Page 47

I race to the bed. “Calm down. This can’t be good for the baby.” I sit and put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry I yelled.”
So many emotions are raging through me right now, I don’t even know how to process them. I’m excited because I never thought I’d have the opportunity to have another child. I’m pissed because she didn’t take my feelings into consideration. I’m sad because it seems like this isn’t at all the fairytale ending I’d wished for us. Most of all, I’m worried because of how she’s reacting.
If she loved me—if she even just liked me a whole lot—she’d have told me.
There’s no time to deal with my own emotions while she’s breaking down next to me. All I can do is try to comfort her.
“Breathe, Allie.”
My touch seems to calm her, something I’m grateful for even if Iamstill pissed as hell.
“I need a minute,” she says, getting off the bed and crossing to the bathroom.
I hear the faucet run. Then the toilet flushes. Then the faucet runs again. Finally, she emerges.
The few minutes she’s been in there have my anger growing again.
She sits in the chair across the bedroom, legs pulled up, arms around her knees, apparently wanting to be as far away from me as she can.
I stand, trying to maintain a modicum of self-control, but doing a shit job of it. “There isn’t a single goddamn thing you could tell me to justify withholding this from me.”
Tears start to fall down her cheeks. “I lost a baby.”
My heart falls into my stomach and I want to throw up. It’s like all in one fell swoop, I’ve been given everything I wanted, but just as quickly, it was yanked away. “You… lost the baby?” The words are stuck in my throat and barely come out past the forming lump. “Are you having a miscarriage?”
She shakes her head. “Not this baby. I lost another baby.”
Again, my emotions are all over the fucking room, plastered to the wall in spits and spatters. I’m elated yet saddened all at the same time. I don’t know which way is up. I’ve no idea what to think, how to feel. I can barely feel my own skin.
“Al, you’re confusing the shit out of me. Can you please start from the beginning? This ismybaby?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s okay?”
A painful sob heaves out of her. “I don’t know.”
My head is about to explode. I try to remain calm because me freaking out is not going to help this situation. I walk over to her and get on my knees. “Allie, what’s going on?”
“I had a baby. His name was Christopher.” She sniffs and wipes at a tear. “I was nineteen.”
Was. His namewasChristopher. Past tense. And she was nineteen.Fuck.
There are so many questions on the tip of my tongue, but I hold them all in. Because I get the feeling this is why she called. This was her nightmare. And I have to let her get it out. After… that’s when I’ll ask her everything I need to know.
Her tears just keep coming, streaming down her face in a never-ending flow. When her body begins shaking, I gather her into my arms and carry her to the bed. Setting her down, I crawl in beside her and wrap my arms around her. “Shhh. It’s okay.”
Her chest rises and falls rapidly, but soon her breathing evens out. “When they put him in my arms, he was perfect. He was smaller than average babies, but he looked like every othernew baby I’d ever seen. He had ten fingers and ten toes—but his fingers were different, overlapping in an odd way. He cried sometimes, but it was so weak, like a mouse squeaking. And occasionally, he’d struggle to breathe.” I watch a tear roll down the side of her head. “Every time it happened,Ialso struggled to breathe.
“My mother was there. She’s the only one who was. But even she had a hard time watching it. I think it was my agony that she couldn’t bear. So she’d have to leave every few hours, probably so I didn’t have to see just how sad she was.
“The neonatologist reiterated what the obstetrician told me. That comfort measures were what was important. That interventions like intubation and medication wouldn’t make a difference and would only prolong the inevitable. That the best thing I could do for him and myself was to hold him, cuddle him, feed him”—she chokes up—“and love him for as long as he would hold on.”
Hot tears flow down the side of my face as I picture a young Allie, just a kid herself, holding a dying child.
“He lived for thirty-one hours and eighteen minutes.” She bellows out a sob. “And then he just looked up at me. Just for a second, he looked at me like he knew me. Like he knew I was his mom and that I loved him. Then he fell asleep and he was gone. He was just… gone.”
I squeeze her tightly and she clutches onto me like I’m saving her from drowning. I kiss the side of her head, letting her distress settle, when it occurs to me that she was nineteen—the same age she was when she said she was in Australia.