Three Breakdowns A Year Was All I Was Allowed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
Christian reads Emmy's hospital words aloud to his dinner guests as a model of grief used well, and she walks out; his text says he will count it against January.
Between the salad and the lamb, my husband stood to say a few kind words about me to a dozen guests.
Then he opened the small black notebook he kept beside his plate at every meal, and read my miscarriage out of it.
I was standing at the sideboard with the carving fork in my hand.
"March ninth," Christian said, and tapped his glasses up his nose. "Fourteen weeks. Emmy said, and I wrote this down that same night, 'I keep reaching for my stomach to check on the baby.'"
Someone at the table made a soft, sorry sound.
"That was allowance one," he said, fond and proud. "And look how well she handled it."
Our house was full of his colleagues and their husbands and wives.
They had come to toast his book deal.
I had spent two days on the lamb.
"Three breakdowns a year is the rule in our home," Christian told them, warm and easy. "It gives grief a frame. Emmy used the first one the morning she lost the baby."
Nobody laughed, but several people smiled.
I knew every face. I had hosted most of them for four years.
"The second came the day after her surgery," he went on. "The third in June, when the nursery paint arrived in the mail. She cried in the hallway for an hour, and then she was done. That is regulated grief. That is a marriage that works."
His thumb rested on the page, right where he had written my words.
The word he had underlined was "baby."
I had said that sentence to a nurse in a hospital bed, with my knees pulled up, at four in the morning.
I had never said it to him.
I looked down the table for one face that would look back at me.
Pia Hellstrom did.
She was his partner at the practice, and the first colleague who had ever sent me flowers after the surgery.
She leaned across and squeezed my wrist where it rested on the sideboard.
"He's proud of you," she said quietly. "He really does mean well, Em. Sit down, sweetheart, you've gone white."
Her hand was warm, and she smelled like the vanilla candle she had brought me in March.
On her key ring, hooked on the edge of her bag, I saw our front door key.
I had never given it to her.
"Pia, did he give you a key?" I asked.
"For the dogsitting," she said. "Last spring. Sit."
I did not remember any dogsitting. We did not have a dog.
My throat had gone tight, and my eyes were stinging.
Christian saw it from the head of the table.
He did not stop talking. He lifted one finger toward me and spoke to the room.
"There it is. She's close to the edge. Emmy, careful, that would be four."
He opened the notebook to a clean page and uncapped his pen.
The pen was waiting above the paper, ready for me.
Eleven faces turned my way.
Not one of them said stop.
I put the carving fork down on the platter, very gently, so it would not ring.
Then I picked up my keys from the hook by the kitchen door.
"Emmy," Christian said.
"I'm going to cry now," I said, loud enough for the whole table. "I'm going to do it in the car, and then wherever I want, for as long as I want. You can write that down."
"Sit," he said. His voice stayed soft. "If you leave this table in that state, I can't protect you from what people will think."
"Then don't."
A woman near the door stood halfway up, then sat back down.
Pia called my name once, kindly.
I did not turn around.
So I walked out of my own house with the lamb still resting on its board.
The October air outside was cold on my wet face.
I was halfway down the drive when I realized I had left my coat and my purse behind.
I had my keys and a cardigan, and that was enough.
I drove across town to my sister's house with the heat on high and cried until I could not see the road, so I pulled over and cried there.
When I wiped my face, my phone was in my cardigan pocket.
I had not put it there. Pia must have slipped it in when she squeezed my wrist.
I almost cried again at how kind that was.
The screen lit up with a message from Christian, sent four minutes earlier.
It said: "That was four. I'll count it against January."
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