Ben and I never spoke of it again. He only visited me that once, said that one sentence and never followed up again. My father didn’t fire him, whereas my mother thought he should be serving time.
I didn’t blame Ben Hallowell upon learning that my body would have a harder time fighting off viruses without my spleen there to help. I didn’t blame him when I limped for a year thanks to my broken femur, or when the physical therapy made my leg burn and ache so fiercely that tears streamed down my face. I didn’t blame him for the twenty pounds I lost with a jaw wired shut. When, a year after the accident, a hysterogram showed significant scarring in my uterus that would “likely” affect my ability to have children, I still didn’t blame him.
But, oh, I blamed him when I lost my unborn daughter, when I held her and keened and felt my heart rip apart. My body could not hold her, and that was because of a stupid accident caused by a man who drove too fast and didn’t take care of his truck. If not for that accident, I would have had a daughter. I knew that in my heart, and my doctor confirmed it. My uterus was just too battered to hold her.
The miscarriage changed me. In most other ways, it made me more tender, more loving, more sentimental.
Getting pregnant at age twenty-two . . . it was a miracle. Sure, it pushed the time frame of my life forward faster than I had planned, but I was pregnant. It sealed the deal between Brad and me, and his parents were over the moon, not even minding that we were having a shotgun wedding, more or less. Dylan seemed like God’s compensation for that car accident and the year of pain that followed. Giving birth didn’t hurt nearly as much as had been direly promised—I was in awe of what my body could do. Clearly, I was a champion with these childbearing hips and juicy ovaries. And because Brad and I were utterly smitten with our baby, we wanted more. Dylan would be such a good big brother. By the age of two, he was so kind and adorable already.
Brad, an only child himself, wanted our son to have siblings. We’d have two girls, we fantasized, then another boy who’d worship Dylan as a demigod and be suitably adored by his sisters. Maybe the girls would be twins. Catia and Aline, with little Rafael a few years later.
When I got pregnant the second time, Dylan was three. Easiest thing in the world, right? But it was a very different pregnancy—with Dylan, I’d had only a little bit of heartburn toward the end, and my belly stuck out in front of me like the prow of a ship. From behind, you couldn’t tell I was pregnant.
With this second pregnancy, I knew it was a girl, because I spread. I looked pregnant from my ankles to my eyes. “Looks like you sat on an air hose,” my dad said fondly.
“Thanks, Pop,” I said, rolling my eyes and depositing Dylan on his lap.
And yet I was nervous. Call it maternal instinct, but there was a strong foreboding in my heart. Something was wrong, I kept thinking. I was getting my master’s to become a CNM at that time, learning about every aberration and chromosomal abnormality there was, wondering if my child would have cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or microcephaly.
The ultrasound showed a perfect baby girl. Every lab test told me I was fine. No diabetes, no high blood pressure, no anemia. Placenta in its rightful place, weight gain perfect, no signs of anything but clear blue skies ahead.
I pushed my fear aside, knowing it was normal to worry (though I hadn’t with Dylan, so stunned and overjoyed at my good luck). I was exhausted (normal, again, showing that all my energy was going to the baby). I could see it in Brad’s eyes—he was so happy at the thought of a daughter. When Dylan asked why my tummy was so round, we told him.
“I be a big brudder!” he crowed, and Brad and I were so happy with his reaction, so delighted. Our perfect little family would grow.
And still, I counted the days, waiting for that magic week when viability would be reached. Nothing was medically wrong, and I kept reminding myself of all that I knew about pregnancies and birth, telling myself it would be okay.
But there’s another thing midwives know, and it’s that some mothers have a sixth sense about their babies, even in utero.
The dread lurked in the back of my heart.
At twenty-two weeks and four days, when I was sitting on the floor making a city out of blocks with Dylan, I got up to answer the phone and saw a splotch of watery red on the floor. For a second, I assumed it was ketchup—Dylan had had ketchup with his carrots at lunch, and somehow, he must have . . . Nope. No.
A sudden, knifelike pain pierced my abdomen, causing me to bend over, keening. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” Dylan asked.
I forced myself to straighten up. “Nothing, honey. I’m fine.”
Another rush of blood soaked my jeans, and I shuffled into the bathroom, holding my stomach. Called 911, then Brad, and told him to meet me at the hospital. Called Beth and told her to come get Dylan right now. I managed to put him in his car seat and drive down Black Pond Road to Route 6 so the paramedics could get to me faster.
My daughter was born in the back of the ambulance on Route 6 about fifteen minutes from the hospital. Tiny, perfect, beautiful, stillborn, shockingly white in a sea of blood.
I stayed in the hospital for six days—complete placental abruption, requiring an emergency hysterectomy and four units of blood. Brad brought Dylan to see me, and he was so sweet, so kind. “I’m sorry, Mommy,” he said. “I love you.” He had drawn a picture of the three of us, giant heads with eyes and smiles, long stick legs, all of us holding hands. My mother came and was uncharacteristically silent. Beatrice wept and held my hand, making me feel awkward. Hannah sent flowers and brought Dylan some presents to distract him and called me to say how sorry she was. And for the first time in my life, I saw my father cry as he sat at my bedside.
These things happen. Oh, they happen all the time. Everyone’s life—especially every woman’s life—is marked by something like this, it seems. Miscarriage, infertility, breast or ovarian or uterine cancer. It’s so personal when our female parts fail us in some way. So hard not to think that we—that I—had caused this, should’ve known, should’ve done something. No matter what my doctors said, I knew. My hubris at thinking my scarred, weakened uterus could hold another baby. My greed in wanting another child when my first had been nothing short of a miracle.
Because she was born after twenty weeks’ gestation, my daughter got a fetal death certificate, which meant she needed a name. We could have left that part blank, but it seemed so cruel not to name her. But we hadn’t settled on one yet, and oh, the deep, aching pain of naming a child who was already gone. The tragedy of it all. The absolute, wrenching grief.
Grace Mariana Silva Fairchild. I could never bring myself to think of her by name. After all, she had never been called that in life . . . to me, she was just my poor little daughter.
Dylan was sad and so sweet for a few days after I came home. He knew “Mommy’s tummy hurt,” and there would be no sister for him. He brought me his stuffed animals to comfort me. A few days later, he said that he’d woken up from a dream where his baby sister was snuggled against him, and he cried because she went away.
Then, cruelly, he forgot about her, as toddlers do.
We had her cremated and took the achingly small box and scattered some of her ashes on Herring Pond. I buried the remainder in my garden and planted blue forget-me-nots in that spot.