Free Bliss by Danyel Smith Page B

It’s sick. It’s wrong
.
    Eva said to the two technicians, and she had the clear jelly on her stomach and it was cold, she was cold within and without, and she was pregnant with twins and her belly was still flat at eleven weeks because that’s how she was counting time, and Eva said, “Maybe I should say something to my boyfriend.”
    One of the techs, who didn’t even look her way this time, said, “It’s up to you, miss.”
    So Miss Eva asked for Mix, but word came back from the receptionist that Mix had been told he could go, and to come back in four hours, and so, really, it was up to Eva.
    “I’m cool,” she said to the tech. Eva was shivering.
    “You’re cool?”
    “With going ahead,” Eva said.
    It was 11: 01 when she got the IV in her left hand and went into the surgery room, and the doctor said, “Count backward from ten,” so Eva counted weeks backward and when she woke up it was 11:07.
    “How long is it gonna take?” Eva asked the nurse, who wasn’t actually a nurse but an aide or a junior nurse or whoever wore pink or flowered scrubs in place of white. Wore fake gingham prints and soft clogs and loose ponytails. The doctor wore sneakers and a mask: was just big blue eyes and a smooth forehead.
How’re you this morning?
All in the course of a sure-footed, red-Nike day.
You won’t miss a step, Eva. You’ll make your finals, no problem
. Those words would come later, from a nurse practitioner. Less than a doctor, more than a nurse. Eva was frustrated with the gradations. Who was a nurse, anyway? One who looked like one who nursed? Where was she?
    “It’s over. You’re done. Rest.”
    Eva felt no pain. She was hazy, and in her haze, Eva wondered why they’d told Mix four whole hours, but then she woke up at 2:17 and they gave her pads to bleed onto and gave her salty chicken broth made from a foil-wrapped cube, and crumbly Lorna Doone cookies and saltines, and Eva sat at a round table with four other girls. The five of them like giant first graders in smocks and with theirsnacks, talking about how boys don’t share. About how boys play, but then they want to play rough.
    Eva had been going with Mix for a year and a half. He was the sixth boy she’d had sex with, although she’d told him he was the second. He was the first boy she gave head to, and for Eva and her school girlfriends of the time it was a womanly milestone, a graceless grab at new levels of fun and negotiation and, for girls raised to be all they could be, a quenching dip into surrender.
    On her eighteenth birthday, Mix had taken Eva bicycling at Santa Monica beach. At around eleven that night, they went to a party at what people were calling an “underground” club, and Mix had told the DJ to say, “There’s a birthday girl in the house! Happy happy to Eva!”
    And people yelled it and clapped, and Eva and her man danced for song after thumping song. Then the DJ said, “This next song goes out to Eva, from Mix,” and it was Keith Sweat’s insistent “I Want Her,” and for Eva there had never been such intense intimacy iced with public appreciation.
I want I want I want I want I want her
. There had never been such bliss.
    When Mix came back in four hours to the clinic, she told him, as he tenderly helped her in the car, that it had been twins. Eva’s movements were small. Once seated, she clenched everything. She hoped his clutch was fixed. She wasn’t in the mood for a jolt.
    “Twins?” Mix walked around back of the car, got in the driver’s seat. He put his hands in the air, fists clenched, winner-and-still-champion. “That’s my super sperm.”
    In her Lost City bathroom, a chill rolled through Eva’s body. Skin rose in bumps. She leaned her face deep in the marble basin and retched over and over.
    Whatever was still in her, Eva wanted out.

    A t a bit past seven-thirty, Eva picked up a brown woven bag packed before she’d dressed. In it was her passport; glutinous, glass-bottled oil of coconut; a