Earth Angel Read Free

done.” Suddenly, the bleeding
     started, followed quickly by the miscarriage and a couple days later by Tim returning the cute baby clothes and darling furniture.
     Just like that, it was over. As if we’d driven through a guard rail and were soaring over a cliff, listening to the rush of
     air beneath us, watching the horizon rise. We still caught ourselves staring at other people’s babies, or stopping to smile
     over some nifty baby clothes in theBaby Gap window at the mall. But I’d pretty much gotten over it and looked forward to trying again next year when the timing
     would be better anyway.
    Afterward, friends kept asking me how I was doing and I’d be embarrassed to tell them I was fine and meant it. They seemed
     either to admire me for bravely lying or else be disappointed in me for not suffering more. I had to admit I hadn’t been the
     best pregnant woman ever. One morning I woke up and found Tim sitting on the edge of the bed smiling sweetly at me. “You’re
     glowing,” he said. “I hate to be so clichéd, but you really are glowing.” Suddenly, I bolted out of bed and puked up in the
     bathroom. I lifted my head from the toilet bowl rim and said, “Want to clean up the afterglow?”
    It was Tim who really took the miscarriage hard. Losing Emily, combined with the usual pressures of the ER, had started to
     fray him a bit. That affected me more than anything else that had happened. The miscarriage was at least natural, but Tim’s
     depression was not. Tim was the kind of person born under a lucky star. Everything he did was successful, from high-school
     football star to the top five percent of his med school class. He saved lives in ER that everyone else thought were hopeless.
     How many times had we been out at a restaurant or movie and someone would come up and thank Tim for saving his or her life.
     Tim was brilliant, decisive, and confident, knew what to do and did it without hesitation. I think that’s why he liked ER
     so much. He was a bona fide miracle worker. He raised the dead. He used to joke that he turned water into whine (watery eyes
     from despair into whining voices about the bill). Emily was the first thing he’d ever failed at, at least in his own eyes.
     And he hadn’t felt lucky ever since. Then, when that realtor jerk in the ER started yelling that he wanted his sprained wrist
     looked at immediately, yanking on Tim’s arm while Tim was rushing down the hall towork on a woman in cardiac arrest, Tim just nailed the man in the nose, breaking it in an explosion of blood. The lawsuit
     was inevitable; so was Tim’s suspension. Even gods are accountable to insurance companies.
    Carol and I walked out into the waiting room. Three Asian men in business suits sat huddled together over the magazine table.
     The magazines had all been removed and neatly stacked on the floor. One of them was drawing something on the back of one of
     our four-color brochures detailing our services. The other two watched silently with intent expressions.
    “What do you think he does with it?” Carol asked.
    “Who?” I thought maybe she meant the man drawing on the brochure.
    “The guy. The guy who bought Napoleon’s penis. What’s he do with it? Keep it on display in his living room and stare at it?
     Make it into a paperweight? Take out his own and compare? I mean, it’s got to be old and shriveled by now. When did Napoleon
     die?”
    “How should I know?”
    Carol snorted. “You shouldn’t. But you do.”
    “Napoleon Bonaparte: seventeen sixty-nine to eighteen twenty-one.”
    “His dick’s over a hundred and seventy years old. Yikes.”
    “Almost as old as your bleach job.”
    She yawned. “I owe you for that, harelip.”
    I touched the tiny scar on the side of my lip, a white check mark from falling against a glass coffee table when I was six.
    Carol batted away my hand. “Oh, come on. I’m not going to play if you’re going to get self-conscious on me.” She grabbed her