Just after the doctors anesthetized my wife and sucked out the now-useless, sixteen week placenta – it hadn’t expelled itself during the miscarriage – they allowed me into the recovery room to watch her come back to life. Monica was the only recoverer there. Her mouth was closed and her lips were curved downward violently, like a pissed-off, nineteenth-century Catholic-nun schoolmarm. I chuckled. I didn’t think that I should have been chuckling, so it came out as a reverse snort with some noisy aspiration from my lips. I looked up, self-conscious, and locked eyes with a nurse across the room. She had obviously heard my expression of inappropriate mirth, but she only smiled as sadly as she could (though I detected some inappropriate mirth in her, too), and went about her nursly duties.
All of my embarrassment vaporized a couple of seconds later when Monica moved her arm. Now I had a reason to laugh – the anesthesiologist’s dire warning that one-in-so-many-hundred people never wake up after he puts them to sleep would not apply. The death of my wife would not compound the shittiness – shit piling upon shit like the interest on a sub-prime loan – of this already considerably shitty week.
Her arm moved again. This time, it seemed to have some destination, but it traveled slowly, unsteadily, and with great effort, as if Monica was lying in a vat of Jello. Her lips still formed a tight, half-moon frown. Her eyes were closed. Visibly fighting the drugs, she pushed her hand through her gelatinous universe toward her face. She poked herself high on the cheekbone and seemed unsatisfied with the result. I laughed aloud, uncontrollably, and Monica’s brow furrowed slightly. She took a stab at her face again, and I lost it completely.
“Whaaat arrrre youuu laughingggg aat?” Her speech was a record on a dying phonograph. Remarkably, as her mouth formed the words, her lips stayed down-turned. The effect reminded me of a massive Jewfish I had once observed head-on in an aquarium. I imagined her burping bubbles.
“Your mouth…..your lips!” I managed between giggles. Manly giggles,of course. Not little-girl giggles. I reached down and, between convulsions, managed to place my forefinger and thumb at the corners of her frown. I tried to force them into a smile. She looked like The Joker. My eyes filled with tears, and I turned away from the bed, trying to calm down enough to take a breath. The nurse across the room had cracked a real smile, but she continued to make up the beds around us.
When I looked back at Monica, she was making another blind attempt at her face. It had been a minute or two since she had first moved, she was recovering quickly, and she had regained enough motor control to touch the right spot – an itchy upper lip. Still, her elbow was bent at a funny angle, and she only had enough strength to tickle herself and make the irritation worse. Tears came streaming down my face, and no breath moved into or out of my lungs as my body heaved. It was probably the only time in my life that I hyperventilated, and the cause was not anxiety or overwhelming sadness. Rather, it was this wonderful opportunity to see my wife when she most resembled a 500-pound grouper. It was that and an unfathomable amount of relief.
I was relieved that these five days were over. Five days in which Monica knowingly carried a heartbeatless fetus in her uterus, worried that it may start to decompose and poison her – ridiculous thoughts, I’m sure, but what did we know? Five days of stressful phone conversations with friends who knew doctors who must be smarter than our doctors. ”They won’t do the D & E? They’re gonna make you walk around in that condition? They must be crazy down there in Arkansas! Backwoods, primitive bastards.” Five days of weepy nights and wasted days, culminating with a splash as Monica’s water finally broke and ran down her legs onto the living-room floor. Five days. Time enough to come to the realization that we weren’t going to be the people we thought we were going to be.
And now it was over. And so I laughed, and soon Monica laughed, too, as her submerged brain swam toward the surface. But those lips! She managed to laugh through heroically straining facial muscles which refused to release their chinward pull. I finally sucked in some air, and my silent convulsions became all-out, screaming belly laughs which the nurse could no longer ignore. She walked over cautiously, smiling openly.
“Look at her lips!” I practically screamed in a high-pitched voice, wiping my eyes. The incongruity of Monica’s stern face versus her obviously light mood must have struck the nurse the same way it had me, because the nurse laughed outright for the first time. And Monica kept up her giant fish laugh. And I laughed. The weird psychological ramifications of miscarriage would come later. For now, we all huddled together, relieved and laughing.