Alligators May Be Present: A Novel

I Heard the Heartbeat

195 W as Glassman to blame? Was it all his fault? So obsessed was he with his own poor performance at the Feins that he didn’t give more than a passing thought to Rebecca’s upset stomach. Such a load of damaged goods was he that he effectively kept his wife from thinking of herself for even one precious moment. He had greedily allowed her to come along to protect him without even thinking that she was the one who more legitimately required protection. Protection and rest. Not the stress of spending an evening as his emotional bodyguard. So was Glassman to blame? “Noooo! Oh noooo!” Rebecca shrieked from the bathroom that night, waking Glassman from his sleep. In a flash, he was wide awake, as if he hadn’t even been asleep just seconds before. It was still pitch black outside. He knew immediately what was wrong. What else could it be? He had never heard Rebecca wail before. She was experiencing , he thought, a previously untapped emotion. At least one he had never seen her experience before. It frightened him. He rushed to the door of the bathroom. Rebecca looked up at him, tears in her eyes. Had he ever seen her cry before? She was bracing herself against the vanity, her cotton underpants just above her knees, half-soaked in blood. Blood! I Heard the Heartbeat “I’m bleeding, Matt! I’m bleeding,” she cried, her terror giving way gradually to sadness. She seemed to be leaning there out of inertia more than anything else. She didn’t know what else to do. “Here, get those off,” he pleaded with her, trying his best to be helpful. “Go lie on the bed. I’ll call Dr. Arias’s answering service.” Rebecca complied. He had the number in a card in his wallet just next to the ultrasound photograph, folded into quarters. He turned on the light, found the card easily and dialed the number, then entered their number into the machine. As he hung up the phone, gingerly, he noticed the time on the nightstand clock: 4:48 a.m. Rebecca had grown silent. She was sitting up in the bed, bolt upright , crying softly now. She had already made her own diagnosis. “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Are you in pain?” She shrugged. Told him she didn’t want anything. Glassman rushed to the family room to retrieve a recently purchased book. “Here, here!” Glassman pointed frantically at a page in the center of the book as he burst back into the room. “It says that spotting’s okay! Maybe everything’s okay!” Glassman tried to convince Rebecca . And himself. But they both knew better. Even Troy, who Glassman just noticed, seemed to know better. He lay still on the carpet, his head half hidden in his outstretched forelegs, a mournful look on his face. The phone suddenly rang (just as Glassman began wondering whether they should go to the emergency room) and Rebecca answered it quickly. “I’m bleeding,” he heard Rebecca explain. “No, it’s much more than that . . . yes, like my period . . . more even . . . no, just blood that I can see . . . no, well maybe just a little . . . yes, I can wait . . . uh huh . . . uh huh . . . I know . . . thank you . . . see you soon.” “Well?” Glassman asked after Rebecca returned the phone to the cradle gently. “What did she say?” “She said that I’m most likely having a miscarriage, and that there was nothing that she could do to reverse it even if it were just starting. . . .” 196 197 She said this all with complete calm. Glassman marveled at his wife’s powers of recovery. She was a rock. He had always thought this about her, realized that her possession of this quality he so utterly lacked accounted in no small part for her pull over him. But he had never seen it so convincingly demonstrated. “She said that it’s not our fault. That it’s increasingly common. Up to 40 percent of all conceptions, which seems sort of high to me . . . I think she might be exaggerating a little to make us feel better.” “She’s a doctor, honey. She wouldn’t exaggerate. Is she going to meet us at her office?” Glassman was already reaching into his drawer for his jeans. “No, she said I could go to the emergency room, but I told her...