Expecting: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

on.
    ***
    If Alan doesn’t think about Troppo, maybe he never existed. Of course, that’s the irony; he never did exist. Not exactly a ha-ha funny kind of irony, but irony all the same.
    Does it make things easier? The fact that Troppo wasn’t close to being a real baby? From a medical point of view, he wasn’t. The pregnancy didn’t take, never got off the ground.
    “It’s very common,” Dr. Liu tells Alan and Laurie in the office after the D & C. “Forty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. But you two are young, in your early thirties. You’re healthy. And more good news—you know you’re able to conceive.”
    Dr. Liu is so cheerful Alan expects him to say that miscarriage is terrific, a wonderful learning experience. As they’re leaving his office, Dr. Liu mentions forty percent again, as if that will make them feel better. But Alan is only thinking one thing—why aren’t we the sixty percent?
    ***
    “I can do the dishes,” Alan says to Laurie after dinner.
    She shakes her head. “That’s okay.”
    He feels guilty and he doesn’t know why. Of course the miscarriage is harder for Laurie—she was the one who was pregnant. But he feels the loss too. Laurie understands that, doesn’t she?
    When the dishes are done, he sits beside Laurie on the sofa in the den. She’s watching Dancing with the Stars . He knows she thinks it’s stupid, but her eyes are locked on the screen. “Doesn’t that dress make her legs look fat?” she says. He sees a heavy woman with too much makeup swirling in the arms of an orange-tan man with a shirt unbuttoned to his waist.
    “Like sausages,” she says. “Cankles, isn’t that what they call fat ankles?” She puts her elbow on her knee and rests her chin on her fist. He should reach over and take her hand.
    But he hesitates. Ever since the D & C, he’s been afraid of doing the wrong thing. “It’s going to be okay,” she told him in Dr. Liu’s office as they prepped her for the D & C. And when it was over, she said, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
    Yes , he wanted to say to her. It was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced. Watching the person I love more than anything in the world have the remains of what was supposed to be our baby scraped out of her. Wondering what they do with the remains of the pregnancy. Do they call it remains? He decides he never needs to know the answer.
    ***
    Another hard part of the miscarriage has been letting people know what’s happened, telling the story over and over. To his parents, Laurie’s mother, their friends. “Laurie’s doing fine,” he said. “Yes, we’re disappointed, but we’ll try again.”
    He’s not sure how word got out at Palmer-Boone, but when he comes in, his secretary, Wendy, tells him how sorry she is. “My sister had a miscarriage and now she’s got three kids. And a fourth on the way.”
    He hears that from everybody at Palmer-Boone, as if they’ve gotten together to come up with the same story—it happened to my sister/cousin/mother/brother’s wife and now they have a girl/boy/ oodles of children.
    Craig from accounting pops his head in Alan’s office, says he’s sorry but, “Hey, at least it wasn’t a stillbirth.”
    Craig wears Ralph Lauren polo shirts, the version with the giant rider and polo pony, the one that announces, “My shirt is really expensive.” Alan is holding a cup of hot coffee and he wonders if he splashes it against Craig’s face if the burns will be first, second, or third degree.
    “Yeah,” he says to Craig. “We’re pretty lucky.”
    When Craig is gone, Alan looks out his office window to the San Gabriel Mountains, a gorgeous view on unsmoggy days. All the Palmer-Boone VPs get corner offices with floor-to-ceiling windows, another Palmer-Boone perk, like a lifetime supply of three-ring binders.
    The best Palmer-Boone perk turned out to be meeting Laurie. Seven years ago, he was standing in line at a Staples in Burbank and noticed a pretty woman in front