The Girl He Used to Know (Page 31)

We shift so that we’re lying down. The small couch isn’t ideal for any kind of sexual gymnastics, but that doesn’t slow us down in the least. I inhale and take hit after hit of her scent, burying my face in her neck while I kiss it. The kissing turns to sucking and Annika arches her back when I remove her shirt and bra. I skim my thumbs across her nipples with a firm touch and she groans. Her full skirt has an elastic waist, so it’s easy to strip her of it in one quick motion. Ditto her underwear. I’ll have to make this couch work, because now that she’s naked, I don’t want to stop even for a minute. There is a total absence of shyness as Annika spreads her legs, and I smile, not just because of the view but because this is the girl I remember. I love the way she opens herself up to me so completely. When we were younger it took a while for us to reach the place where she felt comfortable enough to let go, but once she did, it made me feel like she trusted me more than anyone in the world. Rightly so, because I would never give her a reason to think otherwise.

Annika attempts to undress me without breaking contact with my mouth and within the confines of a surface that is shorter than our outstretched bodies. It’s comical. She soldiers on because she’s as determined to make this couch work as I am. She wraps her hand around me and I smile again because she hasn’t forgotten the way I like to be touched, either.

Feeling around on the floor, I fish my wallet out of the pocket of my jeans. I could ask Annika if she’s on birth control, but I’d use the condom anyway, and not just in the name of safe sex. If anyone would understand my reasoning, it’s Annika.

There’s really only one position that’s going to work, and when I sit up and reach for her, she climbs on top as if she’s read my mind, one thigh pressed up on either side of me as she lowers herself so quickly I groan, but not because it hurts.

I let out a breathless laugh. “And you claim you never know what I’m thinking.” She laughs, too, but our laughter fades away, replaced with whispered words from me about how good she feels and how long it’s been and how much I’ve missed her.

29

Annika

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

1992

I awakened fully from a fitful sleep around 6:00 A.M. Jonathan slept soundly beside me, one foot touching mine. I’d been waking up off and on since shortly after midnight, because a persistent dull ache in my lower abdomen made it impossible to stay asleep. I’d shifted position, closed my eyes, and done everything I could to relieve the discomfort, but nothing had helped. My period had arrived the week before, lighter than normal and a slightly darker color, but the pain in my back had finally gone away. The discomfort I’d felt from the backache paled in comparison to what was happening in my stomach now, and the pain seemed to have intensified significantly in the last fifteen minutes.

Around seven, I walked to the bathroom, hoping that might solve the problem, although I really didn’t feel like I had to go. My shoulder hurt and I felt strange as I walked, light-headed, almost like I might faint. I held on to the wall and gripped the doorjamb hard as I flicked on the bathroom light. I was wearing a pair of cotton bikini underwear and a T-shirt of Jonathan’s that I’d appropriated for my own. Now that I was upright, gravity had taken over and the blood soaked my underwear and trickled down the inside of my legs. Maybe I was having another period, and the pain was due to cramping. Dark spots appeared before my eyes, and I managed to scream Jonathan’s name as the floor rose up to meet me.

I didn’t think I’d been out for more than a few seconds, and when I came to Jonathan was on the floor next to me. “What is it? What happened?” he yelled. He tried to help me sit upright and I felt him shift my legs a little as he gathered me into his arms, my back against his chest.

“Oh Jesus. Annika, tell me what’s wrong!”

I couldn’t answer him with words because the pain ripping through my abdomen made it impossible to speak. Instead, I screamed.

Jonathan laid me back down on the floor and ran.

* * *

I regained consciousness as the paramedics were putting the oxygen mask on me. “Annika, I’m right here. Everything’s gonna be okay,” Jonathan said somewhere off in the distance. I turned my head in the direction of his voice and spotted him next to the door, his hands covered in blood. He was wearing a pair of shorts and his legs were bloody, too. I thought for sure they would drop me as they carried the stretcher down the stairs on the outside of Jonathan’s house, but I felt the thump as the wheels hit the pavement and they rolled me toward an ambulance waiting with its back doors open. A wave of pain hit me then, so severe that I began sobbing hysterically. As they loaded me inside, I tried to tell someone I thought I was dying. I tried to tell them how cold I was because it felt like my blood had been replaced with ice water, and that it was running through my veins in a miserably cold loop, but I must have only thought I’d spoken, because no one answered me. Once the stretcher was all the way in, they slammed the doors and we left, sirens wailing.

* * *

At the hospital, a nurse kept asking if I knew how far along I was. I was having a hard time focusing and there were so many people surrounding me, cutting off my T-shirt and underwear, taking my blood pressure. I tried to say no, that I wasn’t pregnant because I was on the pill and had recently had a period, but I drifted in and out as they brought in a machine and ran a wand over my abdomen. Later, I would find out that the ultrasound was inconclusive because there was so much blood in my abdominal cavity they couldn’t see anything.

Everyone seemed to be shouting. The nurses were giving instructions and Jonathan was trying to give them the information they wanted. I faded in and out as my pulse and blood pressure dropped dangerously low. Then they made Jonathan leave and I tried to yell, to tell them I wanted him to stay, but I was so cold and so tired.

They wheeled me into the operating room, where they performed emergency surgery to stop me from bleeding to death. I had most definitely been pregnant, and the period I thought I’d had wasn’t a period at all, but rather the first sign that things had started to go wrong. The embryo had implanted in my fallopian tube and when it grew too large, the tube burst, more than likely right before they loaded me in the ambulance.

The doctors were unable to save it.

30

Annika

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

1992

My parents and Jonathan were at my bedside when I woke up. I had been gravely ill and required a blood transfusion, but by the time my parents arrived at the hospital, my condition had stabilized. Because my tube had ruptured, I had a more invasive procedure than I would have had the ectopic pregnancy been caught sooner. The doctors had to cut me open instead of going in laparoscopically, and because of this, they said, I would need to stay in the hospital for several days and it could take up to six weeks before I recovered fully.

Janice was there, too. She wrapped her arms around me and cried so hard, I asked her if she was okay.

“I was just so worried when I got the call from Jonathan. I’m so sorry.” She said it over and over.

I didn’t know what she had to be sorry about, because I was the one who’d caused this. Jonathan had had the forethought to grab my purse before following the paramedics down the stairs. He’d assumed my wallet would contain my insurance card, and it had. But my birth control pills were also in there, and it didn’t take the hospital staff long to piece together that I’d missed taking quite a few of them. I had been almost certain that I took one every day, because my intentions were to take them exactly the way I was supposed to. I hadn’t forgotten on purpose, and I did not want a baby, because I could barely take care of myself. I’d simply forgotten in the way I sometimes forgot to brush my hair, or eat breakfast, or take out the trash when it was my turn.

And in the case of the pills, I had forgotten enough times that we made a baby.

* * *

My parents stayed at the hospital from sunrise to sundown and then retired to a nearby hotel rather than make the daily four-hour round trip home and back. Jonathan stayed by my side and only left briefly when he would run home to shower and change. He spent the nights sleeping in a recliner by my bedside as I drifted in and out of a painkiller-induced haze. The first night, after my parents had finally left after receiving enough assurances from the doctor that I was no longer in danger, he clutched my hand tightly in his and there were tears in his eyes. “I was so scared, Annika.”

“Me too,” I whispered. But what I didn’t tell him was that my grief over what had happened outweighed the fear of what had not. During my more lucid moments, I’d thought about the baby growing in my fallopian tube. The doctor had told me that with an ectopic pregnancy there was no way to save the baby, and it was true that I was in no way equipped to have one.

But that didn’t stop my heart from breaking for the tiny living thing that never had a chance.

* * *

Janice brought a pair of my pajamas and helped me change into them in the bathroom, leaving my parents and Jonathan to make small talk in my room. “I know you must hate wearing these,” Janice said as she slipped the hospital gown from my shoulders and replaced it with the long-sleeved top to my pajamas. She held open the waistband of the bottoms, and I stepped into them—gingerly, because even the slightest movement caused a painful, pulling sensation in my incision.