My Shining Lot

I.

We awoke early the morning of the appointment. The sunlight reflecting off the yellowing leaves outside cast a jaundiced glow into our bedroom. Twice Kara dreamt of miscarrying. She went out into the living space to gather her things. I put my clothes on and met her in the kitchen.
                 “Could you get mine?” she asked, nodding toward the wall. I pulled our bikes down from their hooks as she swung the apartment door wide. We exchanged a glance before shouldering our bikes and descending. 
                Behind a pair of double doors, a nurse handed Kara a urine sample cup and directed her to a nearby bathroom while I waited outside. The hallway had a long bank of windows with a view of several of Manhattan’s downtown high-rises. I was snapping a photo of the Frank Gehry skyscraper for an architect friend when the same nurse stuck her head out of a nearby office.
                “You know, you can wait in the room behind you.” she said. 
                “Thanks. I’m just admiring the view.” I said, flashing a smile. I looked back and saw Kara opening the door. I followed her in. 
                Kara put on a large, burgundy robe and settled herself onto the exam bed. Though the stirrups were pulled out from the end, she had let her bare legs dangle over the edge. Her pigeon-toed feet hung slack, her big toes nearly touching. She looked child-like and vulnerable.
                I took my phone out and started reading the news, though I only managed to get through several sentences before losing focus. I opened another app on my phone and began browsing for a coffee carafe and some tennis balls. As I reviewed the order in my cart, I suddenly felt ridiculous—negligent, even. Here I was online shopping while my wife sat on that table in an ill-fitting gown, nervously awaiting news of the life form growing inside her. The scales struck me as so uneven—the physical burden of the pregnancy falling squarely on her shoulders. I slid my phone back in my pocket.
                We could hear muffled voices from the room over. A woman summoned from the reception area at the same time as us had gone in there. After fifteen minutes we overheard an exchange of goodbyes. I got up and weighed myself on the scale against the wall to my right. Kara laughed and told me to knock it off. I had just stepped off when we heard a knock at the door.
                “Come in,” Kara said. 
                Dr. Chen entered the room. She was a slight woman, wearing a white lab coat and glasses. The nurse we had seen earlier came in and dimmed the lights. It felt like the movies. The show was about to begin. 
                Dr. Chen held out the ultrasound wand and the nurse applied a translucent gel to the end of it. Once she had placed the wand inside Kara, it took Dr. Chen maybe ten seconds to zero-in on a dark oval, which she then centered on the monitor to Kara’s right. She began measuring the mass by clicking on one end and dragging a yellow, dotted line across to the other. The stillness of the oval worried me. When I finally tore my eyes away and looked at Kara, tears were already welling in her eyes. 
                Dr. Chen gestured toward the monitor and mentioned something about the measurement of the oval being that of a seven-week-old embryo. We knew Kara was eight weeks along. The nurse handed me a box of tissues, that perennial token of condolence. I took one and handed it to Kara. She held my hand as Dr. Chen said she was going to refer us to a hospital across the street for another scan. There was a small chance a more experienced technician there might find a heartbeat. 
                She and the nurse left the room and Kara got dressed. I walked over to her as she sat on the bed and held her close and told her that everything was going to be okay–that she was going to be okay. 
                “I know that,” she said. “I just want the baby to be okay.”
                I didn’t know how to respond. 
                We had an hour and a half to kill before our appointment at the hospital. I entered “diner” into Google Maps and found one within walking distance just off Fulton Street. The mid-morning sunlight was stark, and the street was alive with construction workers, delivery men, sightseers, business people, students, trucks, vans, taxis, scooters, all moving to and fro. The activity left me feeling distant and alienated. I was a tourist in Normal Land. 
                We found the diner at the base of a low-rise apartment block. A host directed us to a booth next to a bank of large windows where we sat opposite each other. 
                When our food came out, the tink of silverware against my plate was the only noise coming from our table. I stole several glances at Kara, who was staring off into the middle distance, barely touching her bagel. I could only watch as the sadness mounted in her: the strain on her face, her knitted brow, her hunched shoulders, her downcast eyes. I felt powerless against such a swell of emotion.
                I broke the silence by asking Kara what time she was scheduled to fly out to Seattle the next morning. She had planned to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in Washington with her sister, Liz, and her brother-in-law, Nathan. The couple had just had their first child. A girl: Iyla. I had planned to stay back in New York but the arrangement struck me as impossible now. I didn’t want her to experience the aftermath of the miscarriage without me, to have to endure the physical reminder of the loss alone. I didn’t care how much it cost. 
                Kara went to the bathroom. A series of Top 40 songs from the past twenty years played over the diner’s sound system. The music seemed so trivial and vapid. Auditory ornamentation. Hot air. A song by Ed Sheeran came on and I grew angry when I found the chord progression bringing tears to my eyes. The sense of sadness surged like a wave. I felt the morning’s events had eroded something in me–had made me more sensitive to my immediate environment. My emotions were now at the whim of some shitty pop song. I pursed my lips and tried to think of something else. 
                We took a seat on a pier at the South Street Seaport and watched a moored ship rise and fall with the movements of the East River. I rested my cheek on Kara’s shoulder while she wrapped her arm around my back. I heard the wind blowing, the rush of traffic over the FDR, the murmur of distant conversation. Kara’s denim jacket was warm and coarse against my face. We sat that way in silence for several minutes and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more at one with another person. There we were: quiet, the sun pouring down on us on a glorious autumn day, and in that moment I felt an inexplicable stillness unlike any I’d experienced before. 
                Despite Dr. Chen’s tempering of our expectations, I still held onto the slim hope that the technicians at the hospital would find a heartbeat. Stepping into the sonogram room, my breathing shallowed. Kara got undressed and settled herself on the bed with a blue sheet draped across her lap. A nurse came in and dimmed the lights and removed the wand from the portable monitor. 
                The nurse inserted the wand and focused the device’s sensor on the same oval we had seen a couple hours earlier. It looked no different: a blackish gradient contrasting with the TV-static gray of the background. The nurse performed the same measurements, pulled the same yellow dotted line across the same dormant mass. The monitor displayed intermittent splotches of red and blue—indicating the speed and direction of blood flow—near the edges of the frame. The whole thing was incomprehensible to me. I would have been better off deciphering Mandarin. 
                The nurse captured several stills from the moving image and zoomed in, conducting herself without a word. It was maddening. I yearned for any indication that a heartbeat had been uncovered. I pleaded with the machine to detect a sign of life. It was the purest form of prayer I had undertaken in years. Yet as each minute passed, the actions the nurse took on the computer screen made the stillness of the embryo more and more apparent. She snapped a few final stills from the monitor and removed the wand. As she left, she told us she would consult with a doctor to confirm the miscarriage and have him come speak with us. 
                Back at the OBGYN’s office, Dr. Chen had laid out three options for handling the miscarriage. The first was to allow the lost pregnancy to pass of its own accord. The second used a combination of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, to precipitate the release of the pregnancy tissue from Kara’s uterus. If effective, the drugs would give her a degree of agency in the initiation of the release of the tissue, and allow her to avoid the third, more invasive option: a procedure known as suction dilation and curettage, or a D&C. This surgery would involve the opening of Kara’s cervix and the removal of the pregnancy tissue using a suction device. Though it was arguably the riskiest option for managing the miscarriage, the D&C would allow for the release of the lost pregnancy in one fell swoop, as opposed to the two other options, which could drag out for days or weeks. Given her travel plans, Kara went with the drug option.

II.

We landed at the Seattle-Tacoma airport in the early afternoon, which left us with several hours to kill before our evening train ride to Leavenworth, the small mountain town where Liz and Nathan lived. We spent our free time in a daze, distracting ourselves with the simple pleasures we had derived from the city on previous visits: a steaming bowl of pho in Chinatown, a proper hunt through the shelves of the Goodwill on the far side of Interstate 5, bubble tea ordered on a whim at sunset. By the time we boarded Amtrak’s Empire Builder we had reached a pleasant state of exhaustion. 
                As our train plodded northward out of the city, the last of the sunlight glowed red and purple over the hills on the islands across the sound, throwing the silhouettes of the peaks and crests into starker relief along the horizon. The lights of the distant islands, just pinpricks of orange in the growing dark, twinkled beneath the blaze of the day’s dying light.
                The train traced a bend in the tracks before barreling headlong into the Cascade Mountains. Kara dozed to my left while I listened in on the conversations around me. The announcement of our stop over the intercom surprised me. 
                Stepping off the train, I braced myself against the chill air. I looked to my left and saw Liz standing alone on the platform in a cone of white light. Only a year before, she had experienced a miscarriage of her own. It had devastated her. She ran to Kara and took her sister into her arms. Liz’s down coat muffled Kara’s sobs. My breath stuck in my throat and I looked away. 
                We loaded our bags into the trunk of Liz’s car and drove to her place. She and Nathan, a semi-pro rock climber with long hair and kind eyes, rented a one-bedroom apartment above a garage. Some friends of theirs lived in the property’s main house across the driveway. By a stroke of luck, the couple and their children had left for the holiday just before our arrival. The place was all ours. 
                Liz showed us to our room in the main house. As I looked around, I saw that the home’s decor hewed to the muted bourgeois aesthetic typical of the era: off-white walls and carpets, pale gray couches, stainless steel appliances, blonde hardwood floors and cabinetry. The whole space seemed drained of color. We were exhausted from traveling and quickly settled into the ground floor’s front bedroom, which Liz had prepared for its proximity to the bathroom. While Kara changed into her pajamas, I went out for a cigarette. 
                When I walked back into the bedroom, I found Kara lying in bed, the covers pulled over her stomach, her exposed arms curled up toward her chin. The bedroom’s palette differed little from the rest of the house. The walls, the bedding, the carpet–even the art, if one could call it that–were all varying shades of white. The bright orange box of mifepristone sitting atop the covers quickly caught my eye. Dr. Chen had advised her to take this drug first, explaining that it would block the progesterone hormone needed to sustain a pregnancy. The misoprostol would then be taken twenty-four hours later to initiate the expulsion of the pregnancy tissue. We could expect the heaviest bleeding to occur in the hours following the vaginal insertion of the second drug. 
                I crawled onto the bed and brought my face close to hers. She looked at me and motioned to the box, saying, “If I take this it means I’m not pregnant anymore.” 
                These words brought about a new degree of sadness in me. They were a plea, a last-ditch appeal to stay the administering of the drugs that would end her pregnancy. Her body was undergoing what we later came to know as a missed miscarriage: though the embryo had ceased growing, her body had not registered the fact, and so, according to this cruel process, she continued to exhibit outward signs of pregnancy: her breasts swelled, her stomach bloated, her energy waned. 
                It became apparent that she was struggling to come to grips with the fact that by taking the medication, she would become the initiator, that the ingestion of the pills would make her into the agent responsible for the chain of chemical and biological events that would ultimately result in the release of the pregnancy. 
                “I don’t want to hurt the baby,” she said. An ache formed in my throat. My mind reeled in its attempts to form a response. How feeble I felt in the face of such emotions–how utterly useless. Her grief, as I saw it then, was non-transferable. I felt as though I was watching something awful happen to her from behind plate glass. Not knowing what else to do, I moved myself closer: “You’re not hurting anyone, love,” I told her. “This is how we’re going to help you get better. This is what will bring us closer to having a baby.” 
                Kara took the misoprostol just before bed on our second night in Leavenworth. We laid an absorbent pad over the sheets to catch the blood and fell asleep. The rest of the night passed in a trance. I don’t know how long I had slept when I first heard Kara call my name. I lifted my head from the pillow and saw yellow light pouring from the bathroom into the dark hallway outside the bedroom door. I went out and found her seated on the toilet in a panic. She asked me to grab a large bowl from the kitchen. I ran down the hallway and yanked open several drawers before finding one. Kara wrapped her arms around it and sent me back to bed. I had only uttered a few words of protest when she insisted I leave. There was a certainty in her eyes, and I went back to our room without a word. 
                The second time she called me to the bathroom, an acrid odor filled my nostrils as I stood in the doorway. She told me she had been vomiting for nearly an hour. Her eyes were wet and red and I could see her body shivering beneath her baggy t-shirt. I felt sick thinking about how long she’d spent alone.
                I went back into the bedroom and got a pair of slippers and put them on her feet. Next, I grabbed a sock stuffed with dry rice Liz had given us and placed it in the microwave in the kitchen. I began to orient myself to the space as the machine hummed beside me, everything dark save for the orange glow coming from its interior. You’re in Washington. Liz and Nathan have put you up in this house. Your wife is having a miscarriage. I snapped the microwave door open after a single beep and brought the warm sock to the bathroom. Kara took it and placed it against her abdomen and sent me to bed again. 
                The remainder of the night exists only in fragments: a creak of the bedroom door, a splatter in the toilet bowl, the snap of a light switch, footsteps in the hallway, a blown nose, me lying in bed and reaching out for her but feeling only empty space. 
                I awoke early in the morning and found her on the couch in the living room, the golden light of a new day streaming in through the windows. Liz had brought her an Americano and a clementine. Kara’s face showed the hellish night she had just gone through. Yet somehow she managed to smile when she saw me.
                In the following hours we came to learn that the drugs hadn’t worked. Despite some minor bleeding and intermittent cramping, the tissue remained. The rest of the trip became a practice in observation until we could return home and Kara could undergo a dilation and curettage, or D&C. That the bleeding and cramping eventually subsided came as a traveling mercy, one that enabled Kara to spend the rest of the trip with a degree of physical normalcy. 

III.

In our remaining days spent in Leavenworth, we submitted ourselves to the rhythms of Liz and Nathan’s newfound family life. When Liz took Iyla for one of her daily walks along the Wenatchee River, we jumped at the opportunity. When dinner needed making, I set myself to work hours in advance. When Iyla’s cries rang out over the digital monitor in the living room, Kara volunteered to soothe the child. These routines moored us. 
                One afternoon Nathan suggested I go for a bike ride through Icicle Creek Valley.  The route out of Leavenworth took me over rolling hills lined with leafless trees and drab meadows. The light from the overcast sky was muted and diffuse. Some houses–old and new–appeared through the sparse foliage. Only a few miles in, the fresh asphalt of the village streets gave way to the cracked and porous surface of the dead-end road following Icicle Creek into the valley. Mountains covered in conifers surrounded me on all sides. There was no headwind and the steady rate at which the road passed beneath my wheels kept me going. Soon I began to experience that rare and exhilarating cycling phenomenon, when it feels as though a seam has opened in the air before you, enabling a combination of ease and speed that defies possibility. 
                Traffic ceased past a popular trailhead at the mouth of the valley. With each passing mile I felt myself getting further and further from civilization. I heard nothing but the steady flow of water over the rocky creek bed below, the clunk of my bike chain changing gears, my own labored breathing. If there were birds perched in the passing pine trees, their chirps did not reach my ears. The solitude filled me with unease. I could disappear from this corner of the earth and there would be no witnesses. 
                I turned back when the sun began to set. Though the road had risen at a gentle grade as I went deeper into the valley, my ascent had passed so subtly that I had not paused to consider the elevation gain. Shortly after heading back, I began to pick up speed. At times my speed outstripped the capacity of the bike’s gears, and I stopped pedaling altogether, lifting myself up off the saddle so that my limbs could better absorb the bumps that came my way. I had to lean hard to the left or right to maintain my pace around some of the road’s more pronounced bends. On one such curve I miscalculated and lunged for the brakes, my speed having swung me within inches of the edge. A spray of gravel cascaded down toward the creek as I steered the bike back to the center of the road. 
                When I turned out of the valley and into the plain south of Leavenworth, the sun had set behind the mountains at my back. The cold air stung the corners of my welling eyes. 
                Back at Liz and Nathan’s, I stowed my bike in their little shed and entered the main house. All the lights were off. I walked down the hall and into the living room and found Kara curled up on the couch, a blanket half hiding her face. Her cheeks were wet, her eyes red, her features twisted. I suddenly hated myself for staying out for so long. Kneeling down on the floor next to the couch, I wrapped my arms around her and whispered, “I’m so sorry.” 
                Out of the corner of my eye, through the glass door, I saw Liz approaching the back of the house. She slid the door open and paused for a moment at the threshold. I half expected her to leave but instead she walked over to the back of the couch, leaned over, and enveloped the both of us in her arms. Not a word passed between us. We stayed that way for several minutes before lifting ourselves off one another and wiping our eyes, laughing with embarrassment as we made eye contact. When I looked back at Kara, I could tell the surge of grief had passed by the way she blew air loudly through her lips like a horse. Liz wiped the bottoms of her eyelids with her fingers. 
                I have a photo saved on my iPhone, taken on our last night in Leavenworth.  I’m standing in Liz and Nathan’s kitchen with Iyla in the crook of my right arm. She’s wearing a paper headband that I had made for her on Thanksgiving. I had intended for the plume of feathers fanning out at the back of the band to look like a turkey tail, but all the adults agreed it looked more like a tone-deaf attempt at a Native American headdress. 
                Iyla’s gaze and mine occupy the center of the frame. We’re looking directly into each other’s eyes and have the same smile etched across our lips–almost as if we’re mirroring one another. In the preceding days she had tended to display that infantile seriousness so endearing in newborns. This was the first smile I had seen her make during our entire stay.  I remember Liz laughing at the sudden show of happiness in her daughter. I think back to that smile and how it came as an unbidden joy that filled my whole being—a small reminder of the world’s itinerant beaming.

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