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She’d be a survivor like me—I could already tell. I dropped the shoulder of my hospital gown, and Hannah continued to stare up at me with her trusting eyes as she latched on. I smiled as her lids fell shut.
It was perfect. It was my most perfect moment.
And then everything went wrong. The room remained sunlit and still, but she was choking, and chaos ensued as I screamed for help. Suddenly my arms were empty, and the room was full of staff.
None of them could meet my eye when the doctor turned to me with a long face, moments later, no longer trying to save her.
I’ve held those minutes under a microscope, asking what I could have done differently. Learning the answer won’t bring my daughter back. It will just tell me precisely what percentage of her death was my fault, and that’s a statistic I already know: it is one hundred percent my fault, because had I done something different,anything, she would not have died.
Meconium aspiration is rare, but more common in certain circumstances: pregnancies that go past term, cocaine use. If only I’d agreed to be induced early. If only I’d had a C-section or hadn’t done that line of cocaine with my colleagues before I knew I was pregnant. If only I’d allowed the nurse to take her to the nursery so I could rest—a place where they might have noticed the blue of her nails that hinted at oxygen deprivation before she began to gasp.
A single, small action on my part could have saved her. But I didn’t take it.
At the minute of her birth, I hold my breath and wait. I’m a reasonable person, but I can’t help but hope each year that something might change, be fixed somehow, if I can just find the loophole, the way back to her. But at 3:25 PM, the world remains the same. The birds chirp and the breeze makes leaves rustle along the ground like skittish ghosts. And Hannah continues to lay silent somewhere beneath me, and nothing I can do will bring her back home.
34
BECK
Kate’s absence makes it obvious that the bar is no longer where I want to be.
When she’s here, there’s this small fire in my stomach: the anticipation of her, the hope that she’ll emerge from the office to wave a form in my face that I failed to sign months ago, or casually stake her claim the way she does anytime there’s a female at the bar—resting a hand over my arm or referring to ‘home’—though she’ll later say it was an accident.
I should probably be asking myself what the fuck I’ll do when she’s gone, how I’m going to weather the next five decades at a job I hate, but instead, today, I’m just worrying about her.
There was something off with her this morning. She doesn’t reply when I text and I take a quick breath through my nostrils, trying to shut down the possibilities in my head: that she’s hanging out with Lucie’s ex...or that she’s using again.
She’s not. I fucking know she’s not.
Except when shit fell apart with her in the past, it was at the exact moment Caleb was assuring us she was fine. “Loves the new job,” he’d said that last time. “She’s doing great.”
He lied to himself, often, because he didn’t know what else to do. When you’re with a woman who insists she’s fine...what then? Do you drive home to check on her or have her followed as if she can’t be trusted? I hated Caleb for fucking it all up, by not being there when she needed him. NowImay be the one fucking it up.
When she doesn’t answer my phone call, I ask Mueller to take my spot behind the bar and drive home. She isn’t there. She isn’t at the storage unit either.
I tell myself to stop worrying, a tactic that has never worked once in my entire life, and isn’t working today either. I return to the cabin, pacing the living room, and then I finally do the thing I’ve avoided for weeks: I call Caleb.
Though we put the argument behind us, it hasn’t been the same. We’ve never gone more than a day or two without a text or call. Even when he was away at school, we played fantasy football and exchanged a constant stream of shit talk. Now the texts are more restrained and less frequent—the exchange of two people who are trying to move past something but haven’t entirely.
“Hey,” he says, “hang on.” In the background there’s a wave of high-pitched giggles. A second later, a door shuts and the noise falls away. “Sorry, I’m at ballet with Sophie. It’s the part of the class where parents get to come in and watch, so I’ve got to go in a second, but I’ve been meaning to call. Liam said Kate’s working at the bar?”
I slam a cabinet door with more force than necessary. “At a certain point, you probably need to stop worrying about the woman you’re planning to divorce.”
His tongue clicks. “I’m still allowed to worry. I’d worry about you too. And this time of year is hard for her, so a bar is the last place she needs to be.”
At any other point, I’d have a serious issue with the tone he’s taking—he has no fucking claim to her anymore—but I push that aside, because something he said has triggered a new fear, one I know needs to be examined.
A little over a month ago she was crying over that sonogram, in which Hannah was pretty far along. Which means . . .
“What day was Hannah born?”
He exhales heavily. “Today.”
Fuck. Today’s the day it all went wrong. That she’s off somewhere quietly reliving it is thebest-case scenario here.
“I’ve got to go,” I tell Caleb, grabbing my keys. “But keep your phone close. I might have questions.”
If she’s not at home and she’s not at the storage area, I’ve got one last place to check before I start hunting down her dealer.
