I can hear him shuffling about. Maybe changing clothes or running for his car.
“You have the results?”
“I’d like you to come into my office tomorrow.”
“I told you, I don’t want to do that.”
“You said you had an ultrasound at eleven weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get a video or a printout?”
“No. It was a free clinic. Why?”
“Allie, I really have to get to surgery, but I want to go over these results with you in person.”
I almost drop the phone as I slide off my bed, sinking to the floor. I pull my knees up to my chest and a sob bellows out of me. “The baby has it. That’s what you don’t want to tell me over the phone.”
“Ah, shit. No, that’s not it. No Trisomy 18. I promise.” His next few words are muffled, but I think he’s speaking with someone else. Then he talks to me again. “Listen, I have to hang up. Come whenever you can and I’ll fit you in.”
The phone goes dead. I stare at it, crying. He promised the baby doesn’t have Trisomy 18. Hepromised. A doctor wouldn’t lie about something as critical as that, would he? But there’s definitely something he’s not telling me. I can feel it all the way to my bones. He’d have reassured me if everything came back normal. He’d tell me not to worry and to just make an appointment at my leisure. He wants me to come in tomorrow. To go over the test results. That means there is something to go over.
I crawl back up on my bed, curl up into a fetal position, and cry myself to sleep wondering if tomorrow I’ll be going out to find that bridge.
“Push,” the nurse urges again. “You can do it, Allie. You’ve got this.”
Mom squeezes my hand and offers an encouraging nod.
I hold my breath and bear down as hard as I can.
“Okay, stop.” The doctor’s head pops up. “Stop pushing. The head is out. There, okay, now one last push.”
I lock eyes with my mother, hers aren’t as hopeful as mine. I’ve prayed so much these past months, surely my prayers will be answered. He’s going to be fine. He’s going to have ten fingers and ten toes and he’s going to outlive me by twenty years. I even have a name picked out for him. I’m naming him after my father.
I can feel the relief as his body slips out of me. I rise up on my elbows, waiting to hear the sound every new mom wants to hear. When I hear it, I smile. He’s okay. He’s going to be okay. Dr. Miller was wrong.
His cry is everything I want to hear, but it’s not loud. And when I glance around the room, people are shuffling quickly and hovering over him. Someone puts a tiny oxygen mask over his face.
“What’s happening?”
I look up at my mother as if she’ll have all the answers. She just rubs my arm in that soothing manner mothers do when they know you’re hurting.
Mom hasn’t come out and said it, but I know she hasn’t believed like I have that the test could have been wrong. She’s been supportive. She flew out here a week ago so she’d be here when he came. She’s been staying with me at Aunt Lucy’s, where I’ve been living for the past four months.
The doctor is busy delivering the placenta and doing whatever else needs to be done down there. A nurse helping with Christopher looks over at me with a sad smile. Nurses don’t look at new moms with sad smiles. Nurses look at new moms with happy smiles, and sometimes with happy tears.
“No,” I say, shaking my head over and over. “No, no, no.”
Mom climbs on the bed next to me as soon as the doctor is done with me. She pulls me into her arms and cradles me like how I should be cradling my son. “Shhh.” Her breath flows over my hair as she tries to calm me.
A man, the neonatologist I think, steps forward. “Miss Montana.”
I hold out my hand to stop him. “I know. You don’t have to say it.”
He clears his throat. “Miss Montana, your son is breathing on his own at the moment, but he’s weak. We’re taking him to the NICU for evaluation. I’ll report back soon.”
The three words that keep cycling through my head are ‘at the moment.’What he’s really saying is that at any time, he couldstopbreathing. I turn and press my face into Mom’s shoulder and scream.