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“You suffered a miscarriage.”
You know when you stand up too fast and the blood rushes from your head? Everything goes dark for a minute and you feel like you’re going to faint? That’s what I felt when Dr. McClintock told me what had happened. I was sure she must have had me confused with someone else.
“Oh, Dr. McClintock, sorry I didn’t know you were in here. The patient was tachycardic.”
I looked up to see the nurse I recognized as Michelle. She’d come in for a bed check the night before and hadn’t been expecting me to be awake. I was reading and she’d offered me a sleeping pill, but I’d lied and told her I’d be asleep in a few minutes. I’d kept reading until the morning.
I zoned out as Michelle bypassed Dr. McClintock and started fussing with the machines I was hooked up to, still processing what the doctor had told me. Miscarriage? She’d said miscarriage. That couldn’t be right. That would mean a baby had been inside me.
Eli’s and my baby. A baby made from us. Our baby.
“Looks good.” Michelle squeezed my arm. “Don’t know why your heart was racing so fast but everything is good now.”
As the door closed behind Michelle, the doctor’s attention focused back on me. “Do you understand what that means?”
“I lost a baby,” I whispered. Suddenly the three students behind her didn’t feel like people learning, but voyeurs intruding on the worst moment of my life. I wanted them to leave. I wanted everyone out. How was it possible to feel so much for something you hadn’t even known you had?
“Did you know you were pregnant?”
I shook my head, too shocked to speak. Dr. McClintock placed her hand on mine. The gesture was so kind and unexpected that sobs tore from my body. I couldn’t help it. A floodgate released as I mourned the loss of a child never to be born. I mourned the future Eli and I would never have. I grieved so many losses unaccounted for and racked up over the years that my body began to wither from the weight.
Eventually the doctors left, leaving me to my own tear-soaked misery. Some time later, the amount unknown by tears, a social worker came into offer comfort. Snot and tears tattooed across my face, I wailed at her to leave and was left alone for hours.
Mama came back but only dropped by to give me a kiss on my cheek. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes, and I wondered if she knew, if the doctors had told her what happened. She seemed so much more distant than before. I yearned for her touch, for comfort, but I knew it wouldn’t come. The only comfort Mama could offer was books, and she’d already given me that.
When there was a knock on the door and Dr. McClintock entered, Mama stood up and left to give me privacy. I wanted to yell at her to stay. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t do this on my own, that I needed someone with me to tell me everything was going to be okay. Instead I watched her close the door.
She knew. She was ashamed of me. I was unclean.
I looked at Dr. McClintock, her hair was a neat brown bun with only a few frays straying from the crown. She had wrinkles but unlike Mama’s deep grooves, they were light and accentuated her kind eyes and lips. She was not how I had imagined the grim reaper to be.
Dr. McClintock sat down in the same way she had before, when she’d unloaded the biggest of bombs. I braced myself, unsure of what more she could have to tell me.
“Never again?” Dr. McClintock’s words drummed in my ears like the finite reverberation of a gong.
“I’m afraid the hemorrhaging has caused irreparable damage to your fallopian tubes. The bleeding wouldn’t stop so we had to remove one tube and the scarring on the other is extensive.”
I blinked, trying to absorb what she was saying. I would never have children. Ever. I would never, ever have children. I didn’t even know if I wanted to have children, but there she was saying I had not only lost one, but I would also never have one again. Ever.
“Why?” I croaked. My tears had dried up. I was probably too dehydrated to produce them, but the cramping, aching feeling of sobs still remained. The lonely, tearing sensation in my gut was still there as I asked her the question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to.
Dr. McClintock adjusted her glasses. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you why you miscarried in the first place. I can give you a list of possible causes, but this early in the pregnancy they’re all just guesses. I can tell you how this happened. Your body had a natural miscarriage; likely you thought it was an early period. You’ve probably been noticing some light spotting.”
I nodded, feeling numb. Earlier that week I had thought I started my period.
“What happened was tissue from the fetus remained inside you and made it impossible for your body to heal. The large, blackish blobs you noticed were blood clots that your body made while trying to heal itself.”
I thought back to when I’d sat in the tub as black, slimy blood flowed out of me. It was like a scene out of a horror movie. Mama watched from outside the bathroom, offering no comfort, just a fearful face. Daddy had prayed in the hallway, not for my safety but for my sins.
“You lost nearly half your blood, Grace,” Dr. McClintock said. “It’s a miracle you’re alive.”
The nice doctor touched my hand again and I nodded, barely hearing her. The look on Daddy’s face when the ambulance had wheeled me away hadn’t been of concern or fear, but of hate. Even a crazy man knew what that amount of blood between the legs meant. I was condemned in his eyes. A harlot. A whore. A demon. Everything he had tried to beat out of me from birth.
I was barren. The one baby I’d had and ever would have was dead. Eli and I were dust in the wind. If this was a miracle then I didn’t want to know what a curse looked like.
There was a reason why Daddy wasn’t there and Mama was avoiding me. The hospital staff kept asking if they could call someone or if they should look out for visitors. I didn’t have it in me to say no, no one was coming. I was all alone.
I hadn’t realized until the cab pulled up how much I was dreading coming home. Don’t get me wrong, I hated the hospital. I hated everything from the ambulance ride to when they checked me out. It was without a doubt the worst experience of my life. In a matter of days I had gained something irreplaceable and lost it before I could count to three.
