States of Emergency

Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm"

—Bob Dylan, "Shelter from the Storm"

All morning I hear, "Have a nice day."

If I were another writer, say the Writer Before, I would prop those words up for their irony, all these insincere and insensitive people who know nothing about my day. The receptionist at the clinic checkout desk. The shuttle van driver dropping me at the parking garage. The man in a wheelchair on the elevator, his cast-stiffened leg bumping the aluminum wall as his daughter gently adjusts the chair so the door will close.

But I am this writer, grateful now for every scrap of simple human warmth. How many people don't tell me to have a nice day, don't even look at me as I negotiate the massive urban hospital, asking for directions at every intersecting hallway? I think of my runaway stepdaughter who left on her bed an envelope addressed to no one containing a letter explaining nothing. Three months later she can't be bothered to respond to brief emails asking after her well-being, and she doesn't ask about us. I want more people in this world who want me to have a nice day.

Because it won't be.

I'm driving an hour and a half home to find my husband between classes to tell him the bad news, and then I'm preparing for a meeting, moving through the rest of the day like it's normal. Still, some strangers—even if they're just being polite—want me to have a nice day.

________

I'd felt dread and anxiety from the beginning of the week. That's not something I'm making up to fit the facts afterwards. My daily morning writing testifies to this, even noting two seemingly foretelling dreams the night before the sonogram: in one, my sonogram reveals a cartoon baby—two-dimensional line drawing with wide open eyes and a diaper. And a cartoon doctor with white coat and stethoscope tells me there's a strange bulge in the abdomen that could be a problem.

In the other dream fragment, the more ominous one, I am watching a pair of robins preparing to lay eggs on our deck without even a nest for protection, and I'm rapping on the window, waving my arms, trying—unsuccessfully—to scare them off so they'll pick a place more hospitable for their young. This place, not safe.

As soon as the technician positions the wand and points out my strained, overfilled bladder, like a white balloon at dusk, I'm already looking further down the screen for a glimpse of my third baby. I know in an instant that what I see is wrong.

No movement. Not even that curled-up, big-headed tadpole shape. The technician says, "Looks like we're too early." She points out the fetal pole, and I know, because I've obsessed over week-by-week sample sonograms on the Internet, that we should be well past that. I know, when the program generates an age based on measurements of only 7 weeks 2 days, that even then, I should see a primitive, pulsing heart. And there is nothing but a sac and a motionless stick with knobs on either end floating like a dead capsule in outer space.

I say with spooky, unreal calm, "Isn't it more likely that it just stopped developing?"

"I'm not jumping to any conclusions," she answers tersely. But I've already leapt into the chasm of conclusions, and when she suggests a transvaginal ultrasound for a better look, I say no. I want to preserve some dignity.

I move through the maze of hospital hallways, stiff, propelling myself forward on frozen legs that simulate walking. I find my car, pay the parking garage attendant, drive 48 miles in heavy traffic back to work. It is a sunny day for February in western Pennsylvania: a rare, glistening day between heavy, city-crippling snowstorms. I am cold, matter...