Re-Entry
My fiancé miscarried while I was in quarantine.
Her sister broke the news to me via text.
she lost the baby
No elaboration, no punctuation.
I immediately dialed Liz; it went straight to voicemail. I thumbed a quick love you and stared at the carpet, trying to feel something.
I hadn’t breathed fresh air for eight days.
I had been gone for over two months. It was supposed to be a week-long excursion, a small bachelor party of sorts — just me and a couple of friends backpacking through Yosemite. Two days after landing in California, the world shut down.
My friends (all Americans) returned home to shelter in place. They offered me spots on their couches, places to crash to ride out the storm (at this point, the stay-at-home order was only expected to last two weeks). I decided to keep camping, stay out in the wilderness. The pandemic had jostled me a little, shaken me out of a stupor. As ICUs were overflowing and death marched around the globe, I had never felt more alive.
I would come into town for supplies, stock up on essentials, wash my armpits in the bathroom sink, take advantage of Wi-Fi — that sort of thing. It was on one of these trips (I remember I was standing in the produce department at Kroger, considering the ripeness of a bunch of bananas) when I got the text from Liz.
It was just an image: a small piece of white plastic showing a faint red plus sign, no words, no emojis.
My mind was a hurricane of disbelief, excitement, grief.
I tried to call her; it went straight to voicemail.
“Hey.”
Should I sound jazzed? Nervous? Confident?
“Um…”
Shit, this is falling flat.
“… give me a call back...”
This is the moment I failed to be whatever she needed me to be.
“… I love you…”
At least I want to, as much as I want anything.
“… and I’d love to talk about this, uh…”
I missed you long before I lost you.
“… this news. It’s gonna be alright. Ok? I just need to, you know, process it through with you. It’s, uh, wild to think about. Sorry, I know this is a lousy voicemail. Just call me back. Ok? Ok.”
And I lost you long before now.
The arrival in Sydney followed the script of some post-apocalyptic movie. We were herded like cattle through a variety of checkpoints. Words were barked, never spoken. The wonders of the world were reduced to a maze of temperature checks and sanitation stations. The backseat of the taxi was covered in plastic. A ply-glass partition separated the driver’s oxygen supply from my own.
I couldn’t tell you how long it had been since I slept. The airports, the planes, the buses, the cars, the hotels — all turned into holding pins, fishbowls, mechanisms of forced migration. My mask had so melded onto my face, had become so much a part of me, that as I stared into the bathroom mirror in my hotel room, I was a stranger to myself; I became convinced those eyes were not my own, that another’s muscles turned those lips into a smile.
It was day eight of fourteen.
I had just smuggled a microwave into my room. It’s amazing how quickly black markets spring to life.
To me, the food had been the worse part of this. Sure, I’d have loved to get out, move around. But I’m pretty well suited for the quarantine life, stuck in a room with a tv and computer. I was built for hibernation such as this. The bed was comfy, the window (though stuck shut) offered a view of the harbor, the internet was fast, the water was hot. Quarantine could be much worse.
But the food. It gave the whole experience a “prison” vibe. Various combinations of gruel and soggy vegetables, day after day. It crushed my spirit in a way that locked doors and recycled air couldn’t. So, a few hours on the internet landed me in a sub-Reddit that proved to be the underbelly of the Sydney quarantine hotel network. Later that afternoon, there was a knock on my door. Two boxes were waiting for me in the hall: one contained a small GE microwave, the other was full of different microwavable meals (and some THC gummies, just for kicks).
I was filtering through the food box, making a pile of things that needed to be tetris-ed into the mini-fridge when I my phone lit up.
she lost the baby
At first I couldn’t comprehend the words, as if someone had handed me an ancient tablet but no Rosetta Stone.
I knew before I called she wouldn’t answer; she rarely does, especially when she’s in her feelings. After two hours of silence, I called her sister. Jenn picked up on the third ring.
“Hey.”
“Hey. How is she?”
“It’s hard to say. Devastated, mostly. Maybe relieved a little. Angry. Hurt.”
“But is she okay? Like, you know, physically okay?”
“I think so. She won’t come out of her room though.”
“That sounds like her. Hey Jenn?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for being there. I’m just glad that she’s not alone, you know? That she has someone there.”
“Yep.”
“I’d be there if I could.”
“I know.”
“I really would.”
“I know.”
At two months, a fetus is about an inch long. A third of its length is made up of its head. It has fingers, but they’re fused together.
The day before I left California, Liz sent me a grainy ultrasound photo.
I couldn’t really make it out. It reminded me of when I was a kid and discovered that I could turn to the “adult” channels in our cable package. They were just static, a steady snowfall of whirling gray and black. But stare hard enough and the pixels became shapes, the blurs become people, people in motion.
I looked at the ultrasound photo, looking for the person in the pixels. The baby was all head. I imagined I saw a webbed-hand raised in a wave. I imagined lots of things.
After arriving in quarantine, I found myself looking at the photo obsessively. I’d stare into the image and see a daughter, knee high, hair in bows, mouth sparsely populated by Chicklet teeth. Later, the blobs morphed into a son in overalls, toddling through the house with his hands raised, his voice high. Lifetimes existed in the photo. Worlds of possibility.
For eight days, the 330 square feet of my hotel room contained universes.
It was a full 24 hours after the miscarriage before we talked. The conversation was mostly silence, punctuated by sighs. We searched for each other in all that silence as it bounced between cell towers and satellites. We hung up with empty arms.
I spent most of my first day in quarantine sleeping.
On day two, I made a schedule.
Time for reading, exercise, eating. I blocked out six hours each day for focused work. I gave myself time to be creative, time to do nothing. Time to stare at a screen, time to stare out the window.
Every minute was accounted for. There was no room for chaos. I bended forced isolation to my will.
After the miscarriage, the schedule broke down. I would lay in bed for hours — asleep, awake, watching tv, staring out at the harbor. Reality blurred.
On day ten, I deleted the grainy photo that had been my child.
Liz and I spoke once more that week.
The conversation was stilted, awkward; two strangers playing at intimacy.
It ended with her saying that she would pick me up the next afternoon. My sentence had been served; I was free to go. After ten weeks of wandering, I was almost home.
I waited on the curb outside the hotel for over an hour. Liz wasn’t answering her phone; neither was her sister. I called a ride and went home to our apartment. Her stuff was gone, the place scrubbed of any evidence of us.
She finally sent a text message later that night.
I’m sorry, I just can’t.
Nothing more needed to be said.
It’s hard to unplan a wedding. All the phone calls, messages, negotiations, apologies, cancellations. It’s hard to untangle yourself from someone else.
COVID made it easier, though. It gave us an easy out. We could pretend like this was just a pause, like our engagement was in its own sort of quarantine, sheltering in place. We could pretend like this wasn’t the end.
I’ll always be in awe of redwoods. In Yosemite, there is a path that goes right through one. A giant hole opens up in the trunk, twice as tall as a human in any direction. I stood inside it, stared up and around at it, surrounded by a living thing, like a baby in a womb, knowing nothing but darkness. It’s the closest to God that I’ve ever felt.
Sometimes I think of Liz as someone who just passed through me, her path taking her right through the middle of my being. What she found, though, was hollow. Empty. A space where nothing grows, no light falls. I was just a temporary shelter, a place to pause and rest before traveling on. I had no life in me to give. I couldn’t sustain another. I wish she knew that. If she’d listen, I’d look her right in the eyes and say that mine was the barren womb, not hers. I was the unyielding soil.
There’s greenness before her, a entire world of it. She’ll find her way forward into all that life. I know she will.
