By Teresa Burns Gunther

“Echo-Delta,” his wife shouted from the dining room. “Can you order Chinese?” 

Ed sighed and checked his watch. He’d given up begging Tanya not to speak this way. Tango, as she’d taken to calling herself, spoke in the NATO phonetic alphabet now: a side-effect of her new life mission, to change the medical-insurance-industrial complex one military letter at a time. Ed waited the last seconds until his office clock read 5:00 before leaning his hands into his desktop, where a client’s financial records were arrayed, and pushing himself up. 

He grabbed his cane and made his slow way to the kitchen, wincing at the jolt of pain in his left leg, pain that poked a shaming finger. Since the pandemic, his accounting firm had allowed him to work from home, which was convenient given how the accident had left him.  

He dug the worn paper menu from a jumbled drawer. 

“Echo-Delta, don’t forget,” she called from her command center. “No Mike-Sierra-Golf.”  

Tanya insisted the insurance company and its overseas call center had forced her to change the way she spoke. She mimicked their obstinate uncooperativeness in a caustic tone: Please spell your name. What is your medical ID#? Can you repeat that? Your doctor’s name? Can you spell that? They never got it right. Asked her to repeat herself again. And again. Or foisted her off on Chatbots that were never any help. Or left her on hold for hours with fingernails-on-chalkboard musak. If she finally got an English-speaking human, she’d put the phone on speaker and bark, “Hello! This is Tango-Alpha-November-Yankee-Alpha…” pacing around the dining table as she spoke. 

At first, it had sounded ridiculous, his tiny wife speaking like a general, but it seemed to help. The insurance company had finally begun to pay their claims from the accident, after months of stonewalling and refusals. This battle had given Tanya’s life its only direction, so Ed couldn’t bring himself to protest too much. 

The first time Ed spotted himself walking with his cane, in Harvey Hardware’s front window on Main, he’d done a double take. Shocked. Who was that old man of thirty-two? He feared he’d never walk without it. Tanya’s injuries were internal. She walked fine, like a general, an affect he told himself was better than the out-of-character despair that had held her huddled on their queen mattress for months, unable to unfurl until he began to drag her out into the sun each day for a walk. A complicated dance, his cane between them representing the gap between the great before and the after in their life. 

It had happened the previous spring. A day bright, sharp with raw sunshine denied them over the previous months of a particularly brutal winter. They had run out of the house like captives held too long in the dark. Tanya had insisted on a bike ride. Ed worried it wasn’t safe. But she said, “We’ll take an old people ride, along the waterfront, flat and easy.” She was six months pregnant, glowing, and blissed out on life and he could deny her nothing. For this too, he later blamed himself.  

They pumped tires, strapped on helmets. Tanya sang as they rode, her flowered sundress fluttering. Ed remembered with an ache how he’d laughed, flushed with the evidence of his good fortune and happiness. Had his self-congratulation blinded him? He never saw it coming. He was watching a family of cedar waxwings when the truck barreled around a corner, braked hard, locked up its wheels, slid and crushed them against the wall of a discount liquor store.  

At least, that’s what the police report said.  

All Ed remembered was waking in the hospital from an endless dream, riding his bike, the hot sun on his face, his skin burning. Then he became aware of beeping instruments, the smirking of rubber-soled shoes, a low rumble of voices, and that smell: a stale aroma of winter, miserable with disinfectant. He looked for Tanya. She wasn’t there. He grew angry. How could she keep riding when he was hurt? He kept asking the people moving in and out of his room, Where am I? Where is Tanya? When is she coming back? Did you see it happen? Until finally a man who turned out to be his brother wrote a sign on a large whiteboard that said:  

You’re in the hospital. 

YOU WERE IN AN ACCIDENT.  

NO ONE SAW IT.  

You broke your leg, pelvis, and wrist.  

YOU NEED TO REST.  

TANYA IS OKAY. You’ll see her later. 

One morning, a woman pulled a chair beside his hospital bed. 

“No,” she said, “I’m not a doctor. No. Not a nurse.” Turned out she was Estelle. “Tanya’s mother?” she said, twisting the strap of her purse. Remembering his anger at Tanya, he said, “Why hasn’t she come to see me? I had an accident and she just kept riding.” Estelle started to cry. “Oh, hey,” he said. He was upset but it wasn’t an impossible situation. The nurse put a hand on Estelle’s shoulder and said, “He can’t remember anything. He’s had a serious concussion.” And more softly, “He doesn’t know.” 

Ed scoffed, told them they were all crazy.  

Three weeks after the accident, he woke up and returned to himself, his body a study in pain. He asked for Tanya. A sorrowful, white-coated doctor and a weary nurse gave him the news and broke his heart. Tanya had lost the baby. A girl they would have named Grace. She also lost her uterus, the works. The nurse wheeled Ed in to see her. Tanya looked like a ghost but he took a stupid comfort in realizing that she hadn’t been out riding all that time in the bright sunlight without him.  

Ed had his cane as hard evidence of what happened. He still remembered nothing, though he’d concocted a story from all he’d been told and retold until it felt like memory, implanted. He’d seen the wall they were slammed against, the tire marks in the street, the brown stains of old blood, long faded over the seventeen months. Tanya remembered everything. She’d talked him through it, walking and holding his hand, her voice a monotone record of disaster. She called herself sterile, an empty, childless shell.  

When they got home from the hospital, the bills were already pouring in, medical and otherwise. The ambulances, the surgery, an anesthesiologist’s bill that the insurance company refused to pay. We have made it clear to the doctor that we do not pay for that kind of anesthesia. Tanya screamed into the phone, “Should they have just given me a bullet to bite while they ripped my baby out of me?” And “You people are cretins.” And “You people are terrible.” And even, “You people should die.” At which point Ed took the phone from her.  

Tanya didn’t eat. “Animals,” she told him, “Were some mother’s baby, too.” She lived on yogurt, carrots, and nuts. Ed had lost his daughter before ever having a chance to meet her but Tanya had lost so much more.  

She had no passion for anything, except the hospital and insurance Delta Omega Golf Sierras who profited from human pain and suffering. That’s how she saw it. In a way, he was grateful for their stolid cold-hearted resistance. It gave her something to rail against. Without it, he might have lost her, too. 

After ordering vegetable lo mein for delivery, he put away his work and was surprised to hear her crying. He hobbled to the dining room door, confused to see she was still on the phone. 

“Oh, dear,” Tanya said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” And then she was telling their story and as she cried softly, her body eased, her shoulders lowered. A voice through the phone spoke words of commiseration. “Thank you,” she said, “You’re very kind.” 

Tanya listened, nodding her head. When Ed heard the word “adoption,” he froze. The last time Ed tried to talk about adoption, she’d said, “No. I only want our own child,” then spent two days in bed. He hadn’t mentioned it again.   

“You did?” he heard Tanya say. And “Oh! Well, no. No. My husband…he’s talked about it but—” She tugged Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose.  

“Da ting I realized, Ma’am, is that the babies? They are grieving too.” The melodic voice rang through the speaker, sweet and high like bells. “They lost so much, Ma’am.” 

Tanya swiped at her eyes with a tissue. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”  

“Ma’am, whatever is written in your fate will happen.” 

When the doorbell rang fifteen minutes later she was still on the phone. She yelled back over her shoulder, “Echo-Delta, can you get that?” 

Ed walked quietly with his cane to the door, careful to not disturb this conversation.  

In the kitchen, he served up the lo mein while it was still warm. He needed to get her to eat. He stood with the steaming plate wondering where to put it on the file strewn dining table, her command center. 

Tanya smelled the food, turned and looked at him, eyes swimming, nose red. “Can you hang on for one sec,” she asked the kind stranger.  

Oh, yes Ma’am. Of course, Ma’am!”   

“My husband has brought me dinner,” Tanya said, held up a finger and mouthed, one minute.  

“Oh!” said the kind stranger. “You are a lucky woman!” 

“Lucky?” Tanya gave a strangled laugh. Then was quiet. Finally she said, “Yes. I am.” He couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked at him like that. Like she really saw him. She whispered, “Thank you, Ed.” He wiped a tear from her cheek, smoothed her hair then carried the plate back to the kitchen.  

Ed leaned his cane against the kitchen table and set out two placemats. Filled a plate for himself then he felt a hand on his back.  

“Ed?” She opened a bottle of beer. Got two glasses from the cupboard. They ate in silence. He was dying to ask, but the only thing he’d learned to do since the accident was to give her time. 

“That woman I was talking to couldn’t have children either.” Tanya shook her head as if anticipating his question. “No, she didn’t lose her…baby…like I did. Like we did.”  

Then she laughed. 

“What’s so funny?” Ed asked. 

“Well…she never wanted to adopt either. Told her husband, we cannot know what we might get!” Tanya imitated the sing-song accent. In the end, the woman on the phone had adopted, twice. “Little angels, she called them.” Tanya lifted her pointy chin to him. Her eyes even greener from the redness her crying had left. “She didn’t have a hysterectomy. But she never got to experience pregnancy. She tried for so long to get pregnant, it made me think… I at least got to know what it is to feel a life inside me.” 

Ed reached over and took her hands in his.  

For the first time, he imagined how it might be otherwise. They were still young. He would get rid of the cane. 

Anything was possible. 

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Teresa Burns Gunther is an award-winning author whose fiction and nonfiction are published widely in US and international literary journals and anthologies. Her story collection Hold Off The Night, a Finalist for the Orison, and the Hudson Book Prizes, was published June 2023. Her stories are recognized in numerous contests; most recently awarded the 2023 Gemini Short Story Prize and the 2022 New Millennium Award for Fiction. She is the founder of Lakeshore Writers Workshop where she leads workshops and offers coaching and editing