Page 41 of Sexy as Sin
She’s not even eight months,he thought through the cold fog that tried to numb him.It has to be all right, though.Even as he knew it didn’t have to be any such thing,and that he should have known. He should haveseen.
“Nia.” He gripped her hand, and the nurse didn’t even look up. “What happened?”
When she spoke, her voice was controlled. Tight. “I realized this morning that I hadn’t felt the baby move for a long time. I couldn’t remember if I’d felt her move since I woke up. I thought it was what they said, that she was running out of room and the movements would get smaller. I didn’t ever think... I thought it was all right.”
“And then what?” he asked when she ran out of words.
“I was in court, but once I got out, I called. They said to come in to make sure.” She was breathing shallowly now, and he had her hand, every muscle in his body saying,No. No. No.
Finally, she said it. “Her heart rate is too slow, too erratic, and she hasn’t grown much at all since the last appointment. They said they have to take her now. She might have a chance if they do.”
The words were cold, hard, and sharp, bouncing on their way down his body, slicing and bruising, and he felt physically sick.
Once I got out, I called.Once court had recessed for lunch, she meant. Later, he remembered the words, recognized the delay, felt the anger, and did his best to let it go. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference, and she hadn’t done anything worse than he had. Neither of them had realized that you couldn’t compartmentalize this. “How long have you been feeling that?” he asked, there in the moment. “Or not?” He tried to remember how long it had been since her last appointment, and couldn’t. A couple weeks, anyway. He hadn’t made it to that one. He’d had a kickoff meeting with the construction manager up in Bellingham. Nia had told him it was fine. He’d done the first two childbirth classes with her, and they had plenty of time. “Had you noticed anything before?”
More sharpness in her voice now. “Of course I didn’t. I just said. Don’t you think I’d have said something? Don’t you think I’d have checked? I called as soon as I realized, and then I called you. Where were you, Brett? Why didn’t you answer?”
Another nurse came in, moving fast, and told Brett, “Doctor’s on his way. Come scrub up.”
He kissed Nia softly on the mouth and promised, knowing he couldn’t promise it at all, “They’ll fix it. They can do miracles now. Hang on, baby. I’m right there with you all the way.” He never called her “baby” outside the bedroom, because she didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it now. He put on the gown and the mask, scrubbed his hands, and felt the dark water closing over his head. He couldn’t breathe. His hands were shaking, slipping. He couldn’t hold on.
Standing beside another bed, then, a tiny one this time, later. The worst couple hours of his life, worse even than that other one. Swamped by the waves, still trying to get a breath that wouldn’t come, he held his daughter’s impossibly tiny hand, looked down at her waxen face, the perfect, pale moons of her fingernails, the eyes that had never opened, the rosebud mouth that had barely let out a newborn-kitten whimper, because she wasn’t big enough, and she wasn’t strong enough. He felt a hole rip open in his heart, as surely as if he could see it happen, and knew that she was gone.
Willow would have given anything not to hear this. Not to know it. She had Brett’s hand, and couldn’t remember taking it. Her chest hurt. Ithurt.The pain was dull, though, and familiar. Helpless.
“I’m so sorry, Brett.” The tears were there, even though she still wasn’t a crier. “I’m so desperately sorry.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So was I.”
She swallowed and asked it. “What was her name? Your daughter?”
His gaze was steady, and his voice was, too. “Claire. You think all these things before your baby’s born, imagining what she’ll be, what she’ll do. You dream these dreams. You never imagine that she won’t make it at all. I’d lived my life controlling everything I could, and I found out that I couldn’t control the most important thing of all. I didn’t even try until it was too late.”
“What happened?”
“There was a problem with the cord, and she couldn’t get what she needed. That happens a lot, it seems, as these things go. Most common cause of stillbirth, but she wasn’t stillborn. She lived forty-eight minutes. They didn’t let us hold her until after she was gone, because they were working on her. They tried their best, but there wasn’t anything they could do. It just... happened. Sometimes it does.”
“And Nia?” She didn’t want to know, and she had to.
Still steady, but what had that steadiness cost him? “After the first weeks, when the shock had worn off and we were feeling something again, we couldn’t get on the same page. I think she blamed me for not being there more, not asking more questions, not taking better care of them both. Could be I blamed myself for the same thing. You try to be the strong one. That was the only spot I knew. That first night, when she was still in the hospital, recovering from the Caesarean? I went out to get dinner for her, to try to make it better, and I couldn’t find my car in the lot. I walked around that lot for an hour like a blind man, trying not to panic. I was this... this guy...”
“Batman,” she said.
“Batman. I thought so. And I couldn’t even find my car. So, yeah, I tried to be the strong one. Nia was trying to do the same thing for a while, and then she wasn’t. If you can’t fall apart, you can’t put yourself back together again. I didn’t learn that for a while.”
“Surely,” she said through the gripping pain of it, “it’s nobody’s fault. If anything was ever nobody’s fault, surely it’s that.”
“You’re right, but that doesn’t stop you feeling it. I was a lot more sure in those days, let’s say that. I thought I had the answers, that I could always get it right. Smartest guy in the room. So hard to grasp that something that bad could just happen for no reason. You try to bargain, to make it not true, to go back and do it over, but there’s no bargain and no do-over. It just is, and it’s a hard thing to move on from. Harder than you’d expect. Lots of marriages don’t survive the death of a child. Ours didn’t.”
Two words, and they lay there like lead. “Who left, though?” she asked.
A long silence. Brett wasn’t looking at her. He was gazing out into the darkness, and at that moment, she entered into his stillness, and she understood it. From one moment to the next, like a shooting star appearing, then disappearing again, leaving its impression imprinted on the darkness of her mind. He was strong and steady because he’d been tested and hardened, over and over again. Because he’d had nothing left but the core of himself, and he’d built up from there, covering over the pain every time, making that layer stronger and thicker, then moving on to do it again.
Finally, he spoke. “Nia did. Nia left.” Telling Willow nothing she didn’t already know. “She went ahead the only way she could. It’s more than five years ago, and she’s remarried to a great guy and is an assistant U.S. attorney. That’s a big deal, and good for her. She didn’t have another baby. I don’t know whether it was because she couldn’t, or if she couldn’t stand to try. We don’t go into detail like that anymore.”
“I want to say something horrible about her,” Willow said, “but I can’t. And you couldn’t have felt that way at the time.”
He smiled. “Yeah. I didn’t. Couldn’t stay mad forever, though. The look on her face when I had to tell her Claire had died... I couldn’t forget that. It hit her hard. She thought she could do anything if she tried hard enough, and the one thing that turned out to matter most... Well, yeah. We both found out about that. People deal with it the best way they can. I didn’t cover myself with glory either, not for a long time. If a man can’t protect his wife and his baby girl, he might not feel worth much after all. Could be I was a shell myself for a while there. Not hero material.”
