Читать книгу Still - Emma Hansen - Страница 9

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SLOWLY, HEAVILY, I blink open my eyes. Looking to the still-made sheets where Aaron’s body should be, I rub a hand over my swollen belly, waiting for a kick. Aaron must have slept on the couch again. He’s been doing that on the nights when sleep doesn’t come. He gets too hot. And, apparently, pregnancy makes me snore.

I look to the clock. It’s 9:31 AM, Friday, April 3, the day before our due date, which falls on a total lunar eclipse, a full blood moon. Today is also Good Friday, and for weeks now I’ve been greeted by Easter decorations whenever I leave home. I’ve spent my pregnancy preparing for an Easter baby, so they’ve made our child’s anticipated birth even more real.

Last night, Aaron and I walked to the drugstore on the corner to buy some Cadbury Eggs to satisfy an urgent craving. When we reached the till to pay we were greeted by a friendly woman with happy cheeks and wiry black hair. “Oh my god! When are you due?” she shouted upon seeing my belly. I smiled at her and rubbed the little feet poking at my side as I replied that my due date was on Saturday. She clucked and said she would be flat on her back at home if she were two days away from having her baby. I don’t know why, but hearing that made me proud. Even if I was only out to buy myself a family-sized bag of chocolate, I felt powerful in that moment.

Fully awake now, I roll over to my left side and gently press myself up to sit. The bed creaks in protest, and so do my aching joints. I pivot my body to face the edge and extend a leg to reach for the stepping stool. With an arched back, I cling to the sheets to get a few inches further and wrap my toes around the wooden rail to drag it closer. Aaron built the bed from scratch last year and I demanded it be enormous, the biggest bed he could make. It seems a little excessive now, given that I need a small ladder to get my large belly in and out of it.

I grab my robe and tie it loosely around my body; I have been mostly sleeping in underwear, since even Aaron’s shirts don’t fit me anymore. My toe joints crack against the hardwood as I make my way to the kitchen in search of breakfast. Once there, I peek my head around the wall of the pass-through and see Aaron at the desk. He has the day off from work for the holiday weekend and is busy doing taxes. I fight the urge to remind him he needs to have them finished by tomorrow, our due date, like he promised.

“Morning,” I manage through a yawn.

He turns around and flashes a smile. “Oh, hi!” Then, directed toward my belly: “Good morning!”

I bend over to kiss his forehead and he returns one to our baby, then I shuffle back to the kitchen for food. I settle on granola, my staple over the last trimester. I bring the bowl to the bedroom and climb back into bed. Balancing the bowl on my belly, I crunch on oat clusters and browse through the various apps on my phone.

Then I hear the voice again, that of a worried mother. It has spoken only a few times during my pregnancy: when I noticed a speckle of blood at five weeks; at our anatomy ultrasound when it showed something unexpected; when my midwife suggested further testing to rule out gestational hypertension; and earlier this week at our appointment when the heartbeat seemed a little slower than usual. Now I hear it again, bellowing at me: He hasn’t kicked yet!

I shush it. Everything is fine; everything is always fine. I feel ridiculous for even entertaining the worry. I climb out of bed to grab my computer. I think about opening up Netflix to watch Parenthood, the show I started earlier this week, in an effort to distract myself. Lauren Graham is in it and as a Gilmore Girls fan that’s about all it needed to win my love. But the voice only grows louder. Why hasn’t he moved?

I grab my phone. It’s 10:05 AM. I quickly search “Brittany” and type:

So close to our due dates! How are you feeling?

I put the phone on the pillow and wait. Brittany, my blond-haired, bright-eyed, full-of-life friend, is due the day after me, April 5, and we’ve talked nearly every day of our pregnancies.

10:42 AM. My phone buzzes. Brittany’s reply reads:

I can’t believe it!!!!!!! I am feeling still pregnant. How are you?

How am I? I’m freaking out. I can’t shake this feeling that something is wrong, I type, then hit delete until the text field is clear. It doesn’t help; the feeling persists. I type again:

I feel ya! I’m trying to not be too impatient and enjoy these last days but man I just want to meet this little guy!!! I hit send.

My stomach churns, then prickles nervously the way it does in moments of heightened anxiety. It won’t be settled with pastimes or entertainment; I need to do something. I reach for my home Doppler—which I purchased in my first trimester—from my bedside table drawer and turn it on. I hit the power button, squeeze the jelly onto the wand, and press it to my belly. I wait for the familiar whoosh, whoosh, whoosh but there is nothing, just static. I move it around. Still nothing. I pull out the instructions and try to read them, but the words blur together on the page.

“Aaron!” I yell.

I hear the screech of his chair pushing back. He appears in the doorway and after one look at me says, “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t remember how to use this.” I hold the Doppler up by the wand. “I haven’t felt him move yet this morning and now I can’t find his heartbeat.”

He sits down on the edge of the bed and calmly reads the instructions—he is inherently logical, he will figure it out. After flipping a switch he squirts more jelly on the wand and gently holds it below my belly button. Static. He fiddles with some dials and slides the wand down lower. More static. He takes my hand and holds it for a moment. Then he gives it a little squeeze and asks, hopefully, “Maybe it’s broken?”

I know it isn’t.

I throw myself off the bed and run to get the magnet off our fridge with the emergency numbers for our medical team. I plant myself down on the exercise ball in the center of the living room floor and ask Aaron to get me a glass of orange juice, a boost of sugar for the baby. As I dial the numbers to page the doctor on call, I bounce in gentle circles and repeat aloud: “Wake up baby, wake up baby, wake up baby.” Clockwise and then counterclockwise. Back and forth.

The phone rings for what seems like much longer than normal before I am greeted by the medical receptionist, who puts me through to the midwife on call. “I haven’t felt my baby move yet this morning,” I repeat. The gentle voice of the midwife speaks calmly into my ear.

“Hi Emma, this is Tess,” she begins. “Have you tried drinking some cold orange juice? Lying down for an hour?”

“Yes,” I lie. Not about the orange juice, but about the lying down; I’m not willing to wait an hour. I bounce up and down. “He usually moves as soon as I wake up. This has never happened before.”

Tess calmly tells us to come in to get monitored, assuring us that babies tend to slow down right before delivery. I hold on to those words as tightly as I can as I gather my things.

“Should we bring our hospital bags?” I ask Aaron, struggling with a toppling Ugg boot.

“No,” he answers, grabbing my shoe to steady it for me to step into. “If we need them, I can come back and get them. It’s not like the baby is coming right now, right?”

Aaron and I run out of the door and drive to the hospital, ten minutes away. We arrive at eleven thirty. As we walk through the Labor and Delivery doors for the first time, I keep thinking that this isn’t how it should be. I’m probably just over-worrying; there is nothing wrong with our boy. But by the time we reach Admitting my panic is rising—I still haven’t felt him move.

“What brings you in today?” A nurse greets us with a smile.

“I haven’t felt our baby move yet this morning,” I repeat for what feels like the hundredth time that day, but with more urgency. “I called ahead and spoke with the midwife on call, Tess.”

As the nurse shuffles through some papers my eyes lock with those of a woman down the hall. Her blond hair is pulled back tightly and the tops of her cheekbones catch the light just so. In one hand she holds a Starbucks cup and with the other she is rubbing the back of her laboring client, in a hospital gown beside her. A doula. I know it instantly.

“Are you with the birth program?” the woman asks.

I nod.

“Who’s your doula?” A slightly annoyed look crosses her face. “And where is she?”

“Jill,” I answer. “But I’m not in labor. So—”

The conversation stops there because the nurse is now directing us toward the registration desk. I look back at the doula and smile, as if to say, “thank you for caring.” Later, I’ll remember this. The last smile before.

The administrative worker asks me to sit, takes our information, and attaches a hospital band to my wrist. Another nurse brings us to the side and pulls out a Doppler. I read the name on her tag: Hilary. As she works on the machine I look up to study her. She is sweet, with strawberry-blond hair that frames her slender face in tight little waves. She keeps her lips pursed in a straight line.

She reaches for the jelly. As she shakes it onto the probe, she asks, “What position is baby usually in?”

“Head down, back along the left, feet up in my right ribs.” I rub the curve of his back down my side. “But maybe he’s moved?”

“Okay, let’s take a look,” she says. “Lift up your shirt.”

I fold the bottom of my black-and-gray-striped tee to the top of my belly and sit back in the chair. Hilary places the probe below my belly button, to the left, then glides it over my skin slowly, looking for the heartbeat. It must be only a minute, but it’s the longest minute of my life. I watch Hilary’s face the entire time, all the while clutching Aaron’s hand, and in those sixty seconds her expression goes from fresh and confident to very panicked. I know then that something is terribly wrong.

She switches off the machine. “You know what? These things break all the time. Let’s just get you into a room and hook you up to the better monitors.” We follow quickly behind her. In the room, she instructs me to get on the bed. Her hands tremble and she bites her lip as she fidgets to get the straps around my belly and hook up my own pulse monitor. Immediately, the monitor shows 130 bpm, which would be a relief were it not in sync with my own heart rate. This sets off the monitor’s alarms. Hilary tries to silence them, but they ring all around us. The rhythmic beating of my heart quickens, echoing out of the speakers. The monitors show 150 bpm. The alarms continue to sound.

Tess, the midwife I spoke to on the phone, appears. I am struggling to breathe.

“There, there,” she hushes. “What’s wrong?” She manages to turn off the alarms and takes my hand, trying to get me to calm down, but I can’t.

“They can’t find his heartbeat!” I gasp, and then start to sob.

“That sounds like one, doesn’t it? One fifty?” She turns to Hilary, who shakes her head.

“No, that’s hers,” she says.

Aaron meets my gaze and we hold it as a flurry of activity erupts around us. For that moment time stands still, just for a second, and we brace ourselves for what is to come.

“We’re going to do an ultrasound,” someone declares. “Just to check.”

A resident wheels in the portable ultrasound machine. She repeats what Hilary said earlier, that it will be much quicker at picking up his heartbeat. She turns on the screen, finds his heart, and pauses. I see that it is still.

I will his heart to start beating again. Just beat, one more time. The resident asks for the attending doctor, Dr. L., as she keeps the probe pressed firmly into my side. Dr. L. arrives, and the resident asks for confirmation that she has the ultrasound positioned on the heart.

“Yes,” he replies. And then, “Turn on the blood flow imaging.”

The screen doesn’t change. Dr. L. nods solemnly at the resident. And then she speaks the worst words I’ll ever hear:

“Okay. I have the ultrasound focused on his heart now. Do you see that?” She points to a spot in the middle of the screen. “It’s not moving. And there’s no red and blue to signify blood flow. I’m so sorry, but your baby is dead.”

Suddenly, it’s as if I’m removed from everything, a bystander on the outskirts of someone else’s trauma. I see us collapse into each other’s arms, breathless and sobbing. I see Aaron drape himself over my belly, hear him beg for a kick. I see the nurses and doctors that have been buzzing around us slowly trickle out of the room. All I can feel is my heart, how it threatens to escape my chest, and my throat, which houses foreign cries. Everything else seems to have fallen away.

I look at the clock and realize that it is almost one. I am supposed to be meeting my mom for our walk. Then the thought hits me that we’ll have to tell our families. I tell Aaron, and he takes my phone. I gather my hands in front of my face and whimper into the curves of them as he dials my mother’s number.

“Amanda? It’s Aaron.” He pauses. I can’t hear her, but I sense her confusion anyway.

“We’re at the hospital. I think you should come. They can’t find Reid’s heartbeat.” He uses our favorite of the names we chose for our baby. Then I hear the muffled panic of my mother’s raised voice.

“No. No,” he chokes. “They can’t find it. He’s gone.”

He makes more calls, each one breaking my heart into a million more pieces, each one constructing a new level of shock. I don’t think I can face the pain on our families’ faces, though I know I will need their support more than anything.

My mother bursts into the room with an air of authority and asks the nurse what is happening. She fixes things, my mother, and she is ready to fix this too. But she can’t, not now. I just wail in her arms and tell her that it’s too late, that our baby is dead.

And then, for a moment, I can’t cry. I sit there and I stare. I stare at my quiet belly and repeat the words to myself slowly, trying to understand. Our baby is dead. Beneath my skin is the body of our child, and somehow that body has to come out. I am sure that they will put me under and cut him from me.

In the throes of trauma, time moves strangely. It can’t have been more than five minutes, surely, but somehow my father, sisters, and in-laws have joined us. But my in-laws would have had to drive in from the Fraser Valley, over an hour away. It makes no sense, but little does right now.

With our loved ones by our side we let the doctors back in to talk us through what we need to do next. Dr. L. appears in the doorway and says he will take us to get a detailed ultrasound to try to determine the cause of death.

“Do you want a wheelchair?” he asks.

I refuse. I’ll walk, of course I’ll walk. But as soon as I take a step I realize it is a terrible mistake. My body feels different and even though nothing has changed physically from this morning—I walked to the car, I walked into the hospital—I am hyperaware of the lifeless body inside me, shifting from side to side as I move. Perhaps that was why they offered. I make my legs move anyway.

We walk through the hospital to the ultrasound wing, the same one we went through twenty weeks ago to find out we were having a boy. We walk past couples standing in the hallway, then couples sitting in chairs waiting for their turn. They quickly look away from our grief-stricken faces, but their knuckles turn white as they hold each other’s hands a little tighter. We are their worst nightmare. They don’t know exactly what has happened to us, but they can guess. And they know, without a doubt, that they do not want to end up here.

We enter the ultrasound room. It is dark and no one turns on the lights. I fumble my way to the bed and Aaron helps me onto the fragile paper sprawled across it. Then Dr. L. is talking. He asks us if he should turn on the patients’ screen. “Do you want to watch?”

I turn to Aaron for an answer. How can we decide? I am sure I will regret it if I don’t. But how can I watch that screen? A black-and-white movie, frozen on the edge of possibility, forever without color. In the end, I look.

After some searching, Dr. L. sees that my placenta is pale and that there is a tiny bit of fluid around the baby’s heart. But both of those things are also common postmortem, he says, so they don’t necessarily indicate the cause of death. He says that we most likely will never find out what happened, that it’s a sad part of life that sometimes babies just pass for no medical reason, and being dragged through months of tests and autopsies will be more painful than we realize right now. But, he says, the choice is absolutely ours. I am inclined to take his advice, even understanding that without an autopsy, we’ll probably never know what happened.

He leaves us by saying that the chance of anything like this happening to us again would be like getting hit by lightning twice. We shouldn’t fear the future.

Back in the assessment room, a new obstetrician comes in to review our options. All of them involve me having to deliver our dead baby vaginally, something I am completely unprepared to hear. The idea of laboring, which I was so calm about before, terrifies me now. I’m not ready. I want it to be finished, but I also don’t want it to start. How strange that something I anticipated with such joyful ease, I now view with such fright.

Why haven’t they offered me a C-section yet, offered to medicate me into a deep sleep? I just want to close my eyes and wake up with it all over. A part of me hopes that during the process, there’s a chance I won’t wake up at all. But I don’t ask. Maybe because I can’t fathom how any woman can get through birthing her lifeless child, either vaginally or surgically.

I am given the option of either an oxytocin drip to induce labor right away, or a Cervidil insert to soften my cervix. I choose the latter so that we can go home to rest and prepare for what comes next.

The obstetrician unwraps the Cervidil and reaches a hand inside of me. I struggle away from her to the top of the bed, in pain. She holds my hips in place with her free hand to stop me from squirming and reaches in further still. She simply tells me, “You need to get it right up there against the cervix.” Then she pulls out her hand, takes the glove off, and continues, “It’ll likely take a few doses of this, so come by in the morning to get your next one. They might start you on the oxytocin if you’ve progressed.”

A nurse with white hair and soft eyes comes in and hands me a pair of hospital underwear and a pad, in case of bleeding if my cervix starts to dilate. She has a gentleness about her, one that suggests she might have done this before, cared for others through losses.

“But our due date is tomorrow,” I tell her as a silent plea for her to change what is happening. Can’t she undo his death if I make it clear how impossible it is? He lived for thirty-nine weeks and six days in my womb. How is it that he stopped living just one day before his due date? One day.

“I know, dear,” she says as she helps me off the bed. “I’m so sorry.”

I put the mesh underwear on in the bathroom, avoiding the mirror as I do.

IT WAS DECIDED that we weren’t in any state to drive home. My mother-in-law, Annette, waited behind to take us in our car while the others went ahead to our apartment. I don’t remember leaving the hospital, but we end up in our car. Annette takes the speed bumps slowly and it makes me wonder if she senses the pain they’ll cause me, each bump startling the body at rest inside of mine.

It’s five thirty when we walk into the apartment. Hank, Aaron’s dad, is standing off to the side near the corner window in our living room. My parents are in the hallway, and my two younger sisters, Alana and Rebecca, are sitting on the couch—they are both university students, and I think of how they should be studying for their finals right now. Hanah, Aaron’s sister and one of my best friends, and her boyfriend, Carson, are on their way. Aaron’s brothers are out of town—Derek on a missions trip in India, Levi at school in Ontario—and we’re told they’re booking flights to come back as soon as possible.

Arriving home feels like tumbling into a twilight zone—like we’re stuck in a past that no longer fits, with the future lingering just out of reach. Everything is exactly as we left it just a few hours earlier, except the dishes have been washed and our living room tidied.

My mother tells me later that they stressed about what to do to prepare for our arrival. Should they put away the baby items? Do our laundry? Hide evidence of my pregnancy? In the end, they knew that they couldn’t just wipe all signs of our child from existence. So they left everything as it was—including the nursery door, slightly ajar. Once they were exhausted from conversation and tears they looked for something to watch on our TV. Unable to figure out how to summon Netflix into view, they rifled through our towering stack of DVDs in search of something happy to distract them. They ended up pulling out the disc Aaron had made of our trip to Disneyland, a year after we’d started dating. Tears poured out of them as they watched us on the screen: happy, naive, carefree teenagers. We rode rollercoasters and laughed as the cart turned this way and that, kissing for the camera on the upward climbs. Would we ever be the same? they wondered out loud, to no one in particular.

In the haze that surrounds the hours after that resident wheeled in the ultrasound, there are pockets of dreamlike clarity. I feel vividly aware of my senses as I sit down on the couch and fold my legs up beneath me. I am mindful not to move, not wanting to feel his lifeless body stir inside of me. The sensation makes me ill, and then incredibly guilty in turn. My belly is still round, but it has changed. I’m not sure what to do, but I can’t let it be real yet. I don’t know where to put my hands. It feels wrong to place them on my stomach, so they fall awkwardly at my sides. Someone hands me a bowl of tomato soup and tells me to eat. As I sit there, slowly and methodically lifting the spoon to my mouth, I hear my mother and Annette in the kitchen around the corner, whispering.

“I think she’s in shock,” Annette says to my mom.

I mull that over. Am I not acting how I’m supposed to? How should you behave while waiting to birth a child who is already dead? While waiting to gaze upon the face of that child for the very first time, knowing that they will soon fade from memory? There is no making sense of the unfathomable, and so I sit. I sit and I eat tomato soup and I watch Friends on the television. I’ll never be able to do any of those things in the same way after.

I don’t actually watch. Instead, I am stuck in my own mind, traveling back to my childhood. I’m in sixth grade at a new school with new teachers, and already they’ve pegged me for the perfectionist I am. We’re at an end-of-school weekend retreat for my year, some hundred of us, and on the last day they give out satirical awards to some of the students. I win the “Failure to Fail” award. They have me come up in front of all my peers to attempt something that simply isn’t doable: shove a box full of crackers in my mouth and then whistle. I am determined to prove them wrong, and as I blow with all my might, a cloud of crumbs bursts out before me. The room erupts in laughter, and I feel my face flush red with embarrassment. I have only failed to do what is obviously impossible, but all I see is that I have failed. It is the first time I can recall feeling so devastated.

I have failed many times since then. Stumbled and crumpled and collapsed in defeat. But as I sit here now I see all of my past failures as trivial compared to this, because this time I failed and a life was lost. Our baby is dead. I keep repeating that over and over and over again in my mind until the words mean nothing to me. How will Aaron ever forgive me? How will I ever forgive myself?

It is an inexplicable feeling to carry death inside you when the very concept of pregnancy is so explicitly connected to life. To be in a room surrounded by family mourning a soul that has departed when the body has not. He is still here. He is with us. And he has to come out. You can’t bury a body in utero, can’t cremate remains that exist in the in-between. Instead, you have to do the impossible. Somehow, it must be done.