Page 105 of Finding Our Reality

Help me. Help me.

Ry squeezes my hand tightly. His thumb rubs against me, tracing a circle pattern on the back of my hand, trying to calm me. The automatic porch light comes on as night falls, and Iwatch as the thick band of muscle in his forearm flexes each time he makes that circle.

“The door caved in on me.” I point to my left hip snuggled up against his thigh. “Broke my hip. But the worst part was… the impact was so severe, it sent me into premature labor and my water broke. When my water broke, the baby’s umbilical cord dropped past my cervix, into my vagina. Her head immediately started to descend, and it trapped the cord, blocking her flow of oxygen and blood. The pressure from her own body was,” I choke on a strangled sob, “killing her.”

By now, there’s no point in stopping the tears. Yes, I still hate crying in front of people, but it seems to be all I do lately.

“Emergency crews couldn’t get me out of the car. The whole side was basically caved in around me. The dashboard was squashed down. I couldn’t even get my hands all the way underneath me to feel what was going on. I couldn’t take my pants off.” I lick the salt from my lips. “At the time, I just thought I was in labor. Very, very painful labor. I didn’t know the umbilical cord prolapse was happening. All I knew was I was wet. Soaked in blood and fluid.” I snort, cry-laughing, “I remember being terrified she was gonna suffocate on my panties. I asked the paramedic to give me scissors so I could try to cut the clothes from my body because my panties were gonna strangle my baby.”

The tears cascading down Ry’s handsome face break my heart. Shatters it. Grinds it to a fine powder.

Moisture catches in his scruff and he wipes it away.

“When they finally got me out, I realized just how serious it was. I could see it on their faces. They rushed me to the hospital, and I had an emergency C-section. She was alive, but she had lost too much blood and oxygen. She passed away six hours after her birth. Her oxygen levels were too low, and she had a seizure.”

He stands from the swing and walks over to the porch railing. Gripping it with white knuckles, he lowers his head and sobs. Wild and manic. Frenzied and frantic. His own pain supersedes mine for the moment. It’s so intense, I can feel it in my bone marrow. I’ve had nearly twelve years to process the pain of losing a child; he’s had only twenty-four hours. I wrap my body around his. I lay my head between his shoulder blades and kiss the burning hot skin of his back. His devastation is raising his body temperature. He feels like a furnace. My fingertips trace every hard muscle, and I’m careful to use a softer stroke on his injured left side.

“She was beautiful. Small, but beautiful. She was five pounds, one ounce, and she was nineteen-and-a-half inches long. The doctor said if I had gone to full term, she probably would have been one of the longest babies he had ever delivered. She had a full head of brown hair, long eyelashes, and her eyes were a gray/hazel color. I really think they may have turned translucent green like yours, in the end.”

In the end. She didn’t really get an end, though.

“Would you like to see a picture?”

He raises his head, wiping his eyes and spitting across the yard to clear his throat. “You have a picture?”

Reaching into my purse, I dig out my phone and pull up the saved album of electronic pictures. I lean beside him against the railing. I accidentally bump my stitched arm and wince.

“Are you okay?”

I smile at the man I love. “I’m fine.” I flick to the first picture. “This was the first ultrasound I had. You see that circle? That’s her.”

“That’s it? That’s how it looks in the beginning?”

“You didn’t see any ultrasound pictures of Laura?”

He shakes his head. “Brooke had one with her when she showed up at the station that day to tell me she was pregnant,but I didn’t really study it; it seemed too personal. I went with her to some of her appointments, but I always stayed in the waiting room.”

I hand the phone to Ry and let him scroll through the different pictures. “I had an ultrasound at nearly every single doctor’s appointment since I was considered high risk.” Mingled in the album are different pictures of me, holding my belly, documenting the growth of my body, month after month.

He pauses at the picture of me when I was about six months pregnant. Raylee had come to Michigan to visit me. She snapped the picture of me standing by the window, laughing at something she said. He stares at the picture for so long, I start to worry. “Ry?”

“You’re so damn beautiful. Glowing. I thought people just used that word to be nice, but it’s true. And your hair is wavy here.”

“I was huge,” I say with a laugh. “And yeah, about that time is when my hair started changing.”

“You weren’t huge.” He touches my stomach on the screen. “Our baby is in there. A whole person. A human being.” He looks over at me. “That’s amazing, Lulu.” His gaze falls to my lips. Swallowing deeply, he turns back to my phone.

After another couple of pictures, he comes to the last one. The only picture I have of our daughter. My purse and phone were left behind in the wreckage, so I didn’t have a way to take her picture. I was so focused on being present with her during the time she had left on this earth, that I don’t think I would’ve remembered to take pictures, even if I had my phone with me. Plus, I was in extreme pain with my hip. The surgeons stabilized me and agreed to wait about doing the hip replacement until we knew more about my child’s health.

One of the nurses took this picture with her phone. The doctors had done everything for our baby that could be done.It made no sense for our daughter to spend her last few hours isolated in an incubator or hooked up to one-thousand machines. I’m sitting in a hospital bed with my hospital gown folded down to my waist. I’m holding her small body tightly against my naked breast. She wouldn’t and couldn’t breast feed. Her head is snuggled underneath my chin, and I’m kissing the top of her perfect little head. Blood stains my hair.

I didn’t have any injury to my head. The blood was from my hands—where I felt around my bottom half in the car and then ran my fingers through my hair in despair.

Ry gasps in loving disbelief. “Oh, shit.”

Chapter 34

CRUTCH

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