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“And?” Rachel asks. “What did he say?”
“He wanted out,” I say bluntly. “He could just about handle a baby, but one with defects? One that would require so much care, that would mean an entire life change? He wasn’t on board at all. He said I should end the pregnancy. We broke up over it.” Which, funnily enough, had felt like a relief, rather than another heartbreak.
“Bastard.” Rachel is silent for a moment, thinking. “Why do women so often carry it all?” she asks, almost to herself. “Why are we the ones who have to bear the load?”
Does she feel James didn’t? The thought gives me a lurch of alarm, because one of the reasons I fell in love with James was because I thought he did. Because he’d had a child—still has—who was desperately ill and he hadn’t walked away.
Tears prick my eyes as I realize what a mess I’m still in, just like before.
Rachel turns back to me, her gaze narrowed. “So what did you do?” Am I imagining that note of judgment in her voice? I’m afraid I’m not. That she knows the end of the story, and she condemns me for it.
“I thought about going it alone,” I say slowly, wanting to delay the moment when I have to tell her everything. “I wanted to.” I lapse into silence, and Rachel’s gaze nails me to where I stand.
“But?” she says, and of course she already knows.
“But I didn’t,” I say quietly. “I wasn’t strong enough. I was scared and alone and I hadn’t told my family or friends or anyone. I didn’t have the money or the resources… I didn’t think I could do it. And so I didn’t.” I blink back tears I still don’t feel I have the right to shed. “I had an abortion at twenty-four weeks.” It had taken that long, from scan to termination, to get the tests, to make a decision—the longest and shortest four weeks of my life.
I’ve read the articles since then, each one torturous to me, that have shown that a baby born at twenty-four weeks is viable. They can live outside the womb on their own. I’ve seen the photos of the tiny scraps of humanity born at that gestation or sometimes even earlier—the mother’s tremulous smile, the effusive praise for the medical team, the joy in the miracle.
Of course, it didn’t happen that way for me.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” I tell Rachel. “The worst thing.” My throat is getting tighter and tighter and I can’t look at her face. Memories bombard me—cold stirrups, sinking down into sedation, the fear paralyzing me, and then the sad, empty sack of my stomach afterwards. It had only taken half an hour, and yet my entire world had shifted, shattered. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to hold it together even as everything always threatens to fall to fragments in my hands.
Rachel doesn’t speak and I still can’t look at her. “I think of her all the time,” I say quietly. “I wonder so many things. How long she would have lived. What would she have been like. I never got to see her.” Obviously. I wouldn’t have wanted to, and when I really want to torture myself, I think about how she was wrenched out of me and just… discarded.
I found out later that I could have requested the fetal remains to be buried respectfully; I could have had a funeral, given her the ending she deserved, but at the time I didn’t know. I just walked away from it all and tried to forget, all the while knowing I never would.
I take another breath and dare to look at Rachel. Her expression is distant, her face slightly averted. I have no idea what she is thinking. She doesn’t speak, and so I do, still trying to explain myself all these years later, to make her understand the depth of my sorrow.
“I wonder if she might have had a good life. I mean, I know it would have been incredibly compromised. Even if the open heart surgery had been successful, the doctors told me she would had serious ongoing conditions. Problems.” Still nothing, and so I persevere. “And in all likelihood, she wouldn’t have lived past her first birthday. The percentages for five year survival were so low… less than ten percent. And the truth is, I didn’t think I couldn’t handle any of that—her health, her death, how consuming it all would be… I was only twenty, and entirely on my own. I really didn’t think I could do it.” I sound as if I am begging now, pleading with her to understand, to forgive me.
“It must have been very hard,” Rachel says quietly, after another endless moment. I can’t tell anything from her tone.
“That’s why, one of the reasons why, I admire you so much. You’ve done the hardest thing. You’ve lived the life I was too afraid to.”
She lets out a huff of sound, caught between laughter and a despair. “Is that what I’ve done?”
“Part of the reason I wanted to come here, to help you, is because… because I didn’t make that choice before, and so many times I’ve wished I had.” A tear trickles down my cheek and I dash it away. “I wonder how it would have been, if I hadn’t… if I’d…” I can’t finish those sentences. “How she might have made me a better, stronger person,” I continue haltingly. “What joy she might have given me, if I’d let her.”
“And what heartache,” Rachel says, her voice so low I strain to hear it.
“Yes, but isn’t it worth it, in the end?” I ask, my voice rising on a desperate note. “Although maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe I shouldn’t be asking whether it is worth it at all.” Because, just as I asked James, who gets to decide whether another’s life is worth living or not? Who gets to make that call? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for sixteen years, ever since I decided that I did.
“I don’t think you can say whether something is worth it or not,” Rachel says slowly. “We don’t have a crystal ball to know where life is going to lead us, and that’s a good thing.” She turns to face me. “I can see that you’ve been tormenting yourself over this, Eva, and it must have been something so incredibly difficult to decide. To bear, for all these years.” I sniff and nod, grateful for that much understanding. “But maybe that’s the trouble with science today, with technology, with everything. We know too much. We have too much choice. If I’d been told what was going to happen to Emily…? That I was going to end up here, with her like this?” She nods towards the bed. “God knows what I would have done. God knows.”
“But do you regret it?” I ask, the words bursting out of me, revealing how desperately I need to know.
She turns to look at me, an odd look on her face. “Are you asking me if I regret my daughter’s life?”
I cringe in shame. “No…” But I was. We both know it; it’s there between us, dark and heavy. And I know, before she says a word, what her answer is. Of course she doesn’t regret it. No matter what decision she may or may not have made nearly five years ago, she would never wish Emily away now.
Just as I wouldn’t have wished my daughter’s life away, had I let her live. The realization thuds through me, a truth I’ve been trying not to face for half my life. But I can’t any longer; I have to face it now. Because of Rachel. Because of Emily. Because of the love and care Rachel has always shown for her daughter, no matter what.
Of course she doesn’t regret having Emily. Being her mother. And I wouldn’t have regretted it, either. It would have been hard, agonising even. It would have completely changed my life, and not always for the better. But I wouldn’t have regretted it.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp out when Rachel still hasn’t said anything more. “I didn’t mean that. Of course you don’t regret it. Her.” I shake my head, wiping my eyes. “Of course you don’t. You never would.”
“I’m not saying it’s been easy,” Rachel says quietly. “Or that I haven’t had thoughts sometimes…” She looks towards Emily. “But the first three years of Emily’s life were the best of mine, and even now…” She brushes her fingers against Emily’s still hand. “Even now I don’t want to let her go, to move on, whatever you want to call it. I want to be right here with her, all the time.”
