Page 89 of Chasing Blue
CHAPTER20
Scarlett.
I don’t thinkthere’s been a sudden drop in temperature, but I shiver. Wrapping my arms around my knees a little tighter, I pull them closer to my chest attempt to keep warm and stop my entire body from vibrating.
Still staring out at the water, I continue to tell the story of the most harrowing day of my life.
“My move to Sydney is all a bit of a blur. This isn’t me calling you out, you’ve explained your reasons, and I totally get why you handled things the way that you did, but after finding out about Eden’s pregnancy and being told that you two were getting back together, I just needed to get out of Palmers. I’d had to start paying rent on my room to keep a hold on it since the week before anyway, so, with the help of Asher, I moved in early.”
I pause for a moment. I’ve just told him this isn’t about calling him out, but I need him to understand where my head and heart were at, and why I made the choices I did.
I’ve not even said the words out loud, and already I feel a nauseating sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. I wish I could be anywhere else, doing anything else other than being here right now. I know this needs to happen, I’m sick of constantly feeling sick, sick with guilt, sick that I didn’t tell Jack, especially since he came back into my life. I’m just sick of carrying the weight of all this on my own.
Despite all the other emotions churning through my system, the irony of this location isn’t lost on me.
If it had to happen, I’m almost glad it’s here, back where it all began at what feels like a lifetime ago.
“The couple of weeks I had before Uni began, I spent getting myself organised. I found a job, worked out where the best coffee was sold, all the important things. All the while, I was nursing a broken heart. I won’t lie, I was falling, had fallen if I’m honest, in love with you, and when I heard the news about you, Eden, and the baby, it gutted my insides and broke my heart into so many tiny pieces, I’ve never been able to find them and rebuild it. You were the one, Jack,” I admit with a shrug.
“No one else has ever matched up. I’ve never felt for anyone else what I felt for you that summer.” I pause again, waiting, giving him the chance to have his say, but he remains silent, hopefully sensing that I need to put this out there.
“I wasn’t sleeping great, my eating habits were even worse, and once Uni started, and I was juggling course work, a job, and life in general, I dropped about five kilos in that first month, so when my period didn’t arrive, I put it down to all of that.”
Closing my eyes, I draw in a deep breath through my nose, holding the scent of the ocean inside, allowing it a moment to calm me.
“I was about ten weeks when I found out I was pregnant.” I feel him shift beside me, but I don’t turn to look at him. I can’t, I’m not ready. I need to say what I need to before looking into those green eyes. If I do that now, I might falter, hold back my truth when I need so badly to speak it, to finally be heard.
“I never set outnotto tell you, but at the same time, I had no idea when or if Iwouldtell you. As far as I knew, you were playing happy families back in Palmers with Eden, a new baby due, anyway, whatever, my head was all over the place, so I decided just to get on with things. I thought that I would just know when the time was right to let you know.”
I’m not sure if it’s the wind blowing up off the ocean making my eyes water or if they’re tears escaping and wetting my face, but I use the cuff of my hoodie to wipe them away.
“Everything was going great. I was young, fit, healthy, and mentally I was also doing better. Having something other than my broken heart to focus on had kind of cleared my mind. I had meetings with my tutors, who gave me extensions on my work, and referred me to counsellors and the onsite nurse. They were all really supportive, letting me know that if I wanted to stay on, what help I was entitled to. Anyway, between us all, we came up with a plan to get me through the pregnancy and to help me continue studying after the baby was born.”
I feel him shift again. I wipe at my eyes once more and continue.
“I was one day off being twenty weeks, just one day. It was a Friday. I’d been to Uni in the morning, worked the afternoon shift at the café, and was just about to head home when it happened. I’d been fine, a little bit of cramping, but I’d been getting that since the beginning, then suddenly, I just . . . I just felt it. A really strong cramp and I knew I was bleeding straight away.”
I fight to breathe as I talk, sobbing as the words come spilling out.
“The next cramp took my legs from under me. Luckily, I hadn’t left work yet, and everyone helped. They called an ambulance and called Ash. Tina, my boss, rode with me. She stayed with me till Asher got there later that night, but I don’t remember any of that. What I thought was a miscarriage was a placental abruption. The baby . . . The baby, she was a girl, Jack, a little girl,” I almost choke as the words feel like they’re being wrenched out of me, and then he’s there, dragging me into his lap, holding me against him, breathing me in and crying right along with me.
“It’s okay, Blue, it’s okay. I’m here, I’ve got you.”
I want to leave it there, say no more, but he needs to know it all.
“I’d just reached the hospital when I delivered her. She was tiny. Perfect but tiny, too small to survive. She was stillborn, and because of the abruption, I started to bleed, and they couldn’t stop it. I don’t really remember much from that point on, just waking up the next morning with Ash sitting beside my bed. He told me that I’d miscarried, but I remember seeing her. She was a baby, a tiny, tiny baby. In my head, that’s not how a miscarriage looked. She’d been born, she was stillborn, but you know what Jack, the rules, the law, whatever, whoever it is that decides, made it so that because she was less than twenty weeks, she was classed as a miscarriage, not a stillbirth.”
I make a noise, it’s not a cry, it’s more, so much more. A wail that I pull up from my very soul as I recall the injustice I felt when I argued with the doctors when they refused her a birth certificate.
“It was like she’d never existed, but she did, she did, Jack. She was part of me and you, and she was real, so fucking real, and I swear, I swear she had lips just like yours. I know it, know she did, but I was so angry, so focused on their fucking rules, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the truth, or if I just wanted that so badly to be true that I made it up, that it’s all in my head.”
I feel like I’m about to vomit as I literally spill the words, the pain, every emotion out of me.
“They wouldn’t issue a birth certificate, but fuck them because she’s here . . .” I slap my palm over my chest a couple of times, aware that I probably look and sound a little hysterical, but not having a single fuck left to give.
Eighteen years I’ve waited to tell this story, and I’m going to tell it my fucking way.
“She’s here, she’s always been here, and she always will be, and now that you know, she’ll be with you too.”
