Free As Good as Dead by Elizabeth Evans

that Will came along (he was absorbed in studying the influence of Marinetti on contemporary Language, and I felt the baby remained a little too hypothetical to him). He stroked my forehead while the quick lub-dub of the baby’s heartbeat filled the room, and we watched the monitor’s little gray-and-white ghost that was not a ghost. “Spooky,” Will said, sounding to my ears appropriately enthralled.
    During the eleventh week—morning, Will and I both at home, working—I started to bleed.
    The third and final miscarriage happened in the middle of the night. My doctor was at the hospital, but in delivery. She did reach us as we were at the discharge desk. When we finished up, she steered us into a nearby alcove, settled us on a bench. Somberly, she explained that she had studied my records. The placentas, she said, were not attaching to the uterine wall. “I have to tell you: When this problem shows up, it signals the possibility that the placenta could grow into the wall of the uterus or even attach to another organ. Either can be very serious.”
    Will stood. “That’s enough, then,” he said. His eyes were big and switched rapidly between the doctor and me several times. “That’s enough,” he repeated as, a short time later, his hand under my elbow, we made our way to one of that ever-expanding hospital’s temporary gravel parking lots. “We’re fine, just the two of us.” The cloudiness in his voice was something I’d heard maybe twice in all our years together. “More than fine! I don’t want you going through anything more, Charlotte!”
    With Will sorry for me over something that was undoubtedly my fault, I felt too guilty to bring up adoption again, but the whole rotten mess sent me downhill. I couldn’t write. Stayed in my bathrobe a lot. Contemplated going on antidepressants.
    Maybe therapy?
    Then, a morning arrived when I thought, Man up! I didn’t even bother checking the time on my watch. I got right in my car and drove straight to a very funky place called the Alano Club, which I knew held AA meetings, off and on, all day and into the night. During our early days in Tucson, after years of not drinking, I’d nervously attended conference where a tray filled with glasses of bubbling champagne floated toward me and assured me that I was not a true alcoholic, and, naturally, I wound up plastered, hiding out in a hotel storage room filled with folding chairs. To get back on track, I’d started to attend AA again, often at the Alano Club. The Alano Club’s main building was a homely, stuccoed thing the color of an Ace bandage. It housed a big, high-ceilinged, no-nonsense meeting room, plus a low-ceilinged, boggy lounge where you could buy something to eat (coffee, soda, cellophane-wrapped muffins) and mostly men sat around watching TV or playing cards and pinging video games. The twelve o’clock meeting that I’d attended, though, took place in a tiny brick annex at the south end of the parking lot, and, the morning of my post-miscarriages despair, I headed back there.
    The meeting had begun by the time I arrived, but one of the great things about AA was, even if you felt awkward doing so, you could enter a meeting late (yes, some individual member might look askance at you, but the program was based on principles and the principles welcomed you, no matter what).
    All of the places at the big central table were taken that morning, so I wangled a molded plastic lawn chair from a stack by the door and joined the people who sat around the rim of the room. I recognized a few faces—the most important one being that of ivory-skinned, gray-haired Jacqueline C. In her matching pastel knit tops and pants and the bouffant hairdo of her teenage years in the 1960s, the stoutly pretty Jacqueline did not look like a sage, but she knew things (she had stayed sober even during the death of her son to a drunk driver some twenty years before). “Put on protective armor before you talk to your parents,”