His Third Wife

“Oh my God!” Jamison fell to his knees where he was. His tears erupted from someplace old. Erupted from someplace tired. From someplace where nothing was going right. Where an ending could overtake a possibility. A beginning. He cried out in his solitary space in the bathroom beside his wife.

He didn’t notice that the blue in her palms had overtaken her face until her back was on the tile and a seizure made her head thump against the floor.

“Val!” Jamison went to her. Gathered her up into his arms like a rag doll and tried to shake her awake from the tossing. “Mama! Mama!” He cried for help, but these echoes were more helpless than the lips that had produced them.

The doctor on the right side of the hospital bed made a pyramid of Val and Jamison. Val in the bed, her empty stomach covered by cold, crisp white sheets, Jamison on her left side, his head in his hands, his eyes swollen to lemons.

The doctor was talking like this ending was a beginning. Moving on. Saying something about how this just happens to some people. No one knew why. It just happens. They could try again. There was no harm in trying again. There was no guarantee there’d be another miscarriage. The odds were in their favor.

“I was fine,” Val said, her eyes fixed on the white sheets. “I felt my baby. My baby was inside of me. My baby was fine.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” the doctor said as delicately as he could. He’d seen things before. Women who never came back from this. Men who left. People who died for the dead. The unborn dead. “There is nothing wrong with you. Nothing wrong with your baby. We’ve run tests. Everything was fine. It just happens sometimes.” This was one of those moments when life made a pupil of science. When men were powerless to protect a woman from her pain.

Outside, the sun was coming up. New nurses were walking the hallways. New cases. New tears.

The doctor stood, nodded sympathetically at Jamison and promised he’d return. A nurse would be by shortly. Val needed to get some rest. She’d lost a lot of blood.

When the doctor was gone, a hand Val had been using to wipe her tears fell against the sheet, palm up, fingers curled.

Jamison looked at the hand and then at Val.

She was looking back at him.

He looked back at the hand. At his hands, wrapped into one another, balled up in anger or fear or sadness. A tear fell and landed on his thumb. He closed his eyes to trim the torrent. He hadn’t stopped crying since the red lights came flashing in front of the house. Every new tear had a different altar, a different reason for gathering. And last was Val.

Almost as if reaching for a ring buoy while sinking into a sea, Jamison crept his fingers over the bleached fabric and made a tight knot with Val’s hand. He didn’t look at her or say a word. The tears continued to fall.

With the sun came the press. The hospital was filled with suspicious characters with hidden cameras. Men with tape recorders were asking nurses questions. Why was the mayor there? Why was his wife there? W

as the baby okay?

The mayor’s personal security staff cleared the hallways, briefed and required a confidentiality statement from every medical professional who’d been on the third floor since 11 PM.

“You should’ve called me. I should’ve been the first person you called,” Leaf advised Jamison in the hallway outside the room where Val was lying still with her eyes closed.

“My wife had a miscarriage. I wasn’t exactly thinking about work,” Jamison said. There were still specks of pink blood on the chest of his shirt. If it weren’t for the setting someone might have thought it was a design of some kind.

“I understand, but there were other options. You didn’t have to call the ambulance. We could’ve taken her someplace else,” Leaf said before lowering his voice a little to be sure Val couldn’t hear him. “I mean, she’d already lost the baby.”

Standing against the wall, Jamison banged his head back lightly. He heard little of Leaf’s argument. He kept seeing red—in every shade, everywhere. He thought that must be what a broken heart looked like—torn apart inside and out.

“The press is all over this,” Leaf said.

“Who’s talking to them?”

“I don’t know. Everyone? Your neighbors. The ambulance drivers. Who knows. You really should’ve called me. I can’t get in front of a situation if you don’t—”

Jamison looked up and the red was in his eyes. “Why do you care, man?” he shot. “What is it to you?”

“What? I’m your assist—” Leaf stumbled back toward the wall behind him as Jamison stepped closer to him with balled fists.

“No. No. You’re always around. Always in the right place at the right time. There’s something about it—something about you,” Jamison charged with his mother’s accusations, his suspicions, and all the pressure of all the days caving in on his corneas. “Why are you here? Why the fuck are you here, man?”

He’d cornered Leaf, and the young man, who had suddenly become a boy, was shaking in his alabaster skin.

“It’s nothing. I’m just doing my job,” Leaf suffered out.

“Fuck that. Who are you?” Jamison was so close up on Leaf the security guards holding back onlookers on either side of the hallway left their posts to break the pair apart. One got there just in time to stop the mayor from wrapping his hand around Leaf’s blushing throat. “Who are you? Who are you?” Jamison repeated.