This Is Where I Leave You

kissing the cotton candy off her lips. I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.
    “I can’t believe this is happening again,” Jen gurgles. Her tears are hot on my fingertips. The resident continues to move the probe around. 258I can’t believe we’re here doing this again, losing another baby. Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.
    “I deserve this,” Jen says. “I do.”
    “Don’t talk like that.”
    “What I did to you...” She looks up at me, her features slashed with regret. “I ruined us.”
    “Listen!” the resident says sharply. We turn to her, and then we hear it through the static, a fast, rhythmic, robotic swish.
    “What’s that?” I say, but of course I know. I’ve done this before.
    “It’s your baby’s heartbeat.”
    “It sounds so fast,” Jen says.
    “To you, maybe,” the resident says. “It sounds just fine to me.”
    On the gurney, Jen closes her eyes and cries with relief, still clinging to my hand. With my free hand, I wipe away my own tears before she can see them.
    “So why was she bleeding?” I say.
    “It could be any number of benign reasons. I’ve paged the ob-gyn on call. Someone will be down in a minute. But the baby doesn’t seem to be in any distress.”
    “Wait,” I say when she lifts the probe off Jen. “Can we listen for another minute?”
    The resident flashes a kind, lipless smile and pulls out some kind of canvas belt gadget from a drawer and wraps it around Jen’s belly. Then she leaves, and it’s just Jen and me, listening to the frantic, throbbing heartbeat of our unborn child. She looks at me with shining wet eyes and smiles. “That’s our baby,” she says, beaming.
    “He sounds nervous.”
    She laughs. “Wouldn’t you be?”
    We listen for a little longer. Beat, swish, beat, swish, beat, swish.
    “Judd,” Jen says, not quite looking at me. “We can do this, right?”
    And this is where I stop regretting the way things should have been the first time I heard my baby’s heartbeat. This is where I surrender to the magic of it all, the karmic appropriateness of becoming a father right now, when I’ve just lost my own. And maybe I do feel something; it’s hard to say, because we’ve only just begun to try the moment on for size when the curtains fly open and Wade steps in, effectively murdering the moment and all the ones to follow.

    4:45 p.m.
    The last time I saw Wade, I attacked him with an office chair. The time before that, I jammed a lit cheesecake up his ass and almost burned his balls off. So it’s understandable that his first reaction upon seeing me is to flinch and assume a defensive posture. He stands in the doorway looking uncertainly at me, then moves past me self-consciously to approach Jen on the gurney. “You okay, babe?” he says. There are guys who can pull off “babe.” I’m not one of them. Wade is, and I mean that in the worst possible way. I start scanning the shelves for sharp objects. “I got here as fast as I could. My GPS messed me up.”
    “I’m fi ne,” Jen says.
    “Good. Good.” He rubs her shoulder lightly and then stops, too aware of me in the room. There’s no choice but to turn and face me.
    “Hey, Judd. How’s it going?”
    “It’s going swell, Wade.”
    There’s a knock on the door, and a bearded doctor enters the room, carrying Jen’s chart.
    “Jennifer Foxman?”
    “Yes,” she says.
    My last name, still attached to her, is a kick in the crotch.
    “I’m Doctor Rausch, from ob-gyn.” He turns to Wade. “Mr. Foxman?”
    “No,” Wade says.
    “I’m Mr. Foxman,” I say.
    “Nice to meet you,” Doctor Rausch says perfunctorily, before looking at Wade. “And you are?”
    “He’s my wife’s lover.”
    “Shit, Judd,” Jen says, covering her eyes. “Not now.”
    “Wade Boulanger,” Wade says, extending his hand. “It’s complicated.”
    “Not the radio jock.”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    Doctor Rausch smiles. “My wife hates you.”
    “The wives generally do.”
    “Not mine, unfortunately,” I say.
    Doctor Rausch looks at me like I’m spoiling his good time. “Okay,”
    he says, pulling some latex gloves out of his pocket. “I’ve got an ulcer and a long shift to get through. Whatever’s going on here, you’re not going to make it my problem. You two can wait outside.”
    “But I’m the father,” I say.
    “Congratulations. Now get the hell out of my exam room.”

    4:55