Page 33 of Promise Me This

The emptiness of the room presses in on me as soon as I sever the connection, feeling like a sinus headache building in intensity, only it’s my whole body being compressed. Half-blind with tears, I reach for the notebook and pen on the bedside table. Drops fall from my eyes onto the page, blooming into swirls of salt and ink as I pour my heart out to our girl.

My Darling Poppy,

I don’t know what it is about talking to my mother that always makes me want to talk to you. Wouldn’t it be incredible if I could just pick up the phone and call? Ask you how your day has been? I wonder what your voice would’ve sounded like.

When I first found out I was pregnant, those were the kinds of things I wondered about. Would your voice be high and lilted or low and thick like molasses? Would you talk a lot like your grandmother or not so much like your father? How would your handwriting look? How would you smell?

These are the things I will never get to know, and it’s the not knowing that kills me.

Dreaming of you was such a short-lived joy. Three days is all I got. From the time those two lines appeared on the test to the moment I sat in the doctor’s office with a stone-faced university physician telling me I needed to seek another opinion. She hadn’t seen this kind of ultrasound outside of her textbooks, but something didn’t look quite right and she wanted to be sure.

Two weeks later, a man in a white coat sat across from me and said blasphemous words like incompatible with life and miscarriage. He never said when the baby is born, he said if. He said words I’d never heard before, and didn’t even offer me a tissue as I sobbed in my chair, clutching a stomach that hadn’t yet grown to accommodate your presence. I was just shy of four months along, and I was already falling so deeply in love with someone that I might never get to meet.

How do you live with a tragedy like that? How do you function?

The truth is, I didn’t. That numbness held me so tightly in its fist that there was no room for anyone else, not even Callum. It took me days to return a simple text from him, and I just flat out ignored the phone calls. I disappeared from social media. I’d just gotten back from seeing my parents for Thanksgiving, so there were no attempts made to visit me. I did just good enough on my finals to pass, and not a bit more.

After a few weeks spent walking through a haze, I returned to the doctor for another ultrasound. They were wrong. I could feel it. You were alive and you were going to be just fine. I’d call Callum up the next day and tell him the whole crazy story, and we’d cry and laugh together and then everything would be okay.

But they weren’t wrong. That day when I walked into the blinding sunlight after an hour in the dim ultrasound room, I shattered into a million pieces. And I didn’t call Callum. I called my mom.

I didn’t speak. I just dry heaved into the phone, and she heard and understood what I was trying to say but couldn’t. I need you, Momma. And so she came to me, her child, as all good mothers do. She told Dad that I needed help with some last-minute Christmas shopping, and then she made it to me in record time.

There are sacred secrets kept between a mother and a daughter. Like when I started my period on a brisk December morning in the eighth grade, and she quietly brought me one of her pads and then took me to the grocery store. We bought pads and tampons and a jumbo cupcake that we shared in the parking lot while she told me all about her first period. When we came home, my dad asked why I hadn’t gone to school, and Momma just said, “She had the stomach bug, but she’s feeling better now.”

She kept this secret just as she kept all the others. Just as I kept yours.

When she asked me who the father was, I did what I felt I had to. I told her he knew, and he didn’t want anything to do with us. What a lie, of course, my love. Your daddy would’ve come for you, just as my mother came for me, if only I’d let him. But my grief was an ugly, selfish thing. I felt like I had drawn the shortest possible straw, and I wanted to wallow in it. I didn’t want to share you with him because he couldn’t possibly know how I hurt. His pain couldn’t possibly compare.

Misery might love company, but grief is a loner convinced that no one could understand.

And the truth is, my love, that now I have all these thoughts and explanations for how and why and what I felt back then, but at the time I couldn’t fathom any of it. I was numb aside from the pain. I only ate because it fed you. I only slept because it’s when you kicked the most. I’d fall asleep giggling, that manic laughter that comes as a prologue to tears. I missed you with a bone-deep ache, and you weren’t even gone yet.

I begged Momma not to tell Dad, and so she didn’t. I locked myself in my apartment. I stayed alive for you. Kept up with classes for the future I still wanted you to have, against all odds. I read a story about a girl with Trisomy 18 who lived to be forty years old and decided that you were going to be just like her. There was no other outcome that felt fathomable.

Grief, of course, is unfathomable. Even when you’re in the trenches of it. Maybe especially then.

Everyone keeps asking me why I’m here, what I’m hoping will happen. I ask myself that, too. Am I selfish for wanting to tell Callum after all this time, when it will only bring him pain? It’s my selfishness that kept you a secret. My selfishness that put me on that plane. It would certainly be on brand.

But I don’t want to be a selfish mother. And I don’t want your memory to die with me. Your life was painfully brief. I can’t bear for your memory to be also.

I just want you to know that I’m sorry it took me so long to do the right thing. There are some secrets that don’t need to be kept.

You will always be my daughter. But you’re Callum’s daughter, too.

I love you, honey. I’ll be seeing you.

Momma

When my tears finally dry to a crust at the corners of my eyes, I slip out of bed and don a simple white linen button-down and a pair of loose-fitting jeans. They were snug on me when I packed them in my suitcase two weeks ago, but today they hang from my hips in a strange way. One glance at myself in the floor-length mirror in the corner of the room tells me what I should’ve already known: I’m not eating enough. I can’t keep skipping breakfast.

When I hit the second-floor landing, I see that there are three rooms with their doors propped open. No doubt the same three rooms will be written in the notebook on the entryway table. A workload that will take me no time at all now that I’ve gotten into the swing of things.

A quick knock on the bathroom door tells me it’s unoccupied, and so I rinse the evidence of my sadness away and quickly braid each side of my hair back from my blanched face.

I don’t look good, per se, but I look a little less like death, which will have to do.

Siobhan doesn’t let me get two steps into the kitchen before muttering, “My how the tables have turned.”

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