Page 24 of The Other Mother

WHERE'S MY BABY?

I don't sleep. Not really. I drift in and out of consciousness while sitting on the nursery floor, my back against the wall, Eva's weight warm and solid against my chest. The house settles around us with those peculiar desert sounds.

The wood creaks as it expands and contracts with the shifts in temperature and the sand whispers against the windows when the wind picks up.

Eva's breathing is steady and rhythmic, her tiny chest rising and falling in perfect time. The sound should be comforting, but instead it triggers something deep in my memory, something that's been lurking just beneath the surface for weeks.

The hospital monitors. That same steady rhythm, beeping in time with a heartbeat that might not have been mine.

When I was still working as an editor, before Eva, before the move to the desert changed everything, I used to have this recurring nightmare about losing a manuscript.

I'd dream that I'd been working on something important—the next big literary breakthrough—and then suddenly it would be gone.

Vanished from my computer, erased from my memory, like it had never existed at all.

I'd wake up in a panic, searching through files and folders, convinced I'd lost something precious.

Now I realize those dreams weren't about manuscripts at all. They were about the gaps in my own story, the missing pieces of my life that I've been too afraid to examine closely.

Adam and I met at a bookstore reading in Newport Beach five years ago.

He'd been there for a friend's girlfriend, sitting in the back row looking slightly uncomfortable among all the literary types.

I was there because I genuinely loved the author—a debut novelist whose work I'd discovered through my job.

After the reading, we'd ended up at the same coffee shop, and he'd surprised me by asking thoughtful questions about the book, about my work, about what made a story worth telling.

"I'm not much of a reader," he'd admitted over our second cup of coffee, "but I like watching you talk about it. You get this look on your face, like you're seeing something the rest of us miss."

That was Adam at his best. He was genuinely curious about the world, willing to step outside his comfort zone for someone he cared about.

He'd supported my writing dreams even when they meant late nights and weekend workshops and the kind of creative frustration that made me difficult to live with.

When my mother got sick, he'd driven me to every chemo appointment, sat in waiting rooms reading engineering journals while I held her hand through the worst of it.

"Promise me something," my mother had said during one of our last conversations, when the pain medication made her words slur slightly.

"Promise me you'll know your own child when you see her.

Some women, they need time to fall in love with their babies.

But you'll know. When it's really yours, you'll know instantly. "

I'd thought it was the medication talking, one of those strange things people say when they're dying. Now I wonder if she was trying to tell me something important.

The memory surfaces gradually, like something rising from deep water. I'm not sure if I'm remembering or dreaming, but suddenly I'm back in that hospital bed, the taste of metal and antiseptic thick in my mouth.

Dark. Blurred ceiling tiles spinning slowly above me. My eyelids feel heavy, like they're weighted down with sand. My mouth is dry, so dry I can barely swallow. Pain pulses through my abdomen in waves, sharp and relentless.

I'm in a hospital bed. Post-op. The knowledge comes to me gradually, like puzzle pieces clicking into place .

I try to speak but only manage to croak out "My baby ... where's my baby?"

The room is dim, lit only by the green glow of monitors and the hallway light seeping through a gap in the curtain. Shadows move behind the fabric and I hear people talking in low, urgent voices.

A baby cries somewhere far away, muffled by walls and distance. But the sound is wrong somehow. It's unfamiliar, almost foreign.

A nurse appears beside my bed, her smile faint and professional. Her badge is turned away from me, the name hidden against her scrubs.

"She's okay. Just rest now."

I try to sit up, desperate to see my baby, to hold her, to confirm that everything is real. But pain slices through my side like lightning, forcing me back down onto the pillows.

"I want to see her," I manage to say, my voice barely above a whisper.

The nurse reaches for something on my IV pole, adjusting tubes and monitors with practiced efficiency. Someone else enters the room. It’s a woman in dark scrubs I don't recognize. She's older, more severe, with gray hair pulled back in a tight bun.

Panic rises in my chest like flood water. "Where's my baby?!"

The woman in dark scrubs speaks to someone outside the curtain, her voice low but carrying clearly in the quiet room. "We need help in here. "

Suddenly there are strong arms holding me down, pressing my shoulders into the mattress. I struggle against them, but my body feels disconnected, like it belongs to someone else.

A sharp pinch at my arm. An injection.

"No—wait?—"

"She's hysterical," a voice says from somewhere above me. "She's not stable."

"We had to sedate the mother."

Everything starts to float. My vision swims, the ceiling tiles blurring into abstract patterns. As consciousness slips away from me like water through cupped hands, I see something that freezes my blood.

In the hallway beyond the curtain, another woman is screaming. Security guards are pulling her back, their hands firm on her arms as she struggles against them. She's thin, pale, desperate, and for just a moment, our eyes meet through the gap in the curtain.

She looks like Mara.

I jolt awake in the nursery, my heart hammering against my ribs. Eva is crying, the same rhythmic cry from my memory, the one that doesn't sound quite right. I pick her up automatically, shushing her softly as I rock back and forth on the floor.

"It's okay," I whisper. "I was there. I saw you."

But even as I say the words, doubt creeps in like cold air through a cracked window. The woman in the hallway, the one being dragged away by security. Was that real? And if it were, what did it mean ?

I look down at Eva, studying her face in the pale light from the nightlight. Her features are delicate, perfect, beautiful. But in this moment, holding her close after the vividness of that memory, I feel something shift inside me.

"Wait," I whisper, my voice barely audible in the quiet room. "Was it you?"

The question hangs in the air between us, and suddenly I don't know who I'm talking to.