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From the street, Marley’s Gym looked abandoned. The bars over its small front windows caged spider webs as thick as cheese cloth. Graffiti artists had tagged the brick facing and carried right on over the plywood-reinforced front door. Rain dripped through the faded and torn vinyl awning and flowed to a permanent puddle in a low spot on the sidewalk. But the small lot around back was filled with new SUVs and luxury sedans. Del’s Lexus was often one of the more modest vehicles parked on the clean, but crumbling, blacktop. He’d been turned on to the gym by Doug Halling, now preparing for his third season with the Cubs. Over the winter Del had met several area minor leaguers, a pair of professional soccer players, and a former Olympic skier. All had come by referral of someone already working out there, which was the only ticket into Marley’s. And the only way most heard of it in the first place. Marley didn’t advertise. He’d have had to doctor things up for the cameras if he’d wanted to. The equipment belonged in a museum and the locker room smelled of Tilex and mildew. The gym’s utter lack of pretense was in actuality its chief selling point. No one came to Marley’s to preen.
Half a mile away, in a similarly decrepit warehouse, he would often encounter some of the same guys as he finished off his mornings with a long round in the batting cage and a turn on the junior-sized infield, where a pitching machine had been rigged to skip ground balls across artificial turf worn so thin it was patched in places with green spray paint.
His workouts had intensified since New Year’s as he prepared for spring training. Determined to not simply maintain his rookie performance, but better it, he incorporated medicine ball drills into his routine to improve his agility and explosiveness. Some days he found himself passing the weighted ball with little more effort than he would toss a basketball. Those workouts often corresponded with a flareup at home, where Dana’s unpredictable moods had him on constant alert, particularly in the morning when he’d wake to the sound of her retching in the bathroom.
When she told him she was pregnant the week before Christmas she swore him to secrecy, wanting to get through the holidays before they shared the news. She was a full eight weeks along when they finally informed their parents. Milo cried, Gwen advised him to “run for it,” and the Skoogs peddled advice on everything from diapers to daycare that neither he nor Dana were ready to process.
Dr. Quindlen, her OB/GYN, assured her the morning sickness was normal and would taper off after the first trimester. That the moodiness was also typical didn’t make it much easier on Del. Some nights she’d want to spoon on the couch all evening watching TV while they batted baby names back and forth. Other days she could barely seem to tolerate him being in the same room long enough to finish dinner. This morning he’d committed the unpardonable sin of telling her everything was all right when she complained painful cramps had kept her up half the night. Still fuming when she left for work, she screwed her lips together and turned her head when he ducked in to kiss her good-bye, as if she were dodging a lecherous uncle.
He was three miles into his warmup on the stationary bike before he let go of the slight. He finally achieved his desired state of nothingness—a completely blank mind—on the bench press, so perfectly in harmony with the bar he didn’t hear his phone ring on the floor beneath him. He missed the buzzing alert of the text message as well. It wasn’t until he sat up to swig from his drink bottle that he registered the ringing of what was Dana’s third call.
“Can you come get me?” She was borderline hysterical and almost impossible to understand. “Something’s wrong. I need to see Dr. Quindlen.”
Without showering, he dressed and drove to her office, where she was watching out the window of the lobby as he pulled to the curb. The receptionist at the clinic whisked them in, and they were met by an ultrasound technician named Brenda who led them back to the same exam room where ten days earlier they had heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time. It sounded like a horse galloping through a train tunnel when they played back the recording Dana made on her phone. He had found her listening to it several times since, whispering and smiling, once even crying.
Dana reclined on the exam table with her sweater bunched up around her breasts and the waistband of her pants rolled down to her hips. Only a furrowed brow creased Brenda’s poker face as she ran a device that looked like a plastic salt shaker attached to a coiled telephone cord over Dana’s stomach. The shew-shew-shew sound emitted by the fetal Doppler grew louder or softer as it navigated the stretch of milky white skin, but no hoof beats were detected. Del clasped Dana’s left hand in both of his and pleaded under his breath for that a-ha moment when the tech would smile and exclaim, “There it is.” Dana’s tears leaked out the corners of her closed eyes and ran down into her ears.
“Sometimes they like to hide on us,” Brenda said, in a voice that was meant to sound reassuring. “I’m going to go get the mobile ultrasound, and we’ll find that little love bug. Be right back.”
Dana nodded and reached her free arm up across her face to blot her eyes with her sleeve.
“She’ll find him,” Del said. “Or her. Could be a her.”
But he didn’t believe that any more than Dana did.
Brenda rolled in a cart, on top of which sat a computer with a large flat-screen monitor. She snatched a bottle of turquoise gel from a basket next to the keyboard and popped the top. “This will feel a little cold,” she said. Dana flinched when it hit her belly and again when the ultrasound probe made contact. She glanced up at the screen, then closed her eyes again. The black and white image looked like a lunar landscape. Through valleys and canyons Brenda searched, finally locating the rounded skull and tiny body of a sleeping baby. She magnified the view, honing in on the torso. In and out she zoomed until Del was dizzy from watching. Then she picked up the phone on the cart and said softly, “Marie, can you send Dr. Quindlen in to Exam Room Three, please?”
“What is it?” Del asked.
“I’m not detecting any cardiac activity. I need Dr. Quindlen’s eyes.”
Dana’s slow, forced breathing erupted into short, hard bursts that lifted her chest off the table. “My baby.” Mucus and saliva flew from her mouth as she wailed. “My baby.”
Dr. Quindlen entered, scrubbed her hands in the stainless steel sink next to the door, and accepted the probe from Brenda. As Dana writhed beneath her, she relocated the fetus on the big screen and punched a series of keys on the keyboard to enlarge the image. With a grim nod, she handed the probe back to her tech.
“I’m so sorry, Dana.” She was in her mid-fifties and had enough practice breaking such news that it came out coated in professional empathy. Her long auburn hair, accented by the occasional gray strand, was channeled through a punched-leather band and hung down the back of her white lab coat. She may have been pretty once, but time had deepened the hollows in her cheeks and around her eyes to the point she looked slightly skeletal at the wrong angle. Or maybe that was only when she had morbid news to share.
“When she’s had a moment to collect herself,” the doctor said to Del, “I’ll see her in my office.”
Del pointed dumbly at his own chest. “Me too?”
“Yes, of course. It’s a left out of here, second door on the right.”
Brenda toweled the blue gel off Dana’s stomach and followed the doctor out the door, leaving Del to stare at the still image on the monitor of his might-have-been child while Dana sobbed into a handful of Kleenex. He hadn’t really wanted a baby yet, or at least hadn’t given it any thought before Dana told him she was pregnant. Starting a family was so far off his radar he hadn’t even contemplated birth control. He just assumed she was on the pill, particularly given how committed she was to her career at Stearns and Rychuk. Yet this baby had quickly outstripped everything else on her priority list. Even him. Which actually pleased him in light of the odd bond he shared with Gwen. And for as much as he loved Milo, he wanted his boy to grow up with a different father-son dynamic. Or daughter, he would constantly remind himself. Could be a girl.
Could have been a girl. Might have been a girl. Who could tell? He reached over Dana’s legs and shut the monitor off.
Down the hall, Dr. Quindlen handed them some pamphlets with titles like “What do I do now?,” “Where to find support,” and “Why did this happen?” She explained how the body would likely expel the fetal remains on its own, or if Dana preferred not to wait she could schedule a procedure to do it proactively by essentially vacuuming out the uterus. Del held his wife’s hand and answered for her. “We’ll talk about it.” They wouldn’t, he knew. Dana would read about it and decide on her own, assuming nature didn’t beat her to it.
“One more thing I’m going to recommend,” Dr. Quindlen said. “Considering your history, Dana, I think we should run some tests.”
Holding her head in her hands with her index fingers damming what tears were left, Dana nodded.
“What—what history?” Del asked.
“Any time there are multiple failures we like to do some blood work. On both of you. As well as a semen analysis. It can help us determine if there’s a common factor that we can work around going forward.”
Del looked from the doctor to his wife. Her reddened eyes darted from the floor to the wall, then withdrew into their puffed and swollen lids.
“Take your time,” Dr. Quindlen said. “I have another couple to see.”
The door closed behind her leaving the hum of the fluorescent light above and the muffled voices of a conversation on the other side of the wall as the only sounds in the room.
“What did she mean by that?” Del asked.
“It’s not my first miscarriage,” Dana said into her hands without looking up.
“Yeah, I get that part. Whose was it?”
Dana pulled a tissue from the side pocket of her purse, folded it in squares, and dabbed at her eye.
“What, was it Mike’s? Was there someone before him? I mean, it doesn’t really matter, I guess. It’s not my business, probably. But it’s no point testing me if—”
“It was yours,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“What?”
“I was two weeks pregnant when we broke up. You were in Mexico by the time I knew.”
“You weren’t going to tell me? Well, you didn’t tell me, so obviously you weren’t.”
“I would have.” Dana’s brows grew tight and low over her annoyed eyes. “Of course I would have. I just needed time. I didn’t figure you’d come home—”
“I might have.”
“Why? You would have been home in December anyway. You wouldn’t have missed anything, really.”
“Sounds like I missed it all.”
“I was trying to find the right way to bring it up,” she said, punctuating the statement with a pained smirk. “You know how difficult that can be sometimes, don’t you?”