“Anything,” I say and mean it.
“I want to hear more about Meg.” The name sounds impossibly strange coming from Joni’s lips. “You told me about how she got pregnant and died, but I’d really like to know more about her as a person. Why you loved her in the first place.”
I blink. “Are you sure?”
She bites into an Airhead. “Yup.”
I talk for a long time, and she listens closely, sometimes asking questions, sometimes not.
The last thing I say, as Joni pops the final piece of candy in her mouth, is, “I didn’t go to her funeral.”
Joni looks surprised by that. “Why not?”
I take a deep breath, and it shudders on the way out.
“Because I was really fucked up. She died and I became a father all in the same day. Nothing made any sense.”
Joni moves her hand toward me like she’s about to put it on my thigh for encouragement. But then halfway there, she pulls her hand back—slowly, like she’s trying to make the motion seem meaningless—and places it back in her lap.
Guess we aren’t going back to normal as quickly as I’d hoped.
“She was trying to hold on, to stay pregnant for as long as possible so the baby had a better chance of being healthy,” I continue. “In one of her journals, it said that the doctor wanted her to have an early C-section, to get the baby out and give Meg’s body a chance to bounce back, but she wouldn’t do it.” I shake my head, thinking how different things could have been if she had. “She would have had to have a C-section anyway, ’cause she was too weak to push the baby out the natural way, but she was waiting as long as she could. And then, when she was a little more than eight months pregnant, her body failed.”
“What do you mean, failed?”
I clear my throat and check my emotions. “It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was at her house, sitting with her as she watched some movie. I don’t even remember what it was. She looked like she had fallen asleep. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was hanging open. But her chest wasn’t rising and falling as it should have been—the space between her breaths was way too long and uneven. I called her parents into the room and grabbed my phone and called 911. We kept talking to her, trying to get her to hold on while we waited for the EMTs to arrive, but her eyes wouldn’t open. They wouldn’t let me in the ambulance.”
I pause a minute. I will not cry. I will not cry.
“Anyway, I drove to the hospital. But they wouldn’t let me back to see her or tell me how she was doing. And then, after I have no idea how long, I was being led to the NICU by a nurse, and she was pointing at Hope through the window. She was so small—a few weeks early—and hooked up to oxygen machines, but the nurse said she was going to be fine. I asked her about Meg, and her face got sad and all she said was, ‘Congratulations. You’re a daddy,’ and she walked away.”
“She didn’t tell you what happened to Meg?” Joni sounds outraged.
I shake my head. “I went back to the waiting room and waited for a long time. They wouldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t a blood relative. And Meg’s parents seemed to have forgotten about me. Or they didn’t care. The hospital people just kept talking about how the baby was doing—because I was Hope’s blood relative. I was the relative. I had more say over what happened to Hope than anyone. But I didn’t care. All I wanted to know was when I could see Meg and if she was going to be all right.”
I look at Joni and am surprised to see that she’s crying. Not sobbing or anything, but thin tears are trickling down her cheeks. “So what happened?” she asks.
“My mom got there, demanded to speak to someone who knew what was going on, and found out what had happened: Meg had died midsurgery, before Hope was even out. She didn’t live long enough to be a mother, not for one second.” I pause to steady my voice and my breathing. “And that was it. Hope came home with me after she got the all clear, and I never saw Meg or her parents again. When the funeral happened, I was too out of it to know, frantically trying to figure out how to take care of a newborn.” I shoot Joni a sideways glance. “Let’s just say it wasn’t a great time for me.”
“You never got to say good-bye,” she whispers.
“Nope.”
She wipes her face with the sleeve of her hoodie. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you need that chance. To say good-bye. She got to leave you the journals as her good-bye, but you don’t have anything like that. You need closure.”
I smile a little. “That sounds amazing, really, but I don’t know how it’s possible, except for waiting it out.”
She shakes her head. “No. We need to have a funeral for her.”