Her miscarriage. Odd that he hadn’t thought about it till now, or had he? Gwen was in for her annual gynecological exam. It was about two years after Maureen was born. The doctor asked for a urine sample. She sat on the toilet there for half an hour, she said, and couldn’t pee a drop, so the nurse practitioner, he thinks she was, catheterized her and botched up the procedure. She poked the fetus with the catheter. Something like that. Or touched something in the vagina with the catheter that started the miscarriage. He knows they’re two distinctive holes, but that’s what he thinks Gwen told him. It was so long ago; he forgets most of it. And Gwen came home and was never clear about what happened, and he knew it upset her so much that she didn’t like talking about it, so he didn’t ask her about it much after that day to get the details straight. He remembers her saying that night “All I can tell you is that the woman did a lousy-ass job — I actually think she wasn’t adequately trained for it and had her eyes closed when she inserted the catheter — and she and the doctor weren’t very apologetic about it either. Afraid of a suit, you think? They knew we didn’t want another child”—“You mean you didn’t want another,” he said — and she said “All right, I didn’t, so they may have thought they’d done us a favor. But they still could have shown some remorse.” She hadn’t known she was pregnant. So it was very early on; maybe the first or second month. “Did you see it?” and she said “It was almost too small to see — certainly too early to tell what sex it was, and technically not even a fetus yet. And after they scooped it all out and I got off the table, I think they flushed it down the toilet. No, I’m sure they have a special disposal bag for that.” He got sad. Some tears too. “Oh, what’s wrong, my darling? I’m being too cold and clinical about it, I know.” “This was probably our last chance to have another child,” he said. “If it hadn’t been aborted and you had come home and said you’d found out you were pregnant, I would have asked you to have the baby.” “I’ve told you,” she said. “I never wanted to get pregnant again. I want to get on with my life other than just being a mother and part-time teacher. And two’s ideal for me and them, and should be for you too, and affordable.” He would have begged her to have the baby and he thinks she would have gone through with it because it meant so much to him. That so? He’s almost sure of it. He’d have three kids now. The third might be in his first year of college. She did say “We have to be more careful with my diaphragm. I take full blame for what happened because I’m the one who put it in. But I have a bit of arthritis in my left hand. Also, in that hand, this bony knob or swelling below the thumb near the wrist that’s painful sometimes and which I’ll get checked out, but in the meantime get a brace for it at night, so I’ll need to teach you how to put the diaphragm in when I don’t feel a hundred percent able to.” “Glad to, but who’s to say I’ll do it correctly? It’d seem it’d take a lot of practice,” and she said “I can feel when it’s in right. It doesn’t slip or hurt. This time I must have just let it go, or your penis knocked it awry.” “It can do that?” and she said “Sure, although I think I would have felt that too, so I don’t know.”
