Betrayal and Rebirth: My Divorce Choice

I don't remember dialing.

I remember the cold of the bathroom tile through my dress. I remember the iron taste in my mouth, like a coin held too long under the tongue. I remember Chloe's name lighting up my screen and my thumb hitting the green circle by accident, or by instinct.

Her voice came through small and far away. "Nina? Nina, where are you? Nina—"

The phone slid out of my hand.

When I came back into the world, it came back wrong.

Fluorescent ceiling. The smell of bleach laid over something sweeter. A blood pressure cuff sighed and tightened on my left arm. My right arm had a line in it, and a clear bag on a metal pole dripped into me one slow drop at a time.

A hospital wristband sat on my wrist. *Halloran, Nina. F. 31.* I stared at the H until the letters stopped looking like letters.

"Hey." Chloe's hand closed over mine. "Hey. Hey. I'm here."

She had been crying. Mascara streaked under her right eye and not her left, which meant she'd wiped one side with her sleeve and forgotten the other. That detail told me how bad it was, before any words did.

"Chloe."

"I'm here."

"The—"

"Don't." Her grip tightened. "Don't make me say it."

"Say it."

She closed her eyes. "There was nothing they could do, sweetheart. The bleeding — it was already too much by the time the EMTs got to you. I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

The room slid sideways without moving.

My chest sank inward like a soft thing pressed by a thumb. I felt the absence first in my hipbones — a hollow where there had been a small, steady weight I hadn't known I'd been carrying like that. The wire-thin sound from yesterday afternoon came back, higher now, behind my left ear. My eyes were dry. I thought *I should be crying* in the same flat voice a person uses to think *I should buy bread.*

Chloe folded forward across the bed and put her forehead against my shoulder.

"Breathe," she whispered. "In. Out. With me. In."

I tried. The breath went in halfway and stuck.

"Out, Nina. Out."

It came out as a sound. Not a sob. A long, thin scrape, like a chair pushed across a wood floor in another room.

I don't know how long she held me. The drip on the metal pole hit forty-something and I lost the rest. Her hair smelled like the same drugstore conditioner she had used in college, and that — that small green-apple smell — was the thing that finally cracked me. I cried into her collarbone until the front of her sweater was wet through, and then I cried more.

When I could speak again, my voice was wrecked.

"He didn't even ask if it was a boy or a girl."

"I know, baby."

"He kissed my forehead. He said *good.*"

Her hand moved in a small circle on my back, then her voice dropped and sharpened to a point. "I'm going to skin that man alive, Nina. I'm going to take a melon baller to Joey Halloran. Are you listening to me? I've wanted to skin him since the rehearsal dinner."

A laugh got out of me. Wet, ugly. The wrong sound for the room. I couldn't help it.

"Treatment." Chloe pulled back enough to look at me. "Tell me you're starting treatment. Right now. The baby is gone, Nina, but you are not. You are not."

I looked at the IV bag. The drip. *Halloran, Nina.*

"Chloe—"

"Don't *Chloe* me. Tell me yes."

A trolley rattled past in the hall. Two nurses, a low laugh, a name being paged on the speaker. I let the noise wash through me because it was easier than answering.

Then a different voice in the corridor. Closer than it should have been.

"Right here, baby. Sit down. Sit down. I've got you."

Joey.

My whole body went cold from the scalp down, the way you go cold standing too long in a walk-in freezer. My fingers tightened on the sheet without my permission.

Chloe's head snapped up. "Is that—"

"Go look."

She slid off the bed. Her sneakers squeaked on the linoleum and then she was gone around the curtain. I counted the drip. Forty-three. Forty-four.

Forty-seven before she came back. Her face had gone the color of paper.

"It's her." Her voice stayed low. "The Amy person. She told the triage nurse she felt dizzy. He carried her in, Nina. *Carried* her, like a bride. They're getting her a room two doors down. For *dizziness.*"

Something inside my ribcage made a small dry sound, like a twig breaking under a boot. Yesterday afternoon I had bled through a linen dress on a bathroom floor and my husband had texted me, through Amy's hand, to ask for the address of my obstetrician. Today Amy felt lightheaded, and he had picked her up off her feet and run.

The math of it sat in my throat like a stone.

I pulled the tape back from the IV in my wrist.

"Nina, what are you doing—"

"I want to see his face."

"Nina, no, you are not—"

"Chloe." I swung my legs off the bed. The room tilted. I put one hand on her shoulder until it tilted back. "I'm not going to fight him. I'm going to look at him. There's a difference."

She held the door for me because she knew that look. She had seen it once before, the night my mother died.

The hallway was too bright.

Joey stood at the nurses' station with his back half-turned, one hand resting on Amy's elbow as she perched on a plastic chair, holding a small bottle of orange juice someone had given her. A gold straw stuck out of the bottle. I noticed the straw. I don't know why.

He turned.

His face moved through three things in two seconds. Surprise. A quick scrub of something that might have been guilt. Then a small, mean curve at one corner of his mouth.

"Nina." He said my name the way a man says the name of a stain on his shirt. "What a coincidence. You're at the hospital, too."

"Joey." My voice came out level. I heard it from a small distance, as if someone else was using my throat.

"What is it this time?" He took a step closer, hands in his coat pockets. "A migraine? A fainting spell? Don't tell me — chest pains. You always did know how to stretch a bad afternoon."

Behind me, Chloe sucked in a hard breath. "You absolute piece of—"

I caught her wrist.

She looked at me. Her eyes were enormous and full of every word I wasn't going to let her throw at him.

"Chloe." I made my voice quiet. "Don't."

"Nina, he doesn't *know*—"

"Don't."

She stopped. Her jaw worked once. She let me hold her wrist.

Joey's eyes moved between us. The curve at his mouth pulled tighter. "What doesn't I know?"

"Nothing," I said. "Take care of Amy. She looks pale."

His head tilted. He had been hunting for something specific in my face and not found it, and he didn't like that.

From the plastic chair, Amy's voice floated up, soft and almost apologetic. "Joey, don't. She's having a hard week. It's not her fault she has to keep showing up where you are. Some people just need attention."

I felt Chloe's pulse jump under my fingers.

I did not turn. I did not answer. I tightened my grip on her wrist and walked us down the corridor the other way — past the trolley, past the paged name, past an open door where a child was crying about a sticker. We turned the corner.

Then I let her go.

She rounded on me. "Nina, why — why didn't you tell him? Why didn't you let *me* tell him? Stage three, Nina. He thinks you're faking a *headache.*"

"Because if I tell him, he'll come to my room." My voice was very flat. "He'll bring her. She'll cry. He'll hold her hand. And I'll have to watch."

Chloe opened her mouth. Closed it.

"I want to rest." I leaned against the wall. The paint was cool through the back of the hospital gown. "Chloe. Please. An hour. Go get coffee. Go yell at your boyfriend on the phone. I'll be here when you come back."

"You promise."

"I promise."

She studied me, then pulled me into a hug so hard my ribs hurt. She walked off without looking back, because she knew if she looked back, she wouldn't go.

I waited until the elevator doors closed on her.

Then I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the linoleum, knees up, hospital gown bunched around my thighs, and I pulled my phone out of the cardigan someone — Chloe, probably — had draped over me at some point.

Dr. Maren's number was the most recent in my call log.

She picked up on the second ring.

"Nina. Are you alright? The clinic just got a fax from County General—"

"Doctor."

A small pause. "I'm here."

I pressed the phone harder against my ear. The plastic was warm now. Down the hall, two doors away, I could hear Joey's voice through a closed door, low and tender, asking a woman if she wanted ice chips.

"I'm giving up treatment," I said.