Page 8 of The Other Mother

THE ROOM

My thoughts drift backward, pulled by some gravitational force I can't resist. Not dreaming, not quite memory, but something in between. The night Eva was born. The night everything changed.

The hospital room comes back to me in fragments, like photographs scattered on a table.

I'm lying in a bed that's too narrow, too hard, the plastic mattress crinkling every time I shift position.

The fluorescent light above me flickers with a buzz that gets inside my skull and stays there.

My body is shivering and sweating at the same time, caught between fever and chills that make my teeth chatter.

Forty hours of labor. That's what I told the support group, but the details are fuzzy around the edges.

Pain has a way of erasing time, turning hours into moments and moments into eternities.

I remember the contractions that felt like my body was trying to tear itself apart from the inside.

I remember vomiting until nothing came up but bile.

I remember clutching the rail of the hospital bed with both hands, my knuckles white and aching.

"Where's your husband?" a voice asks. A nurse, maybe. I can't see her face clearly through the haze of exhaustion and whatever they've given me for the pain.

"He had to leave," another voice replies. "Emergency at work. But he should be back.”

There was some crisis with a foundation that couldn't wait. Or maybe it was a permit issue. It wasn’t going to take long, he had promised. Maybe an hour or so. The details don't matter now, but they mattered then.

I remember whispering to anyone who would listen, "Don't let her die. I can't lose another one."

The words surprise me now. Another one? What did I mean by that? The memory is clear, my voice hoarse and desperate in that fluorescent-lit room.

There was something, years ago. Before Adam, before we were even serious. I was twenty-six, working at another publishing house, living in that tiny studio apartment in Santa Monica where the walls were so thin I could hear my neighbor's television through the bathroom wall.

I was seeing someone then. Marcus. A writer who came into our office trying to pitch a novel about surfers and existential dread.

He had sun-bleached hair and calloused hands from spending every morning in the water before most people were awake.

We started sleeping together even though I knew it was a bad idea.

He was the kind of man who collected women like seashells, beautiful for a moment before being forgotten on some shelf.

I was two weeks late when I finally bought the pregnancy test. Two pink lines appeared immediately, no waiting, no ambiguity. Just the stark reality of cells dividing inside me, creating something I wasn't prepared for.

I told Marcus in a coffee shop near the pier, the kind of place where aging surfers nursed single cups of coffee for hours while staring at the waves. He went very still when I said the words, his tan face going pale around his eyes.

"What do you want to do?" he asked, but I could see the answer he was hoping for written in the way his hands fidgeted with his car keys.

I wanted to keep it. The realization surprised me.

I'd never thought of myself as particularly maternal, never cooed over babies or imagined myself pushing a stroller through farmers markets.

But something about those two pink lines made me feel protective, fierce.

Like I'd been waiting my whole life for this moment without knowing it.

Marcus left for Costa Rica the next week.

A surf trip, he said, but we both knew he wasn't coming back.

I spent three days calling in sick to work, lying on my couch eating ice cream and watching terrible daytime television while trying to imagine raising a child alone on an assistant editor's salary.

The bleeding started on a Thursday morning. Light at first, then heavier. By the time I got to the emergency room, it was over. A miscarriage, the doctor said gently. Very common in early pregnancy. Nothing I did or didn't do. Just one of those things.

I never told anyone about it until Adam. It felt too private, too much like a failure I couldn't explain. By the time Adam and I got serious, it seemed like ancient history. A different life lived by a different version of myself.

But lying in that hospital bed, delirious with pain and exhaustion, my subconscious must have remembered. The fear of losing another baby. The terror that my body would fail again when it mattered most.

Maybe that's why Eva doesn't feel like mine. Maybe I'm so afraid of losing her that I can't let myself fully accept that she's real, that she's here.

I remember a nurse leaning over me, her face sharp and angular in the harsh light. She's older than the others, with gray hair pulled back severely and lines around her eyes that suggest she's seen too much in too many delivery rooms.

"She doesn't look like you," she says, studying something I can't see.

I try to ask what she means, but my mouth feels stuffed with cotton. The words won't form properly. Everything is distant and underwater, like I'm watching someone else's life through thick glass.

Somewhere outside my room, a woman screams. Not me. The sound is raw and hysterical, cutting through the hospital noise like a knife. She's repeating something over and over, but I can't make out the words. Feet rush past my door, voices calling out urgent instructions.

"Wrong room," someone shouts. "Wrong room."

Then everything fades to black.

When I wake up again, I'm in a different place.

The recovery room, they call it, though nothing about it feels particularly healing.

The walls are the same institutional green, and the smell of disinfectant burns my nostrils.

My throat is raw, my abdomen aches where they cut me open, and there's an IV in my arm that pulls whenever I move.

I look at the clock on the wall. It's two hours later than what I remember. Two hours missing from my life, swallowed by anesthesia and trauma and the strange liminal space between one life and another.

"Where's my baby?" I ask the nurse adjusting my IV. She's younger than the gray-haired one, with kind eyes and a gentle touch .

She smiles and reaches for something beside the bed. "Right here, mama. She's been waiting for you."

She places Eva in my arms, already swaddled in a hospital blanket. The weight of her is startling after forty hours of carrying her inside my body. She's real now, separate from me, her own person with her own needs and demands.

I stare down at her perfect face, waiting for the flood of love everyone talks about. The instant recognition, the overwhelming maternal instinct that's supposed to make everything else fade away.

Instead, I feel nothing but cold.

The baby in my arms is beautiful. Perfect features, tiny fingers, dark hair that looks almost black under the harsh hospital lights. But she doesn't feel like mine. She feels like a stranger's child that someone has placed in my arms by mistake.

The detachment terrifies me more than the pain of surgery, more than the exhaustion, more than Adam's absence during the most important moment of my life.

I'd read all the books, taken the classes, prepared for everything except this complete absence of feeling.

The other mothers in my prenatal yoga class talked about instant bonding like it was guaranteed, like love was just another part of the delivery process.

I try to summon something. Anything. I study Eva's face for traces of myself or Adam, searching for familiar features that might trigger the recognition I'm missing.

Her nose is tiny and perfect, nothing like my own which has a slight bump.

Her lips are fuller than mine, more like Adam's, but even that feels like reaching for connections that aren't really there.

The silence in the recovery room is suffocating. I should be crying with joy, calling family, taking a thousand pictures to commemorate this moment. Instead, I'm holding a baby and feeling like an imposter in my own life.

A memory surfaces from childhood, unbidden and unwelcome.

I was eight years old, staying at my grandmother's house in Bakersfield for a week while my parents worked out the details of their divorce.

My grandmother had a neighbor, Mrs. Barbery, who had just adopted a baby from China.

I remember watching through the kitchen window as Mrs. Barbery held her new daughter in the backyard, both of them crying.

"Why is she sad?" I asked my grandmother. "Doesn't she want the baby?"

My grandmother was washing dishes, her hands moving mechanically through the soapy water. "Sometimes love takes time, sweetheart. Sometimes you have to grow into it."

I didn't understand then. Love was immediate in my eight-year-old world, as simple as liking chocolate ice cream or hating vegetables. You either loved something or you didn't.

Now, holding Eva in the sterile hospital room, I understand what my grandmother meant.

But understanding doesn't make it easier.

If anything, it makes it worse. Because what if I never grow into it?

What if Eva and I are simply incompatible, two strangers thrown together by biology and circumstance?

As I hold her, a flicker of memory punches through the fog of exhaustion and medication. There was someone else in the room. Not hospital staff, not a nurse or doctor. A woman sitting in the corner, crying silently.

I try to focus on her face, to remember what she looked like, but the harder I concentrate, the more the image slips away. Like trying to hold water in cupped hands.

Was she real? Or just another hallucination brought on by pain medication and trauma? The memory feels important somehow, but I can't grasp why.

I bolt upright in bed, my heart racing. Adam stirs beside me but doesn't wake. The red numbers on the clock now show 4:57 AM. I've been lost in the past for over half an hour, reliving that night in fragments that don't quite fit together.

Was that real? Was someone else in the room when they gave me Eva? Was I even fully conscious when it happened?

I slip out of bed as quietly as possible and pad to the living room on bare feet. My phone is on the coffee table where I left it, and I scroll through the photos until I find the ones from the hospital. The first pictures Adam took after Eva was born.

There I am in the recovery room bed, holding a tiny bundle of blankets and baby. I'm smiling, but it looks forced. Exhausted. Like I'm performing happiness for the camera instead of feeling it.

I zoom in on the details. The bed, the machines, the generic hospital artwork on the walls. Everything looks right, looks familiar. But something about the lighting is wrong. In my memory, the room was dimmer, softer. In the photo, everything is bright and clear.

In the photo, Eva is wrapped in a blue and white striped blanket with the hospital logo. But I remember her being swaddled in something different. Something plain pink with a brown trim, soft like it just came from the dryer.

I flip the photo over and find Adam's handwriting on the back: "Our first day as a family."

The word "our" stands out like it's been highlighted. But what if it wasn't our family at all? What if the woman in the corner was the real mother?

The thought is insane. Hospitals have protocols, procedures, systems designed to prevent exactly this kind of mistake. Bracelets that match, footprints that are taken immediately, DNA that can be tested if there's any question.

But mistakes happen. Even in the most careful institutions, human error creeps in. Tired staff working double shifts, similar names on charts, chaos in busy maternity wards where babies are born around the clock.

I think about the plain pink, brown-trim blanket hidden in Eva's closet, the one marked "G. Matthews." I think about Mara's hollow eyes and her certainty that something was wrong. I think about the voice through the baby monitor, trying to tell me something I'm not ready to hear.

What if my instincts about Eva aren't maternal failure but maternal protection? What if some deep, primal part of me recognizes that this child isn't mine and has been trying to warn me since the moment they placed her in my arms?

The thought should be comforting, but it's not.

It's terrifying in a way that makes my chest tight and my hands shake.

Because if Eva isn't mine, then where is my real baby?

Where is the child I carried for nine months, felt kicking against my ribs during late-night bathroom trips, sang to through my stretched skin during quiet evenings when Adam was working late?

I remember a conversation with my mother, months before she died.

I was visiting her in the hospice, trying to pretend that the yellow tinge to her skin and the way her wedding ring slipped around her finger didn't mean what I knew they meant.

She was talking about the day I was born, how she knew immediately that I was hers.

"The moment they put you on my chest, I felt complete," she said, her voice weak but certain. "Like I'd been missing a piece of myself my whole life and suddenly found it. That's how you know, Claire. When it's your baby, you know."

I'd nodded and smiled and filed the story away with all the other pieces of maternal wisdom she was desperate to share before it was too late. But now, sitting in the dark with Adam's phone casting shadows across the hospital photos, her words feel like an indictment.

When it's your baby, you know.

And I don't know. I've never known.

I look at the photo again, at my own face smiling that fake smile while holding a baby that doesn't look like me or Adam. A baby with dark hair and dark eyes, when both of us are fair. A baby who sleeps too deeply, unless she’s crying too much or too little, and feels like a stranger in my arms.

I whisper to the empty room, "Was I even awake when they gave her to me?"

The house is silent except for the hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of Adam's breathing from the bedroom. Eva sleeps peacefully in her bassinet, undisturbed by my middle-of-the-night crisis of memory and faith.

I stare at the photo until the faces blur together. My face, Eva's face, the faceless woman from my fragmented memory who might have been sitting in the corner, crying for reasons I can't remember or understand.

What if it wasn't mine at all?