Chapter 4: Still Alive

I knew what it could be.

I'd spent three years telling other women what it could be, in a calm voice, in a room with a curtain for a door.

Knowing didn't help at all.

I got my feet on the floor.

The next cramp folded me in half over the bed.

The key was in the lock, on my side, where I'd turned it.

Nobody could get in unless I let them.

I crawled.

My fingers slipped on the brass the first time, and the second time it turned.

I pulled the door open and said his name into the dark hall.

Not loud.

It didn't need to be loud.

His door at the far end banged against the wall.

He came down the hall in a T-shirt and bare feet, and he saw my face and then he saw the blood on my sweater cuffs.

He didn't ask anything.

He picked me up and carried me to the elevator with my head against his chest.

"Galina!" he shouted. "Keys. Now."

Galina ran out of the kitchen in a nightgown with his car keys already in her fist.

She pushed my hair off my face and said something fast and fierce to him in Russian.

"I know," he said. "I know."

He drove himself.

I lay across the back seat with my knees up and watched the streetlights jerk past upside down.

He went through every red light on Atlantic Avenue.

"Talk to me," he said. "Tell me what's happening. In nurse words."

"Bleeding. Cramping. Could be nothing." My breath caught. "Could be everything."

"Which is more likely?"

"I don't know."

His hands went white on the wheel.

"Then we'll find out together."

He carried me through the emergency doors himself.

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