Forbidden Fruit by Annie Murphy, Peter de Rosa Read Free Book Online Page B

all, how much blood can you lose?
    “My husband,” I told Eamonn, “took me to hospital. I was bleeding all over the place. It was winter and snowing, and as I
     walked, I dripped.”
    “Blood on snow.”
    I nodded.
    “The hospital was Kings County, a terrible place. No sick person ought to be allowed in there. The two interns who examined
     me hissed, ‘She’s had an abortion. She murdered her baby.’ They had a point. Perpetual mother, perpetual guilt, eh? But it
     was unfair of them to judge me. They didn’t know.”
    Eamonn stroked my burning cheek. “You never hurt anyone, Annie, and you never would.”
    “They put me in a room with a man in the next bed. A nurse came in screaming, ‘Get a tag for this guy’s toe.’ I thought they
     were talking about me. I wanted to tell them I was dying but I wasn’t fucking dead yet.”
    I looked up and said, “Sorry.” He patted my head for me to continue. I gathered his own language was not always monastic.
    “They wanted to put a tag on this corpse. As if without it no one would realize he was dead. He had fooled me because his
     eyes were open and he was looking straight at me.”
    Eamonn stroked my head strongly to intimate, I think, that I was not in the company of a corpse now.
    “My husband came in then. Seeing him, I thought his baby I had let die was getting back at me. He tugged my boots off and
     my toes were all black.”
    “Frostbite?”
    “No. I was losing a tremendous amount of blood prior to going into shock. I started to hyperventilate and had the first panic
     attack of my life. Everyone was running around, shouting and screaming, but nobody really cared.”
    “Oh, Annie,” Eamonn said, sympathetically.
    “A doctor was pressing down on my belly and great gouts of blood were spurting out. I wanted to run away. If I was going to
     die, I wanted out of that madhouse. I got up and ran for the exit. They grabbed me and ordered a big powerful nurse to wrestle
     me and stop me leaving.”
    I must have paused in my story, lost in memory, because I kind of came to with Eamonn asking, “What then, Annie, my poor,
     poor Annie?”
    Hey
, I thought,
stop that or I’ll cry
.
    “What then? The bleeding slowed down. Not much left, I guess.” I said this with a wry smile. “I was transferred to Saint Vincent’s.
     But I was never to be the person I was before. I was now an agitated, panicky, useless human being.”
    “Don’t say that, Annie,” the great healer insisted. “Never say that.”
    “I called my husband and told him I wanted to come home. ‘Get yourself a cab,’ he said.”
    “You had given birth to his child, you were sick in hospital, and he said that? How could he?”
    “If you don’t love, you can do anything, Eamonn. Anyway, I was devastated. That was when my agoraphobia started.”
    “Agoraphobia?”
    “It stopped my first day here when I came down the mountain.”
    “Really?” He shook his head in disbelief. “But what caused it?”
    “I had to go find a cab on my own.”
    “Animals,” he muttered.
    “There were no showers, no one offered me a towel, and I was covered in blood.”
    “But you were in a hospital.”
    “Correction. A New York hospital. No one cared a damn. After all, I was only a human being.”
    “Go on.”
    “I had only a handkerchief to clean myself with. There was blood all over me, on my face, even in my hair. The cab driver
     took one look at me and said, ‘Christ, lady, you been in an accident?’ I said, ‘That’s about it.’ I climbed in and he took
     me home. After that, I never liked open spaces.”
    Eamonn seemed satisfied that my story was complete, though there were dark things in my marriage, in me, that maybe I could
     never tell him. He had his arms around my shoulder as if to enclose me and take away my fear forever.
    For a long time, he stroked my hair and my hands, tender and silent, apart from an occasional long sigh. He seemed to be wrestling
     with some problem that I could