Landis, Corrine
JOURNAL ENTRY 08

A gangly Ziz doctor leads the other four girls out of the room for routine checkups. He moves about the beds buoyantly, bobbing his head and flicking his thin tail behind him. When I attempt to stand, I'm asked to stay behind for an important briefing, which is just as well because the pain of trying to move is nearly unbearable. Then, just like that, Jonathan steps into the room.

His face is every bit as vacant as it was that day in the conference room, and there's a tangible chill in the air as he approaches my bed, wheeling the ultrasound equipment beside him, cold gaze fixed on me. I can only imagine what my expression might have been; there aren't enough words to describe the mixture of emotions soaking me like molten lava. Never taking his eyes off of me, he sits on the edge of the bed, and I instinctively scoot away from him, afraid to make contact. There's a silent moment that feels like hours but is probably just a few seconds, and he reaches for the hem of my hospital gown with a latex-gloved hand. I cower away, still staring into his blank eyes. He pauses, hand in the air, then reaches again and I let him lift the gown over my swollen stomach.

He eyes the tightly inflated sphere of my belly, and there's a momentary glint of some reaction, perhaps disgust. He then twists the cap from a tube of ultrasound jelly and makes a looping discharge of the goo across my skin. Each movement amplified by the silence in the room, like lifting a megaphone to all the menial noises: brushing fabric, joints popping softly, breathing, swallowing. My heart is racing so intensely I'm afraid he can hear it. Then he speaks.

"The other women aren't looking so good," he says flatly, like a doctor or maybe a ghost. He squints at the sonogram projecting on the small screen. "So far, you're fine. We're going to move you into the delivery room. It could be any time now." He puts the equipment away and adds as he removes his gloves with loud snaps: "I'm not a doctor, but most of this is a trial-and-error guessing game. It's a hypothesis."

My mouth begins to salivate the way it does before you vomit, and in another moment I am, vomiting I mean. But not the way you'd imagine, it's a terrible word-vomit. I don't even know where it's coming from or who's crafting the words. They just spill out like an endless ribbon being torn from a magician's sleeve. Everything I had felt since the day I ruined our marriage, even the things I hadn't acknowledged myself yet, they're cascading out of me like an exorcism.

I tell him how racked with regret I've been, how miserable, how suicidal. I tell him I would turn the entire planet upside down to take back that one horrible mistake. I tell him there are no excuses for my wretchedness, only razor-sharp, omnipresent guilt and regret. I tell him it was a mistake, a selfish, inhuman mistake. I tell him I've been to Hell and back and there is no force in existence that could ever make me behave so foolishly again. Not in a million years.

I'm bawling. I don't even know how much of it he can understand. It feels like tearing away the world's biggest band-aid only to expose an unhealed, oozing gash below the bandage.

And like a statue, he sits there through my entire outpour without moving, blinking, or reacting in any way.

"Remember Disneyland?" I ask, choking on the tremors in my throat. "And our Christmases? Remember, John?"

Something in his face changes. He looks away, off into the room, at nothing in particular. Nothing stirs the air other than my sobbing. My eyelids ache from being pulled open so taut, my face poised in anticipation, my heart exploding inside me.

"Yes," he says softly. "I do remember." And for a split second, like a drifting vapor, a smile appears on his face and vanishes just as quickly. He stands and heads for the exit.

"Jonathan!" I cry out, extending an arm toward him. "Please, Jonathan."

He slows his pace slightly and pauses at the door.

"Is there anything..." I whimper. "Is there any way to make it right? I will do anything. Is there anything?"

With his back still facing me, he says, "I don't know." And leaves the room.