kind, lipless smile and pulls out some kind of canvas belt gadget from a drawer and wraps it around Jen’s belly. Then she leaves, and it’s just Jen and me, listening to the frantic, throbbing heartbeat of our unborn child. She looks at me with shining wet eyes and smiles. “That’s our baby,” she says, beaming.
“He sounds nervous.”
She laughs. “Wouldn’t you be?”
We listen for a little longer.
Beat, swish, beat, swish, beat, swish.
“Judd,” Jen says, not quite looking at me. “We can do this, right?”
And this is where I stop regretting the way things should have been the first time I heard my baby’s heartbeat. This is where I surrender to the magic of it all, the karmic appropriateness of becoming a father right now, when I’ve just lost my own. And maybe I do feel something; it’s hard to say, because we’ve only just begun to try the moment on for size when the curtains fly open and Wade steps in, effectively murdering the moment and all the ones to follow.
4:45 p.m.
THE LAST TIME I saw Wade, I attacked him with an office chair. The time before that, I jammed a lit cheesecake up his ass and almost burned his balls off. So it’s understandable that his first reaction upon seeing me is to flinch and assume a defensive posture. He stands in the doorway looking uncertainly at me, then moves past me self-consciously to approach Jen on the gurney. “You okay, babe?” he says. There are guys who can pull off “babe.” I’m not one of them. Wade is, and I mean that in the worst possible way. I start scanning the shelves for sharp objects. “I got here as fast as I could. My GPS messed me up.”
“I’m fine,” Jen says.
“Good. Good.” He rubs her shoulder lightly and then stops, too aware of me in the room. There’s no choice but to turn and face me.
“Hey, Judd. How’s it going?”
“It’s going swell, Wade.”
There’s a knock on the door, and a bearded doctor enters the room, carrying Jen’s chart.
“Jennifer Foxman?”
“Yes,” she says.
My last name, still attached to her, is a kick in the crotch.
“I’m Doctor Rausch, from ob-gyn.” He turns to Wade. “Mr. Foxman?”
“No,” Wade says.
“I’m Mr. Foxman,” I say.
“Nice to meet you,” Doctor Rausch says perfunctorily, before looking at Wade. “And you are?”
“He’s my wife’s lover.”
“Shit, Judd,” Jen says, covering her eyes. “Not now.”
“Wade Boulanger,” Wade says, extending his hand. “It’s complicated.”
“Not the radio jock.”
“I’m afraid so.”
Doctor Rausch smiles. “My wife hates you.”
“The wives generally do.”
“Not mine, unfortunately,” I say.
Doctor Rausch looks at me like I’m spoiling his good time. “Okay,” he says, pulling some latex gloves out of his pocket. “I’ve got an ulcer and a long shift to get through. Whatever’s going on here, you’re not going to make it my problem. You two can wait outside.”
“But I’m the father,” I say.
“Congratulations. Now get the hell out of my exam room.”
4:55 p.m.
“SO, THIS IS some predicament we find ourselves in,” Wade says.
We are standing against the wall in the crowded waiting room. There is what appears to be an entire Little League team and their parents sitting around, waiting for an injured teammate. Two construction workers prop up a third whose foot is wrapped in a blood-soaked towel. On a small television mounted too high for effective viewing, someone is cooking a soufflé.
“This predicament, as you call it, is my life. My family.”
“Jen is my family too now.”
“Jen is where you’re presently parking your cock.”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“I’m not, you dumb shit. I’m talking about you.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you’re shooting blanks.”
“Fuck you.”
“Um, excuse me, guys,” one of the Little League dads says, indicating the children present. But this train has already left the station.
“I know you pretty much fuck anyone who will have you. You fuck the interns, you fuck the sales reps, you fuck the sponsors, or, in one case that I know of, the sponsor’s daughter, who at the time was not quite eighteen yet, was she? I know you won’t last with Jen, because the last thing you want is to be saddled with someone else’s kid. I know you’ve been praying for a miscarriage ever since you got the call and that now you’re weighing your options, looking for the fastest way out of this mess. I know you want to think that underneath it all you’re really a decent guy, but you’re not so sure, are you, and for what it’s worth I can pretty much confirm for you that underneath it all, you’re not a decent guy at all. You’re just an empty soul, devoid of any real substance. So you’ll keep getting laid and getting paid to be the voice of the lowest common denominator, until, as inconceivable as it seems, someone even lower then you comes along, and then you’ll get old and obscure, and you’ll die alone.”
It’s safe to say we’ve got everyone’s attention now. The Little League parents are horrified. The kids can barely contain their exhilaration that a grown-up said “fuck” so many times in one sentence. The construction guys are unimpressed.
“You feel better now?” Wade says with a shit-eating grin.
“Not even a little.”
“That’s too bad. It was a good speech.”
“Let’s just not talk, okay? Can we do that?”
“I didn’t turn her, Judd,” Wade says. “I didn’t seduce her or come on to her, or anything.”
“And by not talking I meant exactly what you’re doing right now.”
“She was lonely and angry and lost, and I didn’t do that to her. You did that, all by yourself.”
“And you saw an opening.”
“Yes, I did. I’ll admit it. She’s beautiful, and I’m human. I crossed the line. But I didn’t fuck her any more than she fucked me. It takes two, my friend. And believe me, no one was more surprised than me when it became something more. So you can go on hating me for it; I certainly would if I were you. But she came after me, Judd. Not the other way around. She came after me. You know that’s true, and that’s the thing you can’t get past.”
“That doesn’t make me want you any less dead.”
“Yeah, well, get in line.”
And that’s when I decide to hit him. I’ve already assaulted him twice before, but neither time was really that satisfying. I need the intimacy of direct violence, the blunt force of bone on bone. But moving from conversation to violence is just as hard as moving from flirting to kissing. There’s that leap you have to take, to shed your inhibitions and expose your naked impulses.
This is how I do it. I bridge the distance between us by pointing at him and saying, “You don’t get it, you dumb bastard,” until my finger is inches from his eye. He swats the finger away, as expected, and that’s my trigger. But I’ve used my right hand to point, so it’s my weaker, less reliable left hand that swings around with the punch, and Wade reflexively turns away, so that my fist glances impotently off his goddamn shoulder. “Asshole!” he shouts, and shoves me back against the wall, not attacking back, just kind of getting me off of him. But that’s when Phillip finally shows up, and all Phillip sees is Wade shoving me, so he steps in and coldcocks Wade with a high arcing punch he learned from watching mixed martial arts matches on television. The punch hits Wade in the nose and he goes down hard. Phillip stands over him with one foot on his chest and says, “Call my brother an asshole again.”
A fat security guard materializes and pins Phillip’s arms behind him. A second one comes up behind me, grabbing my arm tightly. “Let’s go,” he says, and they hustle us toward the exit.
“My wife is in there.”
“We’ll deal with it outside.”
It’s raining outside, a hard rain that makes a racket against the fiberglass awning of the emergency room. The guards release us beside a parked ambulance. They hold a quick, whispered conversation, and then one of them heads back inside. The other, a large black man with a shaved head and thirty-inch forearms, turns back to us. “Is that the
Man Up
guy in there?”
“That’s him,” I say.
“Which one of y’all hit him?”
“Nobody hit him, he just fell,” Phillip says.
The guard smiles widely and extends his hand. “Shake my hand, man. I hate that loudmouth motherfucker.”
Phillip shrugs and shakes his hand. “And if you hadn’t pulled me off of him when you did, I’d have really kicked his ass.”
5:20 p.m.
PHILLIP DOESN’T QUITE remember where he parked, so we get soaked walking around the lot. When he finally locates the Porsche, it’s parked a few cars away from Wade’s silver Maserati, with its MAN UP vanity plate. Before I have time to talk myself out of it, I climb up onto the roof of the car and jump up and down on it, screaming obscenities into the rain like a madman. I jump up and land hard on my knees, feeling the metal crumple satisfyingly beneath me. Phillip pops the trunk of the Porsche and pulls out an L-shaped tire iron. “Here,” he says, tossing it up to me. “Go crazy.”
But I’m suddenly out of steam. I slide down the front windshield and sit on the hood. Phillip joins me, and we sit there in silence for a few seconds as the rain pummels us.
“I miss Dad,” I say.