She laughs. “That sounds great,” she says. “Maybe with a lot of icing.”
“Who wants a cinnamon roll with only a little icing?” I ask her.
“Touché.”
“Maybe right now, all we have to do is go get cinnamon rolls with a lot of icing.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Me and the pregnant lady, putting back a half dozen cinnamon rolls.”
“Right.”
She leaves to go put on her shoes. I put on a jacket and flip-flops. You can do that in Los Angeles.
We get into the car.
“Ethan hasn’t called you, right?” Gabby says.
I shake my head. “He will when he knows what he wants to do.”
“And until then?” she asks.
“I’m not going to wait around for some man to call,” I say, teasing her. “My best friend wouldn’t stand for that.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Extenuating circumstances.”
“Still,” I tell her, “if he wants to be with me, he’ll be with me. If he doesn’t, I’m moving on. I have a baby to raise. A job to start. I’m going through a lot. I don’t know if I told you this, but my best friend is getting divorced.”
Gabby laughs. “You’re telling me! Mine is pregnant with a baby that isn’t her boyfriend’s.”
“No shit!” I say.
“Yeah!” Gabby says. “And she came home the other day with a dog she decided to adopt out of the blue.”
“Wow,” I tell her. “Your friend sounds nuts.”
“Yours, too,” she says.
“Think they’ll be OK?” I ask her.
“I know I’m supposed to say yes, but the truth is, I think they’re doomed.”
The two of us start laughing. It’s probably much, much funnier to us than it would seem to anyone else. But the way she says we’re doomed makes it clear just how not doomed we are. And that feels like something to let loose and laugh about.
After eleven days in this hospital, I’m leaving today. I’m going to end up right back here in forty-eight hours, albeit in the outpatient center. I’ll be seeing Ted, the earnest physical therapist, several times a week for the foreseeable future.
Dr. Winters has been prepping me for this. She has gone over all the details with me, and I know them backward and forward.
Gabby is here helping me pack up my things. I’ve got enough on my plate just trying to get to the bathroom on my own. But I’m making my way there slowly. I want to brush my teeth.
I use my walker to get close enough to the sink.
I stand in front of the mirror, and I truly see myself for the first time in almost two weeks. I have a faint bruise on the left side of my face, near my temple. I’m sure it was a doozy when I got here, but now it’s not too bad. I look pale, certainly. But if I had to guess, I’d say that’s as much from being inside the same building day after day as it is from any health concerns. My hair is a mess. I haven’t taken a proper shower in what feels like forever.
I’m looking forward to sleeping in a real bed and bathing myself, maybe blow-drying my hair. Apparently, preparations have to be made to make that work, too. Mark installed a seat in the shower. Oh, to clean myself unaided! These are the things that dreams are made of.
Now that I’m leaving the hospital, I am starting to realize just how much this has set me back. Weeks ago, I would have guessed that by now I’d at least have gone out and bought a car or started looking for a job. Instead, I’m not where I started but even further behind.
But I also know that I’ve come a long way in my recovery and as a person. I’ve faced things I might not have faced otherwise. And as I stare at myself in the mirror for the first time since I got here, I find myself ready to face the ugliest of truths: it might, in fact, be a merciful act of fate that I stand here, unencumbered by a budding life inside me.
I am not ready to be a mother.
I am nowhere near it.
I slowly brush my own teeth. They feel clean and slick when I am done.
“Why is there always pudding in your room?” Gabby asks me. I turn myself around in slow spurts of energy.
She has a chocolate pudding cup in her hand. I don’t know when it got here. But I know it was Henry.
He left me pudding at some point in the past day. He left me chocolate pudding. Doesn’t that mean something?
Gabby is over the pudding. She has moved on to other things. “Dr. Winters should be here soon to check you out,” she says. “And I read all the documents. I’ve even been doing research on physical therapy rehabilitation—”
You don’t just leave pudding for someone you don’t care about.
“Can you get me the wheelchair?” I ask her.
“Oh,” she says. “Sure. I thought you were going to try to use the walker until it was time to go.”
“I’m going to find Henry,” I tell her.
“The night nurse?”
“He started working days on another floor. I’m gonna find him. I’m going to ask him out on a date.”
“Is that a good idea?” she says.
“He left me pudding,” I say. That is my only answer. She waits, hoping I have more, but I don’t. That’s all I’ve got. He left me pudding.
“Should I come with you?” she asks me once she realizes I’m not going to change my mind.
I shake my head. “I want to do this on my own.”
I sit down on my bed. The act takes a full thirty seconds to complete. But once I do, I instantly feel better. Gabby pulls the wheelchair around next to me.
“You’re sure I can’t come with you? Push you, maybe?”
“I’m already going to need you to help me into the shower. My level of dignity is fairly low, so I’m just hoping to spare myself the experience of you watching me tell someone I have feelings for him when, you know, he will probably turn me down.”
“This seems like something that maybe you should wait and think about,” she says.
“And tell him when? What am I gonna do? Call him on the phone? ‘Hello, hospital. Henry, please. It’s Hannah.’ ”
“That’s a lot of Hs,” she says.
“You can only muster up this type of courage a few times in your life. I’m just stupid enough to have it now. So help me into the damn wheelchair so I can go make a fool out of myself.”
She smiles. “All right, you got it.”
She starts helping me into the chair, and pretty soon I’m rolling. “Wish me luck!” I say, and I head for the door and then brake abruptly, as I’ve learned to. “Do you think sometimes you can just tell about a person?”
“Like you meet them and you think, this one isn’t like the rest of them, this one is something?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Exactly like that.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. I’d like to think so. But I’m not sure. When I met Mark, I thought he looked like a dentist.”
“He is a dentist,” I tell her, confused.
“Yeah, but when we were in college, when I was, like, nineteen, I thought he looked like the kind of guy who would grow up to be a dentist.”
“He seemed stable? Smart? What? What are you trying to say?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Never mind.”
“Did you think he looked boring?” I ask her, trying to get to the bottom of it.
“I thought he looked bland,” she says. “But I was wrong, right? I’m just saying I didn’t get those feelings you’re talking about with my husband. And he’s turned out to be a great guy. So I can’t confirm or deny the existence of being able to just tell.”
I think you can. That’s what I think. I think I’ve always thought that. I thought it the first time I met Ethan. I thought there was something different about him, something special. And I was right. Look at what we had. It turned out not to be for a lifetime, but that’s OK. It was real when it happened.
And I feel that way about Henry now.
But I don’t know how to reconcile that with what Gabby is saying. I don’t want to say that I believe you can tell when you meet someone who’s right for you and then acknowledge that by that logic, Mark’s not the one for her.